One of the challenges of being a freelancer is that since you are self-employed, a regular paycheck is not guaranteed. You may have a big project going this week that will bring in a big payday at the end of the month. However next month your current clients might not have any work for you at all. The way to protect yourself against this is to constantly be on the lookout for new work and new clients. In order to do this, it is important to continue marketing yourself on a regular basis. But how do you do it, and how often? here are some tips to keep you in regular work.

1. Do something daily. Everyday you make time for things like eating, sleeping, your commute (if you have one), and other things that are necessary in your day. As a freelancer, doing something to market yourself every day is necessary to maintain consistent work. Whatever you do does not have to be big or overly time consuming. It just has to be something you accomplish everyday to make your self known to the world. This could be a quick phone call or email to a client or prospective client, even just to say “hi” or “thank you.” Or a few minutes of work on your next blog post, or a few minutes to brainstorm ideas on how to get your name out and work noticed. The important idea here is not to isolate yourself in your office. Let people know you are there.

2. Write it down. Keep a list of things you do to market yourself, similar to the way you track your hours worked or expenses. This will help keep you accountable to your personal marketing strategy, and may even help you come up with other ideas of things you can do. You can also use this same log to track good results that have out of your marketing efforts.

3. In other marketing tasks, be consistent. Once you are setting aside a small amount of daily time for marketing, the next step is to work on consistency in other marketing tasks. If you write a blog or newsletter, create a schedule and stick to it. If you use social media such as Twitter or Facebook (and you should), post on a regular basis. This does not mean you have to post every five minutes, but maybe once or twice a day. You can also schedule posts ahead of time using Hootsuite.(For more information on Hootsuite, checkout my review of must have iPad apps for Freelancers).

4. Check your progress. Once a week take a few minutes to look over what you have done for the week, to gauge your consistency and check your progress. If you fell a bit short that is okay, think of some ways to improve and resolve to be better for next week. Write down good things that happened this week as a result of your marketing efforts so you can chart your progress and know that it is working (and though it may not work overnight, it will work).

Developing a marketing strategy when you are busy with work might seem like a waste of time, however when the downtime comes you will much more secure knowing that you have a plan in place to develop new business and generate new revenue. Either that, or your marketing strategy will prevent you from having downtime at all. Either way, you will be better off.

photo credit: juhansonin