This week, actually, for the last few weeks (ok, months) I’ve been meaning to get a bit more organised when it came to raising the profile of me, my business, and the work that I do.

But you know how it is, stuff gets in the way.

I need to practice what I preach though, so today I have been finishing my marketing and communications plan, putting the final touches to my communications strategy and, most useful of all, I’ve written a draft content plan for the rest of 2019.

It’s the same approach I use with any business, organisation or individual I work with.

Today has been about making sure that I have plenty of sources for great content to curate and share, because otherwise I’m always in danger of getting lost down the internet rabbit hole and losing focus. So that’s blogs to read (you can’t go far wrong with this list from Vuelio), podcasts to listen to (Helen Reynolds has done the hard work for you on this one!), websites to scour, and Twitter accounts to add to lists.

It’s also been about developing blog post ideas for the rest of the year, generating content that will be useful to people, as well as showcasing my skills and experience. This is my content map, and is an absolutely critical tool in keeping me on track. Tools like moz.com, keywordtool.io and the ubiquitous Google are helpful in putting your content map together.

And of course, where would we all be without Canva to produce digital marketing materials, and Unsplash for fantastic photography to use in those materials.

To add to all this, measuring and monitoring all of this work I do is really important. Just as I always tell my clients.

As an aside, reading this great blog post this week from fellow freelancer, Adam Pearson, made me also think about risk mitigation in my business, and how to prepare for when things go wrong. Something I need to add to the list of things to do. And considering that, I do need to think about alternatives for those free tools (like Unsplash and Canva) that I rely on so heavily, in case they ever disappear, as the ever brilliant Stephen Waddington pointed out this week in his latest blog post, when he highlighted the scary ‘Killed by Google’ website. Scary, because it lists the 150 apps, products and services that Google has killed off.

So, today has been an exercise in doing as I say, and carrying out the work I always tell my clients is so important.

Long may it continue.