Where do you find time for marketing?

Finding time to be still and think can be so challenging. A hectic, chaotic lifestyle seems to be the norm for lawyers and professionals. After a full day of work and handling personal responsibilities, where do you find the energy and time for marketing and growing your business? Let me share a few tips that I hope will be helpful.

How to do marketing when you have a full-time job

As a lawyer or service professional, you might not have flexibility in your job schedule to work on marketing during the day. When I first started blogging, we didn’t have kids yet. Nonetheless, my full-time job as a patent lawyer left me with no free time to work on anything else until later in the evenings. I can already hear some of you out there silently screaming that you work well into the night as well. I feel your pain, but know that pain can be a good thing if it drives you to make healthy changes in the long run.

When you’ve spent all day racking your brain on intellectually challenging work, the mere thought of doing more brain work at night can be draining. What helped me to tackle easier articles at first. Blog posts that simply defined common terms in the industry were easy. As I’ve discussed before, these definition-type articles can form a helpful glossary to which you can link in your client emails.

How frequently should you write a blog post?

Try to aim for one blog post per week. If that’s too difficult, shoot for one article every two weeks. Perhaps use a portion of your Saturday to write the post if you can’t find time during weekdays. You can always schedule a later time during the weekday to publish your article.

Every once in awhile, your juices may be flowing as you find yourself wanting to write several articles. Start by jotting down the titles so you won’t forget. You can start several posts at once by simply creating a title, assigning a category and perhaps a couple of tags, and then saving them for later.

Sometimes you’re in the sweet spot where you’re able to write multiple articles during an interrupted block of time. That’s awesome. Stagger the publish dates so that fresh content gets added to your blog on a healthy periodic basis.

How do you stay motivated to keep blogging?

Making time for marketing is a long-term commitment, and any long-term commitment is susceptible to becoming short term. It takes perseverance to stay committed to blogging as marketing for your legal or professional services. What can keep you going besides the obvious goal of getting more clients, especially when it does not appear that you’re getting any immediate results?

For me, it was the return on investment for my time. I compared spending an hour in a networking event where only a limited number of people in a limited geographical location were within reach versus writing a blog post for one hour which could reach a limitless number of people outside of geographical boundaries. The ROI on my time in blogging far exceeded traditional marketing efforts.

Where do you find time to rest?

It might seem incongruous to talk about rest in an article that seems to pushing the idea of working more. So I want to be clear that you should not work seven days a week if you can help it. Set aside at least one day to rest. It’s good for your body and mental health.

Blogging requires a bit of creativity that lawyers and service professionals might not be used to. Speaking for myself, I’m right-brain challenged. Give me a checklist and, like most lawyers, I can work through each task and check off each box. When writing a blog post, I sometimes stare into space for quite awhile trying to thinking of something worthy to say.

Rest can help restore some of that creativity that you need to work on marketing. You may come up with new marketing ideas, either online or offline, that seem to sprout up from nowhere.

No time for marketing? Start with baby steps

Writing a blog post once per week is the goal, but there are seasons in life that make this out of reach. If you’re in that season right now, I would encourage you to take baby steps. It’s OK if it takes you a few months to write your first few articles. At least you’re writing. Get started. Write down article ideas as they come to you, and then return to them when time allows.