How to Create a Blogging Strategy for a Small Business
Almost every blogging strategy assumes somebody whose job this is. You run a business. This one assumes a few hours a month at most. It argues for something small and finite that you can actually finish rather than a commitment you will quietly abandon.
You Have Almost No Time
The reason most small business blogging plans fail is not that they were wrong. It is that they assumed resource nobody had, so they were abandoned in month three and the abandonment got read as failure.
What most advice quietly assumes. A person whose job this is.
Content calendars, editorial workflows, keyword mapping and monthly reviews. Each is sensible where somebody is employed to do it. None survives contact with an owner who is also quoting, invoicing and doing the work.
Why a stretched plan is worse than a small one. It fails visibly.
An ambitious plan half-completed leaves a blog that looks abandoned. A small plan completed leaves something finished.
What this page assumes instead. A few hours a month.
Possibly less, possibly in bursts, possibly with long gaps. Everything below is built for that rather than adapted to it afterwards.
What that changes. The shape of the plan.
The scope shrinks, the schedule disappears and the objective becomes finishing rather than sustaining. That is a different plan rather than a reduced one.
A Finishable Plan Beats An Ongoing One
A short list of posts that will genuinely help, written over a year and then kept current, beats a commitment to publish monthly forever. The second is abandoned by almost everybody who makes it.
Why ongoing commitments fail. No success condition.
A promise to publish regularly can never be completed, only kept or broken. There is no point at which anybody says the work is done, so the only available outcomes are indefinite effort or quiet failure.
Why a finite list succeeds. It can be finished.
A defined set of posts has an end. Progress is visible, the remaining work is knowable, then completing it produces something that keeps working rather than a schedule that keeps demanding.
What finishing actually means. Moving to maintenance.
Not stopping entirely. Once the questions are answered, the work becomes keeping those answers current, which is a far smaller ongoing commitment and one that fits the available time.
Why this feels like less. Because it is less.
It is also more than most businesses achieve, since a completed small thing outperforms an abandoned large one.
Write The Questions Down First
The entire strategy is a list of questions customers actually ask, collected over a fortnight. No tools, no research and no meeting required.
How to collect them. Note them as they arrive.
Whoever answers the phone or reads the enquiries keeps a running list of what people ask before they buy. Two weeks produces most of them, because the same questions recur.
Why this beats brainstorming. No invention involved.
Sitting down to think of subjects produces what you can imagine somebody asking. Noting what people ask produces what they actually ask. The two lists differ more than anybody expects.
What to write down. Their words.
Record the question as it was put to you rather than translating it into trade language. That phrasing is a free sample of how people search.
Which questions matter most. The ones before the decision.
What it costs, how long it takes, what goes wrong, how to choose between options and whether they need you at all. Businesses are reluctant to publish these and they are the ones people search hardest for.
What happens to the list next. It gets shorter.
Not every question is worth a page. Choosing blog topics sets out the tests that reduce it to the ones worth writing.
Eight Good Posts Is A Strategy
Eight properly chosen and properly written posts is a complete piece of work for a local business. That is a realistic target rather than a compromise. It is more than most businesses ever manage.
What eight can cover. The decision.
The cost question, the how-long question, the what-goes-wrong question, the how-to-choose question and a few specific to your trade or area. Between them they meet somebody at most points before they buy.
Why more is rarely better. Good subjects run out.
Applying any sensible test to a local trade's questions leaves a short list. Extending it means adding subjects that failed the test, which spends effort on posts you already knew would not work.
Why this looks unambitious. Compared to nothing.
Eight sounds small against a plan promising fifty. It is very large against the real alternative, which for most businesses is four posts published in a fortnight long ago.
What each one has to be. Better than what exists.
A small number only works if each is genuinely good. That means your own experience, your own figures and the detail somebody who has done the work can supply.
The number is illustrative. Not a target.
Your list might be four or twelve depending on your trade. What matters is that it is finite, chosen properly and small enough to finish.
Nobody In The Business Wants To Write Them
This is where most plans stop. The list exists, everybody agrees the questions are right, then nobody wants to spend an evening writing. There are three options and one of them is legitimate.
Write them yourself. Badly but knowledgeably.
You know the answers better than anybody you could hire. Your writing will be rougher than a professional's and will contain things they could not know, which is the more valuable half.
Pay somebody. Who will need briefing.
A writer produces cleaner prose and arrives knowing nothing about your trade. Without substantial input from you, what comes back is the generic content that fails, so it costs time as well as money.
Do not do it. A legitimate choice.
A business that will not realistically produce the posts is better off deciding that now and spending the effort elsewhere. Block nine covers when this is the right answer.
Why the middle option disappoints so often. The briefing gets skipped.
Businesses hire a writer expecting to hand it over entirely. The writer, given nothing, produces something reasonable and generic. Everybody then concludes content does not work.
What all three share. The knowledge has to come from you.
No arrangement removes that requirement, which is why block six describes the way round it.
Who Should Actually Write Them
The knowledge sits in the business and the writing skill usually does not. Dictating an answer and having somebody shape it works better than either party attempting the whole thing alone.
Why it works. Each side does what it can do.
You can explain your trade fluently to somebody in front of you, because you do it every week. A writer can turn a spoken explanation into a readable page. Neither can do the other's part well.
What it looks like in practice. A conversation, recorded.
Somebody asks the question a customer would ask and you answer as you would on the telephone. That recording holds the specifics, caveats and examples that make a post worth reading.
Why speaking beats writing here. The self-editing stops.
Asked to write, people become formal and cautious and produce something flat. Asked to explain out loud, the same person is specific, uses examples and mentions the exceptions. That difference is the whole value.
What it costs you. Half an hour per post, roughly.
Speaking an answer is quick. The shaping and editing is somebody else's work, which is the part that would otherwise consume your evening.
Why we describe this rather than claim quality. It is checkable.
Any supplier can say their writing is good. Describing how the knowledge gets from your head onto the page tells you whether the arrangement can produce anything worth reading.
Do Not Publish On A Schedule
A cadence commitment produces filler. Irregular good posts beat regular weak ones. Nobody is watching closely enough to notice a gap.
What a schedule does to a small business. Forces output.
The date arrives, nothing worth writing has come up, then something gets written to meet the commitment. That post costs money and attention and answers nothing anybody asked.
Why nobody notices the gaps. No audience is waiting.
A search-driven post is found months later by somebody who has never heard of you. They do not check when the previous post appeared. The regularity matters to you and nobody else.
What replaces the schedule. The list.
Work through the questions when time allows. Three in a quiet fortnight and none for two months is fine, because the list rather than the calendar drives the work.
The one thing worth being consistent about. Finishing.
Whatever pace suits you, the objective is completing the list within a reasonable period. That is a deadline rather than a rhythm.
Then Maintain Rather Than Add
Once the questions are answered, the job changes. Adding more posts produces diminishing returns while keeping the existing ones current produces the opposite.
Why adding gets worse. The good subjects went first.
You wrote the strongest questions first, correctly. Everything after is progressively weaker, so the ninth post is worth less than the first and the twentieth less again.
Why maintaining gets better. Proven subjects.
A post already attracting people has demonstrated that the question is searched and that your site can rank for it. Improving it starts from evidence rather than from hope.
What maintenance involves. Less than writing.
Checking facts are still right, adding what you have learned since and improving answers competitors have overtaken. Each takes a fraction of the effort of a new post.
How often. Periodically rather than on a schedule.
A small review now and then beats an occasional overhaul. The same argument against cadence applies here.
Where the detail sits. Its own page.
How to update old blog posts covers which to revisit first and what updating actually means.
When Not To Bother
For some businesses this is genuinely not worth doing. Knowing that saves more money than any plan on this page.
When customers ask nothing. Simple purchases.
Where the decision is quick and obvious, no questions precede it. Nobody researches before choosing, so there is nothing to be present for.
When national sites own every question. Comprehensively.
Some subjects are answered thoroughly by large sites with far more behind them. Where you cannot answer better, the effort belongs elsewhere.
When the realistic answer is you will not do it. Say so now.
A business that has started and abandoned a blog twice is telling you something. Deciding not to is a decision rather than a failure.
What to do instead. The service pages.
Making the pages that actually sell things genuinely good serves the people closest to buying. For many businesses it produces more with the same effort.
If you are unsure. Try one.
Write the single best question on your list properly and see. One post is a small experiment that answers this better than deliberation does. The full series is on the content and blogging guide.
Speak it.
We will shape
it.
The knowledge sits in your business and the writing skill usually does not. We ask you the question a customer would ask, you answer it as you would on the telephone, so half an hour produces the specifics that make a post worth reading.
How we approach content:
No publishing schedule. A finite list, finished, then kept current.
Every guide.
One practice.
What a blog is for, how to choose subjects worth writing about, how to structure a post, how to promote it, how to measure it and how to keep it current.
