How-To Blog Content is Harder to Write Than First Appears

Giving directions is a lot harder than first appears. That point was brought home to us at a recent tutor training I attended at Ivy Tech Community College. An instructor may believe he’s given clear instructions to his class for completing a particular assignment, but different students interpret those directions… well, differently. Working together in informal study groups, students can help each other arrive at the correct interpretation, was the point.

We tutors were divided into small groups (3-4 people each) and given the following set of directions:

1. Draw a circle about an inch in diameter.
2. Draw a square so that each side of the square touches the circumference of the circle.
3. Draw an equilateral triangle, making sure that one of the triangle’s sides is touching one half of one of the sides of the square.

Sounds fairly simple, doesn’t it? (After all, every one of us in that room has several college degrees!) Well, it wasn’t – it took much discussion and interpretation to comply with those “clear” directions.

There is no end to the technical information available to consumers on the internet. Therefore, as business blog content writers, our job is to help readers understand, absorb, buy into, and use that information. At Say it For You, I’m fond of saying that in blogging for business, teaching is the new selling. One way to empower customers to make a decision is to help them understand the differences between various industry terms, as well as the differences between the products and services of one business compared to those offered by another.

As bloggers, we’re giving readers the raw materials to think about, and even the how-to instructions. We need to go one step further, demonstrating ways different customers and clients have “figured out” how to interpret and use the “instructions” and “directions” we’ve offered for their own benefit.