Content Written by Somebody Who Was Not There

The difference is not style

A page written by a competent writer working from research reads perfectly well. It is grammatical, organised, and covers the topic.

A page written by somebody who does the work reads differently, and the difference is not quality of prose.

It is that the second one contains details that cannot be obtained by reading: what usually turns out to be the actual problem, what customers reliably get wrong, and what the job costs when it goes badly rather than well.

Those details are the evidence, and a page without them is describing a subject rather than demonstrating knowledge of it.

What only somebody present knows

• What it usually turns out to be.
• What customers assume and get wrong.
• Actual numbers: cost, time, frequency.
• What goes wrong and how often.
• What you decided against, and why.
• The exception that comes up twice a year.

The last is the strongest signal of all. Somebody researching a topic finds the general case; somebody doing it knows the unusual case and mentions it because it caused a problem once.

Numbers are the fastest tell

Since researched writing is systematically vague about them.

A page saying this typically takes a few hours could have been written by anybody.

A page saying it usually takes about three hours, longer on older houses because the fittings are frequently seized, could not.

The second sentence contains a duration, a condition, and a reason, and all three came from doing it repeatedly.

Look through any page you are unsure about and count the specific figures. Where there are none, the page contains no evidence.

Adding them is also the fastest way to improve a weak page, since the numbers exist in the head of whoever does the work.

Getting it out of somebody's head

The practical problem, since the person with the knowledge is rarely the person who wants to write.

Record a conversation rather than asking for a draft. Twenty minutes of somebody answering questions about a service produces more usable material than a week of them intending to write something.

Ask the questions that produce specifics: what does this usually turn out to be, what do people get wrong, what does it cost, what goes wrong, when do you tell somebody not to bother.

Then have somebody else shape the transcript into a page, keeping the specifics and the phrasing.

That is a legitimate use of a writer, and it is different from asking a writer to produce a page about a subject.

The writer's job becomes editing rather than inventing, which is where writers are genuinely useful.

A worked example

A business had six service pages written by an agency from a brief.

They were accurate, readable, and interchangeable with any competitor's.

The owner recorded twenty minutes per service on his phone, answering five questions, mostly while driving between jobs.

The pages were rewritten from those recordings, keeping his figures, his examples, and several of his phrases.

The pages were slightly less polished and considerably more convincing, and enquiries began quoting details from them back to him.

Total cost was two hours of his time spread over a fortnight, and the material had existed the whole time.

Keep the awkward phrasing

The editing instruction that matters most.

A recorded explanation contains phrases a writer would not choose, and those phrases are frequently the most convincing part.

Trade language, regional words, and slightly blunt assessments all signal that a person with experience said this.

Editing them into smooth marketing prose removes the signal while keeping the words, which is the worst outcome.

Tidy the grammar, cut the repetition, keep the voice, and resist the urge to make it sound professional.

A page that sounds like the person who will attend the job is doing something a polished page cannot.

Photographs are the same argument

Since the principle extends beyond text.

A photograph of your own work is evidence in the way a stock image is not, for exactly the reason a specific number is evidence where a vague one is not.

The same applies to a diagram you drew, a photograph of a failed part, or a screenshot of something going wrong.

Those cannot be obtained by anybody who was not there, which is precisely what makes them worth publishing.

A page combining specific numbers with photographs of the actual work is close to impossible to fake, and nobody who has not done the work will bother trying.

It answers the questions people search for

A side effect worth knowing, since it is not the reason to do this and is a real benefit.

The questions that produce specific answers are the questions people actually type: what does it cost, how long does it take, why does this keep happening.

A page containing a real figure and a real cause matches those searches in a way a general description does not.

It also tends to be the page somebody links to or sends a friend, because it contains something worth passing on.

So the material that demonstrates experience and the material that gets found are largely the same material, which is convenient and not accidental.

The counter-case

Outsourced writing has a real place.

A business owner who cannot write and will not record anything is better served by a competent researched page than by nothing at all.

General explanatory content, where the subject genuinely is the same for everybody, does not require firsthand experience to write well.

And a good writer working closely with somebody experienced produces better pages than the experienced person would alone, which is the arrangement to aim for rather than a compromise.

The failure is not outsourcing. It is outsourcing without supplying anything only you could have supplied.

What to do

1. Count the specific figures on your pages.
2. Record twenty minutes per service.
3. Ask what it usually turns out to be.
4. Ask what customers get wrong.
5. Ask what goes wrong and how often.
6. Edit the transcript, keeping the voice.
7. Add your own photographs.

Step two is the whole method, since the material already exists and the obstacle has always been getting it out rather than producing it.

How to recognise the alternative is covered in what a ghostwritten page sounds like.

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.