Tutorial Writing: How to Write Tutorials that Get Accepted

When I began my tutorial website, all that I knew was that I wanted to share information with other people. I'd never tried writing a tutorial before, so I wasn't sure how to go about it and decided that if I was going to do it, I should just do it and learn from my - inevitible - mistakes.

It's been nearly 5 years since my tutorial site first opened. During that time, it's changed names once, changed focus twice, and gone from an unknown hobbyist's site to one that is featured in all the top tutorial directories and receives more than 100,000 visitors a month. Not bad for a girl with no idea what she was starting when she started it.

My story is not the norm. Most successful websites spend hours in planning the layout, the focus, and the target audience they will work to bring their tutorials to. Even then, a lot of them fail. Without reputable tutorial directories like Pixel2Life indexing your work, it's very hard to "get known". The directories aren't the end of it, either - you still need to get your name in other places, get yourself noticed for high-quality pieces that really teach readers something useful. Associated Content is a perfect spot for that - and if you can write your work well enough, you can even earn some cash off of the experience.

A good 90% of the emails I continue to receive, though, all offer up the same type of question: "Why is your work in (where ever) and I can't get them to take mine?" So, here it is folks - my best advice on how to write tutorials that will get accepted, read, and welcomed at the tutorial directories and content sites like AC.

Tutorials Teach

I've heard from some of my closest website-owning friends that they started a series of tutorials to draw in traffic. Okay, granted, writing a tutorial that has keyword-rich content can draw in website traffic - it will get indexed in search engines and more people are likely to find you. What good will thousands of hits do you, though, if people see that they've been tricked and decide to never return to your site again? It happens - often.