The Slow Month Is for Writing

The quiet weeks

For many businesses, the first weeks of January are the quietest of the year. The rush before the holidays is over, customers are recovering from it, and the phone rings less.

Those weeks tend to vanish into tidying, invoicing and planning. All useful. But they are also the only weeks in the year with time to write.

And most small business websites are short of writing. The main service gets two paragraphs. The questions customers ask every week are answered on the phone, every week. Last year's best jobs are not mentioned anywhere.

The quiet weeks are when that gets fixed, because the busy ones never will.

Why the writing never gets done

Writing for the website is important and never urgent, so it loses to everything that is.

In a busy month it waits for a quiet one. In a quiet month it waits for inspiration, or for a whole free day that never comes.

The way through is to treat it like any other job: a list, a fixed time, and each page finished before the next one starts.

What to write first

• The main service page, with real detail about what is included.
• Answers to common questions, the ones the phone gets weekly.
• Project write-ups from last year's best jobs.
• A page for the work you want more of.
• A proper about page with the actual people.
• Prices or price ranges, wherever you can give them.

The second is the easiest place to start. You already know the answers, because you give them every week, and writing them down once saves time for the rest of the year.

The service page that needs detail

The page for the service that brings in most of the work is often the thinnest on the site: a heading, two sentences and a photograph.

A customer comparing three businesses wants to know what the job involves, what is included, how long it takes, what they need to do, and what happens if something goes wrong.

Write it the way you would explain it to a customer standing in front of you. Then read it aloud, and cut anything you would never actually say.

A good service page is usually several times longer than the one it replaces, and easier to read, because it answers questions instead of making claims.

The answers you give every week

Ask whoever answers the phone to keep a list for two weeks: every question, in the customer's own words.

Most will repeat: what it costs, whether you work weekends, whether they need to be home, how far you travel, how soon you can start.

Each deserves a short, honest answer on the site, on a questions page or on the service page it belongs to. The phone will still ring, but more of the callers will already know the basics.

Project write-ups

Every business did some work last year that it is proud of, and most websites mention none of it.

A write-up does not need to be long: what the customer needed, what made it tricky, what you did, how long it took. Three or four short paragraphs and a few real photographs.

Leave out the customer's name and address unless they have agreed to be named. A description of the street or the type of building is usually enough.

Write-ups do something no claim can. They show the work, and a visitor who reads one understands what you do in a way a list of services never manages.

A worked example

A two-crew exterior painting company has almost no outdoor work from mid-December to March. The rain makes it impossible, and the owner spends the winter quoting and doing paperwork.

Its website had one page about exterior painting: three sentences and a photograph of a ladder.

This January the owner set aside Tuesday mornings. The first Tuesday went to the exterior page: how the crews prepare a house, why they wash and scrape before priming, which weather stops them, and what the customer needs to move.

The second went to eight common questions, gathered from the office's notes. The next two are set aside for write-ups of last summer's jobs: a cedar-sided house with peeling paint, and a stucco repaint on a corner lot.

The owner talks and the office manager types and tidies. Each page goes live as soon as it is finished, rather than waiting for all four.

A realistic goal

One page a week is achievable for most businesses. Through January and February, that is eight finished pages by March.

That is more new writing than many small business sites gain in a year.

Fix the time: the same morning each week, an hour or two, with the phone on someone else's desk. Choose the page the week before, so the hour starts with writing rather than deciding.

And publish each page when it is done. A finished page on the site is worth more than five drafts in a folder.

If writing is not your strength

Plenty of owners know their work thoroughly and dislike writing about it. That is normal, and it need not stop the pages being written.

Talking works. Record yourself explaining a job to an imaginary customer, then have it typed up and tidied. The result usually sounds more like you than anything written from scratch.

Or have someone who writes for websites interview you for an hour per page. They bring the structure; you bring the knowledge only you have.

The counter-case

January is not quiet for everyone. A furnace repair company, a snow removal business or a ski shop is at its busiest now.

For them, the same advice applies to their own quiet month, whenever it falls. For a furnace company, that is usually midsummer.

And a business with a site due for a rebuild should still write now. Good writing moves straight into a new design, and it is the part of a rebuild that most often holds everything up.

Whenever the quiet weeks fall, use them to write.

This month

1. List six pages the site is missing.
2. Book the same hour every week.
3. Start with common questions and their answers.
4. Write the main service page next.
5. Add two project write-ups from last year.
6. Publish each page when it is finished.
7. Keep the list going for next winter.

Step two does the most work. Writing that waits for a free day never starts, while a fixed hour every week produces a finished page most weeks without anyone having to find the time.

Which page to write first follows from what your website was supposed to do.

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.