Holiday Marketing – Our post last month mentioned that you should have started working on holiday marketing plans (you always should start on that early if you want enough visibility for it to matter closer to the holidays themselves). If you haven’t done this yet, you really need to this month.

Remember, whether or not you personally celebrate a holiday is irrelevant. If the bulk of your clients do, you should be basing marketing tactics around that holiday.  If you haven’t written a report or something to give away as a gift, get started on it this month (I’ll be working on a free report this week). If you haven’t considered bonuses, discounts, or something else for the holidays, consider it. If you haven’t made a list of gift ideas on your blog yet, do it (you need it indexed and showing up in search engines before they sneak up on you; not right before the holiday).

Evaluations

Now to the “big” task for November – evaluating this year’s progress in your freelance writing career (or that of  your sites, blogs, products, etc.).

Let’s face it: you’re probably going to be pretty busy in December. That’s not an ideal time to start looking over the past year. At the same time, evaluating where you’ve been and how you’re doing are vital to your marketing efforts. Why? Because you can’t work on next year’s marketing plan update (or creating a brand new one if you don’t have one yet – which you should) without knowing your current position.

Are you earning at a level you’re comfortable with? Are you working with the types of clients you want to work with? Are you working on the types of projects you want to work with? Are your billable hours generally filled? Have you gotten mostly positive client feedback? Do you have a professional site already? Is there something you could do to improve it? Have you diversified your income streams to protect yourself? Could you add some new products next year? Have your products not sold very well, or are they bringing in a good amount of income?

These are just a few examples of the things you need to ask yourself in evaluating the current state of  your career as a freelance writer. Next month we’ll talk about setting resolutions for the new year. In the meantime, start taking some notes on what you’re not thrilled with at the moment so you have something to base those resolutions on down the road. A great place to start would be to look at your resolutions for last year and see how many you kept, how many you neglected, and why.