My previous personal branding tips in Part 1 explained the rationale behind my recommendation for freelancers to put conscious effort into building a personal brand. There are plenty of benefits as I just showed! And it’s not just the number of nicknames you might get!
This time, Part 2 is a complete personal branding guide for freelancers that includes how to actually do it. And how to do it in a way that brings business!
If you’re interested in the professional opinion of someone who knows branding don’t listen to CocoLord! Instead, you might want to check out practical tips and guides written by Rachel Wells, a LinkedIn Top Voice. Here is a fresh article published in Forbes.
But if you’re like CocoLord in the sense that you have no idea about how to build a personal brand, you might want to sit down, stove your coconut upright, and start reading! Honestly, I still don’t know how to do any of this, not really, but I don’t think that the fact that thousands of people know me because of my #coconuts, coconut jokes, coconut-blunt sarcasm, and a million coconutty freelancing tips is a result of a series of coincidences!
So, here we go. This is a branding guide for those who have no idea about branding by a guy who still has no idea about branding, but has got a pretty strong one somehow. Heheh! 🙂
Branding, branding, branding
As a short summary from Part 1, the benefits of having a clear personal brand include:
- Visibility, perceived authority, and trust among your clientele and fellow freelancers
- Community leadership that allows you to pull off initiatives that require big crowds of people
- Easy recruitment, for example, finding members to join my new Upwork agency
- Easy collaboration with peers up to the point where you get more opportunities than you can handle
- Referral clients that bring you sweet inbound business
It’s worth putting effort into, isn’t it? I guarantee that it is. It’s now a little over 5 years since I reactivated my LinkedIn account, started CoachLancer, and fell out of my coconut tree in every sense of the expression.
I just couldn’t stop myself from making a little video about this… Impossible!
And things keep going even further. A simple metric is the number of my nicknames. At the time of writing Part 1, I had just over 70. Now, past 100. And they only get wackier! The latest ones include (but are not limited to):
- Cocoloco
- Cocomenace
- The coconut preacher
- Master Of All Things Coconut
- Coconut chief
- #Cocodad
- Upwork king
- King of Freelancing
But who’s counting…? Well, me, because at some point one of my friends made me take notes! 🙂 So, I probably missed the first 5-10 of them.
Anyway, let’s now look at how anyone can build a brand that beats all those who don’t have one. All that can be done without any background in branding, marketing, copywriting, or any such skills.
Step 1: Define your identity
You can’t fake it. Or technically, you could, but it would make all the branding efforts painful and you’d probably suffer from a chronic Imposter Syndrome. Not recommended!
So, first, you have to know who you are. I don’t mean something deep like “know yourself” kinds of proverbs, but simply, write down who you think you are. The professional you. Or unprofessional… but you cannot build a brand by purely joking around without delivering any value to anybody. Unless, of course, you’re a freelance comedian! 😉
Seriously, write it down so that you see it in front of you like others would. Use descriptive words about what you do and how you do it, and add a couple of words about your personality and perhaps core values too. Now, you have a keyword mess that you can stare at all day without achieving anything or you can take those words as your guideline and try to crystallize your brand. This can be done by:
- Determining your audience, i.e. the people you try to impress and reach
- Write a brand statement in a couple of well-thought-through sentences
The formula for writing your brand statement is described in an article titled ‘Three Steps to Writing a Personal Brand Statement’ by Katy Pultz.
To me, this was the simplest thing. Everything came down to one word. You know very well what it is. Coconut crystallized everything about me and what I stand for:
- Lifestyle in a tropical paradise that most freelancers dream of – but I started with it!
- Contrast to tiny peanuts that too many freelancers settle for – but not me!
- The journey self-made people must take from the ground toward the top of the coconut tree. (Peanuts grow in the ground, you know… anyone can just go pluck them.)
Step 2: Sync all your profiles
This step should be fairly easy. Once you have an idea about what your core message to your audience is, you need to make sure the outlook is consistent.
An obvious bottleneck here would be having conflicting messages on different channels, for instance:
- Your Upwork profile tells that you’re a talented freelance designer specializing in making awesome landing pages
- Your LinkedIn profile says you’re a full-time cleaner at Walmart
Any client of yours on Upwork who might want to google you would find the search result somewhat confusing.
I don’t mean all profiles need to be identical. That would be another mistake! But you shouldn’t have big gaps that your clients would need to fill with their imagination. That would turn out funny.
One thing about profiles… you need to play according to the rules of each platform. Mixing things would be yet another mistake. For instance, the banner Ignacio Alaggia created for my LinkedIn profile would never appear in any form in my Upwork profile. It has no purpose there. But it works great on LinkedIn!
My upgraded LinkedIn banner!
Remember, in Part 1, I mentioned that I totally underplayed my banner game on LinkedIn… big time! Well, now that issue has been fixed for good!
All the details… including the CocoLord medal on the chest, OMG! And I could never figure out how he got the facial expression exactly right, it’s 99% similar to what I have in my actual Upwork profile pic!
My Upwork profile pic: The original, cropped version, and how it looks in action.
(BTW, if you ever want a great caricature-style banner for yourself to stand out from the crowd in the best possible humoristic way, feel free to ping Ignacio and tell him you read about his work on CoachLancer!)
Visuals are important but that’s not everything. Remember to maintain your keywords and hashtags across your profiles. Lastly, ensure that your profile description or bio has enough similarities to tell the same main story about you even if the versions have been fitted for each platform differently.
Step 3: Content strategy
This is also something that was perfectly clear to me from the start. On Upwork, I was the tech Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Ph.D. level developer guy, and on LinkedIn, that was the basis for me to start sharing freelancing tips. They both made sense.
On Upwork, I got plenty of gigs, and once my LinkedIn got to a decent speed, that platform too started bringing me leads. The difference was interesting but perfectly logical:
- Upwork brought me plenty of primary gigs, and some freelancer followers and coachees
- LinkedIn brought me plenty of freelancer followers and coachees, and even some primary gigs
Only the weight was different but it made sense. Later, the border got fuzzier and fuzzier every year. As I moved to run an agency on Upwork, my freelancer profile there got sort of archived with ‘CocoLord’ in it. Until that, I only used it on LinkedIn. 🙂
Anyway, content strategy means that you don’t shoot every thought you’ve ever had to social media, but that you stick to the topic your brand is built on. Then, keep doing it for years until people know exactly what you stand for and who you are.
Dripify’s article ‘How to Create a LinkedIn Content Strategy’ tells you all about what things you need to take into account, but basically, you should aim to help and educate those people you’re trying to reach. Deliver a tiny bit of value in every post. Define your posting schedule according to when your target audience is likely to be active online, mix personal insights with professional expertise, and use a variety of content formats (text posts, images, videos, etc.) and styles (in-depth articles, commentaries, jokes, and memes).
Keep doing it until people start asking you questions starting with “Hey, I just wanted to thank you for all the great content you’ve been posting! I was wondering if you’d be interested in…”
There you go! Inbound business. That’s what you get when your content strategy works and it’s executed correctly.
Step 4: “Engage!”
I actually hate the word ‘engage’. Not sure why exactly. It’s perhaps the fact that when I was a kid, Star Trek: The Next Generation was the hottest sci-fi series we had on TV.
Anyway, what you need to know about engagement is that it’s a two-way street. I see some YouTube stars with millions of followers break it on LinkedIn without getting anywhere at all. Guess why? Because they “post and ghost”. Once the post is out, they start making another one. Thus, the post doesn’t get seen by many because the platforms are different!
On LinkedIn and other social media platforms, the point is to connect with people. Be social. Even slightly anti-social people like CocoLord can do it when all we actually need to do is chat with others in the comment sections of posts. Your own posts as well as the posts of others. Do it. It’s actually fun even if nobody else than the poster sees it, hahah! Even in that case, you’d get a better connection with that person.
Yes, sometimes you’d need to go one by one. And that’s fine because you create a deeper connection. That is the one thing that brings you referrals, collaboration opportunities, and all kinds of things that you would not get unless you put a little bit of effort into chatting with people. You get to know them, they get to know you.
It’s a two-way street.
Here’s an example of what could happen. I had the honor of writing one of the issues of Gabe Marusca’s The Nomad Solopreneur Letter. And Gabe is one of the eight people I thank in the acknowledgments of my freelancing guidebook. Great fun both ways. None of that would have happened if we didn’t write comments on each others’ posts now and then… for years!
That’s what true engagement means. Getting to know folks and doing things together.
Step 5: Networking
It doesn’t end with engagement and getting some inbound business via online buddies. You should also go “out there” and make yourself seen by the people you want to reach. Go where they go.
It’s easy. If you’re a techy AR/VR guy like me, you might want to visit CES (Consumer Electronics Show) or AWE (Augmented World Expo). Antony Vitillo, for instance, always writes articles and makes LinkedIn posts about every major event he visits, such as AWE 2024. Highly valuable to those who couldn’t travel to the site! And great networking value as he’s known to many from LinkedIn, which feeds into even easier networking!
Designers might want to join Red Dot Design Award events, and so on. You know what is big in your field… so, go there, meet people, and make yourself visible. This way, you don’t appear as just a name, profile pic, and a series of posts, but as a real person worth knowing IRL!
Step 6: Showcase your expertise
Steps 3-5 are essential in your path to being a recognized name in your field. The last thing is to publish something that really proves your expertise. Something in-depth that takes a lot of time to prepare. The deeper, the better.
A blog such as CoachLancer is a great way to do it. Publishing an e-book on Amazon like ‘Go Straight for Coconuts Part 1’ is another. Writing guest articles in highly esteemed forums is great too, e.g. ‘5½ Ways Upwork Helped Boost My Solopreneur Career’ that I was invited to write to launch Upwork’s new blog series.
Giving interviews, appearing in podcasts, and running webinars with major platforms to educate others (e.g. my Upwork LIVE talk ‘Charging 3-Digit Figures Per Hour And Increasing Your Value (Without Breaking A Sweat)‘)… they are all helpful on your journey to becoming a recognized thought leader.
But make sure to note that it’s not only about the numbers, for example, how many podcasts you might have been invited to as a guest. It’s about quality too. The deeper, the better. The more people yo manage to help, the better. And the more established organizations and people feature you, the “bigger” you get. Perhaps even as big as a coconut!
Step 7: Keep it going
Now, the last step might be the showstopper for some. Let’s say you make it and survive all the steps until Step 5. You’re now close to getting invited to all sorts of venues, events, and other things that would put you in Step 6. But can you keep pushing it? It might take years!
Here’s the timeline I went through:
- 2019: Started CoachLancer and reactivated LinkedIn; Little if any visibility.
- 2020: I kept it going, writing content for both those mediums; At least some visibility.
- 2021: I ventured to the Upwork Community Forum, became a Community Guru in 3 weeks, etc.; Upwork picked me up
- 2022: I got to Upwork’s blog and Upwork LIVE Talk, multiple invitations to podcasts, and my LinkedIn blew up; Huge visibility!
Podcasts? Yes, I’ve been invited to so many! But you’ve never seen one, have you? What happened is that after going through that Upwork LIVE Talk, I decided that I could just about survive running presentations with well-prepared slides that have a clear educational purpose, but I wouldn’t go join live podcasts. There are too many of them. And the podcast format is not for me. Writing is more of my thing, not talking BS in front of a camera.
Anyway, in 2022, my LinkedIn metrics showed about 1,600,000 impressions which was a very surprising figure when I learned about the value of analytics. Inbound business boomed. Later years brought me valuable connections, clients, and collaboration opportunities constantly which made all the previous 3 years absolutely worth it!
So, the question is, do you have the patience to become “big” in one forum first, then expand to others, or do you try to do multiple channels at once and perhaps risk spending an even longer time to get anywhere than me?
You can get serious about branding and get a coach to help you to go faster. Or you take each step at your “natural speed” like me, at your own pace without much pressure. Things start to happen when you keep going with the same brand long enough. The volume is a quality on its own and it comes with time.
What you can do to speed things up is:
- Learn basics of related domains, e.g. copywriting or video production
- Utilize metrics and analytics of each platform to optimize your content (built-in tools, paid products)
- Experiment with new features and trends on each platform
- Experiment with how your message is presented (update your profile, change pictures, try different writing styles, etc.)
Either way, branding is by default a long-term activity. It will pay off regardless of how many hurdles you might have along the way. And it’s definitely worth it. You will stand out from your competition when others look up to you as an educator, thought leader, role model, coach… It’s worth the effort.
Personal branding guide for freelancers: WARNING!
Lastly, a word of warning: Don’t lose yourself in your branding efforts. The more natural you can be, the easier every step gets. “Fake it until you make it” won’t work here, not in the case of freelancers. Keep in mind, that you still need to focus on your main thing, i.e. delivering great stuff to your clients.
I’m telling you this because I’ve seen someone spending so much time on social media that the freelance business started suffering. An easy way to keep yourself grounded is to set a schedule for all branding-related work. I spent many weekend mornings and afternoons writing my stuff. I made it a process that didn’t make my project work suffer.
With all these tips, it’s now up to you. Do you want to rise above the average, become visible and well-known, and beat your competitors more easily, faster, and in way more style? Then, go! Follow these steps, dig into more resources to get a “professional opinion” instead of CocoLord’s own words only, and go out there to make your name known among your clients and peers!
Best of luck! Go straight for coconuts!
