Why tutorials aren’t the answer

Look, I know I’m part of the problem.

For 10+ years I’ve been telling marketers to see themselves as developer educators.

The tutorial is a classic developer education tool. Unfortunately, it rarely does what we want—to attract and convert developers. Most tutorials do neither.

They end up looking like this:

Without seeing the body of this tutorial, we already know it’s:

• Focused on Elastic’s product​
• Unlikely to pick up search terms
• Essentially documentation on a blog

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If I had to guess, the content team begged the product or engineering team for a post and they got 300 words and a couple of code blocks.

It’s not strategic. And, unfortunately, super common.

There are ways to make tutorials work. There’s also a whole world of content beyond tutorials that can still be educational.

It’s not just internal contributions that suffer. There is no shortage of technical content agencies and freelancers who will gladly write whatever you tell them. You could easily fill their content calendar with tutorials that won’t move the needle.

I’ve made these mistakes and I want to help you avoid them.

My latest EveryDeveloper post, Read This Before You Hire a Technical Content Agency, will give you my top three areas to consider.

How do you decide what content will be meaningful?