How do you brand yourself as a freelancer?

I know personal branding is an important part of the job to get customers

It pales in comparison to sales. Everything pales in comparison to sales. Including competence. Including doing the work.

What content about you do you emphasize to find leads?

To a first approximation, finding leads consists of finding leads. Not making content. It means pounding the pavement. Making cold calls. Making warm calls to people you know to ask for leads.

Don't get me wrong, I love avoiding sales as much as anyone. I've built websites and used Linkedin and blogged to avoid selling. I joined the local Chamber of Commerce and Rotary to sit in a room eating instead of going out selling.

Selling is really hard because it is mostly rejection. It is even harder when starting out because good clients already have consultants. It is even harder when starting out because you have no idea what sells. And crazy ideas about what might...like consultant CTO who also handles hiring and builds the product. There probably is someone who might buy that. You are unlikely to find that person because there are not enough days in the world for you to meet them and close the sale.

Even worse, if you meet someone who thinks they might buy that thing, they are probably a bad client. In the best case bad because they have no experience working with people like you. In the average case, bad because they do have experience working with people like you...new desperate freelancers.

Sell something that sells. Sell what other people sell because that is what sells. Every snowflake is different. Being different, being niche, pitching a snowflake...these are all excuses to avoid selling. Selling into a niche works when you've found the niche is organically through experience.

Good luck.

I've had a successful career as an independent consultant for the last six years and in my experience branding hasn't been a primary concern at all. As @brudgers already pointed out, sales should be your top priority. Until you're fully booked you should be speaking with friends, acquaintances, and strangers every single day to find work. Your next priority should be delivering the absolute best work you can, so that you can stop making cold calls and start fielding inbound leads. Your past clients are your best source of new business. Even better, keep your clients long-term so you're not kicking off new projects all the time.

I don't think this matters as much as what I mentioned above, but I'll answer your questions:

* Maintain your LinkedIn, Twitter, AngelList profiles just enough to back up your credentials when a potential lead google's your name.

* Don't waste your time blogging unless you plan on committing to being the "go-to" individual for a very niche technology/service. You'll read successful content creators advising the opposite, but for each one of them there are 1000 who never got traction, didn't publish anything valuable, or simply gave up.

* Your most important asset is your reputation

* Use your "personal brand" for as long as you can (i.e. until you're hiring other people). Building a reputation is hard enough, don't make it harder on yourself and others by adding misdirection when it's really just you behind the curtain.

* My niche for the most of my career has been "early-stage startup needs product-minded engineer to wear many hats". There has never been a shortage of rewarding work for me, but your mileage may vary.

Good luck! Happy to chat some time if you want to dig deeper. Contact info in my profile.

Been consulting for seven years. Congrats on your decision to try it, and best of luck to you.

Bits of consulting advice here, from answering similar questions in the past:

https://www.gkogan.co/blog/consulting-advice/

And here’s a summary of my first year as a consultant, with lessons learned:

https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...

And why you should call yourself a consultant rather than a freelancer:

https://www.gkogan.co/blog/freelancer-or-consultant/

For your last question I think you’re thinking about it wrong. People care primarily about their problems and whether or not you are the person who can solve them. And their problems sound more like “We need to launch X by end of quarter but we’re not moving fast enough,” or “we have a talented team of engineers but continue to have production issues that are causing us to lose customers.” Their problems do not sound like “We are lacking a part-time Rust developer!”

I generated ~105 leads from social in the last 18 months for https://contentdistribution.com by (inconsistently) building a brand over the last 2-3 years.

I have had people wire me a lot of $ within 24 hours of talking to me, because they spent a year reading my content before reaching out.

I'm working with companies backed by A16 and Peter Thiel because of my personal brand.

It works, but it takes time.

- Delete your friends from HS and college. Anyone that you'll never talk to 1:1 again, and don't see yourself reconnecting with. When they don't engage with your social content, it lowers your overall reach

- Join Facebook Groups and connect with your target audience. Like 1,000 - 2,000 people. Doesn't have to be all at once

- Post long form content in your status. If you are going to link, drop the link in the 1st comment. FB / LI want to keep people on their platform and reduce reach of external links.

- Be vulnerable. Share vulnerable stories that are actually humble brags.

- Drop knowledge in the group. If the audience who hires you is non-technical, don't talk about super technical stuff. Talk about how you saved the day, or accelerated development, or worked on something that helped win a deal, or developed a process that whatever

- Share wins

- Keep doing it. 2-3 times per week for 2-3 years

- Write down everything in your head on your blog that you repeat. If you have specific positioning on you, or how you do things - document it in the blog.

- Use this content once a lead engages with you to differentiate yourself and build trust and credibility before you hop on the phone

Ultimately consulting services are hard to differentiate.

People like to work with people they like, and people they think will make them look good.

Focus on excelling at both.

A lot of people who will hire you, won't hire you today.

But if you're stay top of mind over the next 2-3 years, an opportunity will come up.

> I'll quit my CTO position in a few months to become a Freelancer

I'd suggest that you should consider a transition from FTE to freelancing over some (fixed?) amount of time vs. a quick change.

Depending on who your prospective buyer is, I would also reconsider using the "freelancer" title. I equate freelancer with the quick, sub-$1000 jobs that are advertised on various "gig" sites. That's not really a pool you want to swim in as it artificially constrains your rate ceiling.

From my admittedly difficult and possibly anomalous past experience as a freelancer for five years or so..

The most effective and long-term impact I saw in establishing my personal brand was releasing or contributing to open-source software.

It's where I proved that I can produce value for a sizable userbase, write documentation, maintain and keep improving it, overall doing professional work. I had full control of the presentation and aesthetics, for my personality to come across, and for people in the right places to notice my work.

Some freelancers achieve similar effect with consistently producing quality articles and blog posts, about niche topics they're interested in.

It depended on a lot of unpaid work, but I write software like I eat and sleep, so I kept releasing more into the world. Mostly I was just lucky to have made the right kind of software that a big enough market needed - which I didn't know was in demand, but stumbled into it.

In retrospect, that was a way to market and advertise my brand, the skills I can offer. There must be an easier way to do it, other than hard work and luck, but I was inexperienced and had to pay my dues, until I had a regular stream of clients.

The thing I did right, I believe, was to plug myself into a fairly niche community (or marketplace), and make personal connections with owners and decision-makers in the businesses.

I would humbly suggest that if you don't have answers to your questions, it is not yet time to quit your day job.

As other folks in this thread have suggested, being a successful freelancer / contractor / small-business owner, etc is all about dolla dolla bills. It all starts and ends with sales. Your brand, the marketing associated to it - everything is about building connections and making the cash register go ding. Yes, ideally you want to also be competent and produce quality work, but a lot of people who are really good at the tech part are not necessarily good at the bringing-in-the-bacon part. Figure out how you are going to create your pipeline and the actual steps of everything you said, IE: the mechanics of what to do, will follow. Get all that going before you jump into freelancing.

I'd start by not calling myself a freelancer.

You are a business solutions architect with heavy emphasis on technology.

Happy clients are the best branding. I built my business almost exclusively on referrals, which not only filters out clients that would not be a good fit, but also provides reputational policing for agreements: The option of a client considering not to complete their side of an agreement has additional negatives due to the relationships involved. Likewise my service/product reflects on the referer, as it were, providing me another incentive to deliver massive value. And the referer gets the bonus of having been part of a successful solution.

Win-win-win.

There's a lot of great advice to be found on this page. I'll just add one thing: your location matters. If you are in places where there is a high scarcity of engineers and good economic conditions (like western europe), it's more the question of how do I select for something that's in line with my wishes and ambitions. If you are in area where there is less of an fortunate situation for engineers, the question would be more: is it possible to move or find high quality remote clients.

By specializing. I develop mostly for mobile and also work on smart contract architecture/servers for early stage startups. I don't do any "content-marketing" on LinkedIn, but just reach out to early stage startups seeing if I can help them. In my experience leads are best generated when you have a previous experience that shows to the client that you can develop the architecture/application. Then, if you sit down in an hour or two and hash out what a basic MVP would look like for them, they're confident you can deliver the product because you can explain how it would work on a technical level. Of course, that architecture will most likely change/improve as the product moves along but as long as you can show an iterative and constantly improving approach that's what matters.

Freelancing and personal brand are not necessarily helping each other. You can have an amazing personal brand with zero income, or vice versa too.

However, personal branding can help in other situations, both socially and mentally.

- Definitely not linkedin. Personal web site. Not on medium, not in some random microblogging platform.

- Blog posts can work wonders. My personal web site ranks quite well on certain SEO keywords, and they generate quite good contracts. Don't focus on SEO, and don't blog unless you know you'd enjoy it.

- My own name. My business model is to work closely with the clients. Most of my clients are quite friendly, and I buffer the technical stuff from them (such as choosing the right stack, and even AWS billing sometimes), so we can establish a good level of trust.

- I suppose it depends the type of branding you want. Unless you are doing a very nice thing, focusing onna specific trait makes you stand out and gives you a leeway to set better rates.

I was freelancing for almost 10 years, and have never set foot in an office with a regular job. I wish you all the best in your endeavors. I know first hand how difficult it can be sometimes, specially when the market is saturated. Trust takes time to build, so I would say your first few clients will take a leap of faith, to which you need to do a wonderful job back.

Clients want one thing only: A business-problem solved right now.

Clients aren't googling "JavaScript tutorial" to find a technical blog post for their specific freelance project. Clients don't care if you're on UpWork, on Toptal, or where you come from.

They usually post a job online and wait for freelancers to come to them, instead of actively searching for the "best" applicant.

Also, most clients don't ever fully go through your portfolio anyway.

They're getting blasted with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of applications. They just don't have the time.

So what can you do?

If your goal is to land a freelance project you want to quickly showcase to the client what you’re capable of creating as soon as you contact them.

The best way that I’ve found to do that is to build a series of small, understandable projects (bits of code hosted on Codepen, GitHub, JSBin, etc.) that a client can look at without much effort.

And then presenting them in a way that the client can easily understand how it helps them.

I put together a free email course of just a handful of lessons that teaches freelance web developers exactly stuff like the above...

If you're interested check it out at https://remoteleads.io/course

I would actually say personal branding is not as important early on as niche specialization. For example, you're not just a Rails developer, you're a Rails developer who specializes in building MVPs for SaaS products.

Also I wouldn't focus on content as much right now. It takes a long of time to create and market content that gets meaningful traffic and unless you do keyword research right (or get lucky), it may not even bring in people who need your services.

Instead, you need to ask yourself: where can I find people who need my services? Example: Angellist, accelerator programs, etc. And reach out to them with an idea of what you can help them build. Here's a good template for this: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer

Do not wait for them to find you because this is how the feast and famine cycle happens.

The followup question - how do you find short term (and premium pay) gigs? It seems most clients try to have you as a long term team member - with all the processes and agile bullshit.

I get all of my work from personal referrals. (3 years freelance DevOps) If you've worked as a CTO you probably know 200 people who know and respect your work. Reach out to your network and tell them you're available and what you want to focus on. I assure you, you'll be swimming in work before you know what hit you.

I got started practicing my pitch by going to a conference and telling people I met what I thought I was about. That got me ready for customer meetings. I've never talked to a potential customer who said no. Once I started, every customer has asked me to come on full-time, several customers have suggested my rate is too low. (it's about what I'd make total comp + benefits if I went back to a FAANG company full-time). I have now welcomed 4 different people to work alongside me and we're still swimming in work.

I have a shitty website I stood up in an afternoon and zero marketing budget. Forget branding, forget marketing. Use your network and practice describing the things you're passionate about. And I suppose, be passionate about things that actually create value. And then be excellent to your customers. It's a small world out there. Word gets around.

I have been consulting full time for about 8 years, mostly with NYC and SV startups. Here's what I use for branding:

- LinkedIn - Youtube channel - Udemy courses

I work through an LLC structure but my clients view me as an individual contractor, not an agency. I don't blog or incessantly tweet for exposure.

Like others mentioned, it's all about sales. I have gotten very attuned to identifying warm leads, nurturing them and closing. Because of that, I don't "spray and pray" either. Each month I contact maybe 3-5 outbound leads and on average 2-3 get back to me. From that, I close 1-2 and sub out to junior devs. Average contract value is around $40k.

You have to sell, there's no other way around it. Not only do you have to sell, you cannot be afraid to sell otherwise it will show. I enjoy the selling process, in particular the "close" - that's like hitting a game winning shot. I'm doing a sales call on Tuesday with another SV startup which I have no real bandwidth to take on. I'm doing it mostly to stay sharp and to a degree, for fun. The sales process is actually fun for me. That's how far you have to go with sales if you want to thrive as a consultant.

You didn't say what you would be doing as a freelancer. If it's something like CTO-in-a-box, the easiest path to success is a network of people who already want to employ you before you leave. In this case "personal branding" is just a good reputation with people you already know.

For example, being good friends with a few VCs may be all you need to have a very successful consulting career.

I would ask the question why is brand important? I'm assuming it is to get sales.

I cannot imagine a World without sales. I see that sales have been portrayed as some form of trickery performed by a person wearing a suit. Forget wolf of wall street. Forget the jargon. Forget Jerry Maguire for a moment. Forget psychological tricks. Let's get to basics.

Sales is an art and science of transferring feelings and solving problems.

Make Sales the centerpiece of everything in building a brand. It has a multi-fold impact.

are some key pointers:

1. Share your authentic story (this is your brand), this will help you build a brand 2. Share your unique point of view form your experiences in the past 3. Help people by solving their problems 4. Write as you speak & concise emails 5. Focus & follow-up are key to win 80% of the sales 6. Get comfortable on the phone or talking to strangers 7. Listen as much as you speak 8. Learn and iterate from every interaction

Again no tricks, no jargon. Just keep it simple. Hope this is helpful.

Good luck.

My friends in photography seem to consider this a solved problem. Granted I have no idea what the details are, but you may be able to find suitable answers by searching for what is considered a good portfolio as a photographer.

I freelanced for 5 years. No personal brand. Old website. Referrals are everything.

I recommend writing a technical book on whatever subject that most fascinates you. Choose a topic based on where your passion is, and don't worry too much about sales.

I once strapped in this branding game, and though I gain something out of it, the biggest gain is that I rediscovered myself — what I do actually really like and expert in my heart and what I think I like or being an expert.

Banding is an interesting game. But don’t start with how. Start with what. Ask yourself why you do you need to brand, and then what you can brand, and then what you really want to brand.

Persinal branding means shit next to sales skills.

Can you sell? If not, dont quit just yet. Go learn sales first.

How?

Start by reading the sales book Jordan Belfort wrote.

Then practice.

ExCTO? You're not a freelancer. You're a consultant. Full stop.

However you position yourself it comes down to trust. Can they trust you? Can they trust you'll get the job done. Use your previous work history as validation.

Write a blog, do podcasts, videos, books, something like that.

Put yourself out there.

Otherwise you will be at recruiters mercy and they usually just have crappy jobs to offer.

Maybe the same headhunter firms that can get you a permanent (higher level management) position, can get you a temporary position.

Focus on:

1) Dialing in a profitable offer 2) Building a predictable source of leads 3) Building a repeatable sales process

1 offer, 1 channel, 1 sales process

Good luck!

hi, for the Freelancer Meetup Vienna (Austria) I gave a talk about that topic. Later turned it into an article. https://medium.com/@franz.enzenhofer/positioning-for-freelan... (Medium non-paywall link). Feedback very welcome. Maybe it's the start of a book.