Millions of people have read my websites, and I earn my living from the comfort of any city my heart desires. I also sell more books than 90% of authors. In this article I’ll show you how to get one million readers by mastering the fundamentals of non-fiction writing – the how-to article.
If you want to make money online, or sell books, or if you plan on being a non-fiction writer in any genre, you must master the how-to article.
How can you give people life advice – which is really just another way of saying “Here is how to live your life” – if you can’t write a basic article explaining how to perform some task?
There are several benefits to writing a killer how-to article.
You’ll actually get web traffic.
To get readers, you have to find them. More accurately, you need readers to find you.
Let’s face it. No one wants to read your life advice or hear your story until you’ve proven you can and will help them. A good how-to article shows you want to help readers discover answers to their problems.
People will find your how-to articles via Google searches. Those random readers are then converted into regular readers who will read your other articles. If you deliver solid value and goodwill through your writing, they’ll share your articles with friends and buy your books.
To this day my top performing posts are how-to articles. Review articles, which discuss a certain product while explaining its uses, are also a form of how-to articles. An article saying “what” something is can also make a killer how-to article.
In terms of traffic, these are five of my most-read articles. Each of these articles have made me money and continue making me money every day:
- How to Choke a Woman During Sex,
- How to Go on Testosterone Replacement Therapy,
- How to Use the Liberator Wedge,
- How to be a More Dominant Man: Mindset,
- How to Make the Joe Rogan Kale Shake.
I’ve written some philosophical articles that you love, but a good how-to article is never forgotten. It’s a form of passive income as readers find these articles every day via Google.
Incidentally, I earn money from each of those posts daily, and I owe Joe Rogan a very nice dinner as the Joe Rogan Kale Shake article has made me tens of thousands of dollars. (I’ll explain how later in this article.)
You demonstrate expertise and authority.
If you can explain how to perform a task to someone, this proves you are an authority on the subject. How do you know I’m an authority on SEO and how-to articles? Read this article.
Then look at this traffic. Fit Juice is an SEO-optimized site.
Fit Juice has received over one-million page views.
I spend less than 2 hours a month on Fit Juice. It receives 50,000 page views a month.
Your writing improves.
How-to articles are hard to write, as you’ll find you either write too much or too little. Either you don’t explain the process well or you bore people to death.
When you can explain a complicated process to someone in words, you’ll be far better at writing abstract or “life philosophy” articles.
You will make money.
People who go onto Google looking for “how to do something,” are the warmest leads you’ll ever find online. They are information seekers. Information seekers are prepared to pay for information and are also in the market for the tools they need to perform the task they are trying to learn how to perform.
You also position yourself as an expert who offers valuable services. If I wanted to sell you on my SEO services (I am not currently taking on consulting clients), would this article not serve as quite a way to show you why you should hire me?
Why I “owe” Joe Rogan a donation to the charity of his choice.
Joe Rogan has made me a nice chunk of change, and if he ever does a charity drive I’ll be sure to kick some of that back to his charity of choice.
Years ago I’d see vague references to the Joe Rogan Kale shake. Joe would mention it on his podcast, and people would look for this recipe. Joe tweeted the recipe out once, but there was no Google search result for “Joe Rogan Kale Shake.”
As there was no singular location online on how to make the Joe Rogan Kale shake, I wrote the article on the Joe Rogan Kale Shake. The article was so good that copycats rose up to try taking away my #1 spot on Google. Even Dave Asprey tried (and failed) to take my spot.
I wrote an article with the recipe, embedded a video of him making it, and then included affiliate links to the blender Joe uses. I also included links to other articles on Fit Juice. (I’ll explain why I did this below.)
Since publication, the Joe Rogan Kale Shake article has received nearly 200,000 views.
Those are great views to have, by the way, as those are people who are:
- interested in health,
- in the market for a blender to make a shake like Joe does,
- curious about green juicing.
Fit Juice has affiliate links and also has a juicing and green smoothie book for sale. The process map is simple.
Google ==> Joe Rogan Kale shake ==> Fit Juice ==> Buys juicer or blender or ebook.
Not everyone will buy something. (Most won’t.) But it took me around 2 hours to write that article, and that article alone has made me over $20,000. Not bad for a “day” at the cafe.
What to Think About When Writing a How-To Article
The Two Most Important Words You MUST know about SEO
- Gorilla Mindset shift: Focus less on how to get people to read your site and more on how to keep them on your site.
Writing for the search engines is not much different than writing for your readers. Google wants to send real human beings to articles those humans will derive value from. Hence there’s no line between SEO and good writing .
However there are some technical terms you need to learn.
- Bounce rate – “the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.”
- Time on site – how long people stay on your site after finding it.
Bounce rate and time on site are the two most important SEO variables under your control. Yes, back links matter. Yes, Google uses around 200 variables in SEO. Yes, learn how to use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Learn that stuff later.
Focus most of your time on what you can control – bounce rate and time on site.
Google wants to give people good search results. This is why you and I use Google. If someone types in “Joe Rogan kale shake,” finds my site, and then leaves after 5 seconds, I’m dead meat.
How to lower your bounce rate.
Imagine you find a new website. What keeps you from only looking at more than one page on the site?
Links to more articles!
The Top Posts & Pages widget will lower your bounce rate.
In every article I link to other relevant articles. If you find an article about the Joe Rogan Kale shake, for example, you may want to know whether the blender Joe uses (a Vitamix) is better than the other category leader (BlendTec). Thus I wrote an article “Vitamix v. BlendTec,” and included that article as a recommended link to click.
The Joe Rogan Kale Shake article also includes a link to the article, “Juicing v. Blending.” If you’re curious about blending kale shakes and smoothies, you may want to know more about juicing.
Finally, the Joe Rogan Kale shake includes links to other smoothie recipes. Again, a person who wants to know about the Joe Rogan Kale shake will also want to know about other smoothies.
- SEO tip: Do you see why a how-to article tests your expertise and allows you to demonstrate that expertise to readers? How did I know to include those articles about various blenders in the Joe Rogan article? Because I’m actually a subject matter expert.
How to increase the amount of time readers spend on your site.
The three simplest ways to increase the amount of time readers spend on your site are:
- Write longer articles.
- Include good pictures.
- Embed videos from YouTube.
Your how-to articles should be between 1,000 and 2,000 words.
Your articles should be grammatically correct and contain few typos, as an article with a lot of typos will get you dinged by Google.
Your articles should break up the text regularly. If someone sees a wall of text without paragraph breaks, they are not going to keep reading. Three sentences per paragraph is plenty, and you should never fear a one-sentence paragraph.
I aim for 1,500 to 2,000 words in a killer how-to article. (Let’s get meta: This article you’re reading is a killer how-to article, isn’t it?)
Your how-to articles should include relevant pictures.
Humans are visual creatures. We enjoy looking at images. We pause from reading to look at good pictures, which keeps the time-on-site meter running.
This article contains five images.
- SEO tip: Save your images as relevant search words before uploading them. For example, I took a screen cap of Joe Rogan’s Kale Shake recipe from Twitter. I did not save the image with relevant terms, which means it is less likely to show up in Google image search.
This is what Google sees, and this makes it hard for Google to figure out what is going on.
http://i1.wp.com/fit-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Screen-Shot-2013-03-22-at-6.37.13–
This is a rookie SEO error.
Do a right click “view image URL” on this image.
Google knows what it is, which means this will show up in Google image and also boost the SEO of the page it’s uploaded in.
Note the pretty drop shadow on the above image. Use drop shadow before embedding an image on your website, a trick I learned from Victor Pride of BADNET, the only web consulting company I recommend.
Your how-to articles should include videos.
Embed videos, when relevant, in your article. If people watch videos, what are they doing? That’s right, they are remaining on your site to watch the video.
In the case of the Joe Rogan Kale Shake article, there was a video of Joe making his kale shake. Include that.
Here is a video explaining how I make money online. If you want to write how-to articles, you want to make money online. Therefore this video is relevant.
Click play to find out more.
There are around 200 other factors to think about when writing a how-to article, but you now know the most important ones. If all you know about SEO is what this article explains, you will make a lot of money online.
Be wary of SEO gurus. They will rattle off a bunch of terms to confuse you. Unless people show you screen shots of their actual websites and let you audit their traffic, do not trust them.
When you write a how-to article, focus on:
- Writing longer articles,
- Including pictures,
- Embedding videos.
If you want to learn more about how to write how-to articles, deconstruct these articles:
Now go forth and get paid.
UPDATE: I did a bonus video explaining how you can write better how-to articles.
P.S. To learn how to control your thoughts and emotions, pick up a copy of Gorilla Mindset today.
Gorilla Mindset is available in the following versions:
