Turn what your business already knows into useful content

You know things worth writing down. You are never going to write them down

Every experienced trade and service business is sitting on genuinely useful knowledge. The questions customers ask constantly, the mistakes that cost people money, the thing you wish everybody understood before they rang you. None of it ever gets written, and the reason is not laziness.

• The evening you set aside for it gets eaten by an actual job.
• You start writing and it sounds nothing like how you would explain it in person.
• You post twice, hear nothing, and conclude it does not work.
• The competitor who is worse than you turns up first on Google because they publish.
• And the same questions keep arriving by phone, one customer at a time.

The knowledge is not the problem. Getting it out of your head and into a form people can find is the problem, and it is a job rather than a hobby.

What we are not selling

It is worth being direct about this, because the market is now full of services that are a thin wrapper around a text generator and a scheduling tool.

We are not selling you AI-generated content. You can produce that yourself in about four minutes, and the reason nobody should is that it reads like everybody else's and says nothing only your business could say. Search engines have got considerably better at spotting it, and more importantly so have customers.

The problem with generated content is not that it is badly written. It is usually perfectly grammatical. The problem is that it is empty. It contains no specific job, no real number, no opinion, no admission of anything difficult, because the tool has never had its hands inside a machine or under a sink.

What we sell is the extraction. Getting the specific, useful, slightly opinionated things out of your head and into a form people can read and find, then keeping that going month after month when you would otherwise have stopped.

What actually works for a small service business

After a few years of doing this for ourselves, some fairly clear patterns. Most of them are the opposite of what content marketing advice usually says.

The campaigns that actually earn their keep

Content brings strangers in slowly. Campaigns go to people who already know you, and for most small businesses that is where the quicker money is.

Honest expectations

This is the service with the slowest and least predictable return, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

Content compounds, which is a polite way of saying it does nothing for a while. The first three months usually produce very little you can point at. Somewhere around month four to six, articles start appearing in search results and the occasional enquiry arrives mentioning something you wrote. That timeline is not a sales technique, it is just how it works.

If you need this quarter to look better, do not start here. Spend the money on capture and follow-up, which show up in weeks. Content is what you do when the leaks are fixed and you want more people arriving in the first place.

We also cannot promise rankings, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What we can do is publish consistently, answer real questions properly, and make sure the site it lands on is fast and well structured. That is the whole of what is within anybody's control.

The businesses that get the most out of this are the ones that treat the monthly questionnaire seriously. The correlation between how good the answers are and how well the content performs is close to perfect, and it is the one part of the process we genuinely cannot do for you.

What we would do in your first ninety days

Not a rigid plan, but this is the shape that works, and it front-loads the things that pay back soonest.

Month one is mostly listening and fixing foundations. We collect the questions your team answers constantly, look at what your website already says, and check that it can host articles properly. Often there is a page missing that should have existed for years, usually about price or about a service that never got its own page, and writing that is worth more than any blog post.

Month two is when publishing starts in earnest, and it is deliberately unglamorous. Two or three solid pieces answering the most common questions, published on your own site rather than only on social, because your site is the asset you keep.

Month three is when the newsletter starts if you are on a plan that includes one, because by then there is something worth linking to. This is also usually when the first reactivation campaign goes out to past customers, which is frequently the point at which the whole thing pays for itself for the first time.

If you already have a list of past customers sitting in an accounting system doing nothing, say so on the first call. That is normally the fastest win available and it changes the order we would work in.

Frequently asked questions