Note from Jennifer: Hoping that everyone had a very Happy Holiday season with your family. I updated a post from last year because the advice is timeless and its a good week to focus on your own business. 

I love the week between Christmas and New Years. All the holiday tasks are behind me and I can truly relax before the next year gears up. But back to work-related matters. Because I typically have fewer deadlines the last week of the year – I only have a draft of a whitepaper to write – I try to spend a little bit of time working on projects that always get pushed to the bottom of the list.

Before Christmas I wrote a post about how this can be a great time to market yourself. And several members of my Freelance Content Marketing Writer Facebook Group got lucrative gigs by following this advice. My advice is the same for this week. My take is that it’s not a good week to market yourself, except when it is. Yesterday I noticed that a Content Director at a major company had viewed my profile. I sent off a quick InMail to her using the technique described in this post. I heard back from her a few hours later and we have a meeting set up to talk about what seems like a great opportunity for me working direct with a company. Its very possible that I might not have heard back if I had waited till next week when she was swamped getting back in the groove and her inbox was full.

However, if you decide to just wait a few weeks to market, which is what I typically do, there are many tasks you can do this week to get ready for a big push in January.

Here are six marketing tasks to do this week to make 2019 your best year ever:

1. Make a list of former clients to contact for work in January. Go through your contact list and find clients that you have not worked for recently. If your contact has left the company, find out their new contact information. I find that past clients are almost always my best source of new work because they already know my work and personality. Just because you haven’t heard from someone in a while doesn’t mean that they don’t have work and wouldn’t love to give you a project. It’s easy to fall off someone’s radar and often a quick email will land in a new assignments.
2. Create a list of potential new clients. If you do only task this week, pick this one. It takes some time and space from interruptions to follow my Audience First method for brainstorming new clients. But I have heard from many writers that they have identified clients that they never would have thought of if they had started from the audience perspective instead of the product point of view. I highly recommend spending time on Step 2 and asking friends and family members for their ideas.
3. Find emails for potential clients. This can be time consuming so it’s a fantastic task to do while watching holiday movies or football.  I recommend using LinkedIn to find the right person to contact and then Hunter, a free email finding tool, to find the email. Check out this post for more tips.
4. Review your Letter of Introduction (LOI). Yes, your LOI should be customized for each potential client, but most writers I know have a basic LOI template that they use to convey their expertise and experience. Take some time to look at your LOI template and make needed tweaks. Does it accurately represent your experience? How can you add personality to the letter? Do you need to shorten it so it’s a five(ish) sentence LOI? If you have multiple niches, this is also a great time to create a LOI template for each niche.
5. Think about ways to outsource in 2019. I shared two years ago 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.
6. 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 profile 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. Check out this post about selecting and organizing your clips as well as this post on updating your LinkedIn profile.

Are you working this week? If so, what are you doing? Any one land new assignments or even better – new clients – this week?