The Daily Freelancer: April 17, 2020 — To (Personal) Brand or Not to Brand
It’s a question I’ve Googled, so hopefully this will be helpful to you. Then again, it’s a little specific to my life, so it may not be. But here you go anyhow!
When you’re starting your freelance business, do you do it under your own name? Or should you create a freelance “entity” for yourself? If you already do something different in one area, should you keep your freelance work separate? Do you segment?
I’ve been writing for a while. I started my first website in the late 1990s (Geocities!) and since then have been blogging or writing under my name, Jessica A. Kent. At the core I’m a fiction writer, so my personal website always focused around that — showcasing my portfolio of stories with the intention of it being an author site some day. I haven’t set up a blog on it, nor does it really get traffic. I have all my own personal social media, and use it as that: personal social media.
Then, in 2012, I started the Boston Book Blog, a website dedicated to covering the local literary community. I got the URL and social media handles, and began scaling it, to where I’m working on it every day, have almost 3000 followers on Twitter (hey, not bad for a super niche market), almost 1000 on Instagram (started two years ago), and get a couple hundred unique visitors a week at the website.
So that’s two: I was maintaining my personal online presence and my Boston Book Blog online presence.
So when it came time to establish a professional, business-oriented freelance presence, what were my options? If I turned my personal brand into my business brand, it would eclipse my fiction writing and the other stuff I do. Not to mention that I’ve used my social media as my personal social media for a while. My freelance work would be like my Boston Book Blog work — another project, but not me.
So I came up with starting my freelance business under the name Comma & Copy. (Get it? I’m a writer and editor, so I work with commas and copy!) I had seen some other freelancers brand under a business name that didn’t include their personal name, so I gave it a try. I snatched up the URL and the social media handles, and build the website intending to scale up my freelancing writing, content creation, and digital marketing business under that brand.
So that’s three.
(But there was content that I wanted to write that fell between the segments, so I started a Medium blog to capture those. So that’s, uh, four?)
But then who knows what Comma & Copy is? I changed it to Kent Content for a while, then back to Comma & Copy. But there were a few inherent issues I ran in to:
I didn’t have my name attached to it, so would it be viewed as a business? An agency? Who would know that it was me, Jessica A. Kent, doing it?
I was segmented. I do my Boston Book Blog content, but could only do writing, content creation, and marketing stuff over on Comma & Copy. What about stuff that falls across my segments? What about the other parts of me? (Medium? Start a personal blog? Pitch out?)
What about LinkedIn? I was still going to be Jessica A. Kent the freelance writer on there, not Comma & Copy. Same with Upwork. I found that I was pointing people towards my personal homepage on these sites, rather than Comma & Copy, because I had more of my work on my personal site.
I wanted to use Comma & Copy to drum up business, and geared the website as such, but I’m not at the point yet of using my website as a business site.
Ultimately, I would have to create a whole other brand for Comma & Copy and scale that up. I had just done that with the Boston Book Blog over the course of eight years, and I really didn’t want to scale up another brand. I was finding that on a daily basis, I was creating content for the Boston Book Blog, and working on my creative writing, and then had to create a third stream of content — and I’d hit the wall every time.
Ultimately, I’m a writer, and while I write things that appeal to different audiences, I’m still writing as Jessica A. Kent. So this past week, I collected my disparate blog posts from Comma & Copy and Medium (and plan to from another blog as well), and placed them here, on my personal site. And it felt RIGHT. I could create content hitting different parts of my interests, but would draw people around my personal brand: writer, content creator, book nerd, with stuff to say. And I think that will help brand me better as a professional freelance writer in the long run as well.
Hi! I’m Jessica, and I can write your content. Head to my Writer for Hire page, and work with me today!