Most business owners who come to us with a blog have the same story. Somebody set it up when the website was built, three posts went up in the first month, and the last one is dated sometime in 2012. The owner feels a little guilty every time they see it. The reason is almost always the same too: “I am not a writer, and I don’t have time to sit and think of topics.”
We understand that completely. But we also think the problem is the idea of what a blog has to be. A business blog writing routine does not need a literary person or long free afternoons. It needs a supply of real questions and a simple habit for turning them into pages. You already have the first part. You just have not been writing it down.
Your customers are already giving you the topics
Think about the last week. How many times did someone ask you, or your staff, something like this?
- How long does it take to get the sofa reupholstered?
- Is this treatment painful?
- Can you deliver to Gurgaon or only within Delhi?
- What is the difference between your two packages?
- Which fabric is better for summers?
Each of those is a blog post. Not a clever one, not a viral one, but a useful one. If one customer asked it on the phone, many more are typing something close to it into Google and not finding a straight answer. A short, clear post that answers the question properly is exactly the kind of page that brings in a stranger who is already interested in what you sell.
The trick is to stop treating these questions as interruptions and start collecting them.
The routine we suggest to owners
This is the routine we give to clients who want to keep a blog going without hiring a full-time writer. It takes about an hour a month of the owner’s time. Some people do it in Hindi, some in English, some in a mix. It does not matter.
Step one: keep a question list
Put a notebook next to the phone, or a note on your mobile. Every time a customer asks something that takes more than one line to answer, write the question down in their words. Ask your counter staff and your sales person to do the same. By the end of the month you will have ten or fifteen questions without trying.
Step two: talk, don’t type
Once a month, pick two or three questions from the list. Sit down with a colleague or with us and just answer them out loud, the way you would answer a customer standing in front of you. Record it on your phone. Most phones have a voice recorder built in, and a simple ten-minute recording is plenty.
This is the part people skip, and it is the most important. When owners try to write, they become stiff and formal. When they talk, they explain things clearly, give examples, mention the mistakes customers make, and tell you what they would actually recommend. That is the material that makes a good post.
Step three: someone else turns it into a post
The recording then gets typed up and tidied. This can be a junior staff member who writes reasonably well, a freelancer, or us. The job is not to make it sound grand. The job is to keep your meaning, cut the repetition, add a clear heading, and break it into short paragraphs that are easy to read on a phone.
Step four: you check it, then it goes live
Read the draft once. Correct anything that is technically wrong or that you would never say. Then publish it. Two posts a month is a perfectly good pace for a small business. One a month is fine too, as long as it keeps happening.
A blog that answers one real question a month for two years is worth far more than a blog that published twenty posts in its first week and then went quiet.
What these posts should look like
You do not need 2,000 words. Most of the useful posts we help with fall somewhere between 400 and 900 words, because that is how long it takes to answer a real question properly. A few practical rules:
- Use the customer’s question, or something close to it, as the title. “How long does it take to reupholster a sofa?” is a better title than “Our upholstery services”.
- Answer the question in the first few lines. Then explain the details.
- Mention prices or price ranges if you are comfortable doing that. People search for them constantly.
- Mention your area where it is natural. If you only deliver in South Delhi, say so.
- End with what the reader should do next: call, visit, send a photo on WhatsApp, fill the form.
Photos help. A picture of the actual work, your actual shop or your actual product beats any stock image. Take them on your phone as you go.
What not to do
There is a lot of bad advice going around about blogs and SEO, so it is worth saying what we would avoid.
Do not pay someone to write fifty generic posts on “Top 10 benefits of interior design” stuffed with your keywords. Nobody reads them, and Google has become much better at recognising thin pages that exist only to rank.
Do not accept every offer of a “guest post” from strangers who email you. Earlier this year Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s webspam team, wrote publicly that guest blogging done purely to get links has become spammy, and he told people to stop using it as a link-building method. If someone offers to write for your blog for free, ask yourself why.
Do not copy text from other websites, even “just to get started”. It will not help you, and it can hurt the rest of your site.
Where the blog fits with everything else
A post you have written is useful in more places than the blog. Share it on your Facebook page with a short line of your own. Send the link on WhatsApp to the customer who asked the question in the first place. Print the answer and keep it at the counter. When the same question comes in again, your staff can send the link instead of explaining from scratch.
Over a year or two, these posts build up into a library of answers that works for you quietly. People find them on Google, read them, and call already knowing what they want. That is a far easier sales conversation.
If you want help
This is work we do for a few clients every month, and the owners spend very little time on it once the habit is set. If your blog has been sitting untouched, start with the notebook. Write down every question you hear for the next two weeks. When you have that list, you will see that you already know what to write about. You just needed someone to help you get it out.
