Drafting a Service Page With a Machine

Two different instructions

Write me a service page for a plumbing business asks the tool to invent the substance, and it has no substance about your business to draw on.

Here are eleven things I know about this job, organise them into a page asks it to do something it is genuinely good at.

Those produce results so different that they should not be described as the same activity.

Most disappointment with these tools comes from the first instruction being given when the second was intended.

The workflow that produces something usable

• Write the facts down first, roughly.
• Ask what questions the page should answer.
• Answer those yourself.
• Ask it to structure what you wrote.
• Work one section at a time.
• Rewrite the result in your own words.

The second step is the one people skip and the one that returns most. Asking what a customer would want to know is a task with no facts required, so the tool does it well, and the list it produces is frequently better than the one you would have written.

Start by getting your own material out

Since everything downstream depends on it.

Write down, badly, what the job involves: what you do first, what varies, what it costs, what goes wrong, how long it takes.

Dictating this is faster and produces something closer to how you actually speak.

Ten minutes of that is more valuable than any prompt, because it is the only part nothing else can supply.

The tool can then arrange, expand, and tidy it, which is genuine work it does well and quickly.

Without it, the tool is writing about plumbing in general rather than about your plumbing business.

Work in sections, not pages

Because a whole page produced at once is hard to correct.

Ask for one section, read it, fix what is wrong, and move on.

That keeps each output short enough to check properly, which is where invented details are caught.

It also prevents the drift where a long output starts accurate and becomes generic halfway down.

And it makes the tool's contribution obvious, which matters when you come to edit.

A page assembled from eight checked sections is a different object from a page generated in one attempt.

A worked example

A business tried asking for a complete service page and got something fluent, correct in outline, and true of any competitor.

They tried again differently: first asking what questions a customer choosing this service would have, which produced fourteen, of which nine were relevant.

They answered those nine in a voice note, transcribed it, and asked the tool to organise the answers into sections with headings.

The result contained their own figures, their own limits, and their own examples, arranged more clearly than they would have managed.

The editing pass took twenty minutes and the page was theirs.

Total time was under an hour for a page they had been avoiding for a year.

Ask it to interrogate you

A technique worth knowing, since it inverts the usual direction.

Rather than asking for output, ask it what it would need to know to write the page well.

It produces a list of questions, and answering them is the content.

That is the same interview a good writer would conduct, and it works because asking useful questions requires no knowledge of your business.

Keep the answers, since they are reusable for every other page and for the questions customers actually ask.

This is the single most useful way to use these tools for content, and almost nobody does it.

What it still cannot supply

Worth being clear about before relying on the workflow.

Your prices, your response times, your area, your qualifications, and the specifics of jobs you have done.

Any regulation, standard, or requirement particular to where you operate.

And anything about your business that is not written down somewhere it has seen, which is almost everything about your business.

Those are exactly the parts that make a page worth reading, which is why the supply-first order matters rather than being a preference.

Keep the questions for next time

Since the reusable output is not the page.

The list of questions customers have, and your answers, is the asset produced by this exercise.

It feeds every future page, your frequently asked questions, your quotes, and what you say on the telephone.

Keep it in one document and add to it whenever a customer asks something not on it.

Businesses that build that document find every subsequent page takes a fraction of the time.

Do not let it write the headings

A small point with a large effect on how the finished page reads.

Left to itself the tool produces headings like Our Commitment to Quality and Why Choose Us, which are the phrases every competitor's page already carries.

Headings are also what a reader scans and what appears in a search result, so generic ones waste the most visible words on the page.

Write those yourself from your own answers: what it costs, how long it takes, what happens if it rains.

That single change does more to stop a page reading as machine-written than any amount of editing inside the paragraphs.

The counter-case

Sometimes the generic version is enough.

A minor page nobody arrives on, or a placeholder while a proper one is written, does not justify an hour.

Some businesses also find the workflow slower than simply writing, particularly people who write easily.

And the whole exercise assumes somebody will edit the output, which is where it usually fails rather than in the drafting.

Get your facts out first, ask it what it needs to know, work section by section, and rewrite the result.

The hour

1. Ask what questions the page should answer.
2. Answer them aloud and transcribe.
3. Give it your answers as the material.
4. Ask for one section at a time.
5. Check each before moving on.
6. Rewrite in your own words.
7. Keep the questions for the next page.

Step one is the reversal that makes the rest work, since asking good questions needs no knowledge of your business and answering them is the only part you cannot delegate.

What happens without that order is covered in asking a machine to write your website.

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.