Finding Something to Write About Every Week

Why it stops

Almost never because the business ran out of things to say.

It stops because on the morning something is due, nobody has an idea, and inventing one under time pressure is genuinely hard.

The failure is not creative, it is logistical. The ideas occurred during the previous fortnight and nobody wrote them down.

So the fix is not a brainstorming session. It is a place to put things and a habit of putting them there.

The list beats the session

A planning meeting produces perhaps twelve topics, of which four are good, and it produces them all at once by thinking about the business abstractly.

A running list captures topics at the moment they reveal themselves, which is when a customer asks something and you notice you have explained it before.

Those are better subjects, because their existence is evidence that somebody wanted to know.

Keep the list somewhere you can reach in ten seconds from wherever you are. A note on your phone works. Anything requiring you to open a laptop will not be used.

The sources that do not run out

• Questions customers ask before buying.
• Questions they ask after, which are different and often better.
• Anything you have explained twice in a month.
• Objections that come up in quoting.
• Jobs that went unusually, well or badly.
• Things you were asked for and do not offer.
• Mistakes you see other people making.

Every one of those is generated by trading. They renew continuously because the business keeps operating, which is why they cannot be exhausted.

Your inbox and your call log

The two richest sources, and both are already written down.

Read back through a month of customer emails and mark every question. You will find the same four or five recurring in slightly different words, and the variation in wording is itself useful, because it shows how people describe the problem.

Do the same with quote requests, particularly the ones that did not convert, since those often contain the concern you failed to address.

If you take a lot of calls, ask whoever answers them to note questions for two weeks. They will produce a better list than any planning exercise, because they hear the questions in their original form rather than translated.

The thing you explained twice

Worth singling out as the strongest single signal.

If you have explained something twice in a month, you will explain it thirty more times this year, and you have already done the hard part: you have worked out how to say it.

Writing it down converts an explanation you give repeatedly into one you give once and then send.

That saves time immediately, independently of whether anybody ever finds it in a search, which makes it the lowest-risk thing to write.

Capture the wording, not the topic

When something goes on the list, record the sentence the customer used rather than your summary of it.

Not enquiry about lead times, but the actual phrasing: how long before you can start, or can you do it before the end of the month.

Two reasons. The customer's words are what other people will type into a search engine, and your professional restatement usually is not.

And the original wording carries the concern underneath the question, which is often the real subject. How long before you can start frequently means I have a deadline and I am worried, and a page written to that is a better page.

A worked example

A specialist cleaning company kept a note on the office wall for one month, with a rule that anybody could add a line.

It collected thirty-one entries.

Eleven were the same three questions in different words, all concerning what had to be moved or cleared before they arrived.

Seven were about whether particular surfaces or materials would be damaged.

Five were about access, parking, and how long the team would be on site.

The rest were one-offs, of which two were interesting.

That single month produced roughly fifteen viable subjects, enough for eight months of fortnightly publishing, and the three preparation questions became one page that the office now sends with every booking confirmation.

Keep the list rough

The temptation is to tidy it: categorise, prioritise, and turn it into a schedule.

Resist that, because the tidying becomes the work and the list becomes a project rather than a tool.

A rough list of forty lines you can scan is more useful than a structured plan of twelve, since on the morning you need a subject you are looking for one that suits your energy and the time available, not executing a sequence.

Cross things off, leave the ones that no longer appeal, and add without judging. Filtering is a job for the day you write, not the day you capture.

What not to put on it

Company news, unless a customer would act on it.

Industry news summaries, which are already covered better by people whose job that is.

Anything prompted by a competitor having written about it, which produces a worse version of somebody else's article.

And seasonal filler written because it is a particular month, which is the most reliable indicator that a publishing habit is running on obligation rather than on anything anybody wanted.

The counter-case

There is a limit to the collect-do-not-invent approach.

A list built only from questions you are asked will cover what customers already know to ask about, and will never cover the thing they do not know they should be asking.

Some of the most valuable writing a specialist can do is exactly that: the consideration nobody raises because nobody knows it matters, which then costs them.

So keep a small second list for those, generated deliberately rather than by capture, and accept that it fills slowly. One or two a year is a reasonable rate and they are usually the best things you publish.

Setting it up

1. Make one list, reachable in ten seconds.
2. Add the customer's exact wording, not your summary.
3. Read back a month of emails to seed it.
4. Ask whoever answers the phone to add lines for two weeks.
5. Never tidy it.
6. Keep a second short list for what nobody thinks to ask.

A month of capture typically yields eight months of material, which is the whole trick.

Publishing when nothing has happened is covered in what to post when nothing happened.

Frequently asked questions

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