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It’s Monday morning. You realise you haven’t posted in three weeks. So you write a post in five minutes because something needs to go up. You also quickly write a newsletter because you now remember to do so. All in all, you scramble for content because you should be consistent, and consistency feels impossible.
And let’s be real, you didn’t start your business to make content. You started it to do the actual work, the thing you’re passionate about. And marketing just came with the territory.
The version most people teach (be on every platform, post every day) isn’t built for someone running the whole business themselves. You wouldn’t have time to actually do that work you love.
So in this article, I want to talk about a different version of doing marketing. A sustainable marketing strategy that survives real life, not just the weeks when everything’s going well. We won’t be talking about sustainable in the eco sense (though that can be really interesting too 😊), but sustainable in the sense that you can keep doing it through a busy week, an illness, or a holiday. So let’s see what a sustainable marketing practice looks like for you.
Why your marketing keeps breaking
What just happened in that Monday morning scene is one of the two ways marketing falls apart for people running their own business. The ‘panic post’.
It’s where you ignore it for weeks, then you panic and react. Quick post, or a short newsletter, or a not-thought-out blog post. It’s reactive, fired up by guilt or fear of falling behind, not by plan.
The other failure pattern is the opposite. You decide this is the year you’ll be consistent. You start posting on Instagram and LinkedIn and TikTok. You write a newsletter every week. You batch reels on Sundays. You’re showing up everywhere, all the time, and it works for about six weeks. You feel so accomplished.
And let’s not talk about a holiday… You don’t have time for one with this new plan. But that’s ok… until you get sick. Or have more work than normal. Or just need a break. And the whole thing collapses. You stop completely. And then comes the guilt.
You can be one or the other but I actually see a lot of people who do both. Six weeks you’re everywhere, consistent and showing up, then three months of nothing, a Monday morning panic post, then quiet again. That’s not really planning. That’s more wishful thinking.
Neither pattern is a willpower problem. It’s a model problem. The version of marketing you’re trying to do is too much, or it’s the wrong shape for who you are and what you actually have time for. Both result in a marketing system that takes everything from you and gives very little back. The fix has to start somewhere else.
What sustainable actually means
A sustainable marketing strategy is a strategy you can keep running for a long time.Â
Not weeks. Not even months. Years. The kind of marketing where someone who’s been in your audience for two years would say, yeah, she’s been showing up consistently. Not because you’ve been hustling every week, but because you’ve built a rhythm that looks steady from the outside even when you are hiking that mountain trail or are not feeling well. You will have built a system that can absorb the ups and downs of real life.
The rhythm and the workload aren’t the same thing. The rhythm is what your audience sees: a newsletter every fortnight, a blog post once a month, a couple of social posts a week. Whatever the cadence is, they see it land. The workload is what you experience: some weeks you write three blog posts because you’ve got the energy, some weeks you write nothing because you’re sick or busy or there’s a code red heatwave. The rhythm holds because the workload flexes.
That’s what makes it sustainable. When you have time and energy to create a little more than the rhythm needs, you do. Not because you’re hustling, but because you’re building a buffer for future you, the you six weeks from now who’s slammed with client work and hasn’t got a single original thought to spare. That you gets the post you wrote today. Future you won’t need to scramble because past you already took care of it.
The same principle works in the other direction. You follow your energy instead of a calendar, writing when the ideas are flowing and batching when you have momentum, rather than because Monday or some productivity advice said you should.
All of this needs space. Mental, physical, energetic. And you have to honour that space before the marketing happens, not after, because it’s the condition that makes the marketing possible at all.
Because the way you’re thinking and feeling when you create your content shows up in that content. A newsletter written on fumes reads that way. A video recorded when depleted comes across that way. Your energy is in the work, whether you want it to be or not.
So sustainable doesn’t mean smaller. It means right-sized for you, with the rhythm that keeps going when life happens. Which is why we start with you, not with tactics.
Find what you actually need
Start with your time
The first question isn’t what to post or how often. It’s how much time you actually have for marketing in a normal week.
Not the aspirational version. Not the version where you’ve magically cleared your calendar. The honest version, which includes client calls, admin, the lunch you should probably eat, and buffer for the things that always come up. How much is left for marketing after all that?
For some of you, that’s three hours a week. For others, it’s one. For others it’s wildly variable: five hours one week, thirty minutes the next, depending on how busy the rest of your business is. All of those are fine. The trick is being honest about your actual number, because building a marketing approach for a person with five hours a week when you have one is the fast track back to the Monday morning panic.
If your number surprises you, sit with it. You shouldn’t make marketing your second full-time job. That doesn’t mean you can’t have great marketing. It means it needs to fit inside the time you actually have.
One last thing about time. If those five hours always land at the end of the day when you’re fried, they’re not really five hours of marketing time. Five hours of fresh morning brain and five hours of end-of-day exhaustion aren’t the same five hours. The amount matters, but so does the state you’re in when it shows up.
What fuels you
The question here is simple: what kind of content actually fuels you to make it? Writing? Speaking on camera? Voice notes? Photos? Long essays or quick observations? Some formats give you energy when you make them. Others drain you. If you love writing, a newsletter is less work than it would be for someone who’d rather do anything else. If you hate video, recording a quick clip will take three times as long and you’ll push it back every single week.
This matters strategically because the format you pick now becomes the rhythm you have to keep up later. Forcing yourself onto video because it’s trendy means you’ve built a marketing approach around something that takes more out of you than it gives. Eventually that breaks. Building around what you actually like to create means you can keep going.
The channels you show up in
Once you know your time and your energy, you can decide where to show up. Which means looking at your marketing circles.
The idea behind marketing circles is that your audience moves through different phases of getting to know, trust, and buy from you, but not in a straight line. Each phase needs at least one channel where they can find you. And here’s the bit most people miss: the same channel can serve multiple phases. Instagram can be where someone first finds you and where they decide they like you. Your newsletter can be the trust-building layer and the place where you sell.
That means most sustainable marketing approaches use two or three channels, not seven. Instagram for discovery, an email platform for newsletters and email sequences. Or Tiktok, a YouTube channel and a payment platform. Pinterest, a blog, and a shop. Whatever combination covers your phases with the time and energy you actually have.
If you haven’t met marketing circles yet, the Marketing Strategy Starter Kit walks you through them. It’s a free download and the fastest way to map out what you need.
The goal isn’t to be on every platform. The goal is to cover the phases that matter for your business, with channels that fit your time and your energy. Done well, that’s two or three channels you can actually keep up with, instead of seven you can’t.
A loose plan for the month ahead
Once you know your time, your format, and your channels, you can plan. But the plan doesn’t have to be elaborate. In fact, it really shouldn’t be.
There’s a whole industry of marketing advice that wants you to plan your year in advance. Yearly themes, quarterly campaigns, monthly calendars colour-coded by funnel stage. For someone running their own business, that’s almost always overkill. By the time you’ve finished the plan, your capacity has shifted, a client has thrown a curveball, or a topic has gone in a direction you didn’t expect.
A loose plan is enough. A useful place to start is picking a “marketing focus” for the month: a product or a freebie you’ll be talking about. That doesn’t mean just sales content. It means a list of topics you want to cover, all loosely connected to the same focus, with a mix of content types across them. That’s it.
For me, that looks different depending on the format. For blogs right now, I just keep a list of topics I want to write about and check that I’m mixing my 5 content categories (Strategy, Content, Email Marketing, Website, Tech & Systems). The marketing focus layer is something I’m building in more deliberately for video next. I use my marketing focus for newsletters and LinkedIn posts. I don’t decide in advance which post gets written on a Tuesday in three weeks. I decide that when I sit down with the list. The looseness is the feature, not the bug.
If you want a little more structure for social specifically, the Content Calendar gives you a template that lets you plan a month out without locking you into a rigid schedule. It works whether you’re a heavy planner or you’d rather keep it light.
All in all, what I’m trying to say is you don’t need a quarterly content workshop to know what you’re posting next month. You need a rough list, a sense of variety, and a way to actually get the stuff made without it eating your week. That last bit is where batching comes in.
Batching protects the rhythm
Batching is creating several pieces of content in one sitting instead of making one piece every day. A few blog posts in a morning. A week or two of social posts in one block. Three newsletter drafts in an afternoon when the ideas are flowing. A slew of TikToks in a row.
It works for two reasons.
The first is creative flow. When you’ve got your brain in writing mode (or recording mode, or whatever your format is), one idea sparks the next. The posts fit together. You notice patterns. The output is genuinely better than if you’d written each piece in isolation between client calls.
The second is the mental switching cost. Every time you stop running your business to make a piece of marketing content, your brain takes a few minutes to settle into the new mode. A few more to remember what you were going to say. By the time you’re ready to actually write, half your marketing time is gone. Batching collapses that. You shift gears once and get hours of work for it.
How much you batch in one go depends on your energy. Some sessions you’ll have an hour and write two posts. Other sessions you’ll have a half day and get a month’s worth done. Both are fine. The point is to batch toward the rhythm you’ve already chosen, not toward a daily posting schedule somebody else made up. If your rhythm is a blog every fortnight and two social posts a week, you batch toward that. If it’s a newsletter once a week, you batch one or two of those when the ideas are flowing. Even getting one batch ahead of yourself changes how marketing feels.
And then scheduling is where the magic happens. You get to use those batched content posts and plan them ahead for when you need them. It doesn’t make your words less genuine. What it does is let you write when you’re in the right headspace instead of when the clock says it’s time to post. Your audience doesn’t care whether you hit publish at 9 am because you were at your desk or because you queued it three days ago. They care whether the post was worth reading.
If you want the full how-to, I’ve written about bulk content creation in more depth. But the short version is this: batching plus scheduling is what turns a loose plan into actual posts that go out without you having to think about them every day. Which leaves you with something else marketing rarely makes room for: rest.
Rest is part of the design
You can’t talk about a sustainable rhythm without talking about rest. Not rest as the thing you collapse into when you can’t do another week. Rest as a regular, non-negotiable part of the system.
Rest isn’t something you earn by working hard enough. It isn’t a reward you unlock once your content is queued and your inbox is empty. It’s a basic condition for doing this work over years rather than months. Your ideas dry up without it. Your writing gets flatter. You stop being interesting to talk to, including in your content. The version of you that’s never had a proper break makes worse work than the version that’s just come back from one. Rest isn’t a tax on your business. It’s an investment in your future content, your health, and your ability to keep going at all.
A lot of business owners struggle with this. You might think taking a break is unprofessional, that clients will forget you, that you’ll lose ground. None of that is true. Your clients can manage without you for a week. People who follow your content can survive without hearing from you. The world will still be there when you come back, and so will your audience.
So rest gets planned in. A long weekend each month. A week off between busy periods. A proper holiday where you don’t check whether anyone replied to your post. Time you’ve built into the calendar before you needed it, not time you’ve taken when you couldn’t go on.
I take four weeks off every summer. Blogs stop entirely. Social goes quiet. Newsletters still go out because they’re already written and scheduled before I leave. That’s the version that works for me right now, but it’s not the only version that counts as rest. If you’re still building your sustainable rhythm, sometimes you’ll just need to stop. No buffer, no queue, nothing. That’s also fine. Rest doesn’t only count when you’ve prepared for it.
Preparation just makes it easier. When you’ve got two weeks of content already queued, you can take two weeks off without anyone noticing. You set the out-of-office reply, and then you actually leave. The rhythm keeps holding from the outside while you do nothing on the inside. That’s a nice version when you can build it. It’s not the entry requirement.
The version of marketing that doesn’t include rest isn’t a sustainable marketing strategy.Â
It’s a slow-motion burnout.Â
The version that builds rest in from the start, in whatever form you can manage right now, is what makes the years possible. Which leaves one question: where do you actually start?
Where to start tomorrow
There’s a lot in this post: time, energy, channels, plan, batching, rest. Don’t try to figure out all of it at once. Pick one thing.
The most useful first step is the time question, because every other decision depends on it. Tomorrow morning, before you open social or check your inbox, write down your honest times for different parts of your business: admin, clients, business future (creating products) and marketing. Not aspirational. Actual. That number is your starting point. Everything we’ve talked about builds on top of it.
If you’ve already done that work, the next step is whatever you’ve been avoiding. The format conversation if you’ve been forcing yourself onto a platform you hate. The channels conversation if you’re spread across seven and exhausted. The rest conversation if you’ve never planned a proper break.
And if you know what you should be doing, but you can’t seem to follow through or you’ve read posts like this before and nothing has changed, then that’s a different problem, and more information won’t fix it. That’s where Marketing Momentum comes in. It’s a membership for people who know what to do but need the structure and accountability to actually keep doing it. Weekly check-ins, coworking sessions, and a group of people working on the same kind of rhythm. The thing that makes a rhythm hold long term isn’t more advice. It’s community.
If you take one thing away from this post it’s this: do less. Stop overstretching yourself and create a plan that is flexible enough that you can stick to it. Start creating the version of marketing that fits the life you actually have, not the one some marketing guru told you to perform. That’s a sustainable marketing strategy. That’s creating a marketing strategy that will work for you, your business and your audience.
Still have some questions? Don’t worry! Reach out and we’ll talk!
