A lot of freelancers seem to think that November and December aren’t great months to land new clients.

In my career, December & January were always my two biggest months of the year, and the work to make that happened started in November.

If you want to leverage the holiday season to make this quarter your best yet, listen to today’s Write Bites episode or read the transcript below.

Listen To The Recording

 

 

Read The Transcript: Why The Holidays Can Mean BIG Money For Freelance Writers

Hey guys! Welcome to Write Bites, a series of 10 minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing. 

In this episode, I want to talk with you about the upcoming holiday season and what you should expect as a freelance writer. We’re going to talk about how you should approach this next two months, what your expectations should be, and how the next two months could potentially set you up for the best year yet in your career in 2021. So let’s dive in. 

Now, when a lot of people think about the holiday season, they envision people being out of the office, gone for holidays, phoning it in–a work version of senioritis. I get a lot of people emailing me and asking me, “are people even going to respond to me when I’m pitching over the next few months?”

In my experience, the holiday season is actually the best time of year to close new business. When I look back over my eight year career, historically December and January have been the two most lucrative months year in and year out. Both in terms of closing, raw numbers, but also in terms of contracts closed that extend through a good chunk of the year.

The reason for this and the mentality that I want to shift you into as you view the holiday season as a freelancer, solopreneur, or service provider, this is the time of year that people who did not have a great 2020 are reevaluating their strategies heading into the new year.

So, people where things may be stagnated or started declining, which is a huge chunk of businesses, they’re looking at this time of year. They’re really coming face to face with the idea that, “hey, what I did this last year is not going to work, and I need to take a new approach heading into 2021.”

Now, assuming the answer to that is not, “hey, we’re changing our product line” or “I’m scrapping this business and starting a new business,” which regardless of whether or not that should be what they’re doing, most business owners are going to hold onto their babies. They see what they’re currently doing as their child and aren’t going to want to change it.

So what that means for the vast majority of business owners is they need to change their marketing. Either they need to invest in new marketing channels or they need to switch up their marketing providers–the people who they’re currently working with. Maybe they have full-time hires that just aren’t working out and they are like, “okay, I’m going to scrap this and put the money into an agency or a freelancer.” Maybe they’re already working with freelancers or agencies that haven’t been working out, so they switched them. 

But that’s what happens. This is the time of year between November and January where that happens. A lot of the deals that you’ll close, especially the larger deals that you’ll close in January…the seeds for that will be planted in November and December.

Now this doesn’t just apply to failing businesses. This is just as true for successful businesses, businesses that have been kicking ass this last year, heading into the new year. they’re looking to double down on what they’ve done. They’re looking at the next year and going “we did a really great job this last year and we want to keep the momentum going. We want to continue scaling.