I love working for myself. I swear to you that I not complaining. But sometimes it’s hard to balance two really crucial things — no, not work/life balance, I manage that pretty well.
I’m talking about the bane of the freelancing life: balancing customer work with marketing.
I like having assignments in hand. Sure money is part of the reason, but it’s only part. I like having something concrete to do. I like seeing the fruits of my marketing labor. I like taking a mass of half-baked ideas, facts and opinions and and turning them into a great piece of content that will bring more business to my client.
Marketing, not so much. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind doing it. Parts of it are even fun, especially the creative challenge. And it’s always good to see positive results. But when I’m heads down creating content for my clients, marketing feels like an imposition, a break in the flow.
Yet I know that the key to marketing is to keep doing it even when I’m busy. When I worked as an analyst I worried about start-up clients who had a lot of initial success and were flying high. They usually stopped spending money on us, their PR agency, and their marketing agency because they were convinced that their market momentum would continue forever.
It didn’t. Without being fed it never does. They lost a lot of ground and had to scramble to get the attention back. Sometimes they did it on time. Sometimes they didn’t.
The same advice I’m giving myself I’ll give to the people I work with and whom I might work with someday: the right time to invest in marketing is exactly when you think you don’t need to. I’m glad you’re flying high, I really am. Keep that wind beneath your wings.