How to Build Your Freelance Brand
The beginning of a freelance journey is an exciting time of learning and exploration. In addition to learning how to set up your business, you are also learning about the market for your skills, and which skills or services you’d like to add to your longer term career portfolio. Even in this stage of exploration, when you have both limited time and funds, it is not too early to begin building your brand as a freelancer. This is the best time to do the work of understanding your offerings and how you would like to introduce yourself to new clients. Since I’m guessing you don’t have the luxury of a Fortune 500 marketing department with budget and headcount to help with this process, here are a few simple and low-cost steps you can take to present the most polished and authentic version of yourself online.
Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
The first step in building your brand is determining what services you will offer. The second step is figuring out why a client should choose YOU to do them. In some ways, this thought process is very similar to the planning you would do in the old world before you started writing a resume or drafting a personal statement for an application.
If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are multi-career and offer a diverse portfolio of services for different industries. Take a look at these services and see why doing all of them together makes you better at each one. There usually is a cross-pollination effect from working in different disciplines. For example, if you are a lawyer and a photographer, it is possible that you have a strong eye for detail, while also making sure things are composed in a well-balanced manner. If you are a consultant and a dancer, you might be very versatile in your expression and can fulfill a client or a choreographer’s vision.
When you explore these synergies, you’ll be able to present your authentic self to clients, which gives them a clear idea of what to expect when hiring you, while also showing how your unique skillset will make you the best one to solve your client’s problems.
Get a Logo
You may decide to name your freelancing business, or you might use your own name. Either way, you should have a logo. Your logo is the face of your brand and a simple way to level up your presence—yet it often goes overlooked by freelancers. The purpose of a logo is to attract your audience and leave a positive, but specific, impression in their memory. Each logo is comprised of three elements:
Knowing what logo is best for your business is both an internal and external exercise. On the internal side, you need to evaluate your portfolio of services and decide what kind of emotion you’d like to convey. If you are providing legal or financial services, you will likely land on one end of the spectrum, aiming for a logo that suggests trustworthiness, safety, and predictability. If you’re in a creative line of work, you’ll be on the other end of the spectrum, looking for a logo that suggests innovation and looks fresh or playful. The external part of the exercise comes when you research logos of other businesses in your market. You’ll want a logo that complements theirs without looking repetitive.
Once you’ve done your research, you can make the logo yourself using an app like Canva, or hire a freelancer to help you using a platform like Fiverr.
Tell Your Story
Now that you have done the work of defining your story and translating it into a visual medium, you are ready to build your platform and communicate your value to the world. This is when the real fun begins! You get to decide which platforms align well with your value proposition and can best reach your ideal clients. When you can afford it, having a personal website that describes your story and your services can go a long way toward establishing your brand and communicating your value proposition to potential clients. You should also complement the website with social media that promotes your brand, whether that is LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Medium, or any other, and curate content that will help your clients. More is not always better—especially when you are just starting out and resources are scarce. Go ahead and reserve your name on all of these domains if it is available, but focus your energy on building one at a time and putting out quality material so that you look polished and present your business in the best possible light. Good luck!!
