Many freelancers don't like to think of themselves as a brand. After all, we're selling ourselves and the services we offer, not a product, and it's a lot tougher to brand an abstract concept than it is to brand a concrete one. What makes it even more difficult is that freelancing isn't the same as owning a business. A business has a name, a logo, and a target customer in mind, and this is why I advocate approaching freelancing in the same way you would a business.
Think about how many freelancers there are around the world: probably millions, and that doesn't make it easy to stand out from the competition. Every freelancer's biggest challenge is figuring out what exactly makes them different and worth remembering. Maya Angelou said, "At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”
Sure, this quote refers more so to the way we make people feel in our interpersonal relationships, but the idea still stands that we're much more likely to remember how something made us feel than the actual information given. Successful branding then, is when your content makes your audience feel something.
What is your field of expertise?
Not just what you do, but within what you do, is there a particular field you specialize in? If you're a writer, are you a copywriter and/or a content writer? What fields do you have the most experience writing for? Health & fitness? Science? B2B/marketing? Naturally a copywriter for law firms will want his or her brand portrayed more formally than a blog post writer for personal trainers.
It's easy to create a website and social media pages and start posting pictures and statuses all willy-nilly, but nobody is going to remember you if there's no consistency in your content. It's kind of like walking into Forever 21: there is so much going on and there are so many different styles and options that it's overwhelming, and chances are you probably won't remember any particular item of clothing after you've left.
Knowing specifically which niche you want to fill doesn't mean you can't occasionally do work in other areas (if you're a sports writer, you can still write serious political pieces here and there), it just helps you to maintain a consistent image that will stick in your potential customers' minds much more effectively.
What makes you unique?
Maybe it's your education, or maybe it's another talent you have outside of your freelancing career. Combining talents is a great way to ensure individuality because what are the chances every other freelancer in your field has that same combination of skills. For example, if you're a website developer but you also speak 4 languages, there's an opportunity to offer your services in each language. Or, if you have a law degree but you're also a skilled illustrator, combine those two completely unrelated talents in a way that would appeal to your target customer in order to stand out.
Whatever it is that makes you different, I say play it up because if everyone were to follow the same rules and post the same content and speak to their customers in the same way, your competition would be a lot more saturated, and the people looking to hire your services would have a much harder time choosing the right freelancer for them.
How do you want your (potential) clients to feel?
As I said, the feeling your content evokes is what will make you memorable to potential clients. They might not need your services now, but if seeing something you've posted intrigues them or make them laugh, they're much more likely to remember you.
Make a list of a few words you want associated with your brand image, and before you upload a new picture or write a blog post, make sure you can actually associate the content with those words.
I chose to have my content convey feelings of minimalism, simplicity, straightforwardness, and darkness (both in colour, as opposed to peppy/bright, and in my dry sense of humour). With a clear idea of the feeling you want to evoke through your content, you don't have to stick to only posting business-related content, you have a little more freedom within the boundaries of those set words.
What causes are important to you?
Of course, you don't want to focus too much of your content on the causes that are important to you, but occasionally voicing your opinion and bringing up the things you care about makes you more relatable and less mechanical. Especially nowadays when so many business don't even operate face-to-face. When your causes align with your brand image, posting content related to these causes comes across as organic as opposed to a PR stunt, and allows your audience to feel like they're getting to know YOU, not just your business.