How-to posts are a great way to reach your target audience. You have resources, tips and insights to make people’s lives easier, and you’re sharing them for free.
This is the essence of content marketing: you provide valuable content (blog posts, videos, webinars, ebooks, etc.) to invite people to your platform.
To make this work, you need to know who you’re trying to reach with your content. If you try to reach everyone, you’ll reach no one.
For collaborative spaces, such as a coworking space, community organization, or arts collective, there are several potential audiences you can serve.
New Members
If you’re targeting new members, create blog posts that demonstrate the power of collaboration and the fact that there’s already a vibrant collaborative community just waiting for them to join.
Existing Members
If you’re targeting existing members of the space, provide them with tools and resources that strengthen their professional skillset, inspire their creativity, or add to their collaboration and problem-solving skills.
Other Spaces
If you’re targeting other collaborative spaces, share insider tips and best practices for running the space, building community, graceful conflict resolution, hosting epic events, etc.
Focus Your Energies
If you’re using your blog for content marketing, don’t blog just to blog. It’s a waste of time and energy. Use your blog to solve problems your ideal customer or community member has.
How-to posts are a brilliant way to do this and you don’t have to craft the next great novel to put one together. Just tap into your expertise, community, and unique insights and share them.
Here are five how-to post ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Feel free to steal them as-is or modify them for your own purposes and community.
1. How to Rock a Networking Event (without Selling Your Soul)
This would be a good post for a professional collaborative community, such as a coworking space. Traditional coworking events can be awkward, overwhelming or shallow. Round up some pro tips for better networking from your community members and pull them together in a listicle how-to. Ask the contributors to share the finished post and you’ll be on your way to a nice little bump to your website’s traffic.
2. 5 Tips for Hosting Your Next Collaborative Event
Collaborative spaces tend to be home to numerous collaborative events, from lunch-and-learns and workshop, to Meetups, skillshares and social gatherings. Some of these events are fantastic and some of them, as my mom would say, leave a bit to be desired. Brainstorm your best tips on hosting a great collaborative event and voilà, you have a nice resource for your community.
3. How to Create Slides that Grab (and Keep) People’s Attention
Putting together an interesting presentation can be challenging. It’s not easy to take a lot of information and condense it into slides that engage your audience. If you have a solid strategy for creating an attention-grabbing presentation, then, by all means share it. We’ll all thank you for it.
4. 8 Insider Tips for New Members
For some people, joining a new collaborative community is fun and easy. Others, however, may find it intimidating and confusing. Put together some pro tips for newcomers to help them feel more comfortable and engaged. They’ll love it and, if you crowdsource the tips from your existing community, it could provide a fun overview of people’s experience as a newbie to your space.
5. 22 Ways to Build Community Around a New Project
Collaborative spaces and organizations tend to sprout new projects. It’s the nature of collaboration to create. But, just because someone has a good idea doesn’t mean that people will flock to it. Building community around a project or initiative is essential to success and it can be a challenge. Round up your best community-building tips and tools, share them in an easy-to-implement way, and watch communities appear before your eyes.
Your turn: Have you experimented with how-to posts on your blog? What kind of results have you had? Any tips or gotchas you can share? In the comments, let me know.
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