Finally Surface · Blog

Do blogs actually bring in customers, or are they a waste of time?

By Noel Halligan

I built a salon into the most referred in the south west by writing simple blogs. Here is exactly how I did it, and why it works even better now.

You have heard you should write a blog. So you sit down, the cursor blinks, and a little voice says, who is even going to read this. You close the laptop. Another week goes by, and you stay invisible.

I know that feeling. I also know what happens when you push through it, because writing simple blogs is the single thing that built my salon into the most referred in the south west.

I was a hairdresser nobody could find

A few years ago I was good with people and good with hair, and completely invisible online. Nobody was searching for me. So I started writing. Not clever essays. Just answers to the questions my clients asked me in the chair. How do I stop my colour fading? What can I do about thinning hair? Real questions, in plain words, one a week.

The whole trick, in one line

Do not write about yourself. Write down the exact questions your customers ask you, word for word, and answer them simply.

That is it. Every post I wrote was a real question I had been asked out loud, answered the way I would say it to a friend. No jargon. No showing off. Just clear, honest and useful.

And I gave every post the same shape, so people learned the rhythm and trusted it. A real question as the title. A quick scene so they feel understood. A short story about a real person. One useful idea. What changed. And one next step. Same shape, every time.

What it actually did

Within a couple of years my salon, NOCO Hair, became the most referred in our area, and grew from scratch into the top 1% of salons in the UK by turnover. People booked me having never met me, and paid more than three times the going rate for a cut. They trusted me before they sat in the chair, because they had already read me being helpful, for free, for months.

Then something happened that told me the world had shifted. A new client walked in and said an AI had recommended me. I asked it why. It pointed at all those clear, simple answers I had been writing. The blogs were not just being read by people anymore. They were teaching the machines who to send.

You can still read the very posts that did it on the NOCO blog here.

Why it works even better now

Here is the bit most people miss. AI does not recommend the loudest. It recommends the clearest. Every honest answer you publish is a brick in your reputation, with customers, and now with the machines doing the searching for them.

So, are blogs a waste of time? Only if you write them to sound clever. Write them to be useful, one real question at a time, one a week, and they quietly become the hardest working salesperson you have. They work while you sleep. They build trust before you have said a word. And they never stop.

The short version

You do not need to be a writer. You need to be useful. Pick a question your customers actually ask, answer it the way you would to a mate, and publish it. Do that every week and you stop being a secret.

That is exactly what we hand you on Cover Day. We dig out your story, find the questions your people are asking, and give you a page and a plan to answer them. If you have been staring at a blinking cursor wondering if it is worth it, it is.

Come and find your thing at finallysurface.com.

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