A whitepaper is highly effective when marketing your business.

Consumers love all of the facts and data that are in whitepapers. They also love how it justifies their purchase. You love them because they can help bring more business your way.

Before you start writing a whitepaper, it’s important you know how to write it.

Pick a Good Topic

You need to choose a topic that consumers will be interested in.

Think about the biggest question your consumers have about your products and services. This question should be one that you can do research about and present highly authoritative information about.

For some questions, you’ll need to provide some background about the answer, which makes it perfect for a whitepaper.

Start Researching

Researching is the most important part of the whitepaper.

Find as much information as possible about the topic you’ve chosen. Make sure the facts and data are relevant and the latest in the industry.

Providing irrelevant, inaccurate, or outdated information can turn consumers away.

Organize the Research

After you have the research, you’ll need to organize it.

Think about what consumers want to know first, or what they need to know first so they will understand the more complex information coming later in the whitepaper.

Start Writing the WhitePaper

You need a cover page. This will include the title and an attractive image.

You will then need a table of contents. This helps consumers find what they want to know quickly and easily.

After the table of contents, you will need to start writing the whitepaper. Keep in mind that people do not like to read long blocks of text.

Just like a good blog post, you need to use subheadings, paragraphs should not be too long, and using images will help break up the text. Give readers the information they need in as little words as possible.

The last section of the whitepaper should be about your business. You should not promote your business at all in the first part of the whitepaper.

This is mostly for informational purposes only. After you give them the knowledge, you can give them information about your services and products. This is usually done with an “About Us” page on the last page or couple of pages of the whitepaper.

Save It and Start to Promote It

A whitepaper should be saved as a PDF. This will let you send it easily to everyone who would like to read it.

You can send it to your email list. Include a link on your website for people to download it off your server. You can give it away to people who sign up for your newsletter. You can also use it for offline marketing by printing it.

Whitepapers should be used often to market your business. You can’t use it for years though. It’s best to have a new whitepaper every year. This way you can choose a current topic people want information on and you can use the latest research. That doesn’t mean you should get rid of older whitepapers. Content is content, so publish it on your site and reap the benefits indefinitely.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to write a whitepaper, get started on one. It’s not as overwhelming as it might seem. Once you have your research and start writing, you’ll be done with it before you know it.

Start by choosing a topic now.

You may want to read more at Content Marketing Institute about how to write a whitepaper.

Let us know in the comments below if you have any specific tips or tricks to writing your own whitepapers!