PR LEADS’ Official Guide to How to Write “How-to Articles”
With Dan Janal, Your Fearless PR Leader
What do you need to write?
So let’s go back to the basics. What exactly is this deliverable? What is this thing that we’re doing?
We are writing an article and this article is anywhere from about 500 to 1,000 words long. This is not a promotional piece about us. This doesn’t say how great we are. It doesn’t talk about our methodology or why we’re better or why we’re different. It’s not your positioning statement. It’s not your branding message. It’s not a brochure. This is an article. This is a piece of material that if you read in a publication you’d say I’m smarter because I’ve read it or I am happier because I have read it or I have tools and tips that I can use for being happier, healthier and more productive because I’ve read this article. That’s what you want the reader to think after they’ve read the article. Why is that good? Because they’re going to say this person is the expert, this person is the consultant I want to work with. If this person can give me this much information in 500 words, imagine how much more I can get from their book. So that’s what you want to have as a result.
So let’s look at the message itself. What are you trying to do here? One, you want to help people. If we look at the headline for these articles, that will really give us the outline for the article so let’s start there. It’s the other way around, usually. You write your story and then you write a headline based on that article. But I think for this kind of exercise it’s really helpful if we think of our headline first because that will tell people and transmit to people immediately what the benefit of reading this article is.
Here are some ideas and listen to the key words that I’m using here as well.
Ten commandments of reducing stress
Ten secrets of getting a rebate from the IRS
Ten tested methods for increasing happiness with your family.
Do you notice what we’re doing here? There’s a number. It could be seven keys to this, the ten commandants of that. That’s a popular one, by the way, ten commandants, people love ten commandants. They also like “secrets,” “tips,” and “tactics” as words in a headline.
So you have the number and you have the tactics of the words or the secrets or the tips.
The third part describes the benefit. Are you going to do to reduce stress? Get your papers in order? Make your kids smarter? Reduce cholesterol? It’s a tried and true formula that will work with most people.
