Content marketing for small-business owners who don't have time to blog every day

Somebody told you that you should be blogging. Maybe it was a consultant. Maybe it was someone at a networking event who does this for a living. Either way you nodded, felt a little guilty, and went back to running the business, because there was a van to load and someone holding on line two.

You can put the guilt down. What you got handed was a frequency instruction, and frequency was never the part that was going to work for a business your size.

Here is what does work. People decide whether to trust you long before they call. They look you up, read a bit of whatever they find, and form an opinion in about ninety seconds. What tilts that opinion in your favor is showing up often enough that you clearly still exist, and being useful enough when you do show up that they remember you were the one who finally explained the thing nobody else would explain.

That's a much smaller job than blogging every day. It's also a completely different job, which is why the daily-posting advice keeps failing honest people who tried it.

What this actually means at your size

Big companies do content marketing with a team, a calendar, and a person whose entire salary depends on filling that calendar. You're not going to do that version, and you shouldn't try, because the version you can sustain is better for your customers anyway.

The small-business version is a short shelf of genuinely useful pieces that answer the questions people ask right before they spend money with you. Six good pages will do more for you than sixty thin ones, and they keep working. A useful answer you wrote in March is still answering the question in November, at two in the morning, while you're asleep.

Say you run a divorce practice. The pages that earn you clients are the plain ones that answer "how long does this take," "what do I need to bring to the first meeting," and "what happens to the house." Someone reads that at eleven at night, feels slightly less terrified, and calls you in the morning instead of the other three names on their list. You were useful to them before they were a client. That is the whole of it.

Your customers have already written your list

The hardest part of this is supposed to be figuring out what to write. It usually turns out to be the easiest, because you already have the list and have been answering it out loud for years. Brainstorming is the wrong tool for the job.

Put a notepad beside the phone, or open a note on your phone, and for thirty days write down every question a customer asks you. The boring ones especially, the ones you answer so often that you have a script for them and can hear yourself starting the script before you have decided to.

Watch for:

• The question that comes up in the first two minutes of every phone call.
• The thing people get wrong about what you do, over and over.
• The question asked at the counter while they are already paying.
• The email you have written so many times you copy and paste it now.

At the end of the month you will have twenty or thirty items, and the top few will be obvious because they will be the ones you are sick of repeating. Those are your first pieces. That copy-and-paste email in particular is already ninety percent of a finished page. You wrote it. It works. It just lives in your sent folder where nobody can find it.

One good piece a month, and I mean one

Ten posts in two weeks followed by six months of silence reads worse than nothing at all, because now your newest piece has a date on it and the date is old. Anyone who checks can see exactly when you gave up.

So: one piece a month. Twelve a year. If that sounds unambitious, keep in mind that twelve genuinely useful answers is more than most of your competitors will manage, and that after three years you have thirty-six of them, all still working, all still bringing people in.

Then make it a real appointment. Pick the day. First Tuesday, an hour, phone face down. The businesses that keep this up are the ones who treated it like a standing supplier meeting rather than something to get to when things calm down, because things do not calm down, and you know that better than I do.

And honestly, an hour is enough when you already know the answer. You are writing down something you have already said out loud two hundred times, which is a far easier job than composing.

Cook once, eat all week

Think about how a decent Sunday in the kitchen works. You roast one chicken. Monday it is dinner, Tuesday it goes in sandwiches, and by Wednesday the bones are in a pot on their way to being soup. One cook, one shop, one mess to clean up, and you ate all week. That is just how cooking works when you have a life, and nobody calls it cheating.

Content works the same way, and almost nobody tells small businesses this, so they go looking for a fresh idea for every channel and burn out in about five weeks.

One real piece gives you:

A page on your site, which is the roast. It is the permanent version. Search engines find it, and you can send someone a link to it.

Three or four short social posts, which are the sandwiches. Pull one point out of the page, say it plainly, link back. That is a week or two of posting from a single hour of work.

An email to your list, which is the soup. Two sentences of context and the link.

And a reply you can paste the next time somebody asks you that question directly, which is the part that quietly saves you the most time of all.

Same idea, four places, one hour of actual thinking. If you do that twelve times a year you are producing more than enough, from a workload that fits in a normal week.

What to skip

Skip most of the platforms. Be findable on your own site, and present in the one or two places your particular customers actually are. You probably already know which ones those are, because that is where they message you from.

Trends are the same idea. If something is going around and it does not fit how your business actually sounds, letting it pass costs you nothing. Dancing in a video is a perfectly good tactic for a business built on being fun and a slow-motion disaster for a funeral home.

Skip anything written to please an algorithm. This is the one I get called in to clean up most often, years later: pages stuffed with phrases nobody would say aloud, written for a search engine that has since changed its mind and now reads roughly the way a person does. Write the answer you would give a customer standing in front of you. That has never gone out of style and it is the only version that ages well.

The ones who end up ahead

The businesses that end up ahead on this are the ones who wrote down the real questions their customers ask and answered them properly, a dozen times a year, for years, while everyone else stayed busy feeling guilty about a blog they never started.

Go get the notepad. The list is already in your head, and by Friday you will have four items on it.