How to Make Marketing as Easy as Tying Your Shoes

t’s easy to use freelance jobs sites or content mills like fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer.com. But steady, high-paying clients  aren’t using these freelance jobs sites and content mills. And they’re not going to magically find you.

Instead, you have to go out and find them. And you have to attract them with your marketing.

If you’re like most freelancers, this is hard for you. But it doesn’t have to be.

You can make marketing as easy as trying your shoes. Here’s how.

Make Marketing Easy by Making it a Habit

Build the marketing habit. Freelancers who build the marketing habit don’t have to use freelance jobs sites or content mills—because they know how to find and attract high-paying clients. They believe in their ability to succeed and are willing to work hard to do this. And they stand out in a sea of freelancers.

Habits Make Doing Hard Things Easy

A habit is “the small decisions you make and actions you perform every day,” says James Clear, best-selling author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Good Morning America called Clear the “world’s leading expert on habit formation.”

The more you practice a habit—in this case the marketing habit—the easier it gets. It’s like learning how to tie your shoelaces. In the beginning, you had to really think about what you were doing. And it was hard. But the more times you tied your shoelaces, the easier it got—because tying your shoelaces became a habit.


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Rewire Your Brand to Make Marketing Easy

Good habits help make it easy for you to do things that will help you reach your long-term goals. They also help you focus on what’s most important—like marketing your freelance business.

Freelancers who want to thrive—in good times and in bad—must do a lot of marketing a lot of the time.

Building a habit actually rewires your brain. So if you build the marketing habit, marketing will be easier for you.

 

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Start by Making Time for Marketing

Many freelancers say that they don’t have time for marketing. What this really means is that marketing isn’t a big enough priority for them.

If you want to thrive, you must make marketing a top priority. The only professional thing that’s more important is always doing great work for your clients.

If your freelance work is slow, spend most of your time on marketing. If you’re busy, this could change at any time. So you still need to make time for marketing.

How to Build Habits that Stick

Here are some simple ways to build the marketing habit.

Start Small and Increase Gradually

Start building the marketing habit with small actions. For example, invite one person to connect with you on LinkedIn each day for the first week. The next week, invite two people to join your network each day. Every action you take helps you build the marketing habit.

Focus on Actions, Not Outcomes

You can’t control outcomes, like whether a client hires you. But you have total control over your actions. For example, if you aim to get 3 new clients in 30 days, you’re going to be disappointed.

Clients rarely need freelancers when we first market to them. And they’re less likely to need freelancers soon during a recession.

But you can easily develop a list of 25 prospective clients and send them direct emails over the next 30 days. And actions like this, repeated often, are very likely to result in new clients in the future.

Chunk the Marketing Habit

Break the marketing habit into manageable chunks. Instead of trying to write or revise your LinkedIn profile in one day, for example, try this:

  • Day 1: Draft your About section.
  • Day 2: Review and refine your About section.
  • Day 3: Finalize your About section. Start drafting your headline.
  • Day 4: Review and refine your headline.
  • Day 5: Work on your Experience section.
  • Day 6: Work on the rest of your profile.
  • Day 7: Finalize your headline.
  • Day 8: Review everything carefully.

This makes it easy to practice the marketing habit consistently and get stuff done.

When You Slip, Get Back on Track

We all slip and get off track. Be kind to yourself and accept that you’re human. Then get back to practicing your marketing.

Be Patient

It takes time and practice to build the marketing habit. Keep going and you’ll see the results.

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