Do You Need To Write How-To Articles For a Niche Website?
This article was going to be titled “My thoughts on James’ Thoughts On My Thoughts,” but it’s now going to be an explanation of the different types of article you should write for a niche site.
Last week, James wrote a great comment on this article about posts on niche sites. He then expanded that into an article which you can read here.
I only found the article last night after I’d written my weekly niche site update, so I only briefly mentioned it in a quick edit.
However, it brings up a particular point: I’ve written about a niche site as containing two different article types:
- How to articles.
- Reviews/Sales letters.
I had a tweet from Andrew that also asked a question about sales letters and reviews:
So I thought it’d be a great time to do a quick article on the different types of posts you’ll have on a niche site. (As always, this is my personal opinion and you can probably do a better job than me!)
A Confession
I write an article for this site every day. Usually, I write the article as the last thing I do before switching my computer off for the night. Most of the time, the articles I write are random thoughts inspired by what I’ve been doing on that day. I only ever spend about 30-45 minutes on these articles.
That means that there are a lot of rambling passages and undoubtedly some chaff mixed in with the wheat. Also, I know that I can get a bit jumbled and contradictory. Hence Andrew’s question above – the honest answer is that I talk about reviews and sales letters interchangeably. Let’s clear that up!
What’s the Difference Between A Sales Letter And A Review?
According to the Jamie McSloy book of terminology: they’re no different.
My success as a writer went up a million-fold when I started treating everything I wrote as a form of sales letter. Every article is selling something – whether it’s knowledge, a car, a lifestyle or a person. As such, I’ll often refer to anything where I deliberately set out to sell anything as a sales letter.
A sales letter follows a certain structure: Take a reader from uninterested and unknowledgeable about a product and get them to a point where they feel they know a product and want it enough to buy it.
A product review is a type of sales letter. Ultimately, you’re following that process, and the “difference” between a review and a sales pitch is just a difference in tone: you replace enthusiasm with level-headedness, hide the benefits as a list of features, etc.
What About How-To Articles?
When I talk about how-to articles, I’m referring to a slightly different structure, but a similar process. You take a person from knowing nothing about a subject/process, through to being interested in knowing about a subject, give them steps to use the knowledge and then give them a final kick up the backside so that they use the knowledge.
It’s a similar structure, but with a different goal.
Also, a caveat: These structures change – they aren’t rigid.
Now, in the article by James, he pointed out that he’s got a successful niche site without having any how-to articles. If you’re following along with the niche site challenge, then you might wonder why I suggest having how-to articles when the goal is to write sales letters and make money.
It’s a good question.
Do You Need How-To Articles For Your Niche Site?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: It depends, but not really.
Real answer: You don’t need them. You can write a niche website about buying X and fill it with different reviews without ever having any sort of how-to information outside of what’s in the sales letters.
However, there are two issues that I see with this:
- It’s hard to have a site that’s got enough content to boost itself to success with various traffic sources. (Google, Twitter, FB, etc.) This is a little issue though really.
- You’re losing an opportunity to get extra sales.
Now, once again, you don’t need to have how-to articles.
In fact if you’re building multiple niche sites, you might want to (and I’m going to) build one niche site with how-to articles and one without, so that you can split-test and get your own results. Remember, learning this stuff with your own data is many times more effective than relying on other people’s information.
But you’ll probably be interested in getting those extra sales, I’m guessing.
How To Use How-To Articles To Sell Stuff
I’m a copywriter. Especially when it comes to niche sites, I’m not creating pages based on the goodness of my heart. (Although, I hope people do find my info useful!)
I’m trying to get people to click those sales letters and make my commission.
The problem with sales letters is that you are only going to get people who are interested in the product, or the benefit of the product, to read them. No matter how good your sales letter, if you don’t have that pre-requisite, you won’t get the reader or the sale. How-to articles can bypass this. I’ll use a slightly obvious example here. Imagine you’re selling a “Make money online by niche websites” course and you find the perfect sales letter headline is this:
“Want to build websites that make you $100 a day?”
Let’s assume that’s a great headline. Now, most people aren’t going to click that perfect headline because they’ve got objections: They can’t build a website. They don’t like the $100 figure. They’re not interested in info-products. Whatever the reason, you’re losing those readers.
How-to articles are like those re-targeting ads you get when you visit a website and then leave and see the company pop up again.
Your reader might not be interested in building websites. What if you write a how-to article though that’s entitled:
“How to clear your student debt in one hour a day?”
You’re hitting a whole different set of readers there. Now, let’s assume that the best way to do this article is a ten point guide. It’ll contain the usual stuff… stop eating out at restaurants, stop wasting your money on computer games when you could take up running. You get the reader’s head nodding, agreeing with you, and then at point eight out of ten, you say, “You also could sell a skill online. You could be a freelancer or you could build simple websites. Here’s how I learned to do it.”
Then link back to your sales letter and go about the rest of the article. You’ll get extra readers that wouldn’t click on a straight product review from doing this.
Now, you could write a sales letter that targets that issue instead. You could base an entire sales letter around how a product made you enough money to clear your student debt. But then you’d have to continually write sales pitches for different markets.
Also, there’s another reason for having how-to articles on your niche sites.
Multiple Products, One Article
With a sales letter/product review, you’re selling one item.
With a how-to, you can ‘sell’ multiple items.
For instance, on one niche site, I have three major products. I have a sales letter for each. Now, assuming a person comes to my site, clicks my affiliate link and buys a single product that nets me $50, then great: I am perfectly happy with that.
But I’d be just as happy as they clicked on my article, “The essential items for an X connoisseur.” In fact, I might be even more happy because there’s a chance they are going to think, “This guy knows what he is talking about” and then buy all three items on my list.
Final Thoughts
Now, there are diminishing returns on writing endless articles on a niche site, as James says.
However, you greatly lessen that diminishing return provided you create articles which are going to give you more traffic and give you more money. Providing you answer a question that’s relevant to your target market and will bring in more readers, you’ve achieved the first objective. Providing you follow the loose framework I’ve talked about above, you’ll mostly achieve the second.
Hopefully, this article will have helped you see why and where to add how-to articles, as well as clear up my thoughts on including how-to information on a niche site.
Finally… remember that split-testing these ideas yourself is the way to go. You’ll absolutely gain more from testing a single niche site than you will from reading about a hundred.