The Quiet Fortnight and What to Do With It

What the fortnight is actually good for

Not the things you have been avoiding, most of which are avoided for good reason.

The useful category is different: jobs that pay back over the following twelve months and never justify an afternoon in June.

Each is small, none is urgent, and collectively they are most of what separates a business that gets found from one that does not.

The quiet fortnight is the only time they will realistically happen.

The list, in order of return

• Update your business listing completely.
• Ask past customers for reviews, in a batch.
• Sort and file this year's photographs.
• Check prices on the site against what you charge.
• Fix anything broken that you have been working around.
• Write down what you learned this year.

The first two are the highest return available to a local business and both are free.

The listing, properly

An hour, once, and it affects every local search for the next year.

Hours, including holiday hours, which most businesses never set and which are shown to anybody searching over the break.

Service area, described the way customers describe it.

Every service listed, since the categories affect which searches you appear in.

Photographs, which are frequently three years old or absent.

And the description, which most businesses wrote once and have not read since.

A worked example

A trade business that used a quiet December to do four things.

They updated their listing fully, messaged eighteen past customers asking for a review, sorted a year of phone photographs into job folders, and corrected three prices on their website that had been wrong since a rate rise.

Total time was about six hours across the fortnight.

Eleven reviews arrived over the following month, which changed how they appeared in local results noticeably.

The photographs became the material for a year of posts and two new pages.

None of it was urgent in December and all of it was working by March.

Asking for reviews in a batch

Worth doing deliberately, since it works better than asking one at a time.

Go through the year's jobs, identify the ones that went well, and message each customer individually.

Individually matters. A personal message referring to their specific job produces a far better response than anything that reads as a mailing.

Expect a minority to respond, which is normal, and eighteen messages producing eleven reviews is an unusually good outcome rather than a typical one.

The end of the year is a reasonable moment for it, since people have time and the year is being wrapped up generally.

The counter-case

Where the fortnight should be left alone.

A business that has had a difficult year and needs the rest more than it needs a listing update.

Anybody whose quiet period is genuinely their holiday, which is legitimate and should not be turned into unpaid admin.

And a business where the constraint is not marketing at all, but capacity, cash or something else the fortnight will not fix.

Two hours of the six is enough to get most of the benefit, and the rest of the fortnight can be a fortnight.

Filing the photographs

The job most likely to be skipped and the one with the longest tail.

A year of phone photographs is a genuine asset and it is unusable while it sits mixed with everything else.

An afternoon separates them into folders by job, named with the month and the town, and removes the duplicates and the blurred ones.

What that produces is a library you can actually find something in, which is the difference between having photographs and being able to use them.

Worth also noting, per job, whether permission was given to publish images of that property, since that is the detail that makes a photograph unusable two years later.

Checking what you charge against what you say

A small job with a direct commercial effect.

Prices on a website drift out of date quietly, because a rate rise happens in conversation and the site is not part of that conversation.

Which produces a customer arriving with a figure from your own site that you no longer charge, and an awkward beginning to a job.

Half an hour reading your own service pages as a customer would catches this, along with the timescales, the service area and anything else that has moved.

Doing it annually is enough, and the end of the year is the obvious moment.

What not to start

Worth naming, since ambition in a quiet period produces abandoned projects.

A website rebuild, which will not finish and will leave the site half-changed in January.

A new system for anything, which requires the busy months to test and will be abandoned.

Learning a new tool that nothing currently requires.

The rule is that anything started should be finished within the fortnight, because whatever is unfinished on the fourth of January stays unfinished.

Holiday hours specifically

The one item on this list with a deadline attached.

Listings allow special hours for particular dates, separate from the ordinary weekly hours.

Which means you can set the closed days now, and they show to anybody searching over the break rather than the usual hours.

Without it, somebody searching on the twenty-eighth is told you are open, and phones, and nobody answers.

That takes five minutes and it is the difference between a business that appears organised and one that appears to have simply not answered.

The half hour that matters most

If only one thing gets done, this is it.

Search for your own business, from a phone, as a customer would.

Look at what appears: the listing, the reviews, the site, and anything else on the page.

Note the three things that look worst.

That is the whole of a marketing plan for most small businesses, and it takes half an hour and produces a shorter and more useful list than any amount of strategy.

The fortnight

1. Search for yourself and note what is wrong.
2. Update the listing, including holiday hours.
3. Message past customers for reviews.
4. File the year's photographs.
5. Correct any wrong prices.
6. Stop there.

The sixth is deliberate, since a list of six completed jobs is worth considerably more than a list of twenty started ones.

None of the six is difficult and all six together are less work than one ordinary job, which is what makes the fortnight worth using at all.

What to do with those photographs is covered in photographs you took and never used.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.