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Finding Time For Marketing
We all love to see the behind the scenes of how other entrepreneurs spend their time. With so much freedom comes a bit of overwhelm and it’s always nice to hear how others are structuring the vast amount of time and vast amount of to-do lists and still finding time for marketing.
And now that I’ve started working part time as the Youth Director at my church, I thought now was a great time to share an updated routines schedule – especially with how I go about having time for marketing these days.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- If you want your business to grow, effective marketing is crucial. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend a ton of time on your marketing – even if you’re a solopreneur. Do you dream of business growth, but aren’t gaining traction? Does the thought of tackling your marketing feel daunting? Or, do you understand the importance of effective marketing, but simply don’t have the time to get it done? There’s good news! Marketing doesn’t have to be so overwhelming, confusing, and complicated. Say goodbye to the confusion and complexity that has held you back, and say hello to a clear, actionable roadmap for business growth. In my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, I’ll take you on a journey to demystify marketing with simplicity as your guiding principle. You’ll walk away with a clear, concise, and personalized marketing strategy designed specifically for your entrepreneurial journey. You don’t need a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or a background in business to tackle your marketing head-on thanks to the strategies and techniques in this book that deliver real results. No longer will marketing feel like an insurmountable mountain; instead, it will become an easily manageable and integral part of your business. Take your content from non-existent or inconsistent, to a true tool to grow your business by Chasing Simple Marketing. You can grab your own copy by heading to Amazon and searching for Chasing Simple Marketing, or you can hop over to amandawarfield.com/book to learn more about buying it for yourself.
- This week’s action step: Evaluate how you’re spending your time, and look at what themes you see commonly appear each week in your to-do list.
- This week’s book recommendation: The Women by Kristin Hannah
- Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield
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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!
Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!
*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate
We all love to see the behind the scenes of how other entrepreneurs spend their time. With so much freedom, it becomes a bit of overwhelm and it’s always nice to hear how others are structuring their vast amount of time and vast amount of to do lists. And now that I’ve started working part time as the youth director at my church, I thought now was a great time to share an updated routine schedule, especially with how I go about having time for marketing these days.
You’re listening to episode 220 of the Chasing Simple podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, Chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own at amandawarfield. com / book.
How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?
Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing, welcome friend, this is chasing simple where practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of chasing simple marketing.
I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business. So that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.
When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.
If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing is the thing that they started their business to do.
That’s Which is why I’m here to help make marketing simple and less time consuming so that you can spend less time on your marketing and more time growing your business and doing what you love each week offering you transparent conversations, actionable steps, and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.
So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choices and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we? Want even more help simplifying your marketing and business?
Love the Chasing Simple podcast? If so, I want to invite you to join me on Monday evenings at 4 p. m. Pacific Time, 7 p. m. Eastern Time for my weekly YouTube lives. Each week, I’ll have a topic for the week, but after my short 5 minute teaching, you’ll have the chance to ask me questions about your marketing and get an answer from me in real time.
Until now, the only way to get this kind of access to me was through my membership, courses, or one on one services. But now, All you have to do is show up live with me on Mondays. You can find my channel by searching for my handle on YouTube at Mrs. Amanda Warfield, or by heading to amandawarfield. com / YouTube.
I hope to see you Monday. Today, I want to talk all about how to find time for your marketing, because that is one of the things that I hear over and over and over again from students, from clients, is that they just have a really hard time finding the time. To market their business and to work on their marketing now that may mean that they are so busy with client work that they are focused on other projects that they just don’t like marketing and they prioritize it to the very bottom of their priority list and the time just never happens to come around because as business owners, our plates are always full and those things just never end, right?
And so today I’m going to share the behind the scenes of what. My schedule looks like on a monthly, weekly and daily basis to show you how I find the time to market my business. I have shared this previously on podcast episodes of mine, but due to some life changes, what I’m currently doing is different from what I’ve shared in the past.
So, even if you’ve listened to those, I think it would be super beneficial for you to stick around today. So, first things first. You will never find time for marketing. That’s just the nature of things. We are so busy as business owners. We have so much on our plate that if you are not prioritizing your marketing, you will never find time for it.
It’s just the reality. And, unfortunately, that means that we have to get really intentional about making time and making space for our marketing. Now, depending on where you’re at in your phase of business and your, you know, where your business is at, how much marketing you need to be doing, You may not need as much time, or you may need more time, and it just kind of depends on a few different factors.
But the truth of the matter is, is that we can’t find time to market. We have to make the time intentionally to work on marketing our business. If you’ve listened to any of my other stuff, you’ve read my book, listened to my podcast, whatever, you know that I am a huge proponent of the fact that there are two types of marketing that we need in every marketing strategy.
That’s nurture marketing, which is your content, and your growth marketing, which is all of the ways that you are getting your business name out there and in front of new people. So when it comes to making time and setting aside that time and space for marketing, you’ve got to make sure that you’re intentionally setting aside the time and space for both.
Okay. So on a monthly basis, I have, let’s say each month has four weeks, how many weeks there are. I have two different types of weeks. Currently right now in my business, I have my I guess we can call it A week, and my B week. B week being batch week, A week being non batch week. Now some people do A weeks, B weeks, and they do, A week is when they do all of their meetings, B week is when they’re only doing behind the scenes work.
There’s a lot of different ways you can set that up, but for me, I just have A week, which is anything that’s not batch week, and then I have my batch weeks. My batch week, having a batch week in place every single month allows me to make sure that I am intentionally setting aside that time for my nurture strategy.
Batch week is when I am doing all of the content creation, setting aside that time to do all of the content creation for the next month. I create a month’s worth of content in one week, and then I have all of next month’s nurture strategy ready to go. That is so key to making sure that I’m able to do both parts of this nurture and growth strategy this both parts of a marketing strategy because if I don’t have that we can place, I’m going to spend all of my marketing time only on content, and if I’m only spending time on content and only nurturing the people that are already in my audience, and I’m not spending that time growing my audience and then continuing to nurture them, and we don’t want to have to choose either or.
One week out of every month is my batch week. And what I do when I’m planning out my year is I sit down and I say, okay, this week in every month is going to be my batch week. I put it on my calendar and then I protect that week. I don’t take meetings during those weeks. I don’t work on client work most of the time during those weeks.
I have one exception to that and I’ll explain in a minute, but I’m not working on a ton of client work. I’m not working on other projects. I’m not, I don’t have doctor’s appointments. I don’t, I don’t do anything. Except, again, an exception I’ll talk about in a minute. Batch week is protected. And so when I set up my calendar for the year, I put batch week in every month.
I pay attention to where my vacations are, where my time off is, so that I’m not putting batch week over the top of those. But I put batch week in first and foremost before I put in promotions or anything else like that. For most of us, when we get started, that’s not going to be the case, right? We’re not going to be able to, Oh, well, Batch Week’s got nothing on me.
Or there’s nothing else on Batch Week because, well, I’ve already committed to these things, right? Like, the first few months as you’re getting started, it’s by the nature of getting started with any new rhythm, any new routine, you are going to have to do some conflict resolution in some cases, and that’s okay.
On a monthly basis, 2 weeks. Batch week, non batch week. Now, a little context about some of the changes that have been made. If you’ve listened to some of my past podcast episodes when I’ve shared about my schedule and things like that. Context to those changes if you haven’t already seen me talking about this anywhere.
We moved from South Carolina to Washington to Seattle, which is right now. I am not working only in my business. When we lived in South Carolina, I was working in my business full time. I wasn’t working full time hours, but that’s all I was doing, was working my business. I worked from home and That was that.
So I could really make my schedule however I saw fit. Since moving out here, I actually accepted the position at my own church as their youth director. And I’m working part time for that. I call that my side hustle, though, because this is still my full time income. This is still my I like to say that my business is my main job, my full time job, and that enables me to have this side hustle in ministry.
So I am working 20 hours a week for the church, which means my schedule is not fully my own. And I’ve had to get really intentional about, well, I can’t work 40 hours a week because when we were living in South Carolina, my husband was working 12 hour days and it was a shift schedule. So it was like, you know, three or four days a week, sometimes five days a week, depending on the week.
It was just the whole thing. And so I was able to work a ton because I wasn’t as involved outside of the house and things. I very much, I had a lot of time to work because he was working 12 hours, but it was also a 45 minute drive one way to work. So like he was gone 14 hours out of the day pretty much when he was working 3, 4, 5 different days a week, depending on how many shifts he had that week.
And I worked a ton and I was able to work on a ton of projects. And now I have to be really, really intentional about my time more so. And I’ve had to get back into some of these rhythms. So shared the monthly on a weekly basis now. My batch week schedule. I am just like I said, creating content, but my non batch week schedule.
I work with themed days. Now, my Mondays are always for clients. That’s always been the case. Um, it’s a day. I do the majority of my client work for the week. It’s the day where all of my clients and all of the members in my membership marketing the community, my VIP members have the ability and clients have the ability to submit content for feedback and review each week.
And copy. And that is always due Monday morning, 9 a. m. Eastern time. And so Monday’s the day I, I see, okay, what feedback and reviews do I need to do this week? Any client work that I need to do? Any client calls? Always happen on Mondays. It’s the Not something I like. It’s the only work day of the week that I don’t go into the church and do any work typically.
So, that client, Mondays are client days. That is my main focus. Tuesdays are for my community and for admin stuff. So, I’m doing my community calls on Tuesdays, but I’m also doing community improvements, community work, things like that. Anything community related happens on Tuesdays. As well as any administrative stuff, so that’s when I’m doing, like, file cleanup and spending a little bit extra time in my inbox.
I try to peek in my inbox every single day, but the day I really sit down and work on my inbox is on Tuesday. Moving the business from one state to another, there’s like administrative stuff that needs to get filed, taxes, all of that stuff happens on Tuesdays as well. Wednesdays are for projects. So the way I set up my Click up is I have my weekly plan of action.
I also have my Rocks for the year, which if you’ve ever read the book traction by gino wickman I believe really highly recommend they talk about rocks in your business and so each quarter you have different rocks that are like the big projects that are going to move you towards your overall goals for the year And so I have my rocks, and then I also have my, I have non rock projects as well, which are just like those little tasks and one off things that I need to get done to, you know, whether it’s, oh, I need to upload new testimonials to this page.
I have it broken down by marketing, customer experience, networking, education, and sales. So like, oh, this sales funnel needs to be updated. It’s not a rock. It’s not a moving me towards my major goals kind of thing, but it needs to get done education, all the courses that I have that I’m enrolled in working my way through those networking, different networking things that I want to be part of customer experience or things that I want to update, like there’s some different sales funnels that need to be updated or like, for some reason, there are certain things that aren’t adding people into my welcome sequence.
I need to go in and fix those. So different things like that, that. I would like to do these at some point, but they’re not this massive priority. Whereas my rocks, Q2 rocks, for example, uh, I wanted to take a workation. That was not happening. I wanted to launch this YouTube channel. That was a big rock. I Had a community promo where I Offered a discount for a certain amount of time for people who wanted to join my community I also was doing some retreat planning and a retreat launch.
I ended up scrapping that in the middle of the launch Which I just recorded a podcast episode today on that and it’ll be out shortly about why I did that But yeah things like that. I I don’t have my full like Q3 rocks planned out, but also I have workation on there. Jason’s a content planner, next year’s is going to launch in Q3, right?
And so there are things like that, like my promotions, my different things like that, that have helped that I do in my 2024 rocks. On my project day, on Wednesdays, I am working on first and foremost, my rocks. But also on some of those other projects, which I’ll explain more in how that works in a minute, on a daily basis.
But Wednesdays are for projects. My Thursdays are for marketing. But, this is for marketing that is not related to content marketing. When I end up Not finishing batch week for whatever reason. I will use Thursdays as a catch up, but usually it’s just one Thursday, a month that needs to be that catch up day.
And then the other two that are left, sometimes three, depending on the month, I get to work on those growth marketing strategies. So things like pitching myself to be on podcasts, finding speaking engagements, all of these different things that I can do to grow my audience. That’s what I’m doing on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, I don’t work.
Those are my weekend because. I work in a church now. I work Sundays. So Sunday mornings are dedicated to church stuff, obviously. Sunday afternoons, I typically come home and take a nap, if I’m being real honest. And then Sunday afternoons are like my, my catch all day. I do what I can to get prepared for the week, but I also, I’ll either start working on client work if I have a heavy client load that week, or I’ll start working on a project or something else that I just want to do for my business.
So that’s kind of what my week looks like. Sundays like the catch all day. Are there things that didn’t get finished last week? Can I prepare for the next week? So on and so forth. Mondays are for clients, Tuesdays are for the community and administrative work, Wednesdays are for projects, and Thursdays are for marketing.
So monthly basis, batch week, no batch week. Weekly basis, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I’m off. So on and so forth. On a daily basis, what that looks like. I’ll say this is my goal. It doesn’t always happen, but my goal is outside of client days. Client days are just, it’s just client work.
Period. Like that’s, it just is what it is. But, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, My goal is to spend at least two hours doing deep work and That means working on a rock Basically if possible so on Tuesdays when I’m looking at community stuff or administrative stuff Are there any rocks that I can work on to move the needle on those rocks?
Based on those days, whatever the theme is. So Tuesday would be the community and administrative Wednesday is like, what are those rock projects? There’s, there would be a marketing rock project. So, for example, working on launch things, like creating a new freebie or something like that. That would be a marketing, a Thursday Deep Work project, right?
Working on the behind the scenes of a launch. How do I? So not the actual marketing part of the launch, but the behind the scenes things. The, that would be great for Wednesdays, basically. Or working on, for a long time I was updating my Year in Preview course. So long to do that. But that would be a project, right?
That’s a Wednesday project where I am updating a course. So that would be a Wednesday deep work. And then community stuff, if I’m adding new things to the community, same thing. So anyways, I try to do two hours of deep work each of those days. Then, I try to do an hour of, you know, daily admin slash like inbox stuff.
So checking my DMS, posting the stories, checking Facebook, checking all of those different, like, okay, where am I showing up? Let me check and make sure that I’m communicating with people. Checking comments on YouTube. Those are all like, those are daily administrative things. I have an hour for that. And then I try to have another two hour block where I’m just working on projects.
Small projects and small tasks that fall into those days. It doesn’t always happen like that, but that’s the goal that I have on a daily basis. And so things like working on one of those funnels that I need to work on that isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing. That would be a marketing type project, right?
Or pitching myself to podcast would be a Thursday project. Working on website updates could be, it could really fall under project or marketing, just depending on what the priorities are that week, working through education stuff, those different things that would be administrative, right? And so I try to spend two hours like, okay, what else can I do today?
What else is a priority? What else needs to get done that I can fit in? So it’s kind of like a sandwich of two hours of deep work. And then I usually go have some kind of break, come back, do that hour of administrative stuff, and then two hours of, okay, what are the other projects, tasks, et cetera, I need to do within today’s category.
And so that’s how I break out my days. So monthly, weekly, daily, doing that. Make sure all of that works together to make sure that I’m setting aside time and space for my marketing my batch week Ensures that I’m setting aside that time and space to create my nurture content, right? My nurture strategy is getting handled those Thursdays Ensure that I’m holding space for growth marketing and Wednesdays actually those project days ensure that I am Also on top of having the growth in the nurture strategies covered I’m also making sure that I’m working on improving Different marketing things that I’ve been working on different projects like those funnels that need to be improved improving the website things like that So that is how I ensure that I make time for my marketing Your action step for this week is to evaluate how you’re spending your time and look at what themes that you see commonly appear each week in your own to do list.
That way you can kind of make a similar schedule if you’d like where you have themed work days so that you’re able to get more done in less time. Your book recommendation for this week is The Women by Kristen Hanna. She recently, I believe this is a really recent release, so you may or may not have heard other people talking about it already, but it’s based on the, the women who served as nurses in Vietnam, which I didn’t know much about, to be honest, and that’s kind of a lot of the premise of the book is that so many of these women that served as nurses, you know, they came home and they had things like PTSD, and they had seen terrible things, and yet no one knew that they had served?
Like, if they told someone that they had served in Vietnam, they were, they were told, oh, no women were in, you know, so anyways, it’s a very, Can be hard to read at times, but also just a very well written, clearly well researched book, and it was not only a good read, but it was also really eye opening to things that had gone on in that time and over in Vietnam, but then also just like it’s The culture post Vietnam here in America, which, you know, I wasn’t around for, but I’ve heard, like, my grandfather talk about it and things like that, so anyways, I thought it was, it was wonderful, so I highly recommend, I believe I gave it 5 stars, which I never do, so, big, big, great book, big deal for me, um, and I highly recommend it, so I will link to that in the show notes for you.
And until next time, I hope you’ll go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.
Thank you so much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode’s show notes as well as all of the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.
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