Morning Marketing Habit
Morning Marketing Habit is a 6-week course designed to help freelancers and consultants form... wait for it... a morning marketing habit.
Very short video lessons and assignments will give you the knowledge, tools, and momentum you need to stay consistent with your marketing and get more solid project leads from your dream clients.
Listen, I know questions like this can be cheesy, but humor me.
How would your life change if your freelance income was steady, predictable, exciting even?
Pause for a moment, and truly consider the implications.
What would that predictable income make possible?
- You could *rehome* the bad-fit clients who cause stress.
- You could say no to boring and last-minute projects.
- You could experiment with charging more.
- You could have more free time and fun.
- You could have more joy in your work.
- You could do other stuff you love.
(Does anyone else out there want to write more children’s books and make more smoked brisket? Just me? Okay.)
Predictable income is the one thing every freelancer needs.
It’s the long crowbar, the force multiplier.
It comes from a surplus of project leads.
And the secret to creating that surplus isn’t a secret at all. People talk about it all the time:
- Peter Drucker (needs no introduction): “Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
- Alan Weiss (author of Million Dollar Consulting): “Success in this business comes from marketing, not from the depth of consulting expertise.”
- Steph Smith (growth marketer & Twitter maven): “The most successful creators are good at what they do, but GREAT at marketing it.”
Does your experience jive with what Peter, Alan, and Steph observed?
Mine certainly does.
Cool clients, more than enough money, and time freedom don’t depend on once-in-a-generation talent but on marketing.
You can be really good at what you do, yet if you wait for your dream clients to come to you, you won’t thrive as a freelancer.
You have to get in front of them and give them a chance to care.
You don’t get a sustainable, satisfying freelance business without marketing.
Our freelance income rises and falls with our marketing.
I knew this for YEARS, yet I was still inconsistent with it. The thought of putting myself out there made me uncomfortable.
I didn’t want to become the shameless self-promoter with one long feed of selfies.
What about you? How do you feel about marketing and self-promotion?
I’ve talked to hundreds of freelancers and consultants, and I hear more fears, frustrations, and “thought defects” related to this than anything else.
See if any of these lines sound familiar:
- “I suck at marketing.”
- “I don’t have enough time for marketing.”
- “I try to stay on top of it, but it’s exhausting.”
- “Marketing doesn’t work for me.”
- “I just really don't like (and probably fear) the act of self-promotion or self-marketing.”
Let's take a closer look at each of them, shall we?
“I suck at marketing.”
Some freelancers do suck at it. They don’t have the knowledge, plan, or gumption.
When they hear cocky marketers talk about their buckets of inbound leads, they feel skeptical, envious, and embarrassed all at once.
That was true for me.
Only within the last couple of years have I truly accepted my past failings and really committed to learning through small “bets” and marketing experiments.
If marketing isn’t a point of pride for you, you’re not disqualified.
Don’t give up on it just yet. Keep reading.
“I don’t have enough time for marketing.”
Other freelancers are quite good at marketing WHEN they do it.
The trouble is, they do it in erratic, ineffective bursts. Like eating vegetables.
“I’m too busy with client work for marketing” for 3 months turns into
“Uh-oh… My project pipeline is dry as dinosaur bones. MUST MARKET NOW!!"
Starts and stops in marketing produce feast and famine.
That was me, circa 2018. I had one big retainer client paying all my bills (and consuming all my time). The reckoning came in March 2019.
[The memory makes him shiver.]
To break out of the cycle, you have to tell yourself a different story: “There’s always enough time to do what’s most important, and marketing is really important.”
Consistent marketing and consistent income go together like my kids and popsicles.
The key is when you do your marketing. More on that in a bit.
“I try to stay on top of it, but it’s exhausting.”
Some freelancers try to be everywhere.
✅ You set up all the accounts—TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Myspace.
😰 You laid out elegant content lanes, beaucoup topics, even an editorial calendar. Maybe you’ll even use them one day!
🌔 Your email newsletters were like eclipses, seen four times a year.
There’s an awful lot of activity but no momentum you can really feel. Is anything actually working?
So many platforms, posts, and tasks leave you feeling a mile wide and inch deep.
Perhaps you’ve even started believing this:
“Marketing doesn’t work for me.”
You took advice from attention-rich influencers, “Instagram reels are where it’s at!”
You really went after it but didn’t get the same results. Maybe you’re doing it wrong? Maybe you were too late and missed the window?
You take a break from marketing (a looong one) and go back to hoping for referrals.
Or maybe for you the marketing conundrum is as simple as what my friend Zach said to me:
“I just really don't like (and probably fear) the act of self-promotion or self-marketing.”
So yeah, marketing stirs more feelings than a middle school talent show: dread and dreaming, flat skepticism and cautious hope.
Let’s go with hope for now.
There is a solution, based on logic and common sense.
I’m going to share it with you.
It wasn’t so long ago that I was the one mumbling excuses.
- "I’ve been really busy.”
- “I don’t like social media.”
- “I’m not sure what I should be doing.”
In 2020, like a million other people, I read Atomic Habits. A revelation had been creeping up on my sideways, and the book turned me toward it.
✨ We can’t control outcomes. We can only control how much effort we put in. ✨
- To get off the feast-or-famine rollercoaster, you need predictable income.
- To get predictable income, you need a surplus of project leads.
- To get a surplus of project leads, you need to market.
The only way you can guarantee you won’t push back your marketing is to do it first thing.
Did you catch that?
The path to predictable freelance income is a morning marketing habit.
You can’t control outcomes. You can only control how much effort you put in.
Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is always hammering the same piece of financial advice: Pay yourself first.
With a morning marketing habit, you spend the first part of the day getting your future self paid.
Because you're resourceful, talented, and smart, you'll figure out how to deliver projects in the time you have left over. 😀
How many project deadlines have I missed since I committed to a morning marketing habit?
Zero. Goose egg.
We can only control how much effort we put in, so we form habits.
Morning Marketing Habit.
We can stick to the 4 laws that James Clear talks about in his bestseller, Atomic Habits:
- Make it obvious.
- Make it attractive.
- Make it easy.
- Make it satisfying.
Do you want to form a morning marketing habit?
If so, I have an invitation for you.
I’m forming a group of freelancers who are going on a little journey together.
The goal of the group is to form a daily marketing habit by making it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
The idea is pretty simple:
- You watch a short training video each day—around 5 minutes.
- You do one short task or assignment each day—less than 30 minutes. Check out some of the specific assignments at the bottom. 👇🏻
- You focus on LinkedIn, not other platforms or strategies.
- You keep it up Monday through Friday for 6 weeks.
The What will be the habit, and the How (at least this time around) will focus on LinkedIn.
You’ll be in good company too.
We’ll do a group session once a week, and share our wins, woes, and wobbly bits in a private Slack channel.
That’s pretty much it.
You can put as little or as much effort into this as you like—or as your current life structure allows. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out.
There’s a strong and direct correlation between how much consistent effort you put into marketing, how much freelance income you earn, and how much you enjoy freelancing.
By the end of 6 weeks, you will have accomplished the following:
✅ Learned the simple but sturdy definitions of marketing terms and ignore all the crap that doesn’t matter.
✅ Created a 1-page marketing plan based on the strategies, tactics, and activities that fit your strengths.
✅ Designed and kickstarted your LinkedIn marketing experiments.
✅ Started making your minimum marketing deposit 5 days a week.
✅ Started tracking the results of these experiments.
✅ Timeboxed those experiments so you can reassess after putting in a statistically significant number of activities—e.g., at least 100.
✅ Zeroed in on what’s working for you so you can double down on it.
✅ Found new friends and potential collaborators [private Slack channel].
What People Are Saying
"I already have one positive result. A past client I reached out to for a testimonial wants me to do a video for her business. So that already made this course worth it for me. 😀"
“The video lessons were a perfect length, and the slides worked well to reinforce the key points without it being 'death by slides'. Austin's availability to answer questions with short videos was superb. The level of support and guidance was the best I've experienced on any cohort-based course.”
Morning Marketing Habit is voting for becoming a more disciplined freelancer or consultant.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
With the right habits, a certain lifestyle becomes inevitable.
Once your freelance business is paying you your desired *salary* and more besides, you can build up your emergency fund, save and invest more, give away more, work less overall, and spend your free time on other things you care about.
Connecting the daily habit to the desired lifestyle is what’s so challenging for many of us.
Are you ready to do something about that for your future self?
When I see your payment come through, I’ll send more details and invite you to the private Slack community.
Frequently asked questions
You've got questions. We've got answers.
Here are some examples of daily assignments I have in mind:
- Write a draft of your Background Story post.
- Optimize your LinkedIn headline based on a specific structure.
- Customize the 1-page marketing plan template to make your own.
- Answer 5 psychographics questions about your target audience.
- Answer 2 content strategy questions: a) What do you want to be known for? b) What problems do you want to get paid to solve?"
- Copy Austin’s template and set up your Lead Tracker GSheet.
- Send 10 connection requests to decision-makers in your target audience.
The goal isn’t to add tons to your workload but to get you out there making moves and getting in the habit of doing something for your marketing every day.
I’ll keep the time required to complete daily assignments on the lower side. If my judgment is off about that, you can let me know. 😃
I’ll also have some extra assignments handy for all the go-getters and overachievers.
When I was working on the concept for this program, a friend recommended that I focus on a single platform (LinkedIn).
The rationale: If I tried to include assignments and make recommendations for multiple platforms and strategies—email outreach, Instagram, freelance marketplaces—the program would become complicated and unwieldy very.
LinkedIn may not be where some of you want to spend your time, and if so, this program isn’t a good fit for you. I’m committed to creating an effective program by keeping things simple for now.
Sidenote: The key with marketing is to pick ANY platform or strategy and stay in the game long enough to improve your strategy and results over time.
The 31-Day Plan
Are you ready to do something about that for your future self?
When I see your payment come through, I’ll send more details and invite you to the private Slack community.