Stay motivated to create your internal content

What did you post for your freelancing business this week?

I think we’re all guilty of assuming that if someone creates [art, writing, infographics, etc] for a living, they always have a pile to pull from for their own business promotion. Easy peasy, right?

Maybe it stems from the notoriously false statement, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life,” but these concepts are equally untrue. If you do what you love as a job, you run the very real risk of getting burnt out on it or so focused on doing it for your clients that you have no time to do it for yourself.

The latter happened to me this week. I decided October was the month to double down on internal creation—social posts, blogs, etc—to see if it moves the needle at all. It was going pretty well, until a new gig came in, I had some technical issues, and I paused non-client work while a family member was in town.

All of a sudden, my best-laid plan was thrown off. I post blogs on Tuesdays and—whoops. Here it is, Tuesday, and all I have is a hefty GPT-generated outline that feels hella overwhelming now that it’s late.

It happens. Obviously, when things get tight, we’re going to prioritize our client work over our internal business development. That’s just smart CYA stuff. But there’s also a pervasive sense that our internal work (just like meetings, client research, and reading industry news) isn’t “real” work. And that’s nonsense.

I’ve started following some steps to really drive home that, yes, building my business is just as important as client work (even if it can’t always take precedence). Implementing these is making a difference, for sure, but I still have a long way to go before I fully internalize that “actions that will increase my business’s success in the long run” are just as valid as “client work that pays me right now.”

3 Ways To Keep Your Own Content Creation Going

1. Plan ahead

I harp on content calendars for my clients, and I’m getting better at taking my own advice. I can build you the best gosh-darn calendar, packed with insightful ideas, topical talking points, and shining evergreen pieces (incidentally, evergreen content is the blog post I didn’t write this week). But setting aside time to create my own, to make sure I’m not wracking my brain for topic ideas the day before a blog or video is due, has been harder.

In practice: October is under control, and November is on my task list this week. Ideally, though, I’ll have December fleshed out by mid-November.

2. Schedule it in

Would you ever tell a client you’ll have their order done by Thursday without immediately scheduling it in your calendar or adding it to your checklist? I doubt it. Why, then, are we so willing to just slide business development tasks in when we have a bit of “free time”? It’s not a job for free time, folks; it’s a work task like any other. If you need to, literally block out time on your calendar for those tasks.

In practice: Time blocking goes off the rails for me every single time, so I stick with a checklist divided by day. That’s where you’ll find “create Nov content cal” and “prep next week’s blog post”. Sometimes, they're even checked off!

3. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

It happens! As vital as business dev is, it’s not going to have nearly as much of a negative impact as not getting your client’s work done by the deadline. So, if a blog post doesn’t go up this week, or you don’t start planning November’s content until November 4th…take a deep breath, go back to #2, and start fresh. It’s all good.

In practice: Today, for instance, the idea for a post about missing internal deadlines popped into my mind and felt so much more achievable than tackling the big bad outline I had planned, so I wrote this instead!

One way I’m trying to keep from falling behind on my internal work is to get myself more than one week ahead. It’s so much easier said than done, but a two- or three-week jump on internal content not only relieves the stress so much, but it results in better content because I have the time to re-read and tweak. (In other words, sorry about this one!)