After engaging Organized Assistant to help her implement her blogging and social media strategy, a professional organizer asked me how much time she should plan to devote to these activities. This is such an important question that I decided to answer it here on my blog.

To begin with, let’s look at marketing as a whole. Regardless of whether you’ve just become a professional organizer or you’ve been at it for years, and whether your organizing business is your full-time career or a part-time venture while you work at another job, attend school, or care for your young children, marketing is an essential activity that needs to be scheduled on an ongoing basis.

When you’re in the start-up phase of your business, you should be spending nearly all of your working hours on marketing activities. If your greatest priority is working with clients, and your available time slots aren’t filled, then you need to put forth every effort to filling them!

As your business grows, you will obviously need to cut back the time you spend on marketing so you can serve your clients, but never make the mistake of thinking you’re too busy for marketing. If you fail to keep promoting your business during busy periods, once things settle down, you may find yourself with no clients lined up, and back at square one again!

My recommendation is that you devote a minimum of 20% of your working hours to marketing your organizing business. By that, I don’t mean you should be spending 8 or more hours a week on social media alone. Websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be valuable marketing tools, but should not be your only resource.

People are much more likely to do business with you after they’ve had the opportunity to know, like, and trust you. Although this can be accomplished online, if your primary service is providing in-person organizing services in homes or businesses, or live training in the form of presentations, seminars, or workshops, you need to spend a good portion of your marketing time attending local networking events. Social media sites can then become a tool for staying in touch with the people you’ve met in person and for connecting with other people in your area that you can then invite to events you’re attending.

You might find it easiest if you set aside one day or two half-days for marketing every week. To make the most of this time, plan your activities in advance. On different occasions they may include attending business networking events, writing blog posts, posting to your social media profiles, engaging with others on social networks, updating your website, and designing flyers or other materials.

As your business grows, it might become challenging to fit all of these activities into your calendar. When that happens, it may be time to think about delegating some of them to Organized Assistant so that you can focus on what you do best!

How much time do YOU spend on marketing?