The Question Is the Post

The hardest part of writing regularly is deciding what to write about.

The fix is usually sitting in plain sight, in the comments, the replies and the inbox.

Someone asks a question.

It gets answered in two lines and forgotten.

That question was a topic.

Probably a better one than anything on the list of planned posts, because someone actually wanted to know.

Planned topics come from guessing what people care about.

Questions come from people saying so.

And if one person asked, others were wondering.

Most people don't ask.

They read, wonder and move on.

The one who types it out is usually speaking for a quiet group standing behind them.

So keep the questions.

All of them, word for word, somewhere they can be found later.

The exact wording matters.

People describe a problem in their own terms, not the terms the industry uses, and those are the words the next person will search for.

"How do I get people to actually open my emails" makes a better title than anything with the word "engagement" in it.

After a while, patterns show up.

The same question in three different forms isn't three posts.

It's one important post that hasn't been written yet.

It changes how the writing sounds, too.

A post that answers a real question has a reader in it from the first line.

It knows who it's talking to and what they're stuck on.

It doesn't have to warm up.

Questions do one more thing.

They show where earlier explanations didn't land.

If people keep asking about something that's already been covered, the answer wasn't as clear as it seemed when it was written.

That's worth knowing as well.

The next post might already be sitting in a reply from last week, waiting for a proper answer.