Something you might not know about me is that before I started my web design and virtual assistance business, I worked in retail management for 20 years. Did you know that September is one of the slowest months in retail? And October, November and December are 3 of the busiest months of the year.

This is one reason why retail stores use the month of September to set Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. They are taking advantage of this very slow period to prepare for their busiest.

Once I started my own business, I found keeping up this retail tradition of preparing for the 4th quarter in September was very helpful.

I want to share with you some things I do every September to get ahead of the game for the 4th quarter.

Review my calendar

First thing I do is look at my calendar and remind myself what days or weeks I will taking off for the holidays. Once I do that I add a task with a due date to my Trello board to send out reminder emails to all my clients about my vacation and holiday hours.

I always want to give my clients plenty of notice so that they can plan any tasks or projects that they have for me in advance. This helps avoid a lot of last minute projects being thrown at me because a client suddenly remembers that I’ll be on vacation. They know at least 3 weeks to several months in advance.

Refresh my social media queue

My approach to social media is that I want to maintain a presence so that it doesn’t look like my business is dead if someone goes to my account. This isn’t the best approach I know. I hope to someday utilize social media to it’s fullest potential but it’s what I need from social media right now.

So a few times a year I go through and fill my social media scheduler, Social Bee, with new content. September is one of those times I do that. My goal is to have enough fresh content for the rest of the year.

I’ll decide on how many posts I want to do per week, what topics or categories I want to have and then I’ll create my content.

For example, on Monday’s I’ll do an inspirational quote, Tuesdays a quick tip, Wednesdays a more in depth topic that would be good for say a carousel post on Instagram, and on Fridays a Friendly Reminder.

To create this content, I’ll pull from…

• past social media posts that performed well and update it with new graphics.
• my blog posts that are popular or new
• my Emails that have good open rates.

This means that I’m not creating everything from scratch – because who has time for that!

Write and schedule blog posts ahead of time

I’ll decide how many blog posts I want to publish for the remaining year. For a while, I published one blog post per month. But this year has been a hard one for me and my family so some things had a to take a back seat. My blogging was one of those things. I’ve published 3 posts all year.

My goal is to publish at least one more, besides this one before December.

You can also decide that your blog can take a break through the holidays and you don’t have to publish anything new at all.

But September always put me in a creative mood, so I’m going to take advantage of that energy and create as much content as possible.

Write and schedule out my newsletters

I’ll use a similar process as I do for social media, I’ll look at blog posts, past social media posts, past emails and repurpose them to send out over the next few months.

Don’t think that your subscribers will have already seen these past emails – many of them haven’t as no one has a 100% open rate. So it’s perfectly ok to re-send your best emails to your list again!

Or take a blog post and shorten into a nice email.

Or flesh out a social media post to make it more email friendly.

The goal is to have consistent content going out but not make it hard on yourself to have that consistency.

Plan Promotions

You might also want to consider what promotions you want to do in the fourth quarter. Will you be doing a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale?

What about your affiliates? Are they offering promotions that your community would want to know about? Add to your calendar time to work on these type of promotions for the holidays.

One thing, I’ve offered in the past is a page on my website that lists all my favorite affilaite promotions. It’s similar idea as my resource page – but the focus is on affilaite Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales. Then all I have to do is promote that page to my subscribers instead of sending out multiple emails about all my different affiliate’s sales.

October through December is also a popular time for online bundles and summits. Will you be participating in any? If so start adding these things to your calendar so that you don’t forget to apply and to do your promotions.

So as you can see, it’s a good idea to take advantage of September being a “slow” month in business. This makes it the perfect time to get organized, refresh your content, and plan ahead so the holiday season feels a little less overwhelming. By taking just a few intentional steps now, you’ll set yourself up to have a 4th quarter with less stress and a lot more ease.

How about you? Do you have any September traditions or routines that help you get ready for the busy season? I’d love to hear—share them in the comments!