Why Tutorial articles are important in building traffic
ADVERTISEMENTSTutorial articles are standard articles that are aimed to teach your readers something. These articles form the foundation of your blog and become the main drivers of traffic to your blog.
Here I will show you why such articles are important and how to make good use of them.
Tutorial articles are important for your blog because
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they willl bring in a burst of traffic when first published
This is mainly because people will link or trackback to the post generating a little bit of buzz around the blogosphere.
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they are not time dependent
You and other bloggers can always refer to it in future posts. Unlike news, Tutorial articles are always interesting and will remain relevant to readers for a long period of time.
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they will generate traffic even after they are archived
Good tutorial articles will receive lots of incoming links to it making it rank well in search engines. They are also likely to show up on the first page of searches, thereby bringing you new readers to your blog long after you first published the article
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they provide a good reason to subscribe to your feed
When a first time reader comes to your blog and see all the great content they are more likely to subscribe to your feed or bookmark your site for further reading later.
As you can see Tutorial articles are important in traffic building and should form the foundation of your blog. I recommend you post atleast one Tutorial article per week.
Secondly write these articles in lists whenever possible. This helps make the post more visually appealing and your readers are more likely to stick around for more reading.
Format the text using bold, italics,etc to make your points clear but do not overuse them.
Also create a new page called ‘Top Posts‘, list your tutorial articles there every month and link it from the homepage.
When first time readers see all the great content on that page they are most likely to transform from casual surfers into regular readers.
Just make sure you post short articles daily to your blog and tutorial articles atleast once a week.
Now watch your site’s pageviews and traffic increase 
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Posted on May 16th, 2006 | Category: Blogging | 10 Comments »
Keith Dsouza
May 16, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Hey John,
Your tips are so good.
Some of your tips have helped me to improve my blog and I definitely vouch startup blogs to come here more often.
I jumped from a ranking of over a couple of million rankings 23,36544 to 936,635 in within two months on alexa with some of your tips and some of my new trciks.
For all once you have learnt the trick of the trade and got better, never forget to thank the people who have helped.
Keith
johntp
May 16, 2006 at 10:58 pm
I learn some of the trick through experience by trial and error method and some from experts I know. But knowledge is never complete.
I can learn from my readers too. Don’t thank me with a ‘Thank you’, thank me by sharing your experiences here like I have done
Basu
May 17, 2006 at 10:50 am
I couldn’t agree more. Though I’ve never really been a focussed blogger, I’ve always seen a spike in hits after posting a howto. Great Blog, mind if I link to you?
johntp
May 17, 2006 at 11:15 am
Tutorial articles help keep casual surfers too. The more Tutorial articles there are, the better.
You can link to my site if you like
Sridhar
May 17, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Liked your idea of a ‘Top Posts’ page. Implemented it immediately @ http://sridhareena.com/top-posts/.
johntp
May 17, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Good to know that my readers are implementing ideas mentioned here
Sam
May 26, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Thanks for this great article, John!
Jason Drohn
July 15, 2006 at 9:19 pm
This is a great article. It is so true, if you read a tutorial on how to write a program or monetize a domain, you will ge back to it. Thank you for the great advice!
Robert Irizarry
September 30, 2006 at 9:18 pm
Wonderful article and it’s great to see confirmation of some of my own observations. My blog, Building The Ergonomic Guitar, is about a niche subject – the ergonomics of the guitar and related subject matter. What I’ve found is that my most popular post is a tutorial on making a guitar template. Its fascinating to see just how much such an article can contribute to traffic. Of the four points you make as to why these are a good idea, I can attest to the first three. Unfortunately, I don’t have any visibility into feed subscriptions at this point. Thanks!