20 things to do during the Christmas holidays to get your

business ready for the New Year

December can be a quiet time for Freelancers. Your clients

are usually winding down for Christmas themselves and,

although it's great to have a couple of weeks off, if you spend

some time during the gap between Christmas and New Year

(Chrimbo Limbo as I like to call it) putting your house in

order, you'll start the coming year way ahead of the game.

Things to do during the Christmas holidays to

get ahead

Here’s 20 things you can do now to ensure you’re primed and

ready for when it all kicks off again in January. You don’t have to

do everything, but whatever you do now will definitely stand you

in good stead for later.

#1 - Assess your social media profiles

Go to every site where you have a presence and make sure

your bio accurately reflects what you do, you're using industry

keywords, and your photo not only looks like your actual face

but displays well on small devices and is the same on all your

profiles.

Categorise, tag and cull your contacts/followers.

#2 - Review and update your website

Add a broken link plugin, WordPress SEO by Yeost and Google

Analytics

Check your About Page is engaging and add testimonials that

will appeal to your target client.

Check Analytics and Webmaster Tools to see how people find

you and what pages on your site or blog are the most popular.

Then write more posts on those subjects or improve / optimise

your most-viewed pages.

#3 - Sort your LinkedIn profile out

People are on LinkedIn solely to do business so make sure

your profile looks incredible, is current, has recommendations,

key words, case studies, rich media and a vanity URL.

This post on my CV website will help you get your LinkedIn

profile up to scratch so you can start to implement my foolproof

method to get new clients.

#4 - Ask for testimonials & LinkedIn

recommendations

Get recommendations through LinkedIn because you can copy

and paste a testimonial from LinkedIn into your website but you

can't do it the other way around.

When you ask for a testimonial tell the client what you'd like

them to say. People often write how lovely and friendly you are,

when really you want to be known for being efficient and adding

value.

#5 - Do your expenses

Boring as hell but they need to be done. Pour yourself a glass

of wine/gin and get them sorted so you can submit them online

at the end of January.

If this is the first time you’ve used the HMRC online system

then you need to register to receive a Unique Taxpayer

Reference which can take up to two weeks to arrive.

#6 - Learn new skills

Learn something new like SEO, online marketing, social media,

book-keeping, Kindle publishing, WordPress, Excel,

PowerPoint, YouTube vids, shorthand or even just update your

skills in your own niche.

Register your website with Webmaster Tools and add Google

analytics to your site if you haven’t already.

#7 - Specify your goals

If you’re specific about what you want then you're far more

likely to get it. Instead of saying “I want to earn more money

next year”, decide how much then break that down into the

amount of billable hours you need to work to earn it.

Instead of saying “I want more clients next year”, specify how

many. If you’d like six more clients then you need to land a new

one every eight weeks.

#8 - Update your contact lists

Check everyone’s details are up to date and add notes on

where and when you met.

Export LinkedIn contacts to your email client then get Twitter to

search through your contacts to find people you know.

Group or label your contacts and cull anyone you don't

recognise. Be ruthless!

#9 - Set up meetings

You probably have a ton of contacts you've never met or

haven't seen for ages so arrange coffee meetings to find out

what's going on in their world and see if you can help. It not

only strengthens ties, but you'd be surprised at the beneficial

things that can come out of these meetings.

Remember that 'people do business with people they know'.

#10 - Sort your office and paperwork out

You don’t want to start the New Year with baggage from this

one so get some sort of system going. Buy ring binders,

folders, clear wallets and sticky labels (so fun!!) and start

archiving and creating an easy workable system for your

paperwork and stationery.

#11 - Switch to Gmail

Google products provide a professional, seamless and

shareable way of working with clients and make tasks a billion

times easier. Google gives you Drive (formerly Docs), Gmail

and Calendars which you can share and sync.

You can import numerous other email accounts into a central

Gmail one and use it as an email-management hub - I import

five personal and client email addresses into my main Gmail

one. Outlook is a dinosaur in comparison.

#12 - Clean your computer

Give the screen, fan and keyboard a good clean and get rid of as many of the desktop icons as you can. Hardly any of them are useful and you can pin them to your Taskbar, Quick Launch or Start Menu if you use them a lot.

Make sure desktop folders are labelled correctly, archive old work, clean up your registry, schedule defrags and save disk space to make your computer run faster.

#13 - Filter newsletters and updates

Set up email filters so social media updates and other

newsletters bypass your inbox. Unsubscribe if you always

delete them, change your settings to amend the frequency or

even create a new email address just for business emails and

updates.

Action, file, archive or delete emails as soon as they come in

and use coloured flags or stars to label them. I have a blog

post on how to do all this.

#14 - Create email templates

If there's a particular email you write a lot then create a

template for it. In Gmail go to Settings, Labs, and enable

Canned Responses. Now when you write an email you just

insert the appropriate template and save yourself loads of time.

#15 - Sort your emails out

Another email one. Go through all your emails and either

archive them, delete them or put them into relevant folders. Add

labels, set up filters and make sure you know where everything

is.

#16 - Schedule stuff

Things are far more likely to get done if you put it them your

calendar. Even if you then end up dragging them across to

another day, it's still a visual reminder of stuff you have to do. If

you schedule client work throughout the week along with

personal and work commitments, you'll also see whether you

can fit it all in or not.

#17 - Assess your marketing

How many new clients did you get this year and how did you get them? Who are your favourite clients and why? Do they have anything in common? If you know what type of client you want then it's much easier to find more of them.

Take time to analyse your marketing efforts. What did you try? (Adwords, networking, email marketing, Social Media etc) and how well did it work? See what marketing worked and what didn’t - and if it worked then do more of it!

#18 - Get more clients

I've honed the method I use to get clients and it works so well

that I now don't need to use any other method to get work.

Chrimbo Limbo is the perfect time to apply my system because

your ideal client is almost certainly using this time to plan their

year ahead. They're trying to work out how to scale their

business so they can get more clients in - and you want to be

the perfectly-timed answer to how they're going to do it!

#19 - Look at your pricing

As well as checking your website is perfectly suited to match

your ideal client, make sure you're charging according to your

current level of expertise. If you're quicker now than you've

ever been then you're losing money just by being better at your

job. Change the pricing on your site and let your existing clients

know your rate is going up in the New Year.

#20 - Assess, reflect and plan

Looking at the past year and evaluate what worked and what

didn’t to see what you need to focus on next year. If you know

when your quiet periods are and why then you can use the

quiet time wisely, if you know what tasks you enjoyed doing

then you can adapt your marketing to get more of the same

(write relevant case studies, edit LinkedIn & Twitter profiles,

change your services page, get testimonials etc).

I know it's the holiday season and, whilst you should definitely

chill out, you don't want to get caught out by being lazy.

Business and technology move fast and it's rare to get a quiet

period like this to get ahead of yourself. Making time to reflect,

focus and work on your own business is what separates an

average freelancer from a really successful one.

Resources

How to use LinkedIn to get new clients (the only method I use

when I want a new client because it works so well)

How to write a great LinkedIn profile