And here we are on chapter three: Tutorials. I separated this from the blog posts chapter for a really good reason. So if you've read the Blog Post chapter, you saw that tutorials was one type of blog post mentioned in there. And it absolutely is it's a great potential type of blog post. But a tutorial does not always sit on the blog.

It could easily be part of documentation. In fact, it often is part of documentation. At least with that, getting started guide that I described in the developer experience episode. But you could have tutorials around sample apps that are in your documentation. They also might exist in their own section of a developer portal or a lot of places that you can put tutorials. And so I wanted to have a chapter that's specifically focused on that. I talked about some of the different types of tutorials and where they might be, but all of these, depending on whichever they are, they all have the same structure. And I think the problem that someone makes when they jump into a tutorial, how many tutorials have you seen that start with the line? In this tutorial, I will… Jumps right into that. And that's one of the mistakes that a tutorial makes. Another common one I see is at the end, it says, and now I told you how to make the whatever. Right? So in the book I talk about the structure. I extract a few things that are different than just that give me the steps.

First to explain the context. So why am I even going to do this? What's the purpose of the tutorial that I'm about to follow? What is the use case? I mean, show me that you even know why I would want to integrate with your tool in this way.

The second is to show the end result. So that's part of the context, but if I'm building an app using your API, for example, then show me what is this app going to look like at the end. Screenshot? Anything that will give me a feel for what it is I'm building. That could also be communicated in words, just as part of the context, but talk about that end result. What am I going to learn here?

And then you do the part that you might think of as a tutorial, which is to walk through the steps. And to give me some headlines that can guide me through those steps, also.

The final, piece of the tutorial structure that is often forgotten is to tell me what's the next step. Now, you've already told me the step to build the thing that you just showed me, but what is the thing that I am now capable of doing? How can you paint the picture for what I need to read after this or what I need to do after this, now that I've built this thing, what is that next step I can take?

So, even though this structure is the same for every tutorial. It doesn't mean that every tutorial has to be identical. There's a lot of room for you to experiment. People, ask about the things they've seen Stripe and Twilio do with, creatively displaying the tutorials, or, I mean, you could even call TwilioQuest a tutorial. So you can absolutely experiment with the format, but if you look at what they've done, they still have these pieces of structure.

You can still find that context and end result, all of the steps and then the, where to go from here, all within that tutorial. The book talks about that structure and how that structure is important. Lots of room for how you do that and where these tutorials live, but that is the Tutorial chapter of Developer Marketing Does Not Exist.