How solo consultants can still create thought leadership content when busy with client work

You’re super busy with client work. Which is an excellent problem to have — until you realize you haven’t posted on LinkedIn in six weeks and your blog is in a coma. And let’s not talk about that podcast you were so excited to launch a few months ago. 

The upshot is that, as your current projects approach their close, you’re starting to wonder where your next round of clients will come from. Long B2B sales cycles make it impossible to instantly pull new clients out of your hat. Even if you run ads — which can quickly attract new people into your orbit — it’s going to take a while for those people to turn into clients.

The risk of famine following the too-busy-with-clients feast is often a frustrating aspect of running a solo service business. When client work is plentiful, marketing often gets pushed aside. There are deadlines to meet, calls to take, proposals to write, and paying clients waiting for your attention. Marketing feels much less pressing by comparison.

But when your current projects start wrapping up, that neglected pipeline suddenly becomes a lot more pressing. No matter how well you’re earning during the busy periods, it’s hard to feel secure when you don’t know when the next batch of work is on its way. And given long sales cycles, the drought could be persistent. 

But how can you keep up with thought leadership content when you’re busy?

The solution is to build a content marketing system that fits the reality of your business, not some idealized plan that’s built for a hypothetical someone who has more available time than you. It’s also important to understand what activities to prioritize and what you can drop. 

In this post, I’m going to share four practical ways to make thought leadership content easier to keep up with, even when your client work is demanding. 

But first, there’s a necessary attitude adjustment that makes the methods below more likely to stick.

First, here’s the attitude-fix

It’s important that I say this out loud. But I promise I am saying it with love:

Marketing is an essential element of running your own business. And you have no choice about that.

Marketing isn’t an optional extra you get to do when client work slows down, you’ve hit inbox zero, tidied your desktop, and deleted enough Dropbox stuff to avoid paying to upgrade.

Marketing is like paying your taxes. You wouldn’t say, “I’m so busy with clients that I don’t have time to pay my taxes,” and just resign yourself to that situation.

Like it or not, have time or not, your taxes need to be dealt with. You either make time to handle them yourself or pay someone else to help you.

Marketing’s in the same boat.

Being short on time is a constraint you need to design around. It can’t be the reason marketing gets postponed indefinitely. Just like being short on time doesn’t give you a pass on filing your taxes.

Client work will almost always win the urgency contest and marketing rarely feels that urgent.

But you know the result of doing marketing only when everything urgent is finished: an empty pipeline. Or, at the very least, worrying about an empty pipeline. Our goal here is to reduce that stress by creating realistic content marketing habits that remain doable even when you’re busy.

So, now it’s clear you don’t have a choice about whether to do marketing, here are four ways to help you do it when you’re busy.

1. Ruthlessly reduce what you’re trying to do

You might be thinking something along these lines:

“Whatever advice you have, there’s no way I can keep up with LinkedIn, my blog, my podcast, my email newsletters…”

Then don’t.

Or, at least, don’t assume you need to keep doing all of them at the same frequency.

Busy consultants can make their marketing much harder than it needs to be by trying to maintain too many channels and formats. Eventually, marketing starts to feel like an entire second business. Instead, decide which two or three channels are most useful for attracting and nurturing the people you want to work with. Then decide what publishing frequency is realistic during your busier periods.

For a solo B2B consultant, maybe that means one strong LinkedIn post a week and one substantial email newsletter a month. Maybe it means one YouTube video a month that you email to your list and that gives you material for several LinkedIn posts. It could mean a blog and email list supported by a robust referral system.

What matters is that the plan is sustainable.

A modest marketing rhythm you can maintain for six months is much more useful than an ambitious schedule you follow for three weeks and then abandon when client work gets busy.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret about blogging:

There’s no good evidence that blogging regularly or indefinitely helps your site show up in Google or AI search. 

I first heard this radical idea from Jana Osofksy. I looked into it further and, despite the standard advice to blog monthly or weekly indefinitely, I agree it’s totally fine to think of your blog as a Little Library of thought leadership articles that you build once, and maintain over time. You might publish one article a month for six months and then go quiet for a couple of months while you’re busy with client work, and then publish three more in a fortnight. That’s totally ok. (It’s different from LinkedIn in this respect, where taking an extended break does tend to be detrimental. Same goes for email marketing; consistency and frequency matter there too.)

With blogging, it’s true that quantity matters, but maybe not in the way you expect. It’s simply that the more good articles you have on your website, the more opportunities you have for a page to rank in Google or show up in AI search. But that doesn’t mean there’s a difference between 20 blog posts published evenly over the course of 20 weeks or 20 months — or at varying intervals over any other period of time. There’s little evidence that Google or AI search cares when your post was published, or how frequently you publish, so long as the content doesn’t go out of date. (I go into more detail in the Appendix.)

Mihaela Istrate is the Head of SEO for an international diabetes care company and a senior SEO strategist with 12 years of hands-on experience, specializing in technical strategy, AI search optimization, and multi-platform visibility. I asked for her opinion on this topic and she said:

“In my SEO experience across dozens of niches, people are poorly advised to keep writing non-stop. It's not the volume of content that helps, it's the quality and the overall strategy.”

Content and marketing strategist, Jana Osofsky, has been working in content marketing since 2016, and her view is that:

“Coaches, practitioners, and service providersdo NOT need to blog consistently — or forever — to get clients from their blogs. What you actually do need is a finite number of blog posts (I say 12 to 20). They need to cover the key things your audience needs to hear, learn, and understand — to be ready to buy your offer.”

I’m actually using Jana’s strategy for my own blog.

Yes, you should maintain your blog so that it doesn’t become outdated — that does matter. Think about it from a human reader’s perspective. If the information you share with a reader is out of date, then that’s bad for your reader. But if the content is “evergreen” (i.e. is permanently relevant and doesn’t go out of date) then does a reader care if it was published last week or last year? No. And neither, apparently, does Google or AI.

Updating old blogs can also mean keeping an eye on your analytics. Are people bouncing without reading all of it? Are they on-page for a good amount of time, but not clicking your CTA? Has it dropped in Google rankings? Is it attracting less traffic than other posts?

It could also mean that you have a new client example to add since you published it. Or a new testimonial. Or a competitor published something similar and you want to make sure yours is better. Or there was a question a client asked you that you hadn’t thought of, but it would be useful to the reader to include the answer in that old post. Or some new industry data’s been published that it would be good to add.

But updating is very different from endlessly write new blog articles.

So you can let yourself off the hook a bit with your blog. It’s ok to have seasons when you write lots of blog articles and seasons when you write few (or none at all). So long as the content isn’t out of date, you’re golden. Once your Little Library of thought leadership blog articles exists, you can repurpose it. When you’re busy, repurpose what you already have; when you’re less busy you can add to your Little Library — and then stop whenever you want! (More on repurposing later.) 

When it comes to what channels and frequencies you should adopt, I can’t give generic “one size fits all” advice that works for everyone reading this. The answer depends on your business, your clients, your existing audience, your goals, your skills and preferences, what you’re already doing, and the other ways you generate leads. You simply need enough to have a way to Attract people, Build trust with them, and Convert them into clients. (See this post where I talk more about my ABC framework.) You don’t need ALL the ways.

2. Choose a small number of themes to write about

One of the biggest time-wasters in content marketing is staring at the blank page or the empty “Start a post” window on LinkedIn and hoping for inspiration.

That creates more work than necessary. You don’t need to invent something new every time you publish something on LinkedIn or your website. In fact, good thought leadership content usually involves returning to the same important ideas again and again.

Start by identifying the themes your ideal clients already care about. Ask yourself questions like:

• What do your clients worry about?

• What questions do clients ask before hiring you?

• What mistakes do you repeatedly see clients making?

• What commonly held views in your field do you disagree with?

• What ideas do you want to become known for?

Questions like this can give you a relatively small set of themes that you can revisit repeatedly. You then take the same core idea and approach it from different directions.

For example, if you're an HR consultant, one of your clients’ big worries could be about maintaining company culture and retaining staff at a new remote location. You could talk about this same topic in different ways. You could explain how your way of approaching this issue is different (better) than other consultants’ ways, or by sharing a case study that shows how you helped a real client (anonymized, if necessary) deal with this issue, or perhaps you could talk about what your process is when a company is expanding, so they can avoid culture and retention problems. Or you could address a common misconception CEOs have about culture and retention during expansion.

The central idea stays the same while the angle changes.

Having a small set of content topics takes a lot of pressure off content creation because you’re no longer starting from scratch every time.

You’re always working inside familiar territory.

This is one of the reasons I start content marketing work with strategy. Before deciding how often you should post or which format to use, or thinking about hooks and post structure, it helps to know who you’re talking to, and what general topics you should be talking about. 

Once those decisions are made, content creation gets easier.

OK, you might be thinking, even if I narrow down the topics I want to talk about, I still don’t have time to actually write anything.

Let’s see if that’s true. Keep reading…

3. Capture content ideas while you’re working

If you’re an experienced consultant or expert service provider, your best content ideas show up in your work every week. 

• A client asks a question you’ve heard 20 times before.

• You explain why a commonly recommended approach doesn’t work in practice.

• You notice the same mistake in three different clients’ businesses.

• You give a client a piece of advice and think, “I wish more people understood this.”

• You use a specific example and see the penny drop in the client’s mind.

• You unearth an unspoken assumption that was holding your client back.

For example, suppose your clients are CEOs with a clear vision, and who come up with annual plans in company strategy meetings — but year after year their teams have been unable to follow through on the execution. You might repeatedly hear the same questions on this topic: How can I get everyone on the team on board? How can I identify what’s going wrong? How do we know what’s most important to focus on?

Make a note when you hear these questions. That’s all valuable thought leadership material.

The key is not to let your thoughts and ideas disappear. Instead, create a simple habit for capturing those moments while they’re fresh. Keep an idea bank somewhere you’ll actually use it. That might be a Google doc, a notes app, a project management tool, or even a folder of voice notes on your phone. (Voice notes can be especially useful when you’re busy. After a Zoom call, you can spend two minutes explaining the idea in your own words while it’s still fresh.)

Keep the bar low. You’re not turning the idea into a polished post on the spot. 

Sometimes one sentence is all it needs. Just enough to give you something concrete to work with later.

This approach saves time because you’re no longer treating content ideation as an activity completely separate from the work you’re already doing. A separate activity that you feel unable to make time for.

By recording your thoughts and observations as you work, your client work becomes a source of raw material.

And it can lead to better content, too, because you’re talking about the real questions and problems your buyers actually have — not random topics you dredged out of your brain when you opened LinkedIn.

Of course, you need to be careful about client confidentiality. You’re not sharing private information. You’re noticing the lessons, patterns, questions, and ideas that spring from the work you’re busy doing.

Those are often exactly the things your future clients want to hear about.

(By the way, AI is pretty good at imposing order on transcripts of disconnected voice notes. This is a good use of AI: Turning your raw spoken thoughts into something more organized that you can then edit, e.g. a LinkedIn post or blog article. Sooooo much better than getting AI to write something from scratch. )

4. Work in stages & build several pieces of content from one meaty idea

Another reason content marketing becomes overwhelming is that people imagine every piece of content as a separate assignment.

They need a LinkedIn post…

Then another LinkedIn post…

Then a blog article…

Then an email…

Then a podcast script…

Then another LinkedIn post…

Then the same all over again next week 🤪

That’s a lot of blank pages.

A different approach is to start with one idea — perhaps first captured in a voice note after a client conversation — and develop it in stages. You don’t need two hours all at once. Spend 15 or 20 minutes developing your point of view on the topic. (At the time of putting this article on my website, it’s been 10 days since I started writing the first draft. It’s been even longer since I came up with the idea and developed the outline. I’ve been working on it a little at a time, while I’ve been busy with client work.)

So, from your initial idea, spend a few minutes asking yourself questions about it:

• Why do you believe it?

• What do businesses tend to do instead?

• What problems does that create?

• What real examples have you seen?

Then organize those thoughts into an outline. As I mentioned above, AI is good at putting disorganized, jumbled thoughts into a coherent order. You can tell it to create an outline from the thoughts that you’ve copy-pasted into it. Tell it to preserve your language as much as possible. Again, this doesn’t need to take hours at one sitting. A few minutes will do the job.

It’s quicker and easier to first correct an outline AI gives you rather than getting it to write a draft that you then have to make big changes to.

Once you have an outline you like, fill it in to turn it into a first draft. Think of drafting as a multi-stage process. You can draft it a section at a time, a few minutes at a time. (You can use AI at this stage too, but be careful that you don’t lean too heavily on its words. Make sure your own ideas and language don’t get swamped.)

Flesh out the first draft, so it’s as rich and insightful as you can make it. Use your own real examples (preserving client confidentiality, of course). Delete or change anything that AI added that you don’t actually believe or can’t confirm. Expand on any ideas where it’s useful to do so.

Later, edit it and post it.

Once the article exists, you can pull several smaller ideas from it. One section might become a LinkedIn post about a common mistake. Another could become a post built around an example. Another could become a short opinion post. The article could form the basis of an email. You might return to the same idea a month later and approach it from a completely different angle.

That’s strategic repurposing.

You’re not simply copying and pasting the same paragraph onto five platforms. You’re doing the hard thinking once, then finding multiple useful ways to express it. (Not that I think there’s a problem with re-posting the exact same social media post from time to time. Not everyone saw it the first time around. And, of those who did, how many remember it? And of those who remember it, how many will object to seeing it again? And if they do object to seeing it twice, does it matter?)

Most importantly, you don’t need a solid two-hour block to create and repurpose your content.

Content creation can be split into separate tasks:

• Capture the idea.

• Develop your point of view.

• Organize it.

• Write a first draft. (Which consists of smaller steps of drafting each section.)

• Flesh it out. (Which again consists of smaller, section-by-section, steps.)

• Edit it.

• Publish it.

• Turn parts of it into smaller pieces and publish those.

Some of those tasks may take only 10 or 20 minutes. Which means it’s much easier to fit content creation around client work, rather than waiting for the mythical afternoon when your calendar is completely clear.

Breaking content creation into stages also makes it easier to get help, if you absolutely don’t have time to spend on some of the steps. You supply the expertise, opinions, examples, and raw ideas. That’s the most valuable part.

You don’t need to personally handle every outline, draft, edit, repurposed post, and publishing task. AI can help at various stages, and so can a hired copywriter, content manager, or social media assistant. 

You need a realistic plan for the time you have available

So, to sum up:

• Accept the reality that marketing is a non-optional part of running a business.

• Be realistic about how many channels and how much content your business can actually support. You don’t need to do it all, all the time.

• Decide on the small set of themes you want to talk about instead of inventing topics every time you face the blinking cursor.

• Capture ideas during the client work you’re already doing. (Try using voice memos.)

• In short sessions, develop one strong idea into a single long piece and then repurpose it, instead of treating every piece of content as a brand-new project.

As you get into the habit of content creation, you’ll get more efficient and you can increase your output. (If you want. Enough can also be enough.)

And if you genuinely can’t keep up with thought leadership content creation yourself?

Then it may be time to pay for help rather than ignore the problem.

Remember your taxes?

There are plenty of essential parts of running a business that you could technically do yourself. At some point, it makes more sense to decide which ones you should devote your time to, and which ones need paid support. (For example, I’ve always paid someone to file my taxes for me. Canada Revenue Agency forms give me hives.)

That applies to marketing too.

I create custom content marketing strategies so consultants and B2B expert service providers can create thought leadership content in the time they actually have available.

We can decide what to prioritize, what you should continue doing yourself, and what can be handed off.

You bring the expertise, experience, ideas, and point of view. I can help turn that into a content plan and execute the content marketing parts you don’t have the time or desire to manage yourself. (I also work with trusted colleagues for some things that are outside my wheelhouse — such as setting up a website or analyzing Google Analytics data — but I manage it all so you don’t have to think about it.)

But everything starts with strategy.

Because if you’re going to spend your limited time — or your marketing budget — creating thought leadership content, you want every piece of content to have a good reason for existing. You want to know it’s pulling its weight.

You need a manageable plan for creating the right thought leadership content even when you’re busy, to help keep your pipeline comfortably full. That’s what my Custom Content Marketing Roadmap is designed to do.

Appendix (which you probably don’t need to read)

This appendix is to provide references for claims I made above, but which not every reader will be interested in.

Look for the word ‘fresh’ on these Google pages:

Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

A guide to Google Search ranking systems

Ahrefs on the age of URLs in organic search results and in AI search:

ChatGPT “cited pages [that] span a wide range of ages—the median is around 500 days (~1.3 years old), with some cited pages over 2,700 days old (~7.4 years old).” Why ChatGPT Cites One Page Over Another (Study of 1.4M Prompts)

The average age of URLs cited by AI is 1064 days, which is about 2.9 years. The average age of URLs in organic Google search results is 1432 days, which is about 3.9 years. So AI has a tendency to cite newer content than Google searches show. New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresher” Content (17 Million Citations Analyzed)

Also from Ahrefs. How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages?

“The SERPs [search engine results pages] are dominated by older pages. 72.9% of pages in the Top 10 are more than 3 years old.”

“On average, the #1 ranking page in Google is 5 years old.”

“If you want to rank in Google’s top 10, focus on creating evergreen content that can stand the test of time and plan to update it.”

In contrast, Hubspot makes claims like, “Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more inbound traffic than companies that published between 0–4 monthly posts.” (Note that the link to the purported research does not actually mention that statistic.)

These kind of claims get repeated and used to justify frequent blogging. But the trouble with this kind of data is that it doesn’t separate frequency from overall quantity. If one firm publishes 16 posts a month for a year, it will accumulate 192 posts in a year. Another firm that publishes 2 a month will have only 24. So comparing their traffic over a year will fail to distinguish between overall quantity and frequency.

And, as I mentioned, having more pages does give you more opportunities to show up in search and attract traffic to your site. That’s different from the claim that blogging regularly or frequently or indefinitely helps.

Not only that, but a company publishing 16 blog posts a month is likely doing all sorts of other things that to help get traffic (promotions, backlinks, SEO, etc.) that the comparison companies may not have been. We don’t know if those factors were controlled for.

Lastly, Orbit Media reports that their survey revealed that “The marketers who publish more often are more likely to report “strong results” [from their blog].” [New Research] The 12th Annual Blogger Survey: What Content Works in 2025? However, this is a correlation and doesn’t prove causation. It could be that because they get strong results from their blog, they then publish more often. The survey also revealed that including audio elements in blog posts correlates with “strong results.” But it’s easy to see how that might not be that audio causes strong results. Rather, when companies see strong results from their blog, they’re more likely to invest more in it, including adding audio.

If you come across any statistic claiming to support the idea that you should blog frequently, regularly, or indefinitely, ask yourself what other confounding factors there might be and whether they’ve been controlled for. If you come across anything, please do get in touch, because I’d love to hear about it.