Treat your personal brand as essential business infrastructure

Howdy! This is Career Freelancer: doable strategies and actionable insights on self-employment as a sustainable, financially rewarding, and engaging career.

This one’s for the self-employed folks who are reluctant to prioritize their personal brand. I know not everyone enjoys putting themselves out there, but it’s a business imperative worth revisiting.

Your personal brand is what you’re uniquely known for professionally. It’s shaped by the work you deliver, the expertise you have, the insights you share publicly, and your relationships.

One academic paper defines a personal brand as “a unique combination of individual characteristics, which signal a certain promise to the target audience through a differentiated narrative and imagery.”

You already have a brand whether you’re actively working on it or not. The ideal state of affairs is that you’re actively steering its direction to your liking in a way that supports your business.

Most of us have the delivering quality work part down; what’s usually lacking is sharing your expertise in public forums on a consistent basis.

We’re not trying to become creators or influencers. We’re trying to communicate our subject matter expertise and track record to the people most likely to hire us.

Like investing time and effort into sales or accounting for your business, your personal brand is a non-optional, core function of a one-person operation today for three reasons.

1. Competition is increasing as more skilled workers enter the independent workforce. According to Upwork research, “58% of full-time employees say they’re considering freelancing.” A personal brand is how you distinguish yourself from the many other options on the market.

2. Trust in your capabilities is harder to earn in the AI era. That’s because many signals of credibility and competency clients once assessed, like a case study, can be exaggerated with the help of a tool. A personal brand articulating your perspective and expertise in public for the long-term is more difficult to duplicate. Years of showing up and sharing is a differentiator, so it’s time to ramp up now for the long haul.

3. AI-powered search now surfaces recommendations differently, altering the way freelancers are discovered by clients. Your activity on external websites and what others say about your expertise impact your visibility in AI search. A personal brand is how you refine your POV and publicize your thinking on different platforms to be found and hired.

In a nutshell, a personal brand helps solopreneurs be memorable, credible, and discoverable as the information ecosystem continues to evolve and becomes more fractured and complicated.

Here’s what you can do to make your personal brand a doable, routine part of your business.

A personal brand can feel nebulous. Describe your focus in a short sentence by zeroing in on the types of work you do, the clients you’re qualified to support, and the results you achieve.

It’s an exercise in clarity and focus. You’re aiming for your version of one of these brand statements:

• Award-winning Smartsheet consultant.

• Freelance writer of AEO/GEO blog content for manufacturing firms.

• Consultant for B2C healthcare brands supporting product teams in market research to unlock new revenue opportunities.

• I help startups replace ad-hoc sales processes with systems that scale.

Consider this a starting point and adapt it to what resonates with you and the market. Draw from these three categories below to define your niche. You don’t need all three; mix and match.

What types of companies do you work with? Consider including the industry, company maturity level, and/or business models you support.

• Industry: Clarify whether you work in healthcare, financial services, retail, or otherwise. You might support one industry, a few, or work at an intersection point like edtech.

• Company maturity level: Indicate if you’re best suited to support startups, small to medium-sized companies, or large enterprise firms and brands.

• Business model: Note whether you’re centered on B2B (business-to-business), B2C (business-to-consumer), B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer), B2G (business-to-government), or NPO (nonprofit organization).

Which roles and teams do you support? Identify the people you assist in the workplace based on their focus, challenges, and goals.

• Department: The divisions you must often serve and have experience in, like marketing, product, sales, human resources, operations, information technology, etc.

• Job title: The specific roles of the people you directly or indirectly impact whether they’re product managers, senior financial analysts, real estate agents, email marketing coordinators, or chief technology officers.

• Workplace tools and platforms: The systems and tools you have in-depth expertise in using to drive outcomes for individuals or companies, like Perplexity, SmartSheet, Slack, HubSpot, or Adobe Creative Cloud.

What outcomes do you consistently deliver for others? The most impactful and measurable results from your contributions. Ideally, you’re calling out no more than one or two outcomes of your work. Examples of potential outcomes:

• Identify new revenue streams

• Standardize onboarding

• Build an unforgettable professional presence at work

• Land your next role as a VP

• Generate more sales with automated drip sequences

• Attract enterprise clients with proven systems

• Reduce operating costs

• Design products that expand market share

• Improve operational workflows across teams

• Refine technical documents for error-free accuracy

• Transform “meh” ideas into market hits

That’s the gist. Build out a statement reflecting these details about your career, credibility, and contributions.

This part is about defining what you’ll share with others, all tying back to your own brand.

After you’ve drafted a statement, let’s break it down more tangibly by listing out any related themes to this focus. I like to call these themes: the flavor of the month.

The point is to cover a different flavor or theme monthly that ties back to your focus. It’s a way to organize what you’ll talk about and keep your messaging fresh for yourself and others.

For instance, let’s say your brand statement is: Ops consultant, Asana certified partner helping agencies untangle their project management chaos. If that’s the case, then you might list these as flavorful themes to consider covering later:

• Building custom integrations in Asana

• Build vs. buy work tools

• Finding operational clarity

• Unlocking team capacity

• Adding creativity to operations

• Asana use cases for agencies

The themes should address real problems your ideal customer is up against, always relate to what you offer so the link to what you’re selling is clear, and be interesting for you to cover.

Covering a different flavor per month, or at whatever cadence, ensures you’ve got a bank of ideas to pull from, allows you to test ideas, and adds variety to your messaging.

With clarity on what you’re covering, where and how often matters too.

Building familiarity and earning visibility around what you know requires sharing insights on two different destinations every week. That sounds like a lot, but doesn’t have to be.

When I say destinations, I mean channels you can commit to publishing messaging weekly like sharing on Reddit, in a Slack community, over email, on your podcast, etc.

Showing up in two destinations improves your chances of reaching the right people and helps mitigate the risk of visibility shifting on either platform.

My weekly cadence is LinkedIn posts and this newsletter on LinkedIn and Substack. Less often, usually a few times per month, I’m publishing articles on Inc and Fast Company too.

Showing up weekly is necessary today to build familiarity with the right people, increase the chances of your insights breaking through, and understand what topics resonate.

Make this more doable by finding opportunities to double dip; sorry for all the ice cream analogies. Basically, what are you already doing that can be turned into content?

As you work on client projects, document the process by taking rough notes on the challenges you’re addressing, patterns you’re seeing across clients, and unexpected outcomes. I’ve been using Wispr Flow recently to more quickly dictate my notes and thoughts for upcoming content.

Sometimes a client or a colleague in my network will ask me a question; if it’s interesting, that’s a post on LinkedIn or the central idea I’ll address in a newsletter. Of course, I anonymize it for their privacy, but it’s a topic to build off of instead of starting from scratch.

Another double dip is paying close attention to what’s performing in terms of the content you’ve previously shared and continuing to riff on the topics that have struck a nerve.

One example of this was an article I wrote for Inc Magazine on how to start a consulting practice, which I created a TikTok video and a LinkedIn post about, reaching even more people with the concept.

This is the part that often gets lost, showing up as a guest star in front of someone else’s audience. That’s either getting interviewed on a podcast, being quoted in an article, mentioned in a video, co-hosting an event, becoming a guest contributor to a newsletter, or referenced on social media. There’s more options, but those are the most common ones.

Showing up with useful insights on destinations run by others is how you gain credibility amongst the right humans (potential clients) and visibility from the robots (the AI platforms).

Publishing on your own newsletter, social channels, or website is important table stakes, but we all recognize anyone can share whatever they want today. Consensus from multiple sources is crucial today for figuring out who’s trustworthy and the expert they say they are.

That’s why showing up as a guest star elsewhere is a source of third-party proof that you’re a credible authority in your industry. When they vouch for you, whether that’s another solopreneur, an industry publication, or a relevant professional group, it’s validation of your expertise.

Showing up consistently as a guest star across multiple destinations is how the LLM’s recognize you as a reputable source on a particular subject area worth surfacing.

I recommend landing one of these opportunities once every other month, so about six times a year at least, to help build your pipeline and impact your discovery in AI search.

It’s up to you to make this happen by pitching yourself for relevant opportunities, building relationships with other folks in your industry, and showing up consistently.

For continuing longevity with self-employment, your personal brand requires equal air time amongst your client work and other business responsibilities. That’s how you achieve the sought-after trifecta of memorable, credible, and discoverable. All in the service of building a career that continues to support your life.

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