I had edited several articles and tutorials for an IBM distinguished engineer and API expert. He had come to trust me for putting his team’s rough drafts into polished  technical content. One time, he sent me an email with five basic steps and the message: “Can you do anything with this?” Knowing his team’s content was driving a lot of traffic to our site, I just had to dig into his request. Besides, the technology the steps referenced were hot at the time with our audience.

Being somewhat familiar with the application that the steps applied to, I went to our cloud platform (IBM Bluemix) and started running the steps. I wrote an introduction, defined each step, included images, and then sent a draft for him to review. He looked it over, made only a minor correction to the introduction, and said “Let’s go for it.” He was pleased and so were our readers.

I published the tutorial for him in the now-former IBM developerWorks Middleware hub. From there, I created a content strategy that included promoting the tutorial in our newsletter, in our community, and on social media, specifically in related LinkedIn groups and on Twitter.

Here’s a sample of a social post I did for the tutorial on LinkedIn:

Here’s a PDF of the tutorial.