Let’s imagine, for a moment, you’ve set out to market your digital-copywriting business.
You look at what other writers are doing, and you spend some time here on Digital Copywriter researching effective marketing strategies. You come up with a three-pronged method to promote your services.
You decide to use LinkedIn to make new connections, an email newsletter to stay top-of-mind with those connections, and warm emails to line up new work at a faster pace — all good, proven strategies. (Remember, this is an example — your preferred marketing stack might be different.)
Each of those strategies has a building stage and then a maintenance stage.
Most writers I talk to have a good handle on the building stage. They identify what they need to create to get started.
But a lot of writers don’t plan for the maintenance required once they start using a marketing system, and they get bogged down. Or they overthink the maintenance and then don’t get started in the first place, because they’re worried about having the time to “do it right.”
The Building/Maintenance Split
For our sample three-pronged strategy above, what will you need to build to get started?
You’ll want to revisit and update your LinkedIn profile. And, if you’re hoping to land clients from LinkedIn, you might want a plan for how you’ll open a conversation with your new connections. You might even want a few templates for the types of messages you’ll send, when people make or accept a connection request with you.
For the email newsletter, you’ll need to decide on a format and a frequency. There might be a few design elements you need, like a banner image. And you’ll have to decide on how you’re going to send your newsletter — through LinkedIn or Substack or through a service like Kit or MailChimp.
For your warm emails, you’ll need to create a basic message format for your initial contact and follow-up messages. And you’ll need a criterion for how you select who to send messages to.
All in all, that’s a manageable workload. Pulling all those pieces together will take somewhere between 10 and 15 hours — something you can do in a week, if you don’t have much else on your plate. And definitely something you can do in a month, even if you’re busy with other things.
But then comes the maintenance.
Each of these strategies requires ongoing attention. And, if you don’t think about that up front, you might find yourself putting a disproportionate amount of time into marketing upkeep. Or worse, you could end up letting your marketing efforts fall by the wayside completely.
The Maintenance Trap
Staying with our sample strategy to illustrate, once you get your LinkedIn profile updated and come up with a basic plan for engaging your connections, you need to determine how you’ll show up on the platform.
Will you…
- Post every day? Or a few times a week?
- Use text posts or video or carousels?
- Comment on other people’s posts?
- Send connection requests out each week?
- Direct message your existing connections?
- Reach out to new connections in a strategic way?
Writing posts, creating videos and carousels, crafting insightful comments, and sending messages to your new and existing connections takes time.
Before you know it, you could find yourself dedicating an hour or two — or even more — to LinkedIn every day.
Once you get your email newsletter established, you have to write new issues to keep up with your publishing schedule. If you’re publishing every week, that could take you two or three hours each week, if you want to do a good job… and believe me, you want to do a good job.
As for your warm email outreach, that will depend on how many messages you decide to send each week. Whether it’s five messages or 25, it will take time to find companies that are a good fit, the right contact at each company, and the actual contact information. This could take you an hour a week, or five depending on how many messages you want to send.
Suddenly, the maintenance of your marketing systems is taking two hours or more out of your schedule every day… sometimes a lot more. And then, you start to wonder… what happens when it pays off, and I land clients? How will I keep up with new client work and my marketing systems.
All too often, once you land clients, you let your marketing slip… and that’s the maintenance trap. Your marketing leads to clients, but then maintaining your marketing systems demands too much time… so you let it slip. And then, when you need to market yourself again, you feel like you’re starting from scratch.
Let’s look at some ways you can avoid the maintenance trap, to keep your marketing systems humming along, even when you get busy with client work.
Batch Your Tasks
Rather than writing a new LinkedIn post each day, sending 10 direct messages to your existing and new connections each day, and sending out five warm emails each day… try batching your tasks instead.
Maybe on Mondays you write your LinkedIn posts for the week.
Then on Tuesdays you outline and research your email newsletter.
On Wednesdays, you send out direct messages on LinkedIn.
On Thursdays, you draft and polish your newsletter.
And on Fridays, you send out your warm email messages.
Batching tasks usually saves time, because you get into a rhythm, and you’re not transitioning from one kind of thinking to another a bunch of times. Those two things combined typically mean better work done in less time.
If you spread all your tasks evenly throughout the week, it might take you two hours a day. But, if you batch them, you might find you need only an hour or 90 minutes to accomplish the same work… and it’s often higher quality.
Use Rotating Lists and Give Yourself a Time Limit
If batching doesn’t appeal to you, consider trying a rotating list for your maintenance tasks. If every day you aim to write one LinkedIn post, make five LinkedIn comments, send 10 connection requests, write one section of your newsletter and send five outreach messages… put that into a list. Then, instead of crossing off the item at the top, cut and paste it to the bottom of the list.
Give yourself a time limit and work as far through your list as you can each day, moving each completed item to the bottom of the list. Then the next day, start at the top and repeat.
This approach means you’ll be consistent about your tasks while also controlling how much time you put into your marketing maintenance.
The one thing to keep in mind with this approach is that you’ll need to let go of working through the whole list every day. Instead, you’ll accumulate results over the week, and then those will add up over time. It’s not perfect consistency… but it’s steady and manageable, which is really what you need.
Use AI Where It Won’t Compromise Your Voice
Some maintenance tasks, like writing your LinkedIn posts or writing your newsletter, require your full involvement, because you want to showcase your thinking and preserve your voice. Handing those tasks off to an AI tool could compromise those things.
But other tasks, like researching companies to send your warm emails to, are faster and easier to do with the help of AI.
Review your maintenance tasks and think about which ones AI can help you streamline without watering down your voice and point of view.
Cycle Down and Cycle Up
No matter how you approach your maintenance tasks, this one is critical. Be ready to cycle up and down as needed.
When you get busy with client work, you don’t want to shut your marketing systems off completely, tempting as it may be. If circumstances change, and a client goes in a different direction, you don’t want to have to restart your marketing machine from nothing.
What you can and should do is scale back your marketing when you get busy. Instead of posting to LinkedIn every day, maybe you post twice a week. Instead of direct messaging 30 people a week, maybe you direct message just five. Instead of sending 25 warm emails, maybe you send 10.
Then, if your project work starts to slow down, you can cycle your marketing back up. It won’t be hard, because you’re already in the habit. It will just mean doing a little more of what you already do.
A lot of writers let their marketing efforts falter, because the maintenance required feels like too much. If you approach your own marketing maintenance with your eyes wide open, set boundaries for the time you’ll dedicate, and have a plan for cycling down when you get busy with client work, you’ll find it’s so much easier to stick with it.
And when that happens, you’ll notice you’re steadily busy but not overwhelmed… and you always seem to have a new client waiting in the wings when you need one. That’s a good place to be!