How to get a year of posts out of one product

"We ran out of things to say" is the second most common reason a company blog dies, after nobody owning the calendar. It is almost always false. What ran out was not subject matter but the particular way of looking for it — usually staring at a keyword tool and waiting to feel inspired.

Companies sit on far more publishable material than they think. The problem is that the material does not look like blog posts, so nobody recognises it.

The questions your salespeople answer twice a week

This is the richest seam and the first place to dig. Every sales conversation contains the same eight or ten objections, and your team has spent years refining answers to them. Those answers are already written, already tested against sceptical listeners, and already in your voice.

Sit with whoever does the most demos, ask what people always ask, and write down the answers verbatim. You will leave with a dozen subjects nobody else in your market can write, because they are grounded in conversations only you have had.

The test of a good one: it makes at least one prospect uncomfortable. Objection-handling that is comfortable for everybody is marketing copy.

The mistakes your customers keep making

Support tickets, onboarding calls, and churn interviews are a catalogue of the specific ways your product gets used wrong. Each recurring one is a post, and each is genuinely useful rather than promotional, which makes it the sort of thing people link to.

There is an added benefit that has nothing to do with search. A post explaining a common mistake can be sent to a customer instead of writing the same email for the fortieth time.

The decisions you made and can defend

Every product embodies choices: what you refused to build, what you priced differently, the convention you deliberately broke. These make excellent posts because they are inherently unique and inherently arguable.

They also fail safely. Even if nobody searches for the subject, a post that explains why you do something unusual answers a question every serious evaluator eventually asks.

The parts of your market nobody explains properly

Most industries have three or four genuinely confusing areas where the public explanations are bad — written by people who do not do the work, or by vendors with a stake in the confusion.

If you can explain one of those clearly, you own it more or less permanently. These are the posts that still bring in traffic four years later, and they are the ones worth over-investing in.

The things that changed

Regulations, platform policies, price movements, new entrants. This seam is smaller than people think and should not be the backbone — commentary on other people's news is the easiest content to produce and therefore the most crowded. But two or three times a year something happens that your customers genuinely need interpreted, and being the one who interprets it is worth a great deal.

Do the whole list in one sitting

The mechanical part matters more than the creative part. Book two hours, get the person with the most business judgment in the room, and work the five seams above until you have forty subjects written down. Forty is roughly a year at weekly cadence.

Doing it in one sitting is the whole trick. The alternative — deciding each week what this week's post is about — turns the hardest, most senior-attention-hungry step into a recurring meeting, and that meeting is precisely where blogs die. A list of forty means the weekly decision is "next", which anyone can execute and which a system can execute without anyone.

Revisit the list quarterly. Cross off the ones that have gone stale, add what the last three months surfaced. It stays a live document, not a plan you made once and drifted from.

Why this is our first meeting with a client

We ask for this session before writing anything, and we push back when a client wants to skip it and let us pick subjects from search volume.

A machine can write forty posts about the topics your competitors already cover. It cannot know which objection your best salesperson has learned to answer in one sentence. That knowledge is the only part of the process that is genuinely yours, and it is what makes the difference between a blog and a search-shaped artefact.