In 2023, my clients began dropping away. An agency lost the account I worked on. Things got weird with a different agency when I asked for help/clarification on a project and we mutually chose to part ways. A freelance budget got cut.
At first, I wasn’t worried. Although most of my clients stick with me for years, they do come and go. I decided to look at the free time in my schedule as an opportunity to add to my skills and services and participated in a very intense, excellent mastermind program to learn about content strategy.
At the same time, I decided to begin purposefully working to add climate technology as a niche. I started by consuming as much information as I could find—reading books and articles, following experts on social media, listening to podcasts, and eventually starting a newsletter to share what I was learning.
Combining the content strategy program with the shift into climate tech made sense. I created a plan, shared it with a few folks for critique and started putting it into action. It had lots of parts, but the centerpiece was the newsletter, where I would feature interviews with people doing interesting work. My target audience for the newsletter was regular people interested in climate topics.
The goal was not to build a huge audience, but instead to get to know the people at companies I wanted to provide content services for through the interviews. The idea was that later, when they needed content, they would remember me. I could approach them with an offer to share their story on my platform, ask them lots of questions, write a great article they would share with their network, and hopefully my network in the industry would grow organically.
It did not work. At all. I never got a single client using this strategy. (I did get paid to write one article for a publication.)
My newsletter audience stalled at about 30 subscribers.
Then, the election happened and everyone working on climate (justifiably) freaked out.
The post mortem
The list of things that went wrong is fairly long, but timing was probably the biggest issue.
- All of this was taking place just after the pandemic and in person meetings were more important than they had been, and I didn’t have the budget to go to conferences.
- The people I wanted to interview didn’t know me and weren’t interested. My rate of return on inviting people to interview was as low as (or possibly even lower than) my rate of return on cold outreach to prospects.
- ChatGPT was launched right at the end of 2022, and the freelance market has been contracting ever since.
- Most of the companies I targeted were early-stage and not ready for content marketing. Many didn’t even have a marketing function at all.
- For most of 2024, people seemed to be waiting to see what would happen, then after the election the whole climate world basically went dark.
Eventually, I narrowed my focus from “climate tech” to energy and buildings and started attending some in person conferences and such. I also pursued bylines in trade publications, and worked on building relationships in Slack groups, book clubs, and forums, and generally just tried to meet and get to know folks.
Several people suggested that I went about the newsletter all wrong and that my audience should have been the decision-makers (CMOs, CEOs, etc) at the companies I was targeting, but that would have been an even more difficult task. At least as it was I had something to offer rather than making a request when I reached out.
The advice to fail, learn, iterate, and try again seems like good advice. I’m not sure what the lesson in this particular failure was. I think that it’s probably that getting to know people within a community is the most important element when market conditions are unsettled. I think more people would have been interested in interviewing for the newsletter if I met them before introducing the idea.
