A Blog Nobody Asked For

The advice everybody receives

Start a blog, publish consistently, and traffic will follow.

It is given confidently, it is not qualified by industry or circumstance, and it is given most often by people who sell content services.

It is also sometimes correct, which is what makes it hard to dismiss. The problem is that it is offered as a default rather than as a conclusion, and the businesses it does not suit are the majority.

What actually happens

The pattern is consistent enough to describe in advance.

Four posts appear over six weeks, written with real effort by the owner or somebody enthusiastic.

The fifth takes a month. The sixth does not arrive.

Eighteen months later the site carries a blog section whose most recent entry is dated the spring before last, which tells every visitor something about the business that the business did not intend to say.

An abandoned blog is worse than no blog, because a missing section says nothing and a stale one says you started something and stopped.

What it costs

The number people use is the writing time, which is the smallest part.

A useful post is a couple of hours to write if you know the subject, plus the deciding what to write about, the editing, the finding or taking an image, the publishing, and the checking afterwards.

Call it half a day, honestly, per post, done by somebody whose time has a value.

Weekly publishing is therefore roughly a day a fortnight of skilled attention, indefinitely, which for a small business is a real commitment and is almost never budgeted as one.

The two jobs it can actually do

Worth separating, because they need different things and are usually conflated.

The first is being found: publishing pages that answer questions people search for, so that strangers arrive who would otherwise not have.

The second is being trusted: giving somebody who already found you evidence that you know what you are doing, which they read before deciding to call.

These pull in different directions. The first rewards volume and breadth, the second rewards a small number of genuinely good pieces, and a business that is unclear which it wants tends to produce something that does neither.

When the answer is no

• Nobody is named as the person who will write it.
• Your service pages are thin or your homepage is vague.
• You have no reviews and an incomplete business listing.
• Your customers do not search for what you do; they are referred.
• The plan is to write about your company news.
• You are fully booked and turning work away already.

Any one of the first three should stop it. Those are cheaper problems with larger returns, and a blog does not compensate for a site that does not explain what you sell.

What the same effort buys elsewhere

A day a fortnight, spent instead on the things a blog is often used to avoid.

Rewriting your service pages so each one properly explains one thing you sell.

Photographing your own finished work rather than using stock images.

Asking every completed customer for a review, individually.

Completing the business listing, with hours, services, and current photographs.

For a local business with an incomplete site, those four will outperform two years of blogging, and they finish, which a blog never does.

When the answer is yes

Two conditions, and both have to hold.

There are questions your customers genuinely ask, repeatedly, that are not answered anywhere on your site and that somebody might type into a search engine.

And a specific named person has agreed to spend specific time on it, with that time protected the way a client commitment would be.

If you can write down the first ten questions and the name of the person, you have something. If either is missing, you have an intention.

A worked example

An equipment hire company decided to blog and wrote six posts over two months: a company update, a new-staff announcement, two industry news summaries, and two general pieces about their sector.

None had any visitors from search over the following year.

Stopping, they instead listed the eleven questions their counter staff answered most often, which took twenty minutes and mostly concerned what was needed to hire particular equipment, whether certain items required certification, and what happened if something was returned late.

They wrote those eleven as ordinary pages over about four months.

Nine now receive search traffic. Two are used constantly by the counter staff themselves, who send the link rather than explaining again.

The same effort, redirected from what was interesting to write to what was repeatedly asked.

The version that works for most businesses

Not a blog at all, but a small set of permanent pages that answer real questions.

The difference is not cosmetic. A blog implies a stream, dates, and an obligation to continue, and it makes every post look stale eventually.

A page answering a question is undated, permanent, and finished. It can be improved when something changes and it never looks abandoned.

Ten such pages, written once and kept accurate, do more for most small businesses than a hundred posts, and the project has an end.

The counter-case

There are businesses where a genuine blog, with a real cadence, is the right answer.

Anyone in a field that actually changes, where customers need to know what is current: regulation, tax, technology, or anything with seasonal or legislative movement.

Anyone selling on expertise, where the writing is the demonstration and a prospect reads four pieces before making contact.

And anyone whose market genuinely searches for information before searching for a supplier, which is common in considered purchases and rare in emergency trades.

If you are in one of those, publishing is not optional decoration, and the rest of this month is about doing it properly.

Deciding honestly

1. Write down ten questions customers actually ask.
2. Check whether your site answers them.
3. Name the person who will write, and the hours.
4. Fix the service pages and listing first if those are weak.
5. Choose pages or posts deliberately, not by default.
6. Start only if steps one and three both produced an answer.

Deciding not to is a legitimate outcome and a better one than a section that stops in April.

The resourcing question is the one that decides it, covered in who is going to write it.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.