Asking a technician to write an article produces nothing, because writing is a separate skill from knowing. Recording a fifteen-minute conversation and writing it up yourself produces material nobody else in your market has.

Why asking them to write fails

Not unwillingness. Two other things.

Writing is a distinct skill, and somebody excellent at diagnosing a fault can find a blank page genuinely difficult. Asking produces a delay, then an apology, then nothing.

And expertise makes people bad at judging what is interesting. The thing they know that customers would find genuinely useful is, to them, completely obvious and therefore not worth mentioning.

That second point is the important one. Ask what they think would make a good article and they will suggest something general. Ask what annoyed them this week and you get the actual material.

The conversation instead

Fifteen minutes, recorded, with a handful of questions. Transcribed and written up by somebody who writes.

That arrangement respects what each person is good at. The technician talks, which they can do fluently, and somebody else does the writing.

Recorded rather than noted, because trying to take notes makes it an interview and the useful material comes when it feels like a conversation.

The questions that actually work

The third and sixth are the most productive. A question asked on every job is a question hundreds of people have, and the answer is content that writes itself.

Avoid asking what they want to write about, what topics would be good, or anything requiring them to think like a marketer.

Getting past the first minute

The first answer is usually short and general. The useful version comes after following up.

Asking for a specific instance is the technique that works: what was the last time that happened, what did you find, what did you do. A general observation becomes a concrete story, and concrete stories are what make writing good.

Asking why twice more also helps. The first answer is what happened, the second is the cause, and the third is usually the insight worth publishing.

What to do with the recording

Not publish it. Transcribe it and use it as raw material.

One fifteen-minute conversation typically contains two or three separate subjects, each of which is a page. The value is in the specifics they mentioned in passing, not in the structure of the conversation.

Keep their phrasing where it is good. Trade language, said plainly, reads as authentic in a way that written-from-scratch marketing copy does not, and it is the reason to record rather than to summarise from memory.

Checking it back

Necessary, and worth making easy.

Send the draft and ask whether anything is wrong rather than whether they like it. The first question gets a useful answer and the second gets a shrug.

Technical accuracy is the thing to check, since a written-up version can lose a qualification that mattered. Style is not their job.

Attributing the piece to them, with a photograph, makes the check more likely to happen and makes the content stronger, since a named person with a trade is more credible than a business.

Making it a habit

The version that survives is small and attached to something that already happens.

Fifteen minutes once a month, at a time when people are already together. Recorded on a phone. That is one conversation producing two or three pages, which is more content than most small businesses publish in a year.

What kills it is scheduling a content meeting, which becomes a thing to cancel when work is busy.

Why it is worth the trouble

This is the content nobody can copy from you.

General advice about your trade exists in a thousand places and reads the same everywhere. What somebody found behind a wall in a specific kind of local property, and what it means for other people with that kind of property, exists nowhere else.

It also builds the site's credibility in a way marketing copy cannot, because it demonstrates knowledge rather than claiming it, and it runs on the same capture-during-work habit as photographs, described in posting consistently without it taking over.

Frequently asked questions

Why not just ask staff to write it?

Writing is a separate skill from knowing, and expertise makes people bad at judging what is interesting. The thing customers would find useful seems too obvious to them to mention.

What works instead?

A recorded fifteen-minute conversation, transcribed and written up by somebody who writes. The technician talks, which they do fluently, and somebody else handles the page.

Which questions produce the best material?

What question do you get asked on nearly every job, and what do you wish people knew before they called. A question asked every job is one hundreds of people have.

How do I get past a short general answer?

Ask for a specific instance: the last time it happened, what was found, what was done. Then ask why twice more, since the third answer is usually the insight.

Should I publish the recording?

No. Transcribe it as raw material. One conversation usually contains two or three separate subjects, each a page, and the value is in the specifics mentioned in passing.

How do I check it back?

Ask whether anything is wrong rather than whether they like it. Check technical accuracy, since a write-up can lose a qualification that mattered. Style is not their job.

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.

Knowledge sitting with people who will never write a blog post?

We run the fifteen-minute conversation and turn it into pages, which is the content competitors cannot copy from you.

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