TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
The design is done, the build is done, and the site has been sitting at ninety percent for three weeks waiting on one page of words. This is the single most common place a website project stops, and it almost never stops because the owner cannot write. It stops because writing about your own business is a strange job: you are too close to see it plainly, and it competes with the work that actually pays you. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites, and this is the process I hand to clients who want to write their own copy, which most of them should.
You have advantages a hired writer does not. You know the objection that comes up on every call. You know the words your customers use, which are almost never the words your industry uses. You know what goes wrong when someone hires the wrong person for this. All of that is the raw material, and none of it is in a copywriter's head on day one.
The fastest way to start is to stop typing
The blank page is the problem, so skip it. Open the voice recorder on your phone, sit somewhere you will not be interrupted, and answer these out loud as if a good customer had just asked you:
- What do you actually do, said the way a customer would say it?
- Who is this for, and just as importantly, who is it not for?
- What do people ask you on every single call?
- What goes wrong when somebody hires the wrong person for this work?
- Why do your best customers pick you instead of the other guy?
- What does it cost, roughly, and what makes it cost more?
Then transcribe it. Your phone will do that for free, and so will most note apps. What comes back is messy and repetitive and about eighty percent of your website. You will have said things in four minutes that you would not have typed in four hours, because talking to a person is a task you have done ten thousand times and writing marketing copy is not.
One page, one job
The most common copy problem is not bad sentences, it is every page trying to say everything. Give each page one job and the writing gets much easier, because you always know what belongs and what does not.
- Home: what you do, who it is for, proof, and one clear action. The full list is in what to put on your home page.
- Service page: one service, start to finish, in the words a customer would search for.
- About: why you, as a person, and what you are like to work with.
- Contact: how to reach you and what happens after someone does.
If a sentence would fit on two pages, pick one and delete the other. Repeating yourself across a site makes every page feel thinner, and it gives Google two half pages instead of one good one.
The five things a service page has to answer
Service pages are where most of the money is, and where most small business sites are thinnest. Every one of them needs to answer these, in about this order:
- What is this, in one sentence a stranger would understand without asking a follow-up question.
- Who it is for, and who it is not for. Ruling people out builds more trust than trying to be for everyone.
- What it costs, or at least a range and what moves it up or down.
- What happens after they contact you, step by step, so nobody has to imagine it.
- Proof: photos of the work, a review with a real name, a number you can stand behind.
The usual objection to the third one is that a price on the page scares people off. It does, and that is the point. It scares off the people who were never going to pay it, which is a service to both of you, and it reassures the ones who were worried you would be twice as much. A range with an honest note about what changes it beats silence every time.
Write the way you talk, then cut a third
Read every paragraph out loud. If you run out of breath, the sentence is too long. If you would never say it to a customer standing in front of you, do not write it. That single test catches most of what makes small business websites sound like they were assembled from a catalog.
This is not a style opinion, it is a well-documented practice. The federal government publishes plain language guidance for exactly this reason, because writing that sounds official and writing that people can act on turned out to be two different things. Your website has the same problem and a much shorter attention span to work with.
Then cut. These phrases are on thousands of sites and have never once convinced anybody:
- Quality workmanship. Everyone claims it, so it reads as filler. Show a photo instead.
- We pride ourselves on. The sentence is about you, and the reader is thinking about themselves.
- Welcome to our website. They know where they are.
- Solutions, seamless, cutting-edge, state of the art, customer-centric, passionate about.
- Any sentence you could paste onto a competitor's site without changing a word.
One more swap that fixes a surprising amount: count how many sentences start with we and how many start with you. If we is winning, rewrite until it is not. Nobody visits a website to learn about a company, they visit to find out whether the company can fix their problem.
The about page is not your resume
About pages are usually the second most visited page on a small business site, and usually the worst written one, because owners either write a resume or write nothing. What people are actually checking is simple: are you a real person, do you know what you are doing, and what will it be like to deal with you.
So write it in first person, put a real photo of your face on it, and give the origin story three sentences rather than three paragraphs. Then spend the rest of the page on how you work, because that is the part nobody else can copy. For a small business, the owner's face and voice are the strongest trust signal available, and hiding them behind a corporate we throws that away.
What to do when you get stuck
Every one of these has unstuck a client who swore they could not write:
- Write the ugly version on purpose. A bad draft can be fixed in twenty minutes, a blank page cannot be fixed at all.
- Steal from your own outbox. The email you send new prospects is already your copy, written in your voice, and you wrote it without agonizing.
- Set a timer for fifteen minutes per page and stop when it goes off. Deadlines beat inspiration.
- Ask two recent customers why they picked you, and use their answer close to verbatim.
- Read a competitor's site and write the honest sentence they were unwilling to write.
And do not write the whole site at once. One page a night for a week is how this actually gets done, and it is the difference between a launch date that holds and one that slides, since content is what sets the timeline on nearly every project.
When you should hand it off instead
Writing your own copy is free in dollars and expensive in weeks. If the site has been stalled for a month waiting on you, the copy has already cost more than paying somebody to write it. That is not a character flaw, it is a scheduling fact, and the honest move is to admit it early rather than at week six.
There is a middle option most people do not know exists. You talk, someone else writes. An hour of questions on a call, recorded, is usually enough for a whole small site, and the result still sounds like you because the words came out of your mouth. I do it both ways, either writing from that kind of session or editing a draft you already have. Rates are on the pricing page, and if you want a straight answer about which of the two you should do, send me what you have got, even if what you have got is nothing.