I am speaking now from a personal standpoint. My advice to you today is this:
Always Keep Filling the Pipeline
Consistency is one of the hardest things to master in the world of business. Once you manage to establish your business and bring in a fair number of customers/clients, it is easy then to set marketing aside to concentrate on servicing your existing business.
Big mistake. You must devote some portion of your time every day toward bringing in new business. My favorite marketing guru, Dan Kennedy, talks about one of his core strategies being that he does at least one thing every day to fill his pipeline with new business. This is a guy who is quite rich and would be just fine without a single new client. But he keeps promoting, bringing in new business.
It’s really basic economics: supply-and-demand. The higher the demand for your services (the more people who want to hire you or buy your product), the more you can charge. Having a pipeline filled with potential new business is a core key to maximizing the amount of money you can extract from your business.
I have personally failed in this concept over the last few months. I think what I am experiencing is a stair step pattern that a lot of businesses go through. Do some marketing, get more business, stop marketing until some time frees up, then do some more marketing, etc. The problem with this approach is that you generate plateaus. You don’t want plateaus. You want a nice upward slope.
So take my advice: promote every day. Fill the pipeline.