Spend an hour extracting figures from your last twenty jobs. That document is what every future page, quote, and answer draws on, and no tool can produce it.

The gap is not knowledge, it is access

Everything that would make your pages specific already exists.

It is in your invoices, your quotes, your calendar, your photographs, and your sent folder.

None of it is written down anywhere usable, so when somebody sits down to write a page, they write from memory and produce generalities.

Which means the constraint is not that you lack material, it is that the material has never been extracted.

Where it actually lives

The first is the most valuable and the least used. Twenty invoices tell you your actual price range, what the typical job costs, and what pushes it up, which is precisely the question every visitor to your site is trying to answer.

The hour

Which is the whole of this exercise.

Open your last twenty invoices and write down, for each, what the job was, what it cost, and how long it took.

Then look at the spread: the lowest, the highest, the middle, and what the expensive ones had in common.

That gives you a price range with an explanation, which almost no competitor's site carries.

Do the same with your calendar for timescales, which are the second thing everybody asks and the second thing nobody publishes.

An hour produces material for every page you will write for the next two years.

Mine the sent folder

The richest source and the one people never think of.

Search your sent mail for the phrase you use when explaining something, and you will find the same explanation written eight times.

That explanation, refined by repetition across eight customers, is better than anything you would write deliberately.

Copy the best version out and it is a page, or a section of one.

The same search finds the questions worth answering, since you only write an explanation more than once when people keep asking.

Do this for the four or five things you explain most, which is an afternoon and produces most of a site.

A worked example

A business struggling to write service pages went through twenty invoices and their calendar for a morning.

They found their actual range was narrower than they had assumed, that one factor accounted for most of the variation, and that jobs took about a third longer than they had been telling people.

All three went onto the site: a range, the factor that moves it, and an honest timescale.

Enquiries fell slightly and the proportion becoming jobs rose considerably, since people arrived already accepting the price.

The timescale correction also stopped a recurring complaint.

None of that came from writing better, it came from looking at what they already had.

Keep it in one place

Since the point is reuse rather than one page.

One document with sections: prices and what moves them, timescales, questions customers ask, things people get wrong, jobs worth describing, and what you refuse.

That is the document you hand to whoever writes anything, whether that is you, a supplier, or a tool.

It is also what makes drafting work, since supplying it converts the tool from inventing to arranging.

Add to it whenever something happens rather than revisiting it as an exercise, which is what stops it going stale.

A line after an unusual job takes thirty seconds and is worth more than an hour six months later.

The awkward specifics are the valuable ones

Worth pushing on, since these get left out.

What you charge to come out and look. What you will not take on. Where you will not travel to. What goes wrong most often. What you got wrong once and changed because of it.

Every one of those is uncomfortable to publish and every one of them is more persuasive than anything comfortable.

They are also, without exception, things no tool can produce and no competitor can copy.

Include them in the document even if you are not sure you will publish them, since the decision is easier once written down.

Check what you believe against the record

An unexpected benefit of doing this properly.

Businesses are frequently wrong about their own figures: the typical price, the usual timescale, the most common job.

Twenty invoices settle it, and the answer is often not what anybody would have said.

That matters beyond the website, since the same wrong belief is in your quoting, your scheduling, and what you tell people on the telephone.

The website is the excuse for doing an exercise worth doing anyway.

Ask the people who answer the phone

Since one person's memory covers only their own share of the work.

Whoever takes the calls, does the quoting, or is on site hears a different set of questions from whoever runs the business, and rarely writes any of it down.

Ask each of them for the three questions they answer most and the thing customers most often misunderstand, which is a five-minute conversation each.

That regularly produces items the owner would never have thought of, because they stopped taking those calls years ago.

Add the answers to the same document, noting who said what, so the next person to write a page knows who to ask about it.

The counter-case

Not everything should be published.

Job specifics involving identifiable customers need permission, and pricing detail can be genuinely commercially sensitive in some trades.

An hour spent on this also produces nothing until somebody writes the pages, which is the step that stalls.

And a business with very variable work may find the range too wide to be useful published.

Spend an hour on twenty invoices, mine your sent folder, keep it in one document, and include the awkward parts.

The hour

  1. Open your last twenty invoices.
  2. Note job, cost, and duration.
  3. Find the range and what moves it.
  4. Check the calendar for real timescales.
  5. Search your sent folder for repeats.
  6. Write it into one document.
  7. Add the awkward specifics.

Step three is the one that changes a site, since a price range with an explanation of what moves it is the single thing visitors want most and almost nobody publishes.

Why this matters more now is covered in a tool that does not know your business.

Frequently asked questions

What is the actual constraint?

Access rather than knowledge. The material exists in your invoices, quotes, calendar, and sent folder, but has never been extracted, so people write from memory.

Where is the most valuable material?

Invoices. Twenty of them tell you your actual price range, the typical job cost, and what pushes it up, which is what every visitor is trying to find out.

What is the sent folder for?

Finding the explanation you have written eight times. Refined by repetition across eight customers, it is better than anything you would write deliberately.

How long does this take?

An hour for the invoices and calendar, and an afternoon if you also mine the sent folder. That produces material for every page for the next two years.

What should the document contain?

Prices and what moves them, timescales, questions customers ask, what people get wrong, jobs worth describing, and what you refuse to take on.

Which specifics are most valuable?

The awkward ones: what you charge to look, what you will not take on, what goes wrong most often. No tool can produce them and no competitor can copy them.

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.

Struggling to make your pages specific?

Open your last twenty invoices and write down the cost and duration of each. That hour is the whole exercise.

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