You are your marketing department and notes from our meeting on 26th February 2025

March 4, 2025

A small meeting of eight freelancers on 25th February, but there was a lot of great chat. The smaller meet ups often end up with everyone in the same conversation, which makes for a variety of views and ways to solve the same problem.

My notes from our conversations:

Work is sporadic in the current market even for the well experienced
Keeping to old fashioned headphones
Anterior pelvic tilt in desk workers
How much work do you need to cover your basics?
LinkedIn as a vivarium
Bluesky
Successful actors and sports people wasting their money
AI use cases and non-use cases
How to get programmers and engineers to talk to each other, and is beer the answer?
Can AI be sustainable financially for the AI firms?
Landlords having to make property more insulated/eco-friendly
Async and JavaScript Brighton meet ups
Where is the Brighton tech scene now Wired Sussex has gone? Silicon Brighton?
Looking for work / being unemployed in the current climate
No work? Your job is now marketing yourself
Weird recruitment processes
HR should be an interesting field but seems mainly used to fire people and provide cover
Avoiding social media to avoid news from the USA

You are your marketing department

This week we were talking about the job market, a perennial topic, and not having enough work on. Hazlitt mentioned something that I’ve summarised as “No work? Your job is now marketing yourself,” which stuck with me for several days as it neatly sums up part of being a freelancer.

In freelancing and especially contracting, it’s natural to have gaps between work. I am temperamentally allergic to having gaps. I hate not having enough work on to cover my family’s bills and have gone to great lengths to always have work on and to juggle multiple clients to always have work to do. I managed a streak of 16 years without having a work gap, broken by the lockdowns due to Covid. I’m now back up to a four year streak which I have no intention of breaking.

When a freelancing friend was out of work after an operation, he put in a lot of effort to get work lined up and got bookings in within about three days of heavy marketing work.

This is a list of what we did to find new work when we’d run out:

Updated our own websites to make sure the primary content reflected the work we were after, updated information about previous projects completed, and in my case updated the design as mine was well out of date
Talked to everyone in our networks (mailing lists, Slacks, forums, etc.)
Posted about availability on social media (I was shared on by some well known people I’d never have expected to help, which was very nice of them)
My friend compiled a list of everyone he’d worked with, every person who’d ever contacted him (within companies and recruiters) and reached out to all of them
Asked previous clients to provide reviews on LinkedIn
Wrote new material for our own sites and LinkedIn targeted at showing we could solve problems for business (I should do more of this but I struggle to fit it in)
Helped out on forums where I am a known freelancer

Although this list is quite short, it represents a lot of work. That that does not matter. If you’re out of work, you have plenty of time and your job has become finding work. When all my work dried up, I went from spending a bunch of hours each day solving companies problems with code to spending a bunch of hours each day marketing myself. It worked out, mainly thanks to a contact of Nick’s, for which I’m very grateful. My network got me the work I needed. This isn’t surprising as I spend most of my marketing time on running a network of professionals in the same industry as myself.

As mentioned in the notes last week, another friend regularly re-writes their website and offerings to match with how they’re seeing clients requesting work and buying now, rather than how they were a few years ago. He’s helping avoid gaps by always responding to a changing market.

For best effect, you should be doing some marketing work all the time. If you’re stuck in a gap, spend a lot of time marketing. People can’t hire you if they don’t know you exist. You could be the best person in the world at what you do, but you will only get hired to do that for people if they can find out about you.