Forty Posts, Not One Moving Job. He Was Deleting the Wrong Thing.

“Patrick, I want the blog taken off the site. Three years of it, forty-odd articles, and I can’t point at one single job that came out of any of them. I’d sooner put the money into ads. Can you pull it down this week?”

That landed in my inbox on a Thursday morning, from a mover with six trucks and a yard full of blankets.

I didn’t pull it down. I called him instead, and forty minutes later he was the one arguing to keep it.

What have you been writing?

“Packing your kitchen. Packing a garage. How to label your boxes so you’re not opening every one of them looking for the kettle.”

They’re good articles, and I read all three before I called him, and the kitchen one is better than anything I could manage on the subject of a kitchen.

So I asked him who he had been writing them for.

“People who are moving. Obviously.”

People who are moving, I said, or people who are moving themselves?

Long silence on the line. I could hear him working it through.

Every article he’d published in three years was aimed squarely at a woman renting a truck from a lot on a Saturday morning.

She’s never going to call him. She decided that before she ever opened his website.

The habit he was about to throw away

What bothered me about the email wasn’t the forty articles at all. It was that he’d found the one habit his trade already leads on, 49.6% of moving companies publishing something, 5 of 47 trades when I put them in order, and he was ready to hand it back.

Owners in other trades tell me every January that this is the year they start writing. Then July comes around and the website hasn’t changed since the day it launched.

Across all the small businesses I audit, 37% publish anything at all, and I’ve stopped believing the ones who say they’re about to begin.

He had three years of proof that he could sit down on a quiet evening and finish something, which is the expensive part of this whole business and the part I can’t sell anybody. Every quote he ever got for that website priced the build, because nobody quotes you for the writing.

His subject matter, on the other hand, was free to change on the spot. So I asked him a different question.

What do people ask you in the hallway?

“Whether we can do the whole thing in one day.”

Have you written that one? No, he said.

What else? What do they ask while you’re standing there with the clipboard, the stuff they’d be embarrassed to ask twice?

“Whether we’ll take the piano. Whether the building needs a certificate of insurance. Whether July costs more than February, which it does, and nobody believes me.”

Three articles right there, and not one of them exists anywhere else in his city.

Think about the certificate of insurance for a second, because that one is my favorite.

A woman signs a lease on the eleventh floor of a tower. Two weeks before the move, the building manager emails her asking for a certificate of insurance from her movers, and she has no idea what that is or whether the company she called even has one.

So she asks her phone at half past ten at night, the way she asks her phone everything.

What is Google supposed to hand her at that hour? It can only offer her a page that someone sat down and wrote, and in most cities not a single mover has ever written that page.

Every one of them knows the answer cold, in the way you know things you repeat all summer. None of them has typed it out where a frightened tenant on the eleventh floor could find it.

Lawyers are the worst offenders I know for this, giving away the same answer on the phone all week and never once writing it down.

The articles that get you hired

There’s a line between the two kinds of writing, and I’d put it here.

An article about labeling your own boxes helps a woman do the whole job without you, and an article about what a building manager wants from a moving company helps her hire one properly.

Both are useful to someone out there. Only one of them ends with a customer who needs a truck and a crew on a Saturday in July.

Writing for the wrong reader is the costliest habit a business blog picks up, and it is nowhere near the only one.

Which kind have you been writing? Go and look at your last three titles before you answer, because most owners guess wrong about their own website.

The lovely part is that the second kind is easier. You already say those answers out loud six times a week, so the writing is closer to a transcript than an essay.

Where the next ten come from

He asked me where he’d find more subjects once the obvious three were used up.

Your reviews, I told him. 96.0% of moving companies hold at least one Google review, and yours are full of sentences that customers wrote about their own moving day.

Read fifty of them with a notepad beside you, and every time a customer explains what she had been worried about beforehand, write that worry down as a title.

Then read the ones that aren’t five stars, slowly, twice over. A complaint is almost always a question you answered too late in the process, and answering it in public tends to settle it for the next hundred customers before they ever call.

His website itself was in decent shape, by the way. Moving companies average 75 out of 100 across the ten checks I run, and his sat right about there, which is not a business with a website problem.

He had a subject problem. Those are cheaper and quite a lot more fun.

What he did

He kept the blog. He wrote the certificate of insurance piece on a Sunday afternoon, in his own words, about nine hundred of them, and he named it after the question instead of after his company.

Nothing happened for six weeks, which is normal and which nobody warns you about.

Then a woman called and said she’d read the piece about the building insurance, and could he come and quote on the eleventh floor, and by the way did he also do storage?

One call doesn’t prove a thing. Forty articles that never mention what you get asked all day proves something, though, and he’d had that evidence sitting on his own website for three years.

Plenty of readers never get as far as calling. She loves the piece on a Sunday and cannot find her way back to you by Tuesday, which is a different problem with the same ending.

If you want to see what the good ones look like when a trade gets this right, I keep a handful of movers’ sites I like and none of them are expensive.

And if writing is never going to happen in your business, no matter how many Sundays you promise it, there’s a version where I look after the whole website for you and you go back to running trucks.

If it were mine

If these were my six trucks, I’d stop writing for the woman with the rented van and start writing for the woman who already knows she can’t do this herself.

Same keyboard. Same hour. Completely different customer at the end of it.