One hour a week of content that produces enquiries instead of a feed

Why one hour is enough, and why more usually makes it worse

The instinct is that content is a volume problem. It is not. The businesses whose content brings enquiries are rarely the ones publishing the most. They are the ones whose content could only have come from that business, that week.

An hour forces the right choices. You cannot invent five posts in an hour, so you stop inventing and start using what the week gave you. You cannot chase every channel, so you pick the ones where a buyer is actually reading. You cannot polish, so you publish something true and move on.

More time tends to go the other way. The desk session stretches, the phone stays in the drawer, and you start writing about your industry instead of your week. That is where generic content comes from: not from laziness, from having time to fill and nothing specific to fill it with.

• The hour has a floor and a ceiling. Less than an hour and the reviews do not get answered. More than ninety minutes and you are writing for the sake of it. Book the hour, keep it, stop when it ends.
• The week does the work. If the hour is the only time you think about content, it will be an hour of staring at a blank page. The five-minute capture habit below is what makes the hour productive, and it costs almost nothing.
• Real beats frequent. A photograph of the actual job with two honest sentences under it does more for a buyer than a week of scheduled posts that could belong to any business in the trade.

The capture habit: five minutes, phone in the pocket

Content that reads as real comes from the work, and the work happens during the week, not at the desk on Friday. So the habit is capture, not writing. Five minutes a day at most, and most of that is taking a photograph of something you were standing in front of anyway.

Two things to capture. Photographs of the job, and the sentence a customer actually said.

• The before, at the start, and the after from the same spot. The pair is the single most persuasive image a trade can publish, and it fails when the after is shot from a different angle. Mark where you stood, or take the before with the doorframe in it so you can find the spot again.
• The middle of the job. Hands doing the work, the room half done, the van outside the actual house, the kitchen at two in the afternoon before service. This is the picture that answers "do they really do this", and nobody else can take it.
• The thing that went wrong. The hidden damage behind the tile, the wiring somebody botched before you, the booking that had to be rebuilt after a double entry. Photograph it before you fix it. It becomes the most credible piece you publish this month.
• The premises, on a day they look right. The exterior, the sign, the room set for service, the chair and the station. These go on the listing and the first screen of the site, and they only need retaking when something changes.
• What to write down. The exact question a customer asked at the counter, on the phone, or standing in the doorway. Their words, not your paraphrase. "Do you do this on a Saturday." "Will it smell." "How long before we can walk on it." "Can you do a table of forty." One line in the notes app. That is the whole task.

The one-hour agenda

Sixty minutes, five blocks, in this order. The order matters: the first block feeds all the others, and the review block sits near the end because when it comes first it eats the hour.

1. 10 minutes: sort the week's raw material. Open the camera roll and the notes. Pick one job that photographed well, one question a customer actually asked, and one thing that went wrong and got fixed. Ignore everything else. Three items is the whole input for the hour, and it is enough.
2. 20 minutes: write one answer to one real question. Take the customer's question, in their words, and answer it the way you answered them, including the part where the answer is "it depends" or "not us". Two to four hundred words. It goes on the page of your site where that question comes up, or on the Google Business profile as a post or a Q&A, and it stays there. This is the piece that still brings enquiries in a year.
3. 15 minutes: turn one job into an update, for every channel it has to run on. The before and after, the thing that went wrong, or a genuine seasonal offer. Written once and shaped for each place: the listing post, the caption, the text to past customers, the email, the sign in the window, the line staff say at the counter. The promo kit writes that set from one description and flags what you forgot to state, like when it ends.
4. 10 minutes: reply to every review. Every one, good and bad, by name, mentioning the specific thing they mentioned. The reply is for the next customer reading it, not for the reviewer. The review reply writer returns three approaches from the pasted review, so ten minutes covers the week.
5. 5 minutes: schedule and stop. Put the listing post up now, the site answer up now, the social piece in the scheduler for a weekday morning. Then close the laptop. The hour is over and the next one is next week.

Where each piece goes, and why in that order

Most owners start with social because it is the channel they look at. Buyers do not start there. A homeowner with water coming through the ceiling, a couple looking for a room for forty, a woman deciding whether to trust you with her hair for the first time: each of them begins with a search and a map, and the listing is what they see first.

1. The Google Business profile, first. It is the page a local buyer sees before your website, and the one most businesses leave untouched for months. The job photograph, the update and the answered question all go here first. Reviews live here too, which is why the reply block is not optional.
2. The site, second. The answer to the real question goes on the page where the question comes up: the service page, the FAQ, the booking page. It compounds. The question gets asked again next month, and the page is already there, being found by the next person typing it.
3. Social, last. Social reaches people who are not looking. It has a place, and that place is the after photograph and the update, cropped from what you already made. It should never be where the hour starts, and if the hour runs short it is the block that gets cut.

Raw material to finished piece

The same three kinds of input, every week, become the same small set of pieces. Here is the map. If you can only manage two rows in a given week, take the top two.

The voice pass on the way out

Some of these pieces will be drafted with a model, and that is fine, as long as the draft is not what gets published. A model given nothing specific writes the average of every business in your trade, and the average of everyone reads as nobody. The reason the raw material matters is that it is exactly the specific input the model was missing.

So the pass before publishing is short. Read the piece once and ask: is there anything in here that could only have come from us, this week?

• The customer's words stay in. If they asked "will it smell", the piece says "will it smell", not "concerns about odour".
• The photograph is of the actual job. Not stock, not generated. A generated image of a workshop is the modern stock photo, and readers discount it the same way.
• The detail that feels too small stays. The extra hour because the access was tight, the fact that it was raining, the thing the customer said afterwards. Those are the lines that read as real.
• The hedge comes out. A model hedges because hedging is the probable sentence. You know the answer. Say it.

The four kinds of post that fill a calendar and produce nothing

When the hour is short and the raw material is thin, the pull is towards the posts that are easy to make from nothing: industry news, a tips list, an announcement, an explainer with no decision attached. Each can be well done and still bring nobody in, because of who it is aimed at.

We have made the full argument once and will not repeat it here. Which posts actually bring people in covers the five that produce enquiries and the four that produce nothing. The point here is narrower: an hour a week has no room for any of the four.

What to measure, and what to ignore for six months

One thing. Did anyone get in touch and mention it. The homeowner who says "I saw the photos of the roof on your listing". The email that quotes your answer back to you. The walk-in who saw the sign in the window.

Ask on every enquiry form and at every counter: what made you get in touch. It is one question, and it is the only measurement that tells you whether the hour is producing work.

• Track: enquiries that mention a piece, by piece. A notebook by the phone is fine.
• Ignore, for six months: impressions, followers, likes, reach, profile views, and any comparison with a competitor's feed. None of them is a phone call.
• Then decide. After six months you will know which of the three inputs produces the enquiries in your trade, and the hour gets rebalanced towards it. Until then, run the agenda as written.

Where this connects

The three tools were built for the three blocks in the hour. The photo prompts tool gives you the shot list for your trade so the week's capture is not guesswork. The promo kit takes one description of a promotion and writes it for the post, the text, the email, the listing, the window sign and the counter line. The review reply writer turns a pasted review into three replies to choose between.

The raw material differs by trade and the method does not. For a contractor it is the before-and-after and the question about access; see home services. For a restaurant, a venue or a promoter it is the room set for service and the question about a group of forty; see hospitality and events. For a salon or a clinic it is the chair, the result and the question about how long it lasts; see beauty and personal care.

Two companion guides. The voice pass is the fuller version of why drafted copy reads as generic and how to fix it. Which posts actually bring people in is the argument for what to write and what to skip.

And the content hour sits inside a wider weekly rhythm. The weekly review is the thirty minutes that looks at enquiries, bookings, reviews and what competitors changed. The content hour is what you do with what that review turns up. If you have to choose one, do the review first.