The unstoppable Mark McGuinness has a piece over at The 99 Percent called ‘Build a Business, Not Just a Client List’ that’s well worth a read for all freelancers and entrepreneurs.
He mentions me because I tend to build new projects around brand names instead of my own name. Mark is right — I do this because it creates a degree of separation from my paid client work and it becomes easier to sell projects because they’re not bound to my name. But there are two other reasons:
I don’t want to be ‘that cheesecake guy’
There’s been a boom in self-promotion chatter, spurred by ‘that wine guy’ Gary Vaynerchuk declaring a ‘Personal Brand Gold Rush’ and stressing the importance of picking a tiny niche and attaching your name to it. I think that can be a mistake.
Attaching your name to a small field might give you clarity of execution and a degree of personal fame, but these benefits come at a price: by broadcasting your identity in too narrow an arc, others will begin to attach labels to you that may prove hard to remove should you wish to reinvent yourself later on.
More critically still, I think there’s a danger that labelling yourself makes you feel obliged to deliver on a single subject alone, to the point where you’re more likely to burn out and get bored. Passion is exciting because it’s fleeting; few can sustain it on a given subject over time — just ask anyone who’s abandoned a niche blog after a year, or answered 50,000 emails about which wine goes best with salmon. Don’t force yourself down that path unless you’re pretty confident you’d be happy doing it for the rest of your life.
It’s simple: I don’t have a personal brand because I don’t want to label myself. Labels determine not just how others view you, but how you start to view yourself. I’d rather be ‘Nick Cernis’ than ‘Nick Cernis, that guy who blogs about cheesecake’. Some folks would say that I’m ‘diluting my brand’ or ‘scattering my tribe’. And that’s fine. At least I’m not the cheesecake guy.
I’d rather the stuff I made got famous
The other reason I use personal sub-brands and multiple mini sites instead of one personal brand and domain is less obvious: I’d rather people talked about the stuff I make than about me.
Getting people to talk about your products will usually do more for your bottom line than a piece pandering to your ego, however flattering it might be to see your name in pixels or print. But it goes further than that.
For me, the greatest sign of success is when the things you create are more famous than you are: it says that you’ve contributed something bigger and better than yourself to the world; that you’ve had a positive net effect on the planet; that you’ve spent your time building something that’s wonderful, beautiful, or useful; something that will outlive you and continue to improve the lives of others for years to come.
