Andy talks to Web and Social Media Developer John O’Nolan and Darren Fell of Crunch about the power of personal branding.
Podcast 24: Personal Branding for Freelancers & Contractors [ 29:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Andy: This is Freelance Advisor. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 24 of Freelance Advisor, brought to you by Crunch at crunch.co.uk. And in today’s episode, we’re taking a good look at personal branding.
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 24 of Freelance Advisor and today we’re looking at personal branding. I have in the studio with me, Mr Darren Fell and on the line, I have Mr John O’Nolan. Hello gentlemen.
Darren: Hello Andy, how are you?
John: Hello.
Andy: I’m very well thank you. It all started with a very interesting talk we did at the University of Westminster didn’t it, Darren?
Darren: It did, it did. I’ve been doing some seminars to help freelancers out there. The first one, of course, was my speciality, drumming up business and how to sell. So I was up at the University of Westminster, passionately marching up and down, encouraging people to get on the phone and cold call and get the sales coming in. And then, if they were involved in a big project, not to forget that they still had to sell, because they had to keep a pipeline, they had to get the right bits of software. So it reminded about all the conversations and they wanted to see the pipeline as it appeared over the year.
So I did all of that and then I realised that there was something else involved here that a lot of freelancers were forgetting. And that was personal branding. Appearing to be an expert, to be passionate, to be unique and how to do that. How to get a following in that specialisation area and get people coming to them. I mean, ultimately, these digital freelancers at the University of Westminster, wanted to know whether it actually affected them getting sales. So I had to prove how personal branding and doing it right, was going to get sales.
So I went through the whole exercise of looking into Facebook and having a fan page and the statistics on the people following you on that. Rather it’s not following you, if they’re a fan of you, they are more likely to buy from you. Looking at Twitter and all of these things. Now in order for me to do this personal branding sort of seminar, I had to learn a bit about personal branding. I know that sounds strange because I’ve done, you know, a number of businesses now, but I wanted to go and find some successful people who had created a personal brand very, very quickly. And the end result was big businesses approaching them.
Not the other way around, which was the previous seminar, cold calling, kicking down doors and, you know, trying to get the business in. This was the other way around and this so intrigued me. I’ve recently come into contact with Mr O’Nolan who’s with us now and enquired how he had been so successful as a web designer in nought to nine months. How big brands had actually called him up. Now, how on earth did this happen? So Mr O’Nolan is on the end this Skype call and probably getting a big head now, but don’t get a big head, John. The whole idea of this podcast is to chat and enquire how you did it.
You know, how you used Twitter, how you used Facebook, if Facebook was successful. How you used a site, how you used blocking, how you used interviewing your peers out there. And I think this makes for a fantastic story to all of our listeners on Freelance Advisor, as to how you successfully and very, very quickly, build up a personal brand. So much so, that big brands that you’d never be able to get in touch with in a million years, actually call you up for work. Now that’s what this is all about. So, where shall we start, Mr White?
Andy: Well I can hardly wait. I think we should ask John to tell us how he did it.
Darren: Sorry, have I built it up too much?
Andy: You’ve built it up so much, I’m bursting at the seams.
Darren: John, where shall we start?
John: I feel like you’re expecting me to have some sort of magic formula now. I’m slightly disappointed that I don’t have a concise answer like wear pink and good things will come. There’s slightly more to it than that, but yes, it’s been a roller-coaster of a year. About a year ago, I left my position at Leeds House, Leeds in-house designer and developer for an extreme sports company in Brighton. I was fed up with that, so I did, you know, I’m not going to go back and do more work for agencies. I’d been running my freelance web design stuff on the side and that’s what I ultimately want to do. So I’m going to do that full time now.
So it was a very natural kind of progression. I didn’t go into it thinking this is how business is done and this is how I’m going to follow in everyone’s footsteps and do it. I kind of felt my way along, felt well what was working for other people, learned from what they were doing. I tried to emulate them and also tried to do new stuff. And that really kind of was a learning experience along the way that just seemed to form very organically and naturally as I went along. But very exciting, I have to say. Going from, as you say, pretty much nothing, to having worked with some fairly big companies these days.
Darren: Right, okay. So John, what was the decision one? Now, for me, personal branding, you know, there’s two, there’s a big decision here, isn’t there? Should the freelancer choose their name as the brand, i.e. personal branding. Or should they go for something like, you know, I traditionally do, which obviously isn’t in the freelancing space, you know, per se. So pure360 for email, marketing and Crunch for, you know, a big accounting solution. What do you think? What’s the criteria that a freelancer out there should make the call on this? Their own name or, you know, a brand name?
John: Well I think essentially this is very personal to the individual. There isn’t a right or a wrong answer. I’ve actually been down both routes, I have a company, my web design agency. That’s a limited incorporated company. But then obviously, as you know, because I’m here, I also heavily brand myself under my own name. So I’ve done both and the one that’s really worked for me, is my personal name, rather than the company name. And I think it depends how you want to approach something.
So if you’re starting a business like an accountancy firm or an actual agency where you’re looking to have offices and employees and entertain that sort of client base, then you want to go for a company name, because that’s where you want to end. You want to scale that up, you want to have offices and that’s where you want to get to. That isn’t entirely where I want to get to. I wanted to get my name up there, get big clients working with me. You know, become recognised as somewhat of a well known name in the industry. And the path that led me down, was to on day one, to start my own blog, talking about the process.
I’ve just quit my job, I’ve gone freelance, I’m going to write about it, why don’t you come and read? And that was as much as a promotional exercise, that was an exercise for me in keeping a diary and tracking my own progress, but in a public space. And that’s turned out to be really the catalyst for everything else that followed. So I think it was an important decision.
Andy: So writing a blog was the first step for you then, was it John?
Andy: So you started off with a blog. I mean, what, if you, if someone said to you, what steps did you take to sort of help your brand, in this case, your personal brand, really take off, what would the steps be?
John: Well starting the blog, I wanted to start getting some traffic and get people reading it. I mean, no one’s going to, if you start a blog and start writing about what you do every day, no one’s going to necessarily read it. What do they care if you get up and have a cup of coffee and do some work and you’re writing about that. That’s not particularly interesting. And so I went, I started out with going for the angle of creating some really relevant and interesting content to people in my kind of community, the design community. So I had some, I approached some companies to get some software giveaways, or web design based software and said can I promote this on my blog.
Several of them were very kind to give me some free licences, so that generated some traffic. As soon as I started generating traffic, then of course, people started subscribing. That meant they started coming back and becoming regular readers. So just kind of continuing on with that. The first couple of months, I was blogging every single day, just to really build that up. It’s slowed right down now, to about once a week. But it was really important to get people interested, not directly in me, but in things on my site, to kind of pull them in and then blog about things that are more to do with me and more to do with what I was doing about.
Darren: So blogging clearly proved to be really successful. I like the fact you were interviewing, you know, peers and people who were clearly very successful, you know, in the graphic design world, web design world. You interviewed them, that obviously appeals to their ego. They want to get involved. You put the blog up and they then get involved and they’re commenting on your site. And everybody is like probably quite impressed, you know, it’s so and so on John O’Nolan’s site. He must be good. You know, obviously, he’s interviewed them, but it’s, you know, they’re then following you on Twitter.
They’re then getting involved in your site, you know, in a massive way, but I think that really, really does look to the community that’s looking at you, on your website.
John: Yes, that was probably my best first business decision in terms of actual money and leads and jobs, was to interview these other web design business owners. Because as you say, what that led to, was them promoting my site, because they said look, I’ve been interviewed and kind of tweeted up those links and had their own following come into my site and have a look. But more importantly, it established relationships with other agency owners. So in particular, when I interviewed Tony Chester, who’s the MD of a large web design agency in America called OnWired, that then led to six months down the line, he had some work that needed doing and I was the person who he thought of.
And after that, I did a lot of work with them, over a period of about six month, where they were throwing work to me very regularly, so that led to my most stable income to start off with, from initially interviewing him and establishing that relationship, moving forward.
Andy: And this really underlines, doesn’t it, this whole concept of, we hear it a lot, don’t we, in sort of modern marketing. Don’t look at people as your competitors, but instead form relationships with them and I think this is a wonderful example of that.
John: Yes definitely. And it’s fairly important, though as you say, not to think of them as competitors and just to be humble and kind of, not necessarily get in at the ground level, but to approach every person as if they could be your next biggest business contact. And you know, I’m fairly young and hot headed and the big learning curve for me over the last year has been to really hold back on getting into arguments or responding negatively to a comment or a blog post. And to really try and, every person who you meet or interact with, to try and turn that into a positive relationship.
Darren: Brilliant. I didn’t actually realise you’d actually gained a load of business from Tony Chester, that is absolutely fantastic. So almost immediately with probably a smaller following on Twitter, smaller in traffic terms to your site, you interviewed this guy. He talks about your site, and he then comes back to you with work. Was that six months later?
John: Around about that, yeah, just over that period of time.
Darren: Perfect. Now this personal branding podcast that we’re doing. I think the most interesting thing that John taught me when we interviewed, well, I interviewed him at a pub, as you do, you know, over pints, it gets more exciting, every pint you get through.
John: Every drink.
Darren: Well exactly.
Andy: And slightly more slurry.
Darren: Yeah, well, you know, you don’t worry about things like that really. The thing that I learned the most, is Twitter. Now if you think about my past and Pure360. I started up in 2001, we didn’t have Facebook then, we certainly didn’t have Twitter. We had traditional methods, traditional selling methods, traditional website. You know, Twitter just wasn’t even in existence then. So you can imagine my thinking in setting up Crunch, that how on earth could this possibly be useful for business. I don’t get it, I don’t care if a mate tweets out that he’s in the Dog and Duck, you know, with Adam. Well, unless I really want to go down and see Adam and then go and get fairly inebriated.
You know, the Twitter thing really, really didn’t make any sense to me until I started talking to you John. So I think, can you guide us through exactly what you did with, you know, your personal brand. How you built up Twitter, the techniques you used and what that’s actually meant for you. How do you use Twitter differently to what many, many people imagine Twitter is used for?
John: Indeed. Yes, Twitter is probably the biggest route of all my success interestingly. And it’s so much more than what people think of it as. They think of it as just people saying I’m having a coffee, I’m going to the shed to get a spade. It’s not that. It’s a platform where you can do anything you want. And the platform is the important part. So if nothing else, you can think of Twitter as a massive forum, full of people who are likeminded to you. You just have to look for them. There are millions and millions of them.
And you will probably find that whatever your freelance niche is, whether that be plumbing, an electrician or something like me in the digital world, you can find a whole community of people who share those interests. So the most important thing, if you’re looking to get started with Twitter, is to immediately go on and find people and follow them. If you go on Twitter and you sit there following no one and you’re just tweeting your own status updates, you’re not going to get much from it. So the thing is, follow a lot of people, not more than a hundred a day or something, because then you would exceed their limits and their terms of use.
But follow people who you are interested in. So find a whole load of people in your actual industry, follow them, follow their updates and then actually reply to them. It’s not all about you. I tweet maybe once or twice a day, to do with what I’m doing. But I tweet thirty to forty times a day, replying to what other people are doing. And that follows on with the whole establishing relationships and networking with other people who are in your community, which then does lead on to other work. And as I think we’ll probably get onto later, leads to much bigger work coming your way.
Andy: So it’s all about interacting and building up relationships I suppose, at the end of the day John, isn’t it?
John: Exactly. It’s not about you. It’s about talking back to people which is, if you are a Gary Vaynerchuk fan, that’s exactly what he’ll tell you. Stop talking, start listening. And if someone else is having a hard time with something, offer them help. Don’t offer them help if you pay me, offer them help and form that relationship. Then next time they need help with something for a client project, maybe they’ll think of you and you will get paid. But it’s a selfless form of marketing. You can’t go in there thinking it’s all about me and I want to get paid for everything I do. It’s about meeting people essentially.
And, you know, that’s traditional marketing was meeting people but more at kind of dinner parties, cocktail parties, conferences, events, going out to local things and interacting with people that way. This is the exact same thing, but just brought onto the internet instead of face to face.
Andy: Brilliant.
Darren: Okay. So John, for the people out there who are non Twitterers, explain this process. You know, so on your site one of your articles about getting, you know, a hundred people, follow a hundred people and you show a graph. And suddenly all your followers increasing massively. How does someone find a hundred people they want to follow, that will actually make a difference to your following in return?
John: It’s fairly easy actually. All you have to do. If you go to search.twitter.com, Twitter has it’s own search engine, where you can search for absolutely anything you want. And it will show you the latest people who are mentioning the words you search for. So if you were to go onto Twitter right now, you search for “web design”, it will show you everyone who has used the words “web design” on Twitter in the last thirty seconds, let alone the last hour. So right away, I see someone who says “I love web design, I can’t wait to launch this new client site.”
I know that they are also a web designer, we probably, as we share that common interest, maybe we’ll share some others. So that’s really the basis of starting to follow people, is finding that common interest, in this case of where you work or what you do. But it could also be on hobbies or anything like that. And then, you know, once you start following them, hopefully they’ll say something interesting and you’ll reply to them. If not, then you just un-follow them.
Darren: God John, what have you done? You’ve given me the access to this amazing tool. I’m just typing in, I need an accountant. Will this work for me for Crunch?
John: Oh absolutely. That’s the number one thing I’d suggest you’d be doing for Crunch. In fact, you’re crazy if you’re not doing that.
Darren: Good gracious me. Well, you know, after that interview, I learnt so much that night and I was so converted to think about using Twitter, that I got back to the office. I set up TweetDeck and I actually saw a comment from one of our customers on crunch.co.uk. And this guy had inadvertently managed to lock himself out. It’s tight security on Crunch. He couldn’t put all of his expenses in over the weekend. He was rightly annoyed. He had contacted our support department, but on the email, the auto responder hadn’t worked. But we have 24/7 telephone lines. So he, being an uber-techie, he didn’t really want to pick up the phone and deal with the support line.
So no one could help him and get the new password reset for him. So as soon as I saw this on TweetDeck, I was replying back to him, saying I’m so, so sorry. We’ve rectified the auto responder. You could have called, you know. You know, in a nice way and by the way, we’ll give you £59.50 back for a free month because, you know, for making a mess of your weekend. And he was a convert instantly. You know, the loyalty was there and I think Twitter used in a support role, is an absolutely fantastic way of engaging that business into the community. You can literally see if there’s any problems at all.
So I think that, you know, literally all of our account managers now on Crunch, have TweetDeck set up, to see exactly that thing. So if they ignore every other support way of getting hold of our team, the emails, the telephone numbers answered 24/7, everything. If they go onto Twitter, like some people do, and say, you know, is this service running slow? Are these servers slow? If that company gets back really, really fast on Twitter, they’re going to be so highly impressed. So that, you know, that one thing and within half an hour, saved one of the customers from leaving Crunch by using Twitter in the way it should be used.
Andy: I’ve heard of this kind of thing quite a bit before. I was interested John, because your business, it’s basically you, isn’t it? I don’t think you’ve got a customer service team around you. So I guess it’s a bit different to you. Have you had any experience, anything, the sort of a single person’s version of this story, if you like?
John: No, it is quite different because Twitter can be used in a number of ways for companies. It’s most relevant as support as we were just discussing. But for a freelancer or an individual, it’s not so much, you’re less likely to have someone go onto Twitter and complain about something, because you’re one person. If they need something, they’ll come straight to you. You’re not a company, so you’re not faceless, you don’t need to go and complain somewhere else, you just come to the individual. So it is different and there’s certainly, it’s a different type of use. But it still applies in terms of being there, caring, being interested, all those things.
But yes, using for companies, Twitter is highly relevant and essentially as a company, you need to go where your customers are. If your customers are talking on Facebook, that’s where you need to go. If they’re on Twitter, that’s where you need to go. It depends who your company is, what your company is and who your customers are most importantly. But you can’t just say we have a phone number and we have a support forum. You’re a customer, you will use those things. Your customers will do whatever they want. If they want to use a different platform, that’s where they’ll go.
It’s up to the company to provide amazing customer service by making sure that they are there, wherever a user mentions their name. And a great way to keep up with that, is if you have Google Alerts set up, which is a service from Google that monitors for any pages appearing on the web that mention a keyword. So you can set up a keyword of your company name and Google will ping you with an email any time your company is mentioned anywhere across the web. So you can then see if someone is complaining about my company or this forum and you can get straight in there and support them properly.
Andy: That is so powerful. I use Google Alerts, they’re absolutely fantastic.
Darren: So John, okay, so Twitter is a fantastic method and being used now. Tell us where you got to, what’s the following so far? And what the listeners really want to hear, is what’s the sales results? Who’s actually picked up the phone and called you, rather than you, you’ve been banging the, kicking the doors down, calling up, cold calling people. Who’s actually phoned you and given you business?
John: Well, the most important thing to know is that it’s not just Twitter. You can’t, in the famous words of Gary Vaynerchuk, sign up to Twitter and then shit happens. That is not it. It’s not the be all and end all. It is part of a larger strategy. So along with blogging and using Twitter and using Facebook to a certain extent, I started getting my name up there. So that meant companies, which in terms of big companies to start off with, was Ubisoft, who are the video games publisher. They found some works which I submitted, for no money. It was just a competition on smashingmagazine.com.
I submitted a typographical layout, which got to, I think about third place in the competition. They liked that. They found me on Twitter. They found my blog through Twitter. They saw all in all I was a, I hoped, well liked person in the community and decided to give me a ring based on that. Which then, further down the line, based on having Ubisoft in my portfolio and again having these presences on Twitter and other social networks, I received a call from Virgin Atlantic Airways about a month later, whose site I’ve just finished working on, which launched last week now.
Andy: How cool is that.
Darren: That is absolutely stunning. I mean obviously these are the results, I gave at the University of Westminster and everybody was like “Right, we’re now really listening.” So if you imagine me having prancing up and down in proper Professor mode, you know, really espousing the benefits of selling. To some people, there were hardcore techies in there and they don’t want to pick up the phone. Cold calling, “No please don’t make me cold call.” You know, it was really that bad. So the very thought of a method where big brands actually called you up, was fantastic. Of course, this requires so much hard effort.
And you know, John is probably making it sound very easy to all of our listeners. Yes, you know, I blinked and there was five and a half thousand people following me on Twitter and then Virgin called me up. I said hello and yes, I said I’d call them back once I had my cornflakes. No, it requires so much effort, so I think one of the caveats I was saying at the seminar, was do be careful, do be mindful of the amount of time. I think you can get so immersed can’t you John, in, you could be doing Twitter all day long. You could be on Facebook all day long. And then suddenly you look at the clock and it’s seven o’clock, you know, pm, and you’ve not done the project for the client.
So you need to be mindful of this. I mean, I think maybe as a roundup, you can tell the listeners how you’re set up. Maybe on your desk, give them an idea of how to use say Twitter and Facebook and email and interacts with all these sort of things. So you’re continually looking for leads but gauging the community as well and helping them.
John: Yeah. I mean, this method that I kind of use and other people use, isn’t for everyone. It’s definitely not. I mean, you’re right, it does sound quite easy in the way I’ve worded it and in essence, it is easy. Anyone can sign up for a Twitter account and anyone can reply to people in a friendly manner and literally just make friends. And through that, establish relationships, which can lead to business later on. Anyone can do that. That being said, I’m not going to lie. For the last year, I’ve had about on average, four to five hours sleep at night. I get up at nine, I work until usually eleven pm and I’m on Twitter that whole time. I’m working that whole time.
This is not a strategy that is light on hours. This is not cold calling from three to four pm then having a coffee and going home. This is not that at all. If you want people coming to you, then you really do have to put in the hours and it’s, like you said, it’s the least scalable business model in the world. But it does seem to work because it’s all you. But yes, you absolutely do have to put in the hours and you have to build it up. And my whole strategy is based on forming relationships with people and really just becoming friends with people. And that doesn’t happen. There is no bulk make friend option, that doesn’t happen.
You can bulk add friend on Facebook, it doesn’t mean anything, they’re just a number until you talk to someone and you know who they are and you know that they have a cat called Lucy and that cat got hit by a car and they’re very sad about it and you can relate to them. They are just a statistic. So there is no way to instantly increase your network or your number of people who you talk to. It takes time and it takes effort and you actually do have to care about the people who you’re talking to. So yes, it does take time. But it’s worth it. But going back to what you were originally asking which is how to manage it.
I have three monitors set up, so that I have one monitor for all my work and that’s only work. And then off to the sides, in my periphery if you like, I have a second monitor which runs Twitter in an app called TweetDeck which works on all platforms, Mac, PC, Linux. And that just runs off to the sides all day long. And I have about fourteen different columns of groups and search criteria that I monitor. So I’ve got everyone who I’m following in one column. Then I’ve got a list of VIP’s who I really want to follow and keep an eye on in another column. I’ve got a couple of columns which search for my company names so I can monitor my brands.
And I shove that off to the side, so if anyone says anything interesting or something that I feel I can help them with or I can reply to, then straight away, I’ll just notice that as it updates, quickly send them a reply and take some time to help them out. And in that way I integrate into my day without it kind of taking over my day, if you will.
Darren: Fantastic, perfect, perfect. Now as a final note. Anybody who’s wondering who the hell Gary Vaynerchuk is. Do you have a spelling John, so they can go and look him up? The want to see the YouTube Expo 2.0 video when he gets up on stage, don’t they? That’s the one, if they don’t still believe in personal branding after listening to this podcast, they should go and see that video shouldn’t they? So how should they search on this mad individual?
John: His surname is one that I wouldn’t even dare to attempt to spell on a podcast for fear of making myself sound like an idiot by getting it wrong.
Darren: Gary Vaynerchuk go and search and you’ll see where he originates from. His tv.wine.library.com which has made him a bit of a star out there. So we’ll leave it there.
Andy: Yeah, so that’s it then. So thank you very much John.
John: Thank you.
Andy: And thank you very, very much Darren.
Darren: Great, thank you Andy and thank you John.
Andy: Thank you for listening to Freelance Advisor. Please send questions and comments to feedback@freelanceadvisor.co.uk.
