36% of the total workforce in the United States are considered to be freelance workers. This sector of the economy is only expected to grow as time goes on. 

If you are a freelancer or thinking of becoming one, it is important to build your own personal brand.

Personal branding is what separates the upper echelon of freelancers from the mediocre. But what is personal branding and how can you use it to make your endeavors more lucrative? Read on to find out.

What is a Personal Brand?

Personal branding is the process of turning yourself into a business and developing a marketing strategy that benefits your endeavors. A combination of traditional and electronic marketing strategies can be used to build your personal brand.

Social media plays a big part in the modernization of personal branding. Platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest give a user’s profile more weight based on the amount of “followers” they have accrued. 

Followers are the total amount of people who have “followed” their page. This means that they are in the individual’s informational loop. Followers are easy to target for advertisements and ideas from the influencers’ page.

“Nano-influencers” tend to have anywhere from 200-1000 followers and are the lowest end of the influencer totem-pole. True influencers have over 20,000 followers and can start to reel in some serious coin from their personal social media market.

Learning how to manipulate social media sites in your favor is one important aspect of personal branding. Read more here about lifestyle blogging with platforms such as Pinterest. 

Building a Personal Brand

There are other ways to build your personal brand in addition to utilizing social media. The first step in personal branding is to take inventory of any skills or abilities that you have that can be monetized.

Writing skills, landscaping skills, personal training skills, art skills, marketing skills, and advising skills are all examples of skills that can be monetized with ease. Next, you want to work on developing your personal image.

This includes tangible things such as your physical appearance and how you dress. It also comes down to less tangible things such as how you want to present yourself to the public online. Start thinking about creating a personal logo and style.

Next, upload photos, a short bio, your aptitudes, and work history to a web platform of your choice. Picking a platform is another important choice. Social Media websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn provide the basics of a useable platform.

At some point, you will probably want to invest in your own webpage or blog. After you have digitized your personal brand, it is time to start building your target audience. Building a client base can be a long process, but it is worthwhile.

Once you have identified your target market you can choose how you will advertise yourself to them. There are many marketing strategies available to take advantage of, so do some research and choose the one that works best for your needs.

To make your customer base grow, continue to do a good job fulfilling their needs. Then your base will snowball and self-marketing through merit-based recommendations will be your biggest market-builder. 

The ultimate form of personal branding is self-incorporation. At this point, you are officially a corporation in the eyes of the law.

Personal Brands Are the Future

Having a personal brand will continue to be more relevant as a larger chunk of the workforce continues to shift towards freelancing. Hop on the bandwagon early and get yourself ahead of the competition by building a personal brand now!

Start with one of the most fun aspects of personal branding: building your own personal logo. For all of your other news and information related to logos and business, make sure to check out the rest of our blog.