4) Using Jargon

Easy-to-follow tutorials do away with jargon. Some tutorial writers, however, will tell you it depends and this goes back to the student’s skill level and what you’re teaching. If you’re offering a tutorial on the basics of a programming language like Python, you expect your student to have basic knowledge of some jargon used in programming. To be on the safe side, you should eliminate any hassles by providing hyperlinks of certain terms for quick access to definitions.

5) Visual Aids Allow for Better Learning

Illustrations or photos showing the step by step process save you time in elaborating through writing. Be sure that your photo is consistent with your written instructions. Your photos and written instructions must work together. You might ask: Is it possible to make a tutorial that is purely visual-based?

Yes and no. Yes, if the student is purely a visual learner and the photographs are meticulous enough to detail all the processes through multitudes of photos. No, because if you want to monetize your tutorial site, written instructions are indispensable because Google indexes and ranks sites based on written content and not graphics. This is why photos and text must go hand in hand.

Providing photographs doesn’t have to be a time-consuming process. Tutorials on programming languages make use of screenshots to capture the steps. Tutorials on how to use screenshots are accessible online.

You can also make use of your smartphone camera to take photographs, provided that it has a high resolution. Recipes, beadwork, and origami are some examples of tutorials that may require photography.

6) The Most Effective Tutorials Are Concise

By conciseness it means straightforward. If you can explain a procedure in one to three sentences, you can write a tutorial article. If you’re giving a how-to tutorial with a visual aid, provide arrows to point where to put the nuts and bolts in replacing a car tire. It may look like spoon-feeding, but a newbie will thank you for it.

7) Test, Test, Test

A tutorial must be tested first before publishing it online. It’s part of your revision and editing process. It’s always wise to solicit the help of someone for testing. This is because it’s easy for us to follow the instructions we made ourselves. Seeing how others navigate through our instructions is a more objective way of seeing if our tutorial works. If you have access to experts or students on the tutorial you’ve written, even better. A student of culinary arts, for example, can give an objective opinion about your tutorial on how to make tortellini.

8) Give It a Good Title

As a standard procedure for your tutorial’s optimization, give it a good title that contains the keywords of what it is all about. A tutorial on how to put a stop loss on your Forex trade should be “How to Put a Stop Loss on Your Trade” or “How to Maximize Profits Through Stop Loss.” Both titles contain keywords that retail Forex traders can find easily.  Once you have given it an easy to search title, publish it and start working on another tutorial.