You don't have to be a writer. You have to be able to decide.

You think about it all day

Ask a business owner what is happening in their sector and you rarely get a pause. They know which way it is going. They know which question customers started asking last year and never asked before that. They know why the approach everyone is talking about does not work in their trade, and exactly why not.

That is not a hobby. It is what the business runs on. Every quote, every assumption, every time you turn down work that looks too easy: it all comes out of the same picture you hold of your own trade.

And almost nobody ever reads it.

A customer catches some of it during a conversation. A colleague hears a piece of it over a drink. The rest stays in your head. Not because you publish too little, that is a marketing agency’s problem. It is a waste for a different reason: something exists that nobody else has, and it goes nowhere.

Three reasons that are one reason

Ask ten business owners why they don’t write and you get three answers.

No time. I can’t write. I don’t have a copywriter.

They sound like three different problems. They are one. All three are about the same thing: turning what you already think into sentences somebody wants to read. No time means no time to phrase it. Can’t write means can’t phrase it. No copywriter means nobody to take the phrasing off your hands.

What you never hear in that list is “I don’t know what I’d say”. That part has been done for years.

Phrasing is the part that became transferable

Fifteen years ago this had a solution too, and it was called a copywriter. You said what you had to say, somebody else made readable text of it and your name went underneath. Nobody called that cheating. That was what our previous article was about.

What changed since then is not that a machine can write. It is that the conversation beforehand became cheap.

With a copywriter, most of the money sat in that conversation. Somebody pressing you on what you actually mean, pinning you down on a vague claim, telling you that you are trying to say three things at once and have to pick one. That hour cost what it cost, and for most business owners that is where the idea died.

You can now have that conversation as often as you like. What is left for you is talking and deciding. Neither of those is writing.

How this article was made

That is easy to claim, so here is what actually happened with this piece. Including the things that got cut, because those say more than the things that stayed.

I dictated it. I did not type it. I said what was on my mind, in ordinary spoken language, half sentences included.

Then came five questions, one at a time. Who reads this and at what moment. What real material sits underneath it. What do you think it means. What changes for the reader. And the last one, which we added ourselves: what would make this wrong.

Plenty went overboard along the way. My first answer about who reads this turned out not to match the material I brought next. That was named rather than papered over, so the reader changed. An example involving a client was cut because it identified him, even without a name.

And a number got cut. Somewhere in the conversation “twenty minutes” came up as the time deciding takes. I adopted it, because it sounded right. Then it turned out it came from the assistant rather than from any measurement. By that point it was already sitting in two of my own sentences. It is gone, which is why this article carries no figure about time at all.

Only then came a map of five lines. Reader, claim, evidence, caveat, structure. Five lines you can correct in a minute. A finished nine hundred word article you cannot correct in a minute, because by then the interpretation is buried inside good sentences.

I approved that map. Then there was text.

That order is the whole trick. Reverse it and you get a piece that reads perfectly well, in which somebody else decided what you think.

What this does not solve

Three things, and it seems fairer to put them here than in small print at the bottom.

Not everyone who doesn’t write has something to say. If your answer to “what do you think about your trade” is a list of your services, this changes nothing. That is not a phrasing problem but a content problem, and no tool solves it.

Talking is easier than deciding. Deciding what the piece says stays your work. It is the shortest part and the only part you cannot hand over. Skip it and you get exactly the slick, weightless piece everyone rightly dislikes.

Your best material sometimes can’t go out. While making this article, the sharpest example was one we could not use. Confidential, or too recognisable for the client involved. That happens more often than you would expect, and it means your second-best example is the one that runs.

And then the caveat you should expect from us: we sell this. SiteOptima helps business owners work exactly this way, so we are not neutral here. Read the piece with that in mind.

What it comes down to

You don’t need us for this. The order is free: say what you think, then decide what the piece claims, then have text made. Anyone who does that, with whatever tool, publishes something that is theirs.

The test from our previous article is still the most useful one. Take your own text later today and ask whether that same paragraph, with only a different company name in it, could sit on your closest competitor’s site.

If it could, nobody put anything into it. Human or machine.

If it couldn’t, there is finally something of yours on the internet.