A simple content calendar for a five-person trade company
A five-person Iowa trade company does not need a 40-slot marketing calendar. It needs a light weekly rhythm: a few job photos, one clear sentence, and a publish path to the website, Google Business, and one social post. The site stays the source of record. Everything else borrows from it.
Fancy calendars die in the truck. A sheet that fits the shop survives.
What “simple” means here
You are not a newsroom. You are a plumber in Coralville, an HVAC crew in Cedar Rapids, or an electrician covering Marion and North Liberty. Five people. Jobs stacked. Nobody has an afternoon for “content strategy.”
So the calendar has three rules:
1. One real job beats five generic tips. Photos from the work you did. Town named. Outcome clear. 2. Weekly is enough. Miss a week when the shop is slammed. Do not “catch up” with four posts on Sunday. 3. The website gets the full story first. Google Business and Facebook get the short version of the same story — not a different story that only lives on rented media.
That is the product Upley sells in plain form: photo from the job, text that teaches, published where customers and AI can read it.
The week, on one page
Print this. Tape it near the dispatch board.
Monday — pick one job from last week. Not the boring flapper. The one you explained twice on the phone. Water heater in Iowa City. Heat pump swap in Davenport. Keep the customer’s name off it.
On the job (any day) — three photos, one sentence. Before, during or detail, after. One sentence: service + problem + town + what you fixed. Send it the same day if you can. Ten minutes is the habit. The calendar only works if the photos exist.
Wednesday — publish the full version on the site. Service page or short post. Same facts a homeowner or an AI answer would need: what you do, where you work, what happened.
Friday — short version out. Google Business post. One Facebook or Instagram update. Same job. Same town. Link or point back to the page you own.
Month-end — one check. Did we publish at least three real jobs this month? Did hours and phone still match the listing? Fix one broken thing if something is wrong. Stop.
That is the whole calendar.
What does not belong on it
Forty “SEO tips” nobody will write. Stock-photo days. “Engagement posts” with no service and no town. Doorway city×service pages with no crew and no proof. A spreadsheet with colors that impresses a vendor and never leaves the office.
If a line item does not produce a URL customers and machines can cite, cut it.
Who owns which piece
In a five-person shop, ownership has to be boring and clear.
Owner or office: picks the job Monday, signs off on anything that names a customer or a price, checks the month-end.
Tech or lead on site: takes the three photos and texts the one sentence. That is the whole field job for content.
Whoever publishes (you or Upley): turns the send into a site page first, then the short posts. Keeps the domain, the accounts, and the copy yours.
Nobody needs a second full-time marketer for this. They need a habit that fits between calls.
Why the site is still the hub
Bots do more of the first pass than they used to. People still buy. Machines decide who they hear about first. Cloudflare’s mid-2026 note that bots outnumber humans on their network is about HTTP requests, not “nobody visits websites.” Your page is still the file both sides read.
A Google Business post disappears into a feed. A Facebook update ages out. The service page on your domain stays. That is why the calendar puts the full write-up on the site before the short versions go out.
Same for Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and the Quad Cities: write the towns you actually cover, the way you say them on the phone.
The cut
A simple content calendar for a five-person trade company is a weekly photo-and-post rhythm, not a marketing novel. Pick one real job. Shoot it. Write one clear sentence. Publish the full story on the site you own, then the short versions elsewhere. The website remains the source of record for customers and for AI.
Upley helps Iowa shops keep that habit without the theater — design, hosting, SEO, GEO, and the publish path from the truck to the page.
Book 30 minutes → /half-hour-meeting/ · aaron@upley.com · 319-535-2508 · from $115/month