How-to articles, continued

Here continues our lesson on how to write a how-to article. (If you missed the first lesson, please report to the office for a detention. Just kidding. Please read the first installment below.)

The title: Okay, we talked about beginning your title with "How to." What should come next? What comes next -- and you don't need me to tell you this -- should be the subject of your how-to. For illustration purposes, our working title would be "How to Procrastinate." Great! you say. Now we can move on to Step 2, which hopefully will not take two days to discuss...

But wait! Is a title like this enough to distinguish your excellent article from all those others out there? What benefit will readers get from your information? Basically, why should they care? Why shouldn't they thumb up their noses at your article, throw it on the floor, and go out to play some golf? Because this is what they will do, if you don't give them, right off the bat, a good reason to read further. After all, not everyone will realize, unless you tell them, why they need to learn to procrastinate. And others will already be as expert as you at it, so they might not see a need to read about something they already know.

So the second part of the title must give them some sort of incentive to keep reading. This is generally done by promising something so fantastic that they can't not read on, such as "How to Make Millions While Doing Nothing." The basic structure would be something like this: "How to ______ to ______" or "How ________ can ______." For our subject of procrastination, you would think to yourself, what benefits could readers derive from learning how to procrastinate? (If you can't think of any answers to this, you should go back to the first part of Step 1, learning about your subject.)

So, plugging one of these reasons into the formula above, we might come up with something like this: "How Procrastination Can Make You a Millionaire" or "How to Procrastinate and Grow More Hair." Thought these are fine titles, there is one trick to using them (I knew it! you say. There is always a trick to everything.): Your article must actually deliver on your title's promise. If you have a proven method of growing hair or money by procrastinating, then by all means use one of these titles. If not, however, you should choose a more doable one, such as "How to Procrastinate and Have More Fun."

Tomorrow: How to Procrastinate and Have More Fun