freelancer – Pawjourr | Blog contributors

There are millions of freelancers out there who are just as ready as you to take on what comes their way. And here comes the dreadful question, “What makes you special?” Then comes the spiraling of coming up with a list of reasons that makes you… you.

Building your personal branding can be intimidating and confusing when you don’t know where to begin. But you’re in luck! Here’s a guide to how you can boost your own branding — simplified of course.

Find A Niche & Create Your Mission Statement

Personal branding is for everybody. However, oftentimes creators are too focused on becoming “everything” and “everyone”. The first step to making unique branding is to find your key message.

What type of content are you creating?
What do you want people to know about you?
What do you plan to achieve by creating such content?

“I want to recommend products, especially brands that I trust, to help hoomans out there!” – @Benjithechicky, content creator with Pawjourr

It might seem strange to craft a statement, but it helps to keep you focused on what makes your brand stand out among others.

Networking & Partnerships

Embrace networking. Building partnerships and reaching out to brands is a key indicator that you’re ready to take your brand to the next level. Partnerships tend to form when brands reach out for collaborations, but who’s to stop you from contacting them

Some key questions that you should answer in your brand pitch are:

Why should brands work with you?
What can you offer them?

Besides collaborating with brands, you should also partner with other freelancers out there. Remember, expanding your network leads to a larger reach. Reaching a larger audience helps to make your brand much more recognizable.

Additionally, having personalized merchandise helps your associates to remember you and your brand better. Just starting your freelance journey and don’t have the budget for it? Well, you can always start small with budget-friendly merchandise like postcards and stickers!

SingaPrinting, an online custom sticker printing provider here in Singapore, offers a variety of products for branding needs. This one-stop shop offers stickers, labels, hang tags, and many more, suitable for marketing, events, special promotions — you name it!

With their affordable prices and an array of options, you’re bound to find excitement in expressing your unique style and personality through your very own merchandise. Check them out today!

Don’t Follow Cookie-Cutter Solutions

It can be tempting to jump on trend, and replicate what others are doing, all for the sake of going viral. But before you jump on the bandwagon, consider how the content might impact your brand and image.

If you’re planning to leverage visuals for your feed or websites, avoid using existing templates. Unless you’re starting your freelance journey, we highly advise against using commonly found templates that make your branding just like many others out there.

Alternatively, you can use these templates as references or the basis of your final design. It’s important to come up with a distinct style so that brands are able to form a unique impression of your service/skill. You don’t need to be skilled to come up with eye-catching designs. All you need is to showcase your personality and just have fun!

Things you should keep in mind

There are no hard rules to being a freelancer. As the name suggests, it should be liberating and invigorating. Don’t be afraid to try out various ventures when you’re just starting out. Explore to find what fits you and your brand, and never stop developing your personal brand!

We all click photos of our pets and pamper them with our love. Occasionally, we also post some cuteness-overloaded pictures for all to enjoy across social media platforms. Generally, images and videos of pets garner greater attention. Have you ever considered making a career using this natural attention that your pet receives?

Like all content creators, a pet influencer must have a recognizable personality. Our pets cannot talk to us, but they have quirks and traits that differentiate them from others. We should emphasize characteristics that make them weird, fun, and lovable. We all talk to our pets and imagine a reply they would give us in our heads. Put that out for the public to enjoy and create a consistent persona with our pet’s characteristics.

Grow Your Skills And Followers

A full-time job requires investment. Therefore, planning to be a pet influencer’s parent will require time, money, and dedication. Social media is filled with influencers coming up with new content ideas every other day. To stand out, we need to polish our skills and methods.

Tripods are important : Smartphones can take decent images and videos to get us started with our pet influencer account. But, to grow our social media account into a full-time hustle, pet videos and pictures must be high in quality. Therefore, we must invest in equipment like lights, cameras, tripods, and stabilizers.

Photography and Cinematography Skills

Proper equipment can only alleviate our images and videos to a certain extent. However, truly bringing the best out of our pets requires learning new skills and techniques. We should practice taking pictures of our pets and try to improve upon them.

Photography and cinematography courses are readily available across the internet, and they can help us understand the minute details that are too complicated for a casual hobbyist. For example, how to utilize natural and artificial light in our photos and videos, use tripods and stabilizers, the correct camera setting depending on the environment, etc.

Followers

With a unique personality, the proper equipment, and the necessary skills, we can start building a fanbase. Consistency is required when it comes to social media following. Utilizing photographs, videos, stories, shorts, reels, and live features of a platform is necessary to maintain consistency. To be consistent on instagram, you can use an Instagram reel maker to create posts quickly and easily.

Using stories and comment sections, we should interact with the pages and accounts of different pet influencers to attract followers of our own. We can also use hashtags to increase the visibility of our pet influencer content.

Start Monetizing

Once we have built up a loyal fanbase of a considerable amount, say 10,000 followers, we should start looking for sponsors relevant to the page. Like all other businesses, influencer management is also dependent upon networking. Some brands might approach us themselves for paid promotions , but we should also prepare ourselves to pitch our business to the brands.

What to Pitch?

It is important to define clear goals and requirements. While brands usually engage in paid sponsorships, some might offer an exchange of products and/or services, and some offer a mixture. Receiving perks like a day at a pet spa or free access to toys and other goodies is lucrative. But we should always assess the worth of our page and quote a fair price.

Firstly, we should get a rough idea from other social media accounts. Brands that usually sponsor those accounts will be interested in our social media page.

Next, approaching brands via email is the best method. We should highlight to the sponsor that our pet regularly uses and loves their products. Mentioning the natural, strong growth of our pet influencer account is necessary. It will help us ask for a price that we think is fair.

And finally, we should stay in our domain. Reaching sponsors that are relevant to our pets is very important. Endorsing a dog skincare product if our pet is a Persian cat makes little sense.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing can help us earn a good amount of money. It is a referral program where a retailer pays us commissions for every purchase made using our affiliate link. We need to divert traffic from our social media page to the retailer site to earn money. For example, if we have a YouTube Petfluencer account, we can make youtube videos and put a link in description to promote affiliate products.

Joining the correct affiliate merchant can be a tricky part. Some merchants provide better commissions, sales, and bonuses over others. We should do proper research before partnering with a merchant.

Promoting products we vouch for is a healthy way to gain the trust of our followers. But it is not always the case. We can promote products we have not personally used if we are assured of their quality. Moreover, affiliates and sponsored posts should be mandatorily disclosed, and we should follow all the guidelines.

Merch is Cute and Profitable

Thanks to our lovable pets’ unique personalities and fan following, merchandise will sell like hotcakes. Physical products with cute designs and photos of our pets can be sold at merchant websites that act like affiliates.

These merchants stock up on socks, shirts, t-shirts, hoodies, and even pillows. They are direct-to-print merchants that print a design only after an order is placed. Therefore, inventory management is a non-issue. They are the ones who build websites for our products; we only need to design and promote them. Instagram is a great platform to promote merchandise. To create some engaging stories with minimal effort, you can use some prebuilt Instagram story templates.

Wrapping Up

While being a pet influencer parent is a full-time job, it is one of the most rewarding and fun career paths. However, it can be difficult to make a living from it. Earnings come from sponsors, affiliates, and merch only after we have built our brand using interesting content. Interactive social media filters, apps, and tools like Instagram reel makers to produce content on the go. All this can be done alongside having fun with our pets!