While freelancing lets you work with freedom, finding regular projects is one of the challenges. Personal branding will play a key role in career growth, whether you’re a seasoned freelancer or new to this domain.
If you’re wondering why you should invest your time and effort in this, read on to know the reasons.
1. Get You in Touch With Ideal Clients
By developing a strong personal brand as a freelancer, you can become the most powerful tool for your business. Wondering how?
Personal branding will help you connect with clients that suit well with your interest and expertise. Besides growing professionally, you can add a touch of your personality to the project that coincides with your interests.
For example, if you’re a technical content writer, you might be able to handle copywriting projects. However, that project won’t be something where you can put your best efforts. If you can brand yourself as a technical content writer, you can easily find clients who deal with technical content.
Therefore, highlight your skill and proficiency through personal branding so that you don’t need to do irrelevant projects to earn your livelihood.
2. Develop Professional Connections
If you’re wondering how to have an ever-growing professional connection, try establishing yourself as a personal brand. This is how you can expand your network and start building professional relationships with others.
Be it personal or professional, we all want to stay in touch with like-minded people. As you display your personality through branding, more related professionals will show interest in connecting with you. Not everyone will become your client, but they surely can help you connect with your prospective clients.
LinkedIn is the most popular social media site for professionals that freelancers should utilize. This platform helps you in expanding your network with other freelancers and clients. You can start making connections with the people you know.
Once you have covered your known contacts, look for other LinkedIn profiles that showcase similar interests. When you become a personal brand, you’ll also have access to various conferences, webinars, and other networking events where seasoned freelancers and clients interact.
3. Build Trust
Technical skills and trust are the most crucial building blocks of any freelancing career. Clients might not trust you to assign you to their projects when you’re new to the freelancing business.
The good thing is, building a trustworthy relationship with your clients becomes easier when you have a brand of your own. It helps you secure projects for new clients.
You can connect with your potential clients to share your experience, willingness, and views on their projects. You may also answer queries in various forums and social platforms to build a brand image as a solution provider. These activities will make your clients have faith in your expertise.
Make sure you display your knowledge and skills during personal branding. In this way, people will understand that you know what you’re doing, and they can trust you with their projects, no matter how critical that is.
4. Offer a Competitive Edge
The freelance industry is booming as more individuals are joining either as a primary profession or side hustle. When a client posts a project on freelance job platforms like UpWork and Fiverr, hundreds of freelancers approach with a quote.
If you approach the same client by putting your personal brand at the forefront, that'll impress the client. Just like identifying a branded product in the market, branding yourself will make you stand out in the crowd.
Whether you’re a digital marketer, writer, developer, or designer, branding will highlight you and give out a precise message about your profession. It’ll even make you unique and give you an upper hand compared to those with no brand identity.
5. Establish Your Identity as an Expert
To establish yourself as a successful freelancer, you don’t have any other choice but to become an expert in your field. Even if you’re an expert, how to prove that to the clients? Do personal branding, and clients will identify you as an expert without a doubt.
When you’re new to freelancing, it’s not easy to display your expertise. Or, maybe, you have worked for third-party clients through your last employer. Now, freelance clients might wonder whether you really delivered those projects. Personal branding helps to get rid of all the doubts.
You can create a free website on WordPress to display your portfolio. Include some of your best work examples on the website, so that visitors won’t have any doubt about your work efficiency. Adding ratings and client testimonials to your social accounts and websites will also help to prove your expertise.
6. Get Better Opportunities
Personal branding won’t only let you secure more projects, but it’ll also help you get hold of better opportunities. Once you start getting ample project offers, you can get picky about accepting them and only do high-paying and quality projects. Even if you have similarly experienced freelancers as your competitors, branding will help you stay ahead of them.
Forget about reluctantly opting for every project you get. Work only for good projects and reputed clients by becoming a popular name in the freelancing industry. Thus, you can get more free time and have the perfect work-life balance that you have always dreamt of.
7. Help You Charge More
Unless freelancing is charitable work for you, payment is the aspect you can’t ignore. In most freelancing projects, the client wants to hand over the task to the lowest bidder. Unless you have become a prominent personal brand, you end up bidding less than your worth to secure a project and stay trapped in this vicious cycle.
Start investing your time and effort in becoming a brand. Clients will already know about your caliber, and they’ll proactively approach you for projects instead of looking for the lowest bid.
Moreover, it’ll place you in a position to negotiate remuneration depending on the project complexity and expertise level. You don’t have to be happy with low-paying projects, instead work with clients who are willing to pay you your worth.
Personal Branding for Freelancers
If you want to get your freelancing career off the ground, personal branding is as important as everything else you do to get clients. Now that you know how personal branding helps you improve your image, you can rope in more projects.
New projects will help you to showcase the talent that you promised through personal branding. While you’re at it, know that meeting project deadlines also helps you in boosting your brand.