What are White Papers?
- Wikipedia description: A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions, and are often requested and used in politics, policy, business, and technical fields.
- Real world description: A white paper is a great way to “open conversations” with prospective clients and create a neutral space to discuss industry trends.
Why do people read white papers?
Interestingly, the Internet is a great place for informal education and resources such as white papers help executives upgrade their knowledge base about their industry. SO…. white papers need to be neutrally written, contain enough intelligent content to be useful to the reader and it is OK to plug in a small pitch for the company promoting the white paper. What’s more is that a good white paper can actually become viral and draw in high quality traffic to your business website!
I have one white paper on my site…what’s next?
The second one. Though there are no best practices for white papers for businesses, here’s Pi Team’s 5 commandments when it comes to WPs.
- Release at least one white paper out every 6 weeks.
- Make it relevant and well researched!
- Make it graphical…white paper does not mean just black and white!
- Put company information as an FYI item at the end of the WP.
- Keep it simple, smarty!
Creating white papers for businesses is a tough job and you might like to check out how Pi team can help you with that by getting in touch!