6 Things to Do This Week to Get 2017 Started on the Right Foot
I love the week between Christmas and the new year. Maybe it’s the fact that my to-do list has shrunk, or that I don’t feel the pressure of creating the perfect holiday any more because this one is in the books. I know that it has to do with the fact that there are rarely any deadlines this week.
But it’s also a really good week to get things done as a freelance writer. Contrary to popular belief, there are other people working. But since there are typically fewer deadlines, it’s also a great week to get things done from your to-do list that always seem to get pushed to the bottom of the list. Since it’s a very natural time to take stock of 2016 and set goals for 2017, I will be posting about setting goals this week as well to give you some ideas.
Here are six things to consider putting on your to-do list:
- Contact current and former clients for work. Yes, many of your clients are not in the office. But some of them ARE working this week, either in the office or from home. Most importantly, work still needs to get done. There are fewer freelancers working this week so contacting your current and former clients can be a great way to get more work. If you haven’t already done so, send an email to your clients letting them know you are working this week and available for last minute assignments. I got $800 in extra assignments this week with two emails. And since many people are taking Monday off, it’s not too late to send out these emails since if a client needs a project finished early next week, they need to assign it now.
- Send LOIs to prospective clients. Along the same vein as #1, the clients who are working this week are likely to be receiving fewer emails. So if you send an LOI to a prospective client who is working, they are likely to pay more attention to it since they don’t have 4 million other things going on at the same time. So, if you are looking for new work, this is a good time to send out LOIs even if it feels the opposite since you will likely have a higher response rate from those that are working. However, it is absolutely essential to follow up in a few weeks on all of these emails since your LOI is likely to get buried if the client is taking time off.
- Evaluate your social media presence. Becoming less lame on Twitter has been one of my goals for several years and this year I finally accomplished it. It’s not something you can fix overnight and it takes time to figure out both you’re your strategy and a plan for staying active on social media. Last year I tackled this challenge during this week and I am proud to say that I grew my followers on Twitter by 3,500 and got several jobs from my effort. I was also selected as one of TopRank’s 50 top influencers at Content Marketing World, which I am positive would not have happened if I was still lame on Twitter. Take some time to figure out your target audience, what you want to talk about and set up a scheduling program (this was the secret for me). And then figure out a time in your schedule to devote daily and weekly to social media – about an hour to set it up and a few minutes each day to respond.
- Think about outsourcing in 2017. I shared this fall about how I actually made more money (or had more free time) by outsourcing some of my tasks by using a virtual assistant, transcriptionist and proofreader. However, when you are swamped and need help, it’s a terrible time to try to find the right VA or services that you need. Spend some time this week thinking about tasks that you could outsource and researching assistants or services. Then when you get swamped, you can outsource without missing a beat.
- Update your website and LinkedIn. Yes, I mention this every time I write a list like this, but writers mention to me all the time that they need to update their LinkedIn and website. I think that this is even more important with content marketing because you want to make sure that a potential client can easily see your subject matter expertise based on brands listed, niches and clips on your website.
Are you working this week? If so, what are you doing? Any one land new assignments or even better – new clients – this week?
Great list, Jennifer. In years past, I’ve done a lot of prospecting and follow-up with current and potential clients during this week and it has always proved fruitful.
This year, however, I decided my brain just really needed a break, so other than a few quick checks of email every day, I’m doing NOTHING work-related this week. Giving myself “the pause that refreshes” that my grandmother always championed so that I can ‘hop to’ as soon as the new year turns. 🙂
Thanks for your constant wise counsel–much appreciated.
Happy New Year!! 🙂
I love your grandmothers advice! That is awesome that you are doing that. I totally agree that some Decembers the right answer is hustling and others it is relaxing. This year, I was somewhere in the middle, which honestly is probably the wrong answer because I am neither really relaxed or with a pile of money!
Jennifer, thanks so much for this fantastic post. Totally resonates. I would really like to know more about your Twitter targeting and scheduling. Last 4 months I have figured how it works and have taken up my followers from 0 to 1300, but I find it equally exhausting because it’s not something I enjoy too much – and it takes much time at my end, and also I don’t think have all the right people on my list. How do you achieve all that.. Thanks in advance, and Happy New Year!
That’s an awesome growth in Twitter followers! Very good questions. I think I will write a post on that in the next few weeks. The first step is figure out your idea audience and then the topics that they want to here about. I think that for writers that the ideal audience is people likely to hire them. So, if you are in a specific niche, you can tweet about that niche and then look for people in that niche.
I use a tool called Manage Flitter to search bios and tweets for people that are interested in content marketing. Another strategy is to find an influencer in the field and look through their followers and begin following those. I also have gotten a lot of followers by finding industry conferences and following people posting to the hashtag.
That’s fantastic Jennifer, and makes so much more sense. I’ll employ these tricks immediately in my Twitter activity and will be waiting for your post to come up. Right now I must ensure that I have a quality following rather than random and casual ones, although each one adds up in the end 🙂 Thanks so much again, Jennifer. All the best to you,
You are a million percent right. A quality following is much more important than a random following.
All good ideas, Jennifer. Thanks for sharing. I’m arriving here a week too late, but still some are relevant despite the work world dragging itself back to the grind today.
Glad you mentioned the TopRank 50 list. That’s how I found you! Keep on rocking.