What Does Your Brand (or Lack Thereof) Say About You?
As a freelancer, you have a lot of issues to juggle – branding yourself being one of the least of your concerns most days. But your brand is a critical piece to your long-term success. You don’t have to engage in a massive marketing overhaul or develop a full-tilt brand management plan to take advantage of the power of branding.
The key is to approach your personal brand from the perspective of your clients and customers. How do you want them to perceive you? This article focuses on techniques and concepts to consider as you develop your own brand that you can leverage for long-term success.
Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Branding
Starting out in a freelancing career can be tough. Ranging from freelance authors to graphic designers and programmers, freelancing comes with many of the same hurdles. One large aspect is building your personal brand – how do you get people to recognize you for your skills? Thankfully the internet has provided a very simple medium for sharing and obtaining information in a very short time. Many tools abound, so how do you know where to start to reach your audience? Continue Reading
Why Personal and Business Branding Work Best Together
Up until September, 2008 I was a full-time freelance writer. I had built myself a little business that kept my family comfortable, and I have to admit, my writer friends who enjoyed hacking away at their fantasy novels after work were a little jealous. I was happy because my lifelong goal, ever since I could clasp a pencil between a few fingers, was to make my living from writing.
The problem in this story was unrestricted growth. Maybe you think I sound like a bit of an ass looking at growth as a problem when many people are losing their jobs and closing up their shops, but don’t make that mistake. Unrestricted growth can be a problem, and saying it can’t be is a bit like the obese person telling the anorexic that they don’t have any real problems.
I was killing myself with work, and still taking on new clients because I didn’t want to let any of that growth “go to waste.” Nobody wanted to be around me at the time because I could barely hold a conversation after spending long, hard days doing nothing but writing and editing.
When it became clear that I couldn’t take on any more work whatsoever and I wasn’t comfortable with raising my prices anymore than I already had, I did what anybody in my situation would do.
I took a job.
The Dangers of Personal Branding
Establishing a brand when you’re a freelancer is a great idea. You create an image about who you are, what you stand for and what you promise to customers. A brand provides consumers with an image and a set of emotional and mental associations that represent you – and that’s what you sell.
Your brand influences people and their decision to work with you based on their perceptions of your image. They may need a page of sales copy, but they’ll want to work with you because you convey a brand image as being the superhero of sales copy, able to vanquish any argument and rise to glorious conversion victory! Or, perhaps your brand image conveys sharp corporate savvy, the ability to hone in and target sales like an archer hitting the bulls-eye every time.
No brand? All you sell is a commodity, just words on paper. Pretty worthless, if you ask me.
Effective Differentiation for Freelancers
One of the biggest struggles for many freelancers is finding a way to stand out from the crowd of others providing similar services. In many cases there really is a huge difference from one freelancer to the next in terms of quality of work, quality of service, specific services provided, experience, and turnaround time.
However, potential clients often seem to have the perspective that we’re interchangeable and all created from the same mould. Therefore, they usually see price as the main point of difference between freelancers.
If this is something you’ve been struggling with, you may reap significant benefits from developing a plan to successfully differentiate yourself from others. If you’re finding the intense competition to be limiting your workload or forcing you to lower your rates, take a look at what truly makes you different from the other freelancers out there waiting to land your would-be clients. More importantly, be sure that whatever makes you different is clear to those potential clients.
Differentiation can help freelancers in a number of important ways. The obvious benefit is more business, but there is also the ability to help you to avoid competing solely on price. If you’re tired of pricing your projects too low in order to secure and retain clients, find a way to be different than the others competing for the business. If you really are different, price comparisons become less effective for the customer, because they know they’re not paying for the same product. Continue Reading
