A whole bunch of new houses are under construction on my street, and watching them go up is fascinating. Some have solid concrete pad foundations and some have concrete form foundations, but most have block foundations, which are set on gravel. Once the foundation is built, various crews come in – the framers, the roofers, the people who put in windows, the finishing carpenters, the sheetrock crews, the flooring crews, the painters, the electricians and plumbers, the landscapers, and probably more professionals I don’t even know about. 

But none of that can happen without a secure foundation to hold up the house.

You know an analogy is coming, right? Building a marketing program is similar to building a house, and content strategy often serves as the foundation. Just as with the houses down the street, the foundation can vary, though. Perhaps events are more suitable for an industry and are the foundation of the marketing programs, and content is more like the frame, or maybe most of a company’s leads come from direct marketing and content is finishing touches, like trim and paint.

Since I’m a content producer, this post is going to talk about content marketing strategy as the foundational element of a marketing program, and why it needs to be carefully constructed. 

Watching the houses at the end of my street go up, I’ve noticed how much work happens that you can’t see at all once the house is completed. For example, months before any building started, they cleared and leveled the lots. Even before that, the piece of property was divided into lots. Access from the road had to be created using heavy equipment and gravel, and the first three areas for access didn’t become driveways—those were created after the houses were in place so that they led to the garages precisely.

Often, content creators work to increase their value to their clients by filling a consultative role. We’re sometimes asked to help come up with topic ideas for blog posts, white papers, ebooks, videos, and other marketing assets. The problem with that is all the work that gets done before the visible construction. 

What does your audience need? 

A good content strategy includes audience research. Far too many business leaders think they know what their audience wants and don’t take the time to actually confirm it. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the story about how Henry Ford didn’t deliver what people wanted (faster carriages) but instead made what they needed (cars). That misses the fact that cars addressed a specific pain point: the need to move people and goods faster and more efficiently. 

It also makes it seem like your business needs to be completely transformational to be successful. Consider all the iterations of car design since the Model A. Business leaders need to know what their audience wants; a multitude of solutions exist for most every pain point.

Audience research is similar to clearing the lot and creating access from the road. It’s a basic first step that isn’t visible when you’re looking at the completed project.

Keywords (and meta descriptions and subheads and more)

Another crucial element in content strategy is understanding and using SEO properly. As a writer, I’m sometimes tasked with using particular keywords in a piece and I’m pretty good at it. However, I’m not an SEO expert because of it. SEO is essentially a house all by itself. The list of keywords is just one small part of it.

The thing about SEO best practices is that they change significantly over time. Foundations for houses used to be stacks of rocks (and in the case of my house, those rocks weren’t always perfectly suited to the heavy task they are supposed to perform), but modern construction has evolved. Keyword stuffing was considered the right thing to do for a long time, but techniques have evolved (thankfully!) and different approaches are better now.

What’s everyone else doing? 

Along with understanding the pain points of your audience, you need a clear picture of what your competitors are doing. How are they working to make things better? Where do they post content? How is it received?

The houses at the end of my street under construction now aren’t part of an organized subdivision, but they are part of the same development. That means they look nice next to each other. They are all painted some shade of gray, have similar finishing touches, like rock work and nice wooden trim. If one of them were pink it would stand out, and no matter how lovely it might be, it wouldn’t stand out in a good way. 

However, if one of them had a nicer front porch than the others, or if a homeowner were to put in some eye-catching flower beds, that house would get noticed and complimented. Companies need to know what their audience is used to, and how they can differentiate rather than alienate, themselves.

What are YOU doing? 

Before the framers and roofers show up to do their part of the work, the foundation has to be completely finished. Concrete needs to be thoroughly cured before it’s dried. There must be openings for plumbing and ventilation. The whole thing has to be structurally sound, so that it can safely support the weight of the house. 

For businesses building a content strategy, it’s important to understand what already exists, and how it can be best used going forward. A content audit shows what is working well, what’s not working at all, and shows where any gaps might be. Repurposing existing content can save money and time and is rarely a priority. Building a content strategy based on existing strengths simply makes sense.

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I recently took on an assignment writing about institutional research (IR) in K-12 independent schools. IR in that setting is a type of data analysis, and can be used in many of the same ways businesses are now using data to inform decision-making. From admissions and fundraising to student life and student wellness to diversity equity and inclusion, IR can help schools measure the impact of programs, better understand trends and how to effect them, and even specific elements of teaching and learning.

One thing I didn’t expect in talking to a bunch of data scientists was to hear the word “emotional” mentioned several times. The experts talked about how sometimes, when you collect data and analyze it, it doesn’t say what you expect it to say and that can be upsetting. Or demoralizing.

As I conducted the interviews, I began to understand that I do IR in my business all the time, but it’s an institution of one. I measure the number of assignments I have, when they are assigned, how long they take from assigned to submitted, how I’m paid per project, word, and hour, how many hours I spend on each element of a project, and anything else I can think of to measure. And, I realized, it’s also sometimes an emotional exercise.

An Example

In 2018 or so, I decided it was time to “level up.” My business has changed and grown over the years, and at that time, I was looking to boost my income significantly. I set myself a course of professional development: I read a few books, started participating more in a couple of networking groups, joined a professional organization I’d considered before, and started tracking both my clients and my time a little more closely.

It was the result of the time tracking that caught me off-guard. I work from home and it often feels like I’m always working. Time is … well, it’s difficult for me. I struggle to understand how long it should take me to get places. I get lost in my work (or more often, in a book) and forget what time it is. In order to track my time, I put a piece of graph paper under my keyboard, and jotted down any time I changed activities. “8:45 email” then “8:50 coffee” and so on.

The result: I was at my keyboard, actively working, about 10 hours a week.

That counted checking and responding to email, administrative stuff like bookkeeping, marketing my services, participating in networking activities, and of course, writing. It did not count pulling weeds while thinking about writing, or going for a run and mulling the structure of an article. It also didn’t count random social media scrolling, chatting with friends, or paying household bills. I tried to keep it strictly to work.

This realization brought on a tangle of emotions. I was shocked. It really felt like I worked at least full time, but 10 hours? a WEEK? That’s not even part-time! It also made me ask a bunch of other questions, with the biggest one being what, exactly was I doing with my time? Going back to my graph paper, I found that I was doing a lot of laundry, handling TONS of tasks like dealing with insurance, utilities, and other household things, exercising more than I realized, and generally staying quite busy with stuff that needed to be done.

It’s hard to describe the emotional cascade that followed this data analysis. It seriously took me about a year to come to terms with it all.

Some of the feelings:
* I was proud of myself for earning a full-time income in so little time. Even by that point I was earning more than I ever had in any regular job.
* Looking back over my life, I was sad that I spent so many years beating myself up for being “lazy” when in reality I simply had not had time to do all the things. There’s no way I could do all of the things I do now if I had to work 40 hours a week and commute an hour a day. It’s no wonder I couldn’t maintain a regular exercise routine or do any creative writing when I worked a 9 to 5 and children to care for.
* My hourly rate was far higher than I thought it was before tracking, which gave me confidence to boost my rates a little.
* I wondered what would happen if I set up a schedule that was closer to 20-25 hours a week. Would my income double with more hours worked? What if I filled 10 hours a week with marketing activities?
* I wrestled with the idea of whether or not I work “full time.” Can I really say that I do?

During that year, I also thought a lot about “time wasted.” I felt like if I wasn’t earning money with all that “spare” time I was wasting it. I had to consider whether what I was dealing with was toxic productivity and whether or not I was doing tasks just for the sake of being busy?

Finally, the big question: do I spend my time doing what I want to do? If I knew I only had a year or two to live, what kinds of changes would I make to my daily schedule? If I won the lottery and money wasn’t an issue, what would I do with my time?

Did I make changes?

I did make changes, but they weren’t particularly drastic. I carried on with my professional development plan, and eventually stopped tracking hours so closely (for awhile). Now I’m working between 12 and 15 hours a week, and my income, as of last year, had doubled. I’m on track to increase by an additional 25% this year.

I still fall prey to feeling guilty about the amount of time I (don’t) work, but much more rarely. Mostly I’m very happy to be able to do other things that are important to me in addition to doing work that I enjoy. I’m grateful to have control of my time and understand more clearly now why I don’t clock tons of hours. The work I do requires deep thought and it’s nearly impossible to track that. Even when I’m not at my desk the work is happening in my brain—often in the background, without my conscious self realizing it’s going on. Sometimes I sit down at my keyboard and the words are simply there in my brain waiting to be typed out because they arranged themselves while I wasn’t paying attention. Other times, I write a sentence, scroll social media, come back and write another sentence.

One of the changes I made was to start working in timed blocks and attempting to extend those blocks. On the days the words are waiting to be typed, I can focus for about an hour or so at a time, but on the sentence-at-a-time days, my focus only lasts for about 10 minutes. My goal is to get to the point where I can focus for around 90 minutes at a stretch. Focused blocks of work are super efficient. I’m always amazed by how quickly projects come together when I can shut out everything else.

Another change was to expand my service offerings. Until about 2019, I described myself solely as an healthcare information technology content writer. Around that time, I started taking on more varied technology writing assignments, and that has been one of the biggest drivers of increasing my income. Many experts say that niching down more and more is the key to doing well as a freelancer. In my case, expanding a little was more helpful.

I also started feeling more comfortable accepting more projects and stopped worrying about taking on too much. Knowing that my schedule is relatively light most of the time makes me less worried about becoming burnt out. I know that as long as I stay under 25 hours a week most of the time, I’ll be fine. Two or three weeks in a row of 25 hours, though, pushes me dangerously near burnout. In other words, now I know my limits much better than I did before.

Have you done this type of data analysis to see where your time goes? How did you feel about it? Did it make you want to change things?

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One of the things about freelancing that people complain about is the “feast or famine cycle.” It seems like you’re either covered in work, getting up early and staying up late, struggling to meet all the deadlines or you’ve only got an hour or two of work to fill each day. There are plenty of strategies to beat the feast or famine cycle, but it’s still likely to happen now and again to everyone.

This morning, I got up, did a short yoga practice and came to my desk ready to get the work done. But there wasn’t really any work to do! Even after a dozen years of running this business, I encounter hills and valleys. Mostly, I don’t fret about them anymore. In this post, I discuss why I don’t fret and what I do instead.

Keep a list of tasks for slow times

There are always going to be things that you put to the side when it’s busy. Slow times are great for working on projects. Maybe you have a course you want to develop, or you’re building a database for marketing. Perhaps you have a personal project you often neglect. Have you always wanted to publish a series of e-books? Maybe you’re working on a novel.

I’ve started keeping a list of things to do when it’s slow. They are all things I want to get done, but usually feel like I don’t have time to do. Some of them are work-related, many are not. This week, I plan to do some business planning, research a couple of potential niche areas, and maybe start building my marketing spreadsheet for this year (yeah, I’m behind on that!). I also plan on doing some big work in my garden, making some progress on a decluttering project, and deep cleaning my bathroom.

Reach out to past clients

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients in the last few years, and am guilty of not staying in touch when my work-focus changes or I find new, higher-paying clients. That’s not good business for several reasons.

Editors change positions and staying in touch can mean better work from folks who know you and like you. Staying top-of-mind is important when people are busy or stressed, and really, who isn’t busy or stressed right now? Ultimately, marketing is about building solid relationships and staying in touch is how you build a relationship.

Work on administrative tasks

This year, I’m focusing on tracking my time and projects so that I can get a clear idea of how much I earn per hour on different projects and from different clients. I enlisted the help of the wonderful professional organizer Julie Bestry in building a spreadsheet to help with this, and am finding there are endless ways to use the information. But, the spreadsheet always needs tweaking and analyzing the data I collect takes time. I spent quite a bit of time on that today.

Email cleanup and filing is a never-ending task, and I tend to do it when I’m tired or when there’s not a ton of work. It usually doesn’t make my list of things to do when it’s slow, but probably should.

My colleague Jen Phillips uses scripts and pre-written forms in her business and that seems like an excellent approach. Slow times are great for putting things like that together.

Taming the Famine Anxiety

There’s feast anxiety—how am I going to get all of this done? why did I say yes to this? my work is going to suck and no one will ever hire me again! And there’s famine anxiety—I will never get more work, and my family will starve! this is the beginning of the end of my business! I’m going to have to start from scratch and rebuild my client roster. And the one that tends to get me: If I relax and enjoy this, I’ll be doomed! I didn’t plan this slow time so it’s most certainly a harbinger of disaster.

All of this seems a tad dramatic, doesn’t it? Always, looking back at either a time of feasting or a time of famine, I realize my fears were quite out of proportion to the situation. As soon as I recognize either thing is happening, I start taking steps to avert the worst mental drama.

What’s the money situation?
One of the first things I did this morning was check to see how many invoices I have outstanding. It is enough to pay my bills for two months. Not exactly the best savings plan, but good enough to help me feel calmer. I can pay my mortgage, and two months is plenty of time to hustle up more work.

The next thing I did was make a list of my current anchor clients and how much I earn from them on average each month. Right now, I have two very solid anchor clients and between them I earn enough to pay our bills. So, I’m not only counting on outstanding invoices.

Life wouldn’t be super comfortable if I was only working with my two anchors, though, and I wouldn’t be hitting my target for the year.

Is there work on the horizon?
The second thing I did this morning was take a look at potential work. I have two projects that editors have contacted me about but not yet assigned anything. I’ll email them both this week. Then there’s a much longer list of people I consider “warm” — we’ve talked, but not established anything definite or discussed specific projects. I’ll also be contacting them to say hi and ask how things are going.

Simply having those three items—outstanding invoices, anchor clients who assign regular work, and a list of prospects—usually eases the fears associated with famine. There are other things you can do, too:

Build an actual savings
I’m aiming to save enough to pay bills for 3 months, then 6, and hopefully eventually a year. I’m not there yet, but that’s the goal.

Do a marketing challenge
Set yourself a goal to send out a certain number of letters of introduction, or attend a certain number of in-person events. Jennifer Goforth Gregory has a fantastic list of marketing activities for January that work any time of the year. If you think your slow time is extended (it happens!) spend a couple of weeks or a month completing a marketing challenge.

Actually enjoy your time
This is going to be my approach for this week. Since I’ve already realized I’m not facing eviction or actual famine, I’m going to try to relax, enjoy the fact it’s spring time and my flowers are blooming, take extra walks with my pups, try a couple of new recipes, and maybe even find a shady spot to read.

If, next week, things are still slow, I’ll start actively searching for new work.

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For the last couple of weeks, maybe longer, my anxiety has been running amok. Anxiety is a sneaky beast and doesn’t always show up as heart palpitations and shaking. Sometimes it’s the feeling of being behind on everything, or a sense of impending doom, or even thoughts about how there’s no possibility you can do it all, for whatever value of “all” you want to consider.

As I reviewed the month of April during my not-quite-really-a-vacation last week, I began to understand why I’ve been feeling anxious. A bunch of things that wouldn’t have been noteworthy alone happened all at the same time: a project that had been difficult from the beginning continued being difficult and I ended up making the worst hourly rate I’ve made in years; another challenging project was, well, challenging; I had to do an entire rewrite on a piece; three families I care about encountered extremely difficult times; and those were just the bigger things. All the normal day-to-day difficulties persisted, too.

Once I identified the source of the problem, I got down to figuring out what I could do about it. This sounds pretty simple, but it took a few days. I’d wanted to do so many things during my quasi-vacation, but it turned out what I needed was to rest. It was Friday before I felt like even tackling trying to solve the anxiety problem. I made more progress on Saturday and Sunday than in the entire week.

On Friday, I wrote a long journal entry and pondered the question of why I was feeling like my life is out of control (it’s not). I ended up making a bunch of lists, one for each area of my life that I felt I was not keeping up with:

• Work/money
• Exercise
• Food/nutrition
• Gardening
• Housekeeping
• Home projects
• Personal projects

Then, I wrote out the steps I needed to take in each category to feel better. I half-expected to feel overwhelmed at this point, but instead, it all felt much more doable written out like that. Saturday I worked in the garden and ended up feeling better about that—it’ll always be more work than I can get done, but now at least I might end up with some tomatoes—then Sunday I did a ton of cleaning and straightening.

I’ve always been a list-maker. And it is always surprising how much better I feel when I’ve given thought to the steps necessary to complete a project, write a book, grow a garden, or whatever endeavor I’m chasing at the moment. Why is it so easy to forget?

Are you a list maker? Does it help you feel calm? Or does all of this seem a bit much?

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People make fun of Google+ all the time, even now, years later. But, for me G+ was the home of a community that became really important in my life. When Google pulled the plug on Plus, our community was scattered—despite some truly concerted and genuine efforts to keep it together.

“I’ll go wherever everyone else ends up,” more than one of the 70 or so people in the group said. And we tried. We really tried.

We tested Reddit, Discord, TapaTalk, MeWe, and I don’t even know how many other platforms. Some folks flatly refused to be on Facebook (no judgement from me!) and others thought Twitter was too useless to even try.

Although many of us are still in touch, it’s not the same because we are on disparate platforms and no longer a cohesive group. On G+ most of us checked in daily, there were lively conversations, folks shared their art regularly whether that meant short stories, poems, drawings, recipes, or what-have-you. We talked about food, kids, marriage, illnesses, and all sorts of stuff. It couldn’t be replicated, regardless of how hard we wanted it to be.

With Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, I’m feeling all the grief of losing my Plus community again. It’s different in many ways, but that same feeling of loss is there. I fully expect an emphasis on “radical free speech” to make Twitter a place I don’t want to be, and that doesn’t even take into account the fact yet another billionaire owning my information is … I don’t even know the word, but I do know I don’t like it.

The only power I have in this scenario is to stop using Twitter. In fact, that’s all any of us can do, and I think that a mass departure from the platform, even if it happens over the course of a few months, is the best thing. We should just not use it rather than worry about how it might enable this or that bad actor. It’s probably the only way to prevent it.

That brings me to my 2022 resolution: Bring Blogging Back in ’22. A blogging community doesn’t give the quick hit of a social media platform, but it is entirely possible to have such a community. When I started Smiling Tree Writing, the blogs of other writers were so important. There were probably 10-15 I read regularly. They had blog rolls, and I used those to find more blogs. Usually when I commented on a post, the blogger would come here and comment on my most recent post, too. We got to know each other. I’m still in touch with most of those folks, though I admit that we mainly talk on Twitter now. Ha!

I propose we return to blogging. Several friends have done so already. We agree that it feels weird. None of us feel like we have anything to say worthy of a post. We all feel isolated, and each post feels like shouting into the wind.

But it’s far less likely that a blog will get yanked down at someone else’s whim. It’s the only way I can come up with to preserve some shred of community. I’ve set up a Feedly stream to help me remember to check in on my friends’ blogs. Drop a link to yours in the comments, and I’ll add you to my feed.

I’m going to try putting up a couple of brief posts a week, maybe even more, to try and rebuild this blogging habit. If they disappear into the ether, so be it. Maybe, though, these short posts will patch up the foundation of my blog community or inspire others to take a minute or two out of their day to share something (anything!) on their blog. We don’t have to be any more articulate or intelligent on our blogs than on Twitter, after all.

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How many times have you decided to do a thing, figured out the steps you need to take to do it, then berated yourself for not getting it done?

Here’s an example: Improving nutrition. For years, I would decide to “eat better” then really struggle to do so. The soundtrack in my brain was pretty ugly. I wasn’t eating well because I was lazy, didn’t really care, etc.

In order to change my dietary habits, I had to break the process down into steps: making a menu, listing the items necessary for the menu, shopping, prepping, keeping the kitchen clean, and accounting for the time it takes to cook. Turns out, nutritious meals don’t just magically appear when you decide you want to eat better.

Even after I plotted out the steps that are necessary to improve my nutrition, there were still barriers. What would I do when I was *really* hungry and needed to eat immediately? How would I handle the craving for something sweet after a meal? What kinds of snacks, if any, are appropriate between meals? The answers to all of these questions turned out to be much more important than I realized in those early efforts to improve my nutrition.

This same process of recognizing barriers has turned out to be crucial in everything important goal I’ve worked toward, including running Smiling Tree Writing, developing an exercise routine, home improvement projects, and on and on, right down to doing a better job of keeping the bathroom clean. When I identify the barriers I can figure out a way to walk around them.

When it came to better nutrition, I decided to make it a pleasure as far as possible. Usually Saturday or Sunday mornings are dedicated to a leisurely press of coffee and time on the sofa with my iPad and a notebook, browsing new recipes and listing the ones I’d like to try, looking at the weather forecast for the upcoming week (I like to grill on nice days, or have stew on chilly days) and creating a menu that includes what we have on hand, what we need to shop for, any prep that needs to be done, and options for lunches and snacks for the week. If I’m planning to exercise, I’ll include that, too, because sometimes I get dinner started and my partner finishes it while I go run.

It’s a bit of a time commitment, but since I’ve been doing it, we’ve had far more enjoyable and healthful meals. I don’t feel guilty for what I eat (most of the time) now. Splurges and treats are largely planned in advance. One of the biggest barriers was actually having to figure out what to cook each day, so the menu was an important path around it.

I can think of a bunch of other examples of how this process of figuring out what’s stopping me from reaching a goal has led to a breakthrough. Sometimes it’s a very small thing—I wanted to spend a little bit of time working on my quilt most evenings, and putting my sewing box with everything I need within reach on the coffee table helped more than I imagined. Before, it was on a shelf on the other side of the room, about 8 steps from the sofa. Those 8 steps were a barrier when I was settled in and comfy.

Have you ever identified a barrier and charted a path around it?

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