A deep dive Into my strategies and tactics.
In the last part of this blog post I have promised you to share my strategies and tactics. How do I organize myself as a freelancer? How do I approach clients? How do I find projects? This is going to be a post with lots of informational goodies, so keep on reading.
Let’s start with the day to day organization. My mentor pushed me on this. She asked me, if I had a yearly plan and I kind of had, but woman, was there a lot to improve…
My yearly plan until this point was written out on some A4 sheets of paper and contained goals, dreams, ideas. Then I would break those goals into actionable steps and plan them out into quarters and weeks. So far, so good. But you know what? A printed A4 sheet isn’t the most practical, I haven't kept it close to me at all times to check if I’m on schedule and what I should be concentrating on next. Plus, another crucial part was missing: deliverables.
That’s how my yearly plans looked like until 2022
When faced with all of this, I asked my mentor if she knew a cool app for it and she replied in a pretty dry manner: I use excel. And so I started using excel, too. Not only for my yearly plan, but for social media calendars, acquisition spreadsheets, you name it. Excel and I became friends.
The yearly plan
Let’s dive into how my yearly plan looks like. The most important question hovering above all other questions is: What’s the overall goal I want to achieve this year?
2022 it was (continued) financial independence. It’s very important to me, so I needed to make sure to be able to support myself and my son fully from my earnings in illustration. I knew how much I needed to earn monthly to achieve this goal (because I have my finances pretty much in check), so the goal was a clear number.
my excel yearly plan. Yes, it can be colorful, too. I blackened out some info. I am not comfortable sharing
Next I have goals, deliverables and estimated timing. Let’s dive into an example: I need x amount of money per month, so I need to get new clients regularly. The overall goal is client acquisition, the deliverables are the concrete numbers I think I need to achieve my goal. For instance: writing 4 cold and one warm lead per week. I estimate one day per week for the cold leads (which gives me 2h per pitch) and 1 day per month per warm lead, which includes portfolio updates and client newsletters. Do you see how concrete those tasks are? That’s how tangible they need to be for me to really tackle them.
Push vs. pull marketing
What else could I do to gain my overall goal of financial independence in 2022. Besides actively reaching out to clients (push marketing), there's the huge part of letting yourself be found (pull marketing). Achieving this effect is easiest through showing yourself on platforms and social media, you expect your clients to be on or look for someone like you.
I decided to stay on instagram, but since I hardly ever got a job offer through that medium, I decided to add LinkedIn into the mix and to concentrate primarily on it.
That again needed some deliverables, so I went for 2 posts per week and 2000 contacts by the end of the year. I estimated 3 hours a week for this (1 hour per post and 1 hour for networking).
Here’s a glimpse into my LinkedIn posting plan. I have the days of the month, the subjects and some links in it.
Other income streams
Last but not least, I want to diversify my income streams, so to be independent from what I cannot control (enough commissions), I plan for what I can control: my own projects and products, digital and analogue. The deliverables here are the finished, released products.
Then I have an overview of ongoing and recurring tasks, like (WELL GUESS WHAT) actually illustrating :D, bookkeeping, client acquisition, social media posts, product developments, etc. I batch all those tasks up, similar to similar and estimate how much time each batch takes (or rather I add up what I have estimated before) to see how I could structure my week.
Next, I will have months, weeks and days planned. Don’t worry, only months are kind of detailed, weeks are just to say what focus I take in which part of the months (like i.e. I do my bookkeeping in the first week, social media plan for the next month in the second, products in the third, planning the goals for next month in the fourth). Similar for the days. I’ll plan which day to post on which social media, which day to do some bookkeeping and other organizational stuff but what I’ll do each week and day in the end will be very variable.
Months, weeks, days planned (some info blackened out).
A plan is a plan is a plan
And while I’m on it, let me tell you: I plan ambitiously as hell and never reach my goals. But I don’t beat myself up for it, I just accept it as a fact and the goals that I couldn’t reach that year but are still important to me, I’ll take into next year with me. After approximately half a year I do an adjusted plan for the second half of the year and continue form there on.
This blogpost got pretty long and detailed, so I’m gonna spare you even more details, but be sure you can always reach out to me in my DM’s on instagram or per mail and ask me any questions!
Now I really feel like slowly planning 2023. Two months are left of this year. I have already reached my big overall goal and I am very proud of this. I haven’t reached half of the smaller goals but achieved other things, I coudn’t have imagined in the beginning of this year. Like working for Special Olympics, signing a new book contract with Favoriten Presse, residency is Lisas’s Studio Vasvari.
And that’s the note I want this blogpost to finish on: Plans are important, goals are motivating, structure is helpful, but in the end life happens and luckily, as a freelancer, you are your own boss and can adjust as much, as needed.