End-of-Year Freelance Writer Marketing
Want to fill your calendar for Q1 of 2021? Your end-of-year marketing is how to get it done. We'll be going over why it's important to not wait until next year, why marketing now fills the pipeline for later on, and how your last-minute tasks for 2020 will pay off in the following 12 months.
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Hey. So when you're thinking about the end of the year, are you confused about whether or not you should be marketing or basically putting your foot on the brake and stopping all efforts while everyone's off for Christmas or new years today, we're going to talk a little bit about how did you your end of year marketing, why that matters, why you need to actually do it and how to actually do it without being at your desk. So this is a cool thing that I think a lot of people get confused about because they think that everyone's out of the office. They think people aren't checking their email, but if anything, this year we've learned, people are checking their email all the time. They're bored at home. They're trying to figure out you know, what to do with extra time after they finish all the board games or they finished hanging out with their significant other or their dogs for the 85th time this year.
So let's talk a little bit about planning, putting in breaks and marketing. So here's a couple of interesting stories. I think that are really key to thinking about end of year marketing. So I know someone who marketed a pitch on Christmas day, she sent it out and she ended up getting a magazine gig, like a top level magazine gig because the editor was like bored with her family and checked her email and was like, Oh, I love this. Like, can you get it to me by early January? So that's one really cool story. Like people think that a lot of people just shut down over Christmas. They think they're not checking in. They think they're not doing a lot of work things, but they really are. You'd be surprised how many people answer emails on holidays? Like, no matter what the holiday is like whether it's Christmas or new year's or a high holiday, or, you know, like they're checking their email, they're checking their phone, even when they're not supposed to, even when they're supposed to be with family or at, you know, some sort of gathering or still checking their phone, they're still getting all their work stuff.
So that's one story where she got a really great gig on Christmas day. Another one was that I have had friends like including myself in some of my other friends, friends just do marketing over Christmas. And this is kind of a cool thing that I think a lot more people need to do. Oh, hi, Vicki. Vicki's in the house. So if you guys are thinking about having those weeks off, so for me, a lot of times I want to have the two weeks off from Christmas and new year's and then come back in January. So what I do is I have marketing that goes out when I'm out of the office and that I do with boomerang. So we've, we've kind of gone over a boomerang a little bit, but I am obsessed with it. It is one of the best tools I ever got in my business.
So I use boomerang to send out marketing emails when I'm out of the office, right. So I can send them like an LOI or I can send a pitch and I can just use boomerang to say, Hey, send this on December 21st at 9:00 AM. Or, you know, if I want to make it feel more real, I can just pick a time like nine 37. Okay, cool. Sounds good. Send it then. And it can send it. And then if someone's working and they get back to me, that's great. Like I still have an out of office message that says, Hey, I'm out of the office. You know, I'll get back to you on X date, whatever. But if someone wants to respond, they can. So that's number one, number two, they have it when they come back. So let's say they're taking off just the week of Christmas.
They're coming back the week following and then just taken off new year's even new year's day. So basically a week later they'll be like, cool. This message in my inbox, I'll check in. Oh, she's out of office. They don't know how long my out of office is. Right. Like my out of office could have been just that day. It could have been something else. Like they don't know the span of the out of office. I typically do say like, I'll be back responding to messages on X date, but it's not always there. Like I just say like, Hey, thanks for reaching out. I'll get back to you. Like when I get back in the office, so they're not tracking me, they don't know me what I'm doing, but they're getting the message. So the most important thing here is our marketing is getting done. It's all scheduled ahead of time.
So if I wanted to the Friday before, I'd take all this time off, I could schedule a hundred messages to go out while I'm off. And they would end up in inboxes of people who may check it that day. They may check it when they get back in January, they may check it on Christmas day or new year's day or a high holiday day. And that, that can happen anytime. But my marketing's done. I could go on my time off without having to worry about everybody, you know, be getting two weeks behind on marketing or not getting a jump on my January work or not trying to you know, miss out on stuff that I might want to get while they're still maybe working on Q1 planning. Like some businesses are behind the ball, like they're going to do their Q1 planning, like before new year's day.
So sometimes getting those in at the right time really matters and the way to do it when you're out of the office is just boomerang, those messages to send out. And if you don't want to put an out of office on there, like you just say, you know, you're going to send them and maybe they'll answer them and they won't get your out of office reply. Like you can answer them if you don't want to take that time off, you can wait a day. There was a lot of things that you can do, but the thing that you don't have to do is be at your computer, sending these messages, you've scheduled them all to go out. They're all organized. They're all gonna send through through boomerang and you don't have to worry about, like, I gotta be in the office every day until Christmas or every day until this, or you don't have to, they're all scheduled out.
So we're going to do that. Like you can, you can't really do that through LinkedIn. Like you can't like future send a message on LinkedIn yet. I'm sure they'll figure that out eventually. But you definitely can reply to a message. So if you get a message on LinkedIn, if you reply in the email, it replies back to the message, right? So you could do that in boomerang that for later you just can't do it within the LinkedIn platform, but if you're just going to do some marketing, I would just set it up through boomerang and get it to send while you're out of office. And if you want to, you can have the out of office reply or not, but it lets you get some marketing done while getting some downtime, which I'm a big, big fan of. So when you're thinking about end of year marketing, think about who you want to work for in 2021, make a list of those people then send your messages to them with boomerang.
So I always like to get ahead of the year. So pick some ideal clients, pick some people who are really good fit for you and add them to your, you know, I don't know, 25 to 50 LOI that you're going to send out through boomerang. And then, you've already reached out to all these top level clients. You've already gotten the ball rolling because I think something that freelance writers forget sometimes is that we have to fill the pipeline. The pipeline doesn't get filled when we're out of work, when we're out of work, that's how we start the feast and famine cycle. People get like writers, get confused with this whole cycle where they're like, Oh, I was working all the time and now I have no work. I better Mark it for right now. Now we're not marketing for right now. I'm marketing for Q1.
I'm marketing for Q2, maybe even Q3, like I'm filling the pipeline for my whole 2021 right now. That's what you should be doing. You should be thinking about sending LOAs. Now that might pay off next Christmas. Like there have been companies who haven't gotten back to me for nine months or a year, or I follow up with them for a year and a half until I actually work with them. Like, and I follow up with them with boomerang, right? They would respond and say, Hey, like we're not ready yet. We're trying to figure it out. Talk to me later. Okay, cool. Boomerang that for three months, three months, because look in my inbox, I follow up. So a lot of that follow up the process is, is a lot longer than people think. People think like, Oh my God, I need work. Now I should get on a platform.
I should get on Upwork or oDesk doesn't exist. So I just get an upward or I should get on like Fiverr or some other service. And that's, that's just kind of fulfilling the cycle of work. If you try to get work right now, when you need it, that only pretty much makes it so that you're scrambling and you're going to pick the work. That's maybe not the highest paying work. It's just the work you have right now. And that kind of ruins the cycle. Right? We can't actually move up if we're always in this cycle of like, Oh my God, I need work now. Oh my God. Any work now. So when you're thinking about your end of your marketing is for all of next year, I think expanding your mind to not just Q1 or Q2, think about all the people who could get back to you in the next 12 months market to those people, big corporations.
Like if you want to work for a giant corporation and they're your ideal client, they take a really long time sometimes to get back to you. And they have like 80 people that have to pass it through. Oh yeah. Sharon says, we have to talk to Melissa who has to talk to Robert, who has to talk to, you know, this person and that person is, it can be a very long process and you may have to onboard them for like six months. It may be a very long process. So you to start that early, you have to start that all, like, it's not like you get a client and they pay you and you start working. That's sometimes the case, but not always. So I think when you're thinking about your end of your marketing, what can you get in the next 12 months? Think about how you can send those while you're out of the office taking some time off.
And basically, why are you filling the pipeline now? Right? Why are you filling the pipeline now? It's for later it's, it's not for Christmas. It's not for, like, I noticed that some of the communities I'm in that there's writers talking about how they're like, well, I don't want to work over Christmas and I don't want to work over, you know, the first week or two of January, I want some time off. It's like, that's not what we're marketing for. We're not marketing to get work right now. I think that's the mindset that kind of gets messed up here is people think that they're marketing and that everyone's going to get back to them today. Like, they're like, Oh no, if I send this, they're going to get back and be like, no, they won't like pretty much like maybe half or less, maybe 20 to 50% will get back to you.
And less than 20% will hire you. So even if they get back to you, here's a quick little tip that I like to use. That I learned a while back is that we're not at the Beck and call of our clients. We're running our own business. We work with our clients. So you don't need to get back to someone immediately. And when I get a new client, even if I like have extra space to answer that email today, which you know, I typically don't recently, but if I do, I just boomerang it to the next day and deal with it. The next day they get 24 hour turnaround. I'm not gonna, you know, move all my other stuff, move my other clients move my, their deadlines, the things that I have already committed to just to answer an email. Like that's not right. Like you're not any more of a priority than my other clients.
Then my coaching clients, then all these other priorities I have to do. Like, I'm not, I'm not going to be basically like, you know, starting a fire, just answering email. So when you get a response, you don't have to answer within 24 hours. You don't even have to answer in a week. If you don't want to, like you could say like, Oh, I'm so sorry. I've been busy. Like happy to chat. Like there's plenty of times I've emailed people and they take a month to get back to me. They're like, Oh, this got lost in my inbox. Sorry. Like you don't, you can train. I'm just going to say that nicely. You can train your clients too. Like, I don't think I want to use the word train, but you can set a boundary with your clients that you have answer emails within 28, 24 hours or 48 hours.
You can, you can tell them, you could send them something in your onboarding. Like when you onboard them, you're like, Hey, great to work with you. Just so you know, it takes me 24, at least 24 to 48 hours to get back on emails. I will try to get back as fast as I can with you, but that's kind of my typical turnaround. So that's kind of all you need to say to them that you just set that expectation with them. You don't have to make it this huge thing. Like, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I didn't answer. Like we have hundreds of emails. I don't know about you, but I wake up with hundreds of emails. Like it's everywhere. Everyone wants your attention. Everyone's got a press release or a product or a vacation spot or an opening or a closing or a new study.
Like there's always something or someone like you need to get back to a client. You need to get back to a coaching student. You need to review this thing. You need to go dah, dah, dah. Like all of those things, they're going to be filling your inbox all the time. So setting a boundary with your clients about your turnaround time is normal and natural. It's totally okay. It's not that you're bad for not getting back to them in 10 minutes. Like it's okay. That goes back to our marketing piece, right? Like you could send them the thing on Monday, they get an out of office. And if you really want to, you can reply on Wednesday and say like, Hey, thanks so much for getting back to me. I'd love to talk to you when I'm back in the office, blah, blah, blah. So I think that a lot of times when we're thinking about our marketing and the time-span and the turnaround times and the amount of time that we give ourselves to do work, it needs to be much longer.
Think in three month, spans six months spans. Don't think like, I don't want to work over spring break. I don't want to work over, you know 4th of July or whatever holiday, like whatever time of year you take off, like, this is not for that. Ideally what you want is that people are getting back to you and you say like, Hey, it's the end of may or it's the beginning of June. I'm so happy we're signing this contract. Just want to let you know that I'm going to be off the first week of July, just as a heads up. Boom. Now it's done. They've already been notified from the very beginning that you're taking time off and you don't have to worry about getting a client and then being like, Oh, I'm off next week. Like, you can always tell people they're just humans. Like, they're not, it's not going to be this whole thing where they own you or they're doing this thing.
And if you have someone like I've had friends and myself had clients that are basically like, we own your work and everything, you do have to get back to us. Like, no, you should not work with those people. You should definitely be working with people who see value in your work. Understand you have other pieces in your business, understand that they're they, you know, you're doing your best to get back to them. As soon as you can give them priority treatment, making sure you answer everything as timely as you can, but they shouldn't be thinking that you only work for them and treating you like an employee. So those are a few things on our end of your marketing. One of the other things I wanted to go over is the confidence piece. So when you're marketing, now you have confidence going into next year when you've already set your pipeline with 50 Los.
By the end of the year, that gives you a push into January of potential clients who can get back to you. You're already going into the year, more confident that you have some work potentially coming in or that you're making strides on marketing or that you're growing your business. There's a lot of pieces here where, or you can think about the growth of your business over the long-term. Instead of just like, I need a client, I need to make some money. Oh my God, I'm going to die. Christmas presents are expensive or holiday gifts are expensive, whatever. Like we want to build competence for the longterm, which means putting in all of our systems in place and our systems are sending wise through boomerang or our systems are having our boundaries with our clients. Our systems are understanding that we can get back to people without being below them.
Like we are partners with them. We have a lot of different things to build confidence here and especially taking those little pieces of marketing. Now that builds a lot of confidence going into the new year that you're like, cool, it's January 4th. Or I think that's how it is. The first year. Fourth will be the Monday 2021. So it's January 4th, I'm back in the office, but I've already done a ton of marketing. So I'm already ahead for the month. I'm already ahead. So then once you start doing marketing for that year, that month you've already been, you know, you got stuff you can follow up on, right? Like let's say you sent 50 and you got zero replies. January 4th is the day where you follow up with everybody. Hi, I'm back in the office. Or maybe not that, but just say, Hey, hope you had a great holiday or week, week off or time off, welcome to the new year.
Do you want to work together basically? So there's a lot of pieces here where we can we can build our confidence going into the new year and we can build confidence in that. We're like a real business owner who has other things to do than serve one client. And I think if you only have one or two clients and you're like obsessed with them and you're spending all your time and you're like, don't have any marketing time, then you need to figure out basically how to get more clients so that you're not focusing on, on so many, so much of these. And then you're also building in time to build your business. There's a piece of working in your business, which is completing your deadlines, getting your work done, doing edits, then working on your business, which is the marketing, fixing your LinkedIn profile, fixing your website changing your pitches, learning more about how to pitch better, how to get more marketing done how to grow your business in different ways.
Like whether you want to start a podcast or a YouTube series, or you want to create an email list to market, to, there's a whole bunch of different things that you can slice and dice here, but we want to build our confidence through action. Like we want to be taking action now so that when we get to the new year, we're like, cool. Even if that was a 0% success rate, I already sent them out. Maybe they won't get back to me for six months. Maybe I can go and talk to them later on and figure it out. But at least it gives you something to follow up on. Right? You could boom. Like if nobody gets back to you or even if some of them do, you can say like, cool, I'll follow up with them in three months or I'll follow up with them in two weeks, but you've already set the pipeline.
You've already set in motion. So you're already kind of scheduled in a way to get everything ahead and feel confident that you could have work coming in with all these people you can follow up with. So those are a few things. Let me just check my notes. I want to make sure that I'm covering all the stuff we talked about. So yeah. Yeah. So I think we covered everything. So I'm gonna give you guys a quick pup date because today is like literally my favorite. We finally got our gift or not our gift, but our purchase from Darren and Philip and Darren and Philip is a dog brand that we follow on Instagram. They are amazing. They give 20% of profits to dog rescues, especially bully breeds, which both of our dogs are, or my dog, our dogs are. And so we got these cute GMEs, I'm going to show you guys cause I am obsessed.
So we got these cute jammies and I, I, they slept in them and I have been waiting for, these are like two weeks or maybe even three to come from Australia. And it's just like, I just love them. They have a little pit bull on the back with a little bow tie and they're Christmas and festive. And I hope I'm thinking guys for letting me adults be with all of my dog stuff. But I just love him. Like, I've been waiting to find pajamas that actually fit them. Like I'm going to give them some treats, but they, you know, sure. Well, it has a really beefy body. She, she Charlie, she has a really beefy body. It's hard to find things that actually fit her chest. Cause she's got yeah, really big chest down here. And I finally got some jammies that actually fit her and Bo's asleep.
So we'll just let him sleep. Cause he's 14 and that's what he's going to do. But you know, it's just, I just love it. They look so good in them. They fit them so well, they're super soft. They are just darling, I have assessed with them. So yeah. And they're just like, if you guys want to follow them on Instagram, that's Darren and Phillip and then they, their that's their dog brand. But the page where they kind of started was the blue boys and I am just obsessed with them. The jammies look so good. And let's see if we can get Charlie on it. They're a little bit more, here we go. Yeah. So, but you guys were like, we talking about these jammies cause like I have been waiting for them for so long and I just, Oh, they're so cute.
So there's that. So that's been like my big highlight for the week. But if you guys have any questions about any of your marketing or anything that pops in mind, you can pop them in the chat. If you feel like this has been helpful so far, make sure you subscribe, make sure you like the video, share the video. Anybody you feel like could be you know, could get some help from this video. Make sure you share it with them, but I'll take some questions. If there's any questions, I'll just go over some things. So one of the questions that I get very often is should I, or should not, not Mark it over this time. So there's one cool thing that I think is really helpful is Carol Tice has the make a living writing blog. She I just shared this on LinkedIn, but if you go to make a living blog or make a living, writing.com, she has a post about how to get work right now over the holidays. So if you're kind of scrambling for work and you're like, no, I do not want to take time off. I am scared about marketing. I need it now. Like she just put up a post about holiday marketing, holiday work, all these things that you can do. So I would go read that number one and then number two, definitely market. But we already talked about that, right? Definitely market right now. Make sure you're setting up the pipeline. I'm going to put Minneapolis.
She looks super cute. She looks really cute. Okay. here we go.
Good girl. You look so good in those jammies girl work at working. So yeah, so we're going to do our marketing. We're going to do our marketing for later and we're going to make sure that we fill our pipeline. The other question that I get is like, do people actually answer emails, which we also talked about, right? So people answer emails, people check their email. But this is also about long-term planning. And a lot of times I think freelance writers forget how long the span can be. They forget that this way it could be three months or six months or a year before someone gets back to you and talks about, you know, working together or a project that might make sense, or maybe, you know, you decide to change your business and you don't want to do case studies anymore. You want to do more blog posts or you decide you want to do marketing positioning, or you want to help people with content marketing or content strategy instead of doing all the blog posts.
So there's a lot of changes that can come along from your business over the time that you know, your marketing, getting things set up for 2021. So there's that piece there? If anybody has any other questions, I have a couple more that I can pull or we can go back to our update where Charlie looks, she's like trying to be a dog model right now. I don't know if you guys know this about me. This is like a secret fun fact that I am trying to be a dog stage. Mom. Not for real, not, not like a scary stage mom where I'm like trying to make her like lose weight and like fit in these stupid garments and like put weird stuff on her. But I just like her in her little cute jammies is like a dream come true for me.
I just, I just get just a little ham. You're like more treatise, please bear your sleep. You want to treat up? Oh, good job. Good morning. Welcome to the club. You go. Good job. All right, cool. So last couple of things. And then I'm gonna hop off a little early today because I think we've kind of covered why we should be doing it, how to do it when we're out of the office, building confidence, all the cool stuff. So yeah. So do the end of the year marketing use boomerang to send out stuff later on. If you want to try to get as much done as you can make that list of 25 or 50 companies that you really want to work with either they are you know, ideal clients, they're big corporations or just big startups, or they have a lot of funding and it's a reach client or it's just someone you feel like is a good fit and then send those things out and make sure you're building all of that pipeline in for the next year.
Oh, Vicky says cute instant dogs side gig. Yeah. Seriously. That's why we have snorkel peanuts. People always laugh. Like I, I put a video up on our thing talking about why it's called snorkel peanut. So there's that, but yeah, like maybe someday, maybe someday we'll have an Insta dog thing right now. It's kinda like, I just really I love Darren and Phillip as a brand. And then also I just can't get over how cute she looks in these jammies. I just, can you just, you just look so cute and they fit her. They fit her really well. And she's, you know, she's a pit bull Frenchie mix and she's just got this beefy body. She's like a little meatball. So it's hard to find little things to fit her. And also she gets cold at night. So these GMEs are very warm.
They keep her warm at night. So there's that too. But yeah. Thank you guys for indulging me on my dog stuff. This is a really cool thing for me. I never thought I'd be the dog mom to like put my dogs in clothes, but since Charlotte gets cold at night, I'm getting her jammies that are warm. It's important. There's that? But yeah. So thank you guys for joining me. And I'm looking forward to talking to you guys more about business next week. We have basically analyzing your business goals from 2020 and 2021 coming up next week. So if you guys ever have questions or you ever want me to cover anything, just send me an email or you can pop it in the comments below and I will get back to you. I hope you guys have a great Friday and see you next week. Bye.
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