How to promote your tutorials. Tutorial directories. (Part 1)

Tutorials are the sort of online resources many people like. At the same time they are a great way to promote your web sites, products, services and skills.

In this post, I want to talk about how you can promote your online tutorials.

First of all, online tutorials are regular web pages and all general web site promotion techniques works well with them. I.e. write quality content that other people would like to link to, have your tutorial indexed by major search engines and rank well, submit it to social media sites, advertize, etc. You can easily find tons of resources about web site promotion, so I’m not going to talk about them here.

This post is about promotion opportunity specific to online tutorials - tutorial directories.

Tutorial directories

Tutorial directories are web sites with categorized catalogs of links to various tutorials. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of such sites and you can submit your tutorial to most of them. The easiest way to locate such sites is to google for “submit tutorial”.

How to submit a tutorial?

The submissions are free and easy. On a specialized page, you need to select an appropriate category for your tutorial and specify a title and a short description along with a link to the tutorial web page. Some site will also ask for your web site (home page) link and an icon or a thumbnail that they can place next to your listing (usually a 50×50 or 60×60 gif file). Some sites require that you register before you can submit a tutorial.

Why use tutorial directories?

There are two major reasons why you might want to get listed on as many tutorial sites as possible: traffic and inbound links.

Traffic. Every tutorial directory tries to highlight new submissions on its home page and you may expect a short-term increase of traffic from tutorial directories right after the submission. A few days later, when your tutorial is no longer on home pages and can be only found under specific categories of directories, the traffic will significantly decrease, and only occasional visitors will come to your site from tutorial directories.

Inbound links. Nonetheless, in the long tail, you will benefit from the inbound links that will help you rank better in search engines. Most sites provide links both to the tutorial web page and the tutorial author’s web site. However you should be aware that some sites include only redirected or “nofollowed” links, and/or display your web pages in a frame. Although such links can channel traffic to your web site, they are almost useless in terms of SEO.

To be continued…

In the second part of this post I will review tutorial directories. I have submitted my own tutorial to some of them and will be able to share my own experience with you.

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Tags: tutorial directories