I’ve spent way too much time playing on Facebook the past two weeks. And finding delicious looking recipes to add to my collection. And not to mention planning several fantasy trips complete with itinerary and accommodations that I will never book. I took the entire month of December off work and feel very sluggish getting back in the groove. I will admit that when I sat down to work in January, I had disconnected so much from work that I couldn’t even remember the names of my clients. It was both a fantastic and terrifying feeling.

Work is a little slow since I took so much time off and I need to find a new client or two, but I feel just plain stuck. And since I don’t know where to start, my solution has been to simply avoid marketing. When this has happened to me in the past, the best way to get started was to come up with a few concrete marketing tasks to do, bribe myself with a treat when I finish (a piece of pie or watching a television show in work hours often does the trick for me) and force myself to get started.

Since I have heard from other writers who are feeling stuck and in a slump, today I wanted to share five marketing tasks that typically yield good results and are very concrete.

1. Follow up on letters of introduction you sent in 2014. Most of the results I get from cold emails come from following up. I try to follow up every 3 months with clients who have told me that they are interested, but don’t have projects right away by using one of these five strategies for following up as well as sometimes just simply sending a quick email. If I don’t hear back from a client, I usually follow up two times and then give it a rest. Once a year or so, I will go back and touch base with those clients just in case something has changed and have occasionally gotten a reply even at that late date.

2. Contact previous clients and ask if they have any content marketing writing needs. This is honestly the best strategy for getting new work quickly. One of the best strategies is to follow up with specific ideas for projects that the client mentioned to you in the past.

3. Send LOI’s to the Custom Content Council list. The Custom Content Council website has a fantastic list of all of its content marketing agency members, their niches, clients and contact information. If you have not emailed the contacts on this list that relate to your experience, I would highly recommend spending a few hours going through this list. Be sure to use the search feature to narrow down the list based on industry and even location. In 2014, 25 percent of my income came from agencies on this list. I found that most of the agencies pay in the ballpark of $1 per word and work with many big name companies with ongoing work.

4. Find 10 new prospects on LinkedIn. One of the best ways to find work is to identify clients who are currently using content marketing strategy since they may have a need for writers. One of the most effective ways that I have found to do this is to use LinkedIn to search for people with the job title Content Marketing Manager in your niche and follow up with them either in an email or LinkedIn Inmail.

5. Contact 5 companies who are advertising for full-time content marketing writers. This is a different take on the above strategy. Even though you are not looking for full-time work, job advertisements are great leads for identifying companies who use content marketing writers. I have had good success contacting these companies to offer my freelance services during the hiring and onboarding process for their current needs as well as any projects that arise in the future. While I have typically used LinkedIn to identify openings, you can also apply this strategy to any job board, such as Monster or Indeed.

What do you do when you feel stuck with marketing?