Creating a Daily Marketing Habit

I started to title this post "For Writers," but I realized that it applies to more than just writers.  It also applies to entrepreneurs, small business owners, and anyone else who needs to market on a regular basis.

Years ago, when I was a newbie freelancer, I had an informal schedule where every morning (or after I got up - we'll just call that morning), I would "warm up" by catching up on other freelancer blogs and newsletters, and then I would search for new freelance work.  I did it that way every day for at least a couple of years.

Over time I stopped marketing on a daily basis.  I had a lot of repeat clients at the time, and it stopped seeming necessary.  Yes, I'd forgotten about the importance of marketing for freelancers, and honestly it probably set my career back quite a few years.

Another thing that led to me marketing less - and to my career setback as well - was that I got burnt out, but that's a good subject for a future post.

Fast forward to today.  I have squeaked along for some years on longtime repeat clients and one-off work from a freelance job board I frequent, but in 2022 I've lost two of my repeat clients.  I was already feeling the pinch after losing the first one early this year, and then of course after my horse got sick and I could barely find time to work.  For the past couple months, my horse has been doing a lot better, and I've been working more... and boom, I lose another client.

So obviously I need to start marketing regularly again.  Ideally I'd like to settle into a daily schedule again that includes time to market, just like I used to.  Unfortunately, my horse isn't entirely back to normal yet, so my schedule is still a little topsy turvy, and I'm not sure where marketing is going to fit in.  Additionally, I have a couple other business ventures now that I didn't have then, so my schedule is definitely much more complex.

Right now my routine is to get up, get a few things done at home if I have time, and then head out to the barn with my computer to feed Panama.  While he eats (which takes a while now, since he's finally back on hay) I can work.  Often I work on client projects during this time, but I'm thinking that it might be an ideal time to work on marketing.  Marketing requires a little less focus than client work, and sometimes the distractions at the barn can be bad, for one thing.  For another, going to the barn is often the first "real" thing I do with my day, and I like the idea of reinstating the goal of working on it first thing.

Note: For a lot of freelance writers, marketing means combing through freelance job postings, but not always!  Lately I've been working on my websites and blogs, social media posts, and videos.  For other (non-writer) small businesses, that's probably a lot of what your time marketing is going to look like.

What about you?  Do you schedule time to market to ensure it gets done?  What do you find works best for you?

For Writers: How to Streamline Your Job Search

When you spend a portion of every day job hunting and responding to ads, it can get a little time consuming.  Fortunately, there are ways to streamline your job search so that you can finish marketing and get to work on client assignments a little more quickly.  These are some shortcuts I used to take when I was marketing on a daily basis - and since I'm gearing up to start marketing more regularly again, things I am currently getting into place again.

Here are a few ways to make your job search faster.

• Bookmark your favorite job boards and go through the list every day.  I used to have a short list of my favorite freelance job boards, and I would check each one on a daily basis for new job postings.  Typically I go through the job postings quickly, opening each new one into a background tab, and when I am done searching, I can get to work on responding to each one.
• Have not just your resume, but also your cover letter ready to go.  I like to have a cover letter template with some boilerplate that I can tweak as needed.  I just copy and paste it into the email or web form as I apply, and then tailor it for the specific position.  It makes applying a lot faster to have the basics already written.
• Have a list of go-to writing samples.  Some job postings will ask for specific writing samples, and they don't want just a link to your portfolio.  Be ready with a curated list of writing samples that demonstrate a variety of skills, subjects, and writing styles, so that you always have an appropriate clip on hand when asked..
• Don't wait.  I used to fly through the easier applications, but I would put off any that required a little more work.  Unfortunately, I probably missed out that way, as the client had often already chosen someone by the time I responded.  Learn from my mistakes and try not to wait too long.  Freelance job posters are often inundated with responses, so you need yours to either really stand out, or get to them before they get too overwhelmed by the flood.

I'm starting to market regularly again for the first time in years, so I'll probably have more tips as I get back into the swing of things.  For certain I'll be talking about how to create (or re-create, such as in my case) a daily habit of marketing.  Stay tuned!

Learning My Own Lesson

I have been talking a lot about the importance of marketing lately, but guess who hasn't been actively looking for new clients?  This girl.

To be fair, I haven't exactly been doing nothing.  My horse got sick in April, and quite a few months of the year were spent simply keeping him alive.  I had no time to market; I was lucky when I was able to just get existing client work finished on time.

Since then, I've been working a lot on branding, websites, and my resume and portfolio.  So it's not like I haven't been marketing at all.  I've been working on getting all this stuff ready for potential clients to see, which is important too.

But I have not been looking for new clients, and it is coming back to bite me.

Early this year, just before my horse got sick, one of my regular clients went on hiatus.  They had something in the pipelines that they were working on, and needed to finish it before they could send any further work my way.  It was initially just supposed to be a couple months, but it has gone on and on.  I got a little bit of work from them a couple months ago, but that unfortunately didn't last long before they were back to the drawing board.  I'm still currently waiting to see when they'll be back.

And now, I've just lost another regular client, one I access through a writer site.  They've decided to stop offering client marketing as a service, so they no longer need writers to create marketing content.  It's unexpected and a disappointment, since I've been writing for them for about seven years - a pretty long time for a repeat client.  But it's also a significant loss of income, since they were one of two remaining regular clients.

The only regular client I have left does give me a fair amount of work, and has increased what they give me recently, but it's not quite enough to make up for losing not just one but two clients in one year.  So it's good that I'm almost done working on my website, resume, and portfolio, because I'll need to start actively hunting for more clients soon if I don't want to feel too much of a pinch from the loss.

Using Canva for Social Media Marketing

In a recent post, I mentioned Canva, a design tool I've been using for everything from video editing to marketing materials.  I'm still loving Canva, and was super interested when a self-publishing author support firm whose mailing list I'm on posted a Canva for Beginners virtual class coming up.

I'm not entirely sure I'm a beginner with Canva anymore, but since I'm largely self-taught, there's probably still something I could learn in that course.  I'm considering taking it.  I really like that if you register for the class, you can listen to it live, but if you can't make it live you also get the audio file download afterward.  I'm terrible at making it to things like that on time, so I think I'd probably be dependent on getting the download later.

While I was looking for the My Word Publishing business page and event schedule, I did a little Google search and found a surprising amount of Canva tutorials for authors and small business owners.  I found tutorials for everything from creating ebooks in Canva, to social media marketing for authors.  I'm thinking about reading and watching some of those free YouTube videos before I decide whether to pay $29 for the paid course.  I'd be interested in learning as much as possible about how to use Canva, so I may end up doing all of it.

The other thing I found while looking up the Canva for Beginners online class is that My Word Publishing also sells access to recordings for past classes.  Click here for their list of events and recorded classes.  I'm potentially interested in the Basics of Email Marketing and MailChimp and Instagram for Authors recorded classes.  Perhaps not yet, but hopefully next year I'll have to start thinking about starting to market.  But again, me being me, I'll probably check and see how much of that information is available online for free first.

A note about My Word Publishing: I found out about them a few years back, when they reached out to the Denver area NaNoWriMo MLs to let us know they were having some free related seminars during October and November.  I went to one or two of them, just to check things out.  They were, of course, ultimately marketing their services to wrimos, but I remembering still feeling like I walked away with some valuable information.

The bottom line is: There is so much you can do with online marketing these days, and knowing how to use tools like Canva to your best advantage is so important!

Freelancers: The Importance of Diversifying Your Client Base

Like my last post, this post is more for other freelancers, although some clients may find it applicable to them as well.

As a freelancer (or any small business person, really), it's important never to focus all of your work in one place.  Freelancing is about working for more than one client, after all, as working for just one employer would be essentially full-time employment without any of the benefits - and what's the point in that?

More importantly, though, spreading out your work between many clients is what protects your livelihood.  If you work for many clients, even if they are repeat clients, you have a buffer if you should lose one.  Yes, you might miss that income and you might have a tight month or two if it takes you a while to replace the lost work, but you will still have your other clients.  It's the modern-world equivalent of putting your eggs in more than one basket.

This is also why marketing is important for freelancers, as I discussed in the last post.  If you're marketing regularly, you should have some work already lined up.  Plus, if you're marketing on a weekly or even daily basis, you may even be able to fill the opening before you get through the queue and start to feel the pinch from the lost client.

Diversifying also has one other benefit that isn't often discussed: It helps protect you from burnout.  It's really easy to get burnt out when you're writing too much of the same thing all the time.  One of the benefits of freelancing is that we have a little more power over what we choose to write, so exercise that power, and make choices that keep the work interesting to you.

It takes a dedicated freelancer to juggle regular marketing plus multiple clients and a project queue, or perhaps I should say a dedicated small business person and entrepreneur - as that is what we are, after all.  If you feel overwhelmed by the many hats you have to wear as a freelancer, or if you worry that you don't have the skills to juggle all of this, find some productivity tools (like these that I suggested not too long ago) that will help you accomplish what you need to do to freelance successfully.

Ebb and Flow: Why Freelancers Need to Keep Marketing

This post is more for freelancers, although small business clients who hire writers could use some of the marketing insight as well.

You may have heard other freelancers talk about marketing.  But what is it, and why is it important to keep it up?

Marketing can take many forms.  Cold calling or writing to clients is marketing, yes.  But browsing freelance job boards and responding to job postings is also marketing.  Reaching out to past clients or following up with current clients to see if they have more work for you is marketing.  Posting your resume, building your website, blogging, posting to your writer Instagram: all marketing.

Simply put, marketing is anything that gets your name out there and helps to build your brand.  Sometimes marketing may see immediate impact, such as cold calling, responding to job postings, or following up with past clients.  Those actions can result in work right away.  Other times marketing doesn't pay off for a while, such as when a client doesn't have any work for you yet (but your follow-up keeps you fresh in their mind when they do have some work).  And sometimes, marketing doesn't really have any direct payoff, but contributes to building your brand or online presence, so it's beneficial in a cumulative sense.

Lately I've been working a lot on marketing materials for my businesses: overhauling my websites, settling on visual branding, rewriting my resume, and updating my blogs.  It's been a ton of work, and there's no immediate benefit of any of it, but it's still important.  Once I get everything updated the way I want it, I intend to make a habit of trolling the job boards on a daily basis.

I used to search for work daily.  It was how I started out every day: I read email, I caught up on the blogs I followed (yes, this was when blogs were the primary source of social media), and I searched the job boards.  I would do quick searches of all of my favorite job boards, saving all of the ads I wanted to respond to, and then I would spend some time responding to each one.

I haven't done that in a long time, but I need to start doing it again, for the simple reason that marketing regularly helps you to avoid any gaps in work (and income).  Not every query or cold call or job ad response will lead to work, so doing a few a day ensures that a freelancer can keep plenty of work queued up.

I've gotten a little stuck in my routine and lately have been getting all my work from just a couple of clients on one freelancer site, but it's time to start marketing again, as I don't like being dependent on just a couple of clients.  I had a third client who stopped needing work from me early this year while they worked on their software, and the loss of income from that client has been really rough to deal with, on top of an already really difficult year.

With all of this in mind, my next post (also for freelancers) will talk about the importance of diversifying.