It’s school holiday time (in Vic anyway)…and you know what that means?

It’s the juggle struggle of running a business whilst running the social lives of your children at the same time!

Being visible in school holidays comes down to planning

And even if you don’t have kids, you’ll probably experience that deafening silence when you email one of your clients or that cagey low-talking when they answer the phone. Because chances are they’re dealing with a child tugging at their attention, wanting to be fed, wanting a cure for boredom, wanting to make noise the minute they get on the phone. It happens to the best of us, even with the most well-intentioned children and the most carefully organised activities – they just NEED you when you are the phone.

So, how do you deal with this predicament? How do you manage to do all the things you have to to keep your business ticking whilst you have the kids home from school? You can’t always take weeks off every time the school holidays roll around, nor can you palm your kids off the entire time (or can you???)

Definitely there’s room to alter your schedule, for instance you may not see clients for 2 weeks, and you may not attend events or hold workshops, but the thing is you still need some kind of visibility so people don’t think you’ve fallen down a black hole.  Visibility online and virtual conversations with your tribe is the most effective way.

3 Quick Ways to Stay Visible During School Holidays

1. Schedule one Facebook post per day for your business page, and one Instagram post per day on your profile (make sure they’re different posts – don’t just share from one to the other). Use the Facebook scheduling tool and something like grum.co to schedule Instagram from your computer.
2. Write two blogs for your people THIS week and schedule them to go out once per week in the school holidays.
3. Do one Facebook Live per week, and don’t worry about where you do it from or whether your kids are in the video too! Think about something you’d like to say, schedule a post to go out the day before or the morning of letting everyone know you’re going to do it, then just do it! Embrace the opportunity to show a bit more of a personal side of you – being a parent – and perhaps in some interesting location.

These 3 things are easy and fast to do, won’t take too much time or effort this week, but will have a big impact on your visibility during school holidays. You will appear to still be out and about and busy and doing and engaging and active and interesting to your tribe, and yet you won’t be sacrificing precious holiday time with your kids, nor will you be up all night trying to get stuff done.

The reason this tactic works so well – and can, incidentally be adopted any time you go on holidays or want a break – is that the process to get the work created and scheduled is done all at once.  The concept of ‘batching’ is one I’ve spoken about before. It’s a highly effective way to do content creation en masse.  No distractions, all in the same headspace with a single focus. It’s super powerful and makes content creation much faster (and usually more enjoyable and more effective too!).

Let me know what you think of these ideas to help you maintain visibility throughout the school holidays. If you need a hand with any of this stuff – just ask!