The Importance of Personal Branding as a Freelancer

9 min readJan 30, 2023

Personal branding is an important aspect of marketing a freelance business. Do you know your own personal brand and how to promote it online?

Welcome back to this series of lessons learned from my 15 years as a freelancer and running a small niche content marketing agency. In this lesson, we’ll look at the importance of personal branding as a freelancer.

What Is Personal Branding?

I stumbled over the term personal branding during the pandemic. Work was slow, and when my freelance work through my marketing agency, Seven Oaks Consulting, slows down, I take the opportunity to boost my skills. Often, I pursue certifications or take courses through my alma mater, New York University, to enhance my marketing skills.

One day I saw an advertisement in my NYU alumni newsletter for a webinar on “personal branding.” Even though I have been successfully supporting myself and my family through my freelance work for many years, I still felt invisible online. Many less talented writers seemed to be achieving much more, and I felt undervalued. I knew through experience that once clients worked with me for several months, we developed a deep rapport, and if clients continued working with me for more than six months, we would likely have a long-lasting business relationship. But getting them to work with me was a challenge; it was difficult for me to present my worth, skills, and talents in a consistently successful way.

Enter personal branding. I had seen the term floating around the internet and knew it meant developing a ‘brand’ for myself the way I had branded products and businesses. Here’s one definition of personal branding that may make it easier to understand the term if you aren’t already familiar with it:

Personal branding is the process of creating an image or identity that you present to the world. It is a combination of your skills, experiences, and values that are used to build your reputation, influence, and success. It involves actively managing your online presence to create an authentic and positive impression of yourself. It is a way to show the world who you are, what you stand for, and why they should care.

As with branding products, services, or companies, personal branding means:

Creating an image that is congruent with the internal values of the person;
Developing an honest and positive reflection of an individual;
Consistently sharing that image with the world.

From my decades of experience as a marketing director, I knew the power of branding, and the thought of extending that to my own personality felt weird. Yet it also felt like the missing piece to the puzzle of promoting my freelance services and content marketing work from an authentic perspective. I took the plunge and signed up for the seminar.

The Power of Personal Branding Revealed

As in my previous lesson, Know Yourself, the webinar leader encouraged us to know ourselves inside and out. This is what prompted me to take the assessments I mentioned in Lesson 1: the ADW Profile, the Fascination test that led me to understand my dominant strengths, and several other assessments that helped me understand who I am and how I communicate it to the world.

From these tests, I learned to identify specific skills from my resume that might be of high value to my target market. I used the information I shared in Lesson 4 (micro niche/niche determination) to realize that my most profitable long-term target market is startups — small technology companies, and that the main skills I bring to them are in content marketing, including SEO writing and article writing.

But now, I needed to combine my niche market evaluation and my skills evaluation with the information gleaned from my personality assessments to create a personal brand. Here are the steps I took to develop my personal brand.

Review Past Personality Assessments

I took the time to review the many personality assessments I described in Lesson 1. This included the ADW Profile report, Myers-Briggs, Fascination Quotient, and Enneagram. I made a list of my dominant personality characteristics just as I would make a list of product or company characteristics to incorporate into a brand. Then, I created a bulleted list of words to describe myself that would become part of my personal brand.

Examine Past Testimonials

Do you ask people for recommendations on LinkedIn? If so, this provides a wealth of feedback as it shows you how your personal brand appears in the eyes of others. Look for common clues as to how people describe you or your work.

I noticed a trend right away — people described working with me as low drama, easy to work with, warm personal style, gets the job done, hard working, things like that. All of these are excellent personal brand attributes to share with others and valuable traits for some companies.

Ask Past and Current Clients

This is a scary step but one that was invaluable. I created a short quiz using Survey Monkey and asked past and current clients if they would be willing to take it. It contained five questions asking them about what it was like to work with me, my strengths, and areas of improvement. Not only did this survey confirm what I learned by examining the testimonials I had received on LinkedIn, but it uncovered some additional strengths I didn’t know I had. I was able to see myself through the eyes of others with whom I worked, a truly valuable gift given to me by my clients.

By the way, out of 10 clients I asked to take the test, only one never got back to me. If you keep it a really short quiz and make sure the answers are anonymous, few people will mind taking it.

Make Your List

Now it’s time to make your list of the skills and personal attributes you will market via your personal brand. Then, translate these into benefits clients receive by working with you.

My personal attributes ended up something like this:

1. Warm, personal, professional, and trustworthy

2. Earns loyalty through dependability

3. Radiates a sincere, familiar warmth

4. Watches and reviews details carefully

5. Brings stability and calm to situations

6. Values routines and punctuality

7. Builds loyalty through consistency

Thus, my personal brand is: trustworthy, dependable, consistent, calm, warm, and professional.

Be Clear on Who You Are (Not Who You Want to Be)

Note that the characteristics you list from testimonials and your client quiz may not be valued by all potential clients. Some clients and companies want “rock stars” or “divas.” I find those terms repugnant, frankly, as I have a low opinion of both rock stars and divas! I’m not a good fit for those companies. See my list of personality attributes above — warm, dependable, trustworthy, and low drama are great ways to describe me. Over and over again, clients cite these characteristics as reasons why they enjoy working with me.

But there have been clients over the years who have been frustrated by these same characteristics. And that’s okay. Neither you nor I are the perfect freelancer for every client or company. We are, however, each person for someone. And by creating and presenting a consistent personal brand, we help increase our chances of matching our freelance services to the right clients because we consistently put forth an accurate reflection of who we truly are and the values and characteristics we bring to each project and company we serve.

Bring It Together: Sharing Your Personal Brand for Maximum Impact

Now that you understand your unique skills and personal attributes, let’s look at how they comprise a personal brand. Let’s return to the original definition of personal brand for a moment:

A personal brand is a unique set of characteristics, values, and skills that distinguish an individual from others. It is the way in which an individual presents themselves to the world, including their values, strengths, interests, experience, and expertise. It is a way of defining who they are and what they stand for, as well as how they wish to be perceived by others.

If you were rolling out a new corporate brand image, how would you do it?

You might:

Create a logo and select images, fonts, and colors to represent the brand attributes (visual branding)
Write a tagline, mission, and vision statement reflecting the brand attributes and desired position in the marketplace (brand positioning)
Decide on specific attributes you wish to express in your interactions with others (value proposition statements)
Record this information into a style guide or brand book (develop your brand guidelines)

Think about what you will need to complete each aspect of personal branding:

Logo, images, and fonts: Do you need a graphic designer to help you with this or are these items you feel confident doing yourself? If you’re a freelance graphic artist, show your skills! If you’re not, find and hire a good designer whose work you like. You can find them through recommendations, online searches, or asking friends whose brand images (for their companies or personal profiles) you admire.
Images: Do you need a new profile image? Your photograph should reflect your personal brand. Hire a professional photographer to capture exceptional images rather than taking a selfie or handing your camera to a friend.
What do you need to do to write your value proposition and positioning statements? You may need to take a class via Udemy or Teachable if you’ve never done this before, or perhaps a book from the library or a YouTube video will suffice. Set aside an hour or two of quiet time to work on this, and be willing to revise and refine it several times until you feel it is a good reflection of your personal brand.
Create a brand book: I created my own brand book using a combination of PicMonkey, images licensed from Unsplash, my logo (created by a professional designer), and a color palette I developed on the website couleurs.com. I brought it all together in a Word document. Some people use Keynote or Powerpoint. The idea is simply to create a single source where all of your branding information is in one place and easy to find. I printed out my brand guidelines and have them in a folder on my desk, within arm’s reach at any time. It makes it easy to be consistent in my marketing.

Marketing Your Personal Brand

Consistency, as previously noted, is one of the steps to successfully deploying a brand, including your personal brand. Once you have the basics, deploy your personal brand across every platform.

Here are a few ideas of how you can deploy your personal brand:

Personal website or business website
Social media profiles
Resume and clips profiles
Bios on external website
Signatures on your emails
Business cards

But remember — branding is more than deploying a consistent visual approach. To build a memorable brand, all elements of your communication, from how you answer your phone to the way you handle meetings, customer calls, and more, are part and parcel of your branding.

Now It’s Your Turn

As a virtual or remote worker, your online presence is everything. Creating and deploying a consistent personal brand that clearly and accurately reflects who you are and what you offer potential clients is an important element in your marketing. If you haven’t given thought to your personal brand, you may find that taking steps to explore, create, and deploy your personal brand increases sales and helps you land more clients.