How to Prep for Maternity Leave as a Small Business Owner | Whitney Beth Photography
 

It’s finally here, maternity leave! Aside from baby, this is the thing I’ve been looking forward to most! That’s not to say I can just stop what I’m doing and pick up in a few weeks when I’m ready (although I wish that was how it was!) There’s a lot of prep work that I need to do on the backend of things. This year has been booming for me, and that’s all thanks to my blog, Pinterest views and Google ranking - if I were to stop everything, all the uphill climbing I’ve been doing would be for nothing and I’d slowly start to loose the awesome online presence I’ve built up. Which leads me to today’s post: prepping for maternity leave as a small business owner. 

If there’s one takeaway from this: AUTOMATE EVERYTHING

- The first thing you’ll want to do is sit at a calendar and plan out everything you’ll need to have automated while you’re away, and then some. (I don’t like coming back to an instant deadline, but if I know I have some wiggle room, I’m good.) For me that looked like content planning and figuring out which blog post I wanted to post when. The next step is to write and write and write. I have every blog post written and scheduled to publish until September. What’s nice about doing batch writing is you don’t have to worry about manually publishing each blog post. 

- Once you’ve got all your blog posts scheduled, you’ll need to schedule out your instagram posts. I only do this for the three blog posts that I wrote that week (but you can do however many you want) I use Planoly. It helps me prep my future feed, write captions in correlation with what blog was launched that day, and I’m able to set the time so it automatically does all the work for me.  

- Now that your blogs and Instagram are set up, make sure your Pinterest is locked and loaded. Thanks to Tailwind I’m able to schedule out posts months in advance and still keep my views and standing on that platform. I just take a day and sit down and pin EVERYTHING until I’ve got enough pins scheduled to go for beyond my maternity leave. (remember how I don’t like coming back to deadlines?)

After all that automating, there will still be the occasional email that will come through (hello extended family picture season!) To combat that I simply wrote up a response email that I’m able to customize as needed explaining that I’m on maternity leave until XX and if they need a photographer before that, here are a list of friends that I trust with my referral. I have it saved in my notes on my phone so it’s an easy copy, paste and tweak. 

And after all that, sit back and enjoy the baby snuggles. If something doesn’t post or you’ve got technical difficulties, don’t stress. You’ve got enough on your plate while you figure out life with your newest little one. Your clients will understand, and if they don’t, they weren’t really worth working with in the first place. 

You got this, mama!

This is Fields as a baby