Boost Your Freelance Career with Personal Branding, Part 1
How can freelancers stand out and attract more clients? There are multiple strategies, but the one I always suggest first is personal branding. It has a direct impact on your prospects and leads and will amplify the effectiveness of other marketing efforts, including costly marketing efforts like advertising campaigns.
Personal branding is like your professional fingerprint. It’s the narrative you create around your experience, skills, personality, and insight—basically everything that makes you authentically you.
Why does this matter? Because people trust people more than companies — 92% more according to Nielsen. By developing your personal brand with an intentional strategy, you position yourself as trustworthy. Selling your services will always be more manageable with a foundation of trust.
Building Your Base
Craft a Compelling Bio
People want to know about you and look to your bio as a first step. It’s important for your bio to showcase your experience, expertise, insight, and personality. It will pull pieces from your resume but it shouldn’t read like one. Make it a narrative about you, where you’ve been, and what you’re trying to do. Make it clear to your prospective clients that you’re qualified and someone they’d like to work with. Add depth with stories and details that paint a more holistic picture of you who you are.
How will this attract more clients?
People need and want solutions to problem they and/or their businesses have, but people hire people. They need to know you can get the job done, but also that you’re someone they want to work with. Your bio can achieve this and reassure visitors that you’d be a good choice. This can help increase how many visitors become leads.
Create Your Pitch
This is the basis of your personal brand. Think about what you're good at and want to be known for. How do your unique traits, experiences, and insights support those goals? From there, create a quick summary of who you are. It doesn’t need to be a classic elevator pitch, it just needs to be concise and something that you could explain easily to someone else.
How will this attract more clients?
First, this will guide most of the steps below by keeping them aligned with the core of your personal brand. Second, this will make you appear more credible, authentic and trustworthy when you speak with prospects. This often results in a higher conversion rate from prospects into clients.
Get Professional Headshots
Invest in high-quality, professional headshots. The style should reflect your personal brand and you should dress authentically to you and your profession. This will ensure your headshot portrays trustworthiness.
How will this attract more clients?
We like to see the people we might want to work with. We’re all taught to “not judge a book by its cover,” and while that’s sound advice, humans tend to jump to conclusions pretty quickly. A professional headshot in a style that’s aligned with your personal brand will ensure people make an accurate conclusion about you - that you’re authentic, trustworthy, and someone they’d want to work with.
Showcase your brand and work
Create a detailed online portfolio to showcase your best work, case studies, and testimonials. This should be an expansion of your resume, tailored to your specialty, and designed to guide prospects through your experience and expertise.
Creating a quality personal website for your online portfolio can elevate how prospects perceive you and your work. A well made personal website can showcase your work in a way that’s easy to browse and inject elements of your personal brand for a seamless experience.
How will this attract more clients?
When prospects learn about you for the first time, they’re going to need some validation. Your bio, headshots, and a well built LinkedIn page will help get that process started. The next step will be for your prospects to see details about the work you’ve done and how you manage projects. This can often provide enough validation for them to reach out to chat. When you invest in a better method to showcase your brand and work, you’ll be able to convert more of those prospects into leads.
Leverage LinkedIn Recommendations
One of the most impactful things you can do for your freelance business is to gather recommendations. LinkedIn's recommendation feature simplifies this process, allowing you to request feedback from current and past clients. These are invaluable, especially for those just starting out, as it provides trustworthy insights into their collaboration and client management skills.
How will this attract more clients?
Recommendations and reviews are like gold for businesses. They provide visitors to your LinkedIn page immediate validation of your skills and abilities, making it easier for them to reach out for a conversation. More recommendations can help you convert more people into prospects.
The Brandwaves Blog
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Design Swell Identity Lab
Want to elevate your personal brand from 'meh' to 'marvelous'? That’s where I swoop in. Think of me and Design Swell Identity Lab as your personal brand stylists, giving your brand image the zing it needs to not just be seen, but to dazzle. Intrigued? Message me or book a chat, and let's make your brand the talk of the town.
