To reach all your freelance writing goals, it is essential to market your services on a regular basis. From query letters to cold calls to cold emails and everything in between, the more time you spend on marketing the better off you are going to be.
Year after year, I have found that my marketing success is an up and down affair. By this, I mean that some months my marketing efforts payoff with many new clients. Unfortunately, there are other months when it feels like I am spinning my wheels.
It is easy to get excited when a marketing campaign results in a new client. At the same time, it is just as easy to get down on yourself when things don’t go as planned.
Like many writers, there are times when I feel that I am spending too much time on marketing. However, like most, I get over this soon enough.
The last thing you want to do is abort all marketing efforts because of a down month or two. Instead, continue to work your plan while focusing on the strategies that have worked best for you in the past.
Although there is a lot of “up and down” in the game of freelance writing marketing, you have to stick with this task if you have any vision of achieving long term success.
Just when it seems like you are not doing things the right way, your marketing approach will once again begin to payoff.
The bottom line: you have to market your freelance writing services, month after month, regardless of how fast the results roll in.
Hi Chris,
I’ve found that in a 40 hour work week, about 20 hours are spent on writing copy. The other 20 are spent marketing, managing the business, working on my blog. I’ve found this to be a fairly consistent number across the board for most freelancers.
So I absolutely agree – while it might seem like a lot of our time is spent on marketing, it’s truly a necessity.
Danielle
The 50-50 split is often a good one in my experience. And oftentimes when I meet writers who say they’re struggling, they say they don’t have time for things like more marketing because all their time is spent writing. They struggle because they take poorly-paying gigs which force them to churn out content all day long, and they still don’t meet their income goals, whereas writing less would likely help them earn more. I always recommend a 50-50 time split on billable hours and non-billable work like marketing when someone is just starting out. It’s just an easy way to handle things, while ensuring enough time is going into the long-term growth plans.
And Chris is absolutely right about some things paying off quickly while others don’t. You just have to be patient at times. Sometimes the best marketing tactics in the long-term take time to bring in clients (like establishing a platform). But they can bring in more than other options overall. And when you find that something simply doesn’t work no matter how much time an energy goes into it, you don’t need to quit. You just adjust your plan and try something new. The possibilities are pretty much endless. 🙂