Ultimate Personal Branding For Freelance Writers (2023)

“How do I brand myself as a freelance writer?” is among the frequently asked questions by many freelancers who get in touch with us.

It indicates that freelancers rapidly realize the importance of branding as a major leap toward taking their skills to the next level.

Whether you are a newbie freelancer or have been in the business for a while, you want to explore the possibility of upping your game and the ability to charge more for your time.

The answer to this is to create a brand.

According to ContentWonk, personal branding or social media presence contributes more than 60% of growth and job opportunities for freelance writers.

Freelance writers make more money from personal branding and social media than any other methods.

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding for you as a freelancer basically involves building a unique portfolio, engaging clients, and managing the financial side of things.

Regardless of the niche, the best freelance writers you look up to today are getting great clients because of their positioning, which they achieved through personal branding.

However, there is more to these.

In the rest of this article, we will hold your hand and walk you through the know-how of building your freelance writer brand.

A good place to begin would be identifying the meaning of personal branding and exactly where it cuts ties with your freelance writing skill.

Why you should embrace personal branding as a freelance writer in 2022

A study by Entrepreneur, an online business magazine, on Statistics That Prove the Value of Personal Branding, revealed that 92% of people trust personal brands more than corporate brands.

Every client you pitch to or get referred to always wants to know what they get when working with you. This is what a personal brand helps you take care of.

Your freelance writing career is not all about personal branding, but it is a good kick-off point to find high-paying clients and scale your freelance writing business.

This is why it is important that, before we go into how to build a personal brand more efficiently, we touch on why it matters at all.

The reason why you see those your favorite top freelancers build a brand around their skill, and why you should too, is for the following reasons:

Why Personal Branding?

It makes it easier to not only project yourself as an expert in a certain writing service niche but to become one.
The writing market is highly competitive. Almost everyone with one digital skill or the other considers themselves content writers on the side. This is why clients are scared of hiring mediocre people. But personal branding increases your authenticity and uniqueness in the writers’ market.
When you build a brand image around your skill, it becomes possible to affect the public perception of the topics and trends you cover
It gives you the leverage to raise your prices and get better writing contracts.
Personal branding increases your readers’ trust in your writing such that you can build a solid, loyal audience.
All these directly connect to your success as a freelance writer in attracting clients and readers alike (depending on the nature of your writing service).

MUST READ: Secrets of the freelance tech writers with Solomon

Now that we have established the importance of branding for your skill and how it can be put into use, let’s get down to the main meat of this article.

5 personal branding tips for freelance writers that attract high-paying clients

There are some personal branding tips for freelancers that are archaic.

They used to be effective a few years back, but today, with the evolution of technology and an increasingly congested market, you don’t want to be playing catch-up.

Let’s focus on what works today.

The best way to brand yourself as a freelance writer for a stronger reputation in today’s marketplace is to pay attention to:

Your Bio description
Image across all platform
Your website/portfolio
Most importantly, your writing
Your social media presence

Let’s look at these areas one after the other.

Your Bio Description

Many writers see their Bio description on all platforms as a vacuum that needs to be filled with information on what they do and then links to their website or portfolio.

But writers who usually stand out from the crowd insert some branding elements into their bio description, and there is usually a similarity across all their social platforms.

The first part of branding for your readers and clients alike is your description on either online job sites or social media platforms.

Take a look at this:

There is nothing wrong with the bio of the writer above. However, Many prospects are seeking writers with a certain edge of personality.

Suffice to say, the writer above has less chance of landing a total stranger compared to this below:

As you can see, the writer goes an extra mile to constructively and creatively reveal their personality, and not just what they do.

That’s what branding is all about.

P.S: We’ll be developing a guide on how we helped writers construct killer Author Bio to land clients without pitching on the popular job listing sites. You’d want to subscribe to our newsletter to not miss that.

Image across all platform

What is a personal brand without an image? To brand yourself as a unique writer, you need to put your face there.

The presence of a human face increases the chances of conversion by almost a hundred percent, says research.

This is very instrumental for freelance writers’ branding. It would be best to have a headshot taken with Natural light and clean background and then uploaded on your website, social media, and email signature.

Aside from revealing the identity of who will be handling the projects of your prospect, this increases the trust and breaks the ice of dealing with a total stranger over the internet.

You don’t need to break the bank hiring a professional for a photo of you. The catch here is to dump that Avatar or sunflower image for your face to increase the trust and comfort prospects have while considering hiring you for their next project.

Your Website/portfolio

It is nearly impossible to talk about personal branding for freelancers in 2022 without mentioning the need for a customized website or portfolio.

MUST READ: How to create a freelance technical writing portfolio from scratch

A good point to begin when taking your freelance writing business to the next level is developing a hands-down website dedicated to presenting all about you and your business.

You can get a professional website developer to get this done for you at a fee, or you could look up some YouTube videos that teach how to build a simple customized website for your portfolio.

When branding your website as a freelance writer, pay attention to

The copies of the website to present your expertise
Your logo design
Colour harmony
Your credibility as a writer through your portfolio and testimonial
Your experience via your client list and guest posts

This helps clients to grasp a better picture of who you are and what you can offer.

I recommend using Contentre for creating your portfolio.

This is because the platform already has all the necessary details needed to make a killer writer portfolio, and all you’ll have to do is fill in your information.

There are also additional helpful features on Contentre that will help you in the long run regarding the freelance writing business.

Your Writing

They say that an On-Air Personality (OAP) is recognized by the voice. In the same light, a writer is recognized by his writing style.

This speaks a lot about personal branding for freelance writers because it allows you to leave a footprint on every project you’ve worked on, promotes uniqueness, and blocks out chances of plagiarism from the mediocre out there.

You want to handle a writing project with your voice. Your branding as a freelance writer concerning your writing style boils down to

The way you form your sentence
The way you convey your thoughts
Punctuation and paragraph introduction
Illustration and storytelling.

If you are a newbie freelance writer, you may not resonate well with this. But as you improve your writing and research skills, you will realize and adopt a writing style that prospects like and seek, making you stand out as a brand.

Social media presence

A few years ago, before the burst of social media, personal branding excelled without having a footprint on any social media platform.

But today, social media profiles are now the easiest and quickest way to brand yourself as a freelance writer or into any digital skill.

Thankfully, the options are endless. You don’t have to be everywhere and on all social media platforms, but gaining a stronger audience in one would do.

Popular freelance writers like Kirsty Boden-Stuart (@kirstythewriter) on Twitter exemplify individuals leveraging social media platforms for a great cause. She shares her initial struggles as a writer and the best tools for content writers.

Well, Twitter is not the only hub where freelancers love to hang out and create their social media brand presence. Instagram is also instrumental, and the likes of K.M. Weiland (@authorkmweiland) are killing it.

Your skill is now a brand; handle it as one

Personal branding, especially for freelance writers, is not entirely about putting your profile together.

MUST READ: Technical Tutorials: How to Write Good Technical Tutorials (2023)

If you are concerned with staying afloat for the long term, you have to look at the other end of the aisle.

The ultimate purpose of personal branding is not limited to landing a new content gig, and it is also to retain clients and leave a memorable footprint of service.

Many writers have learned this hard, but you don’t have to. Here are other areas of personal branding you should not ignore as a writer.

Excellent Writing: Writing is your business, irrespective of the niche. No matter how mouth-watering or meager the job is, ensure you treat each project with excellence. You want to make sure your delivery is of consistent excellence because that is what speaks well of a brand.

Reliability: Freelance writers are accorded value when they keep their commitments and complete each project on time. You ruin your brand reputation; what you do is the opposite because it cuts the ropes that launch you to referrals and recommendations.

Customer Service: Every company strives to have a 24/7 customer service and chat feature that makes it possible for their clients to communicate with them directly. Emulate this in your freelance writing business by building yourself as a problem-solver who puts customer needs first.

Summary

You may have the liberty to work and earn from anywhere in the world and at your own pace as a freelance writer, but you are running a business.

Personal branding can never be thrashed for digital skills like this because it is a strategy for building a lucrative writing career.

Meanwhile, all of what we have discussed in this article will not be possible if you are yet to identify your specialty area as a freelance writer both in service and industry.

A crucial part of personal branding is to choose your niche earlier on because being a “jack of all trades” is a red flag that prospects look out for.

Want to know how to identify your niche as a freelance writer and a profitable writing niche you can excel in as a freelancer in 2022?

I’d recommend you read out the recent article HERE.

Let us know your thoughts on personal branding in the comment section below.