FREELANCE FRIDAY: Marketing {without losing your mind}

 

FREELANCE FRIDAY #7
MARKETING {without losing your mind}

This one’s tough. It’s summer. Soon the holidays will be coming around. And basically, there’s always fifteen different things commanding your attention, between work (aside from your freelancing), your freelancing, content creation, family, friends, maintaining a social life (whatever that is), keeping up with the ever-changing algorithms that demand your attention, and more…

It can be a LOT.

But it doesn’t need to be overwhelming, nor should it cause a ton of stress. As I’ve grown into helping run other social media pages aside from my own, I’ve had to learn a lot of time management and marketing tricks to keep from going insane. And I hope they help you as well!

 

#1: PRIORITIZE.
Know in advance which posts you absolutely must make in a month, which ones you’d like to do, and which ones are essentially fillers to feed the algorithm. Prioritize the most important posts first and make sure they’re out of the way with plenty of time to spare. Even if you just take ten minutes to schedule those posts at the beginning of the week, do so! It takes a load off of you mentally when you don’t have those marketing deadlines bearing down on you on top of all the other deadlines you have for projects, things going on IRL, and more.

And if something is just a filler, try working on those posts after your biggest-priority posts are out of the way. Give your followers something meaningful, not just filler!

 

#2: TAKE A DAY FOR MARKETING.
Write up your captions, hashtags, and decide which graphics you’re using. Marketing takes a lot of brainpower and sometimes it can zap creativity. So take a day and dedicate it solely to marketing for the entire month! If you can’t do that, take fifteen minutes at the beginning of the week and plan the week’s posts out. Either way, get it out of the way as early as possible so you’re free to do other things.

#3: PLANNERS ARE YOUR BUDDY.
Seriously. Take some time toward the end of the month and plan your posts for the upcoming month ahead of time. Set a schedule for what days you always post, plus whatever additional posts you may need to share for other folks/networking purposes. (For example, I post Monday/Friday with a reel on Wednesday.) Doing so takes the guesswork out of what days and times you should post, it gives you concrete deadlines to work against, and you can schedule your posts in advance. Keeping a planner also helps keep your own projects and deadlines in mind.

#4: DON’T OVERSTRETCH YOURSELF.
That means not signing up for every single release team. Which is something I’m still learning. So when you DO sign up for extra work, your followers also understand that it’s something very meaningful to you! If you need to take a break, that is okay too. When it comes down to it, your wellbeing is more important than the algorithm.

#5: MAKE GRAPHICS AHEAD OF TIME.
Set aside a day once a month to create as many graphics or reels as you can for the month ahead. Some posts will need individual attention, i.e. if you’re part of a release team and operating on someone else’s schedule, but for the vast majority of your posts, you should be able to make graphics ahead of time. Even if you set aside half an hour to work on Canva, you’ll still get several graphics made in short order. A little bit of work ahead of time can save a lot of headaches when your posts are due and the algorithm’s angry.

#6: EVERGREEN MATERIAL.
This is my favorite. Whether you have book quotes, inspirational tips, marketing for your business offerings…you can create “evergreen” material that you can pull out anytime and use. I have seasonal ads and graphics typed up and ready to go for my editing posts. I save my favorite book quotes as I write them, then save them to a folder on my computer so I can bring them out anytime. Save pics you took quite awhile ago, and re-use them, especially if they’re favorites or performed well at the time.

For the church pages I run, I pull together quotes from books I read or see online, create graphics, and keep them on hand so it only takes 10-15 minutes to schedule the posts I am able to schedule out. (Yes. Ten to fifteen minutes.)

These graphics take time in the beginning to gather, but after you have them, they’re absolutely priceless. And time-saving. And brain-saving.

And that’s it! I hope you found some nugget of helpful information in this post—and if you have some tips, please share them!