Guide to Creating A Brand Manifesto for Freelancers, Entrepeneurs and Bloggers

Connecting to Your Brand as a Freelancer, Entrepreneur or Creative

Everyone deserves to follow their dream. And if your dream involves going your own way and creating a business or creative project, you’re often expected, right from the very start, to be highly-skilled in every facet of business, marketing, web design and everything in between, and that includes knowing what your ‘brand’ is. Even if all you really want to do is design earrings or teach yoga classes online.

Over at The Light Studio, we want to help make your dreams doable! So as our first free download (more to come!), we’re offering a guide to creating your very own brand manifesto to help you connect deeply to this thing you just know you gotta do.

What is a brand?

The word ‘brand’ is thrown around a lot these days and it has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. Some would say it’s your logo, the way you write, the colours or the style of photography you use. And, sure, a brand is made up of those things, but it’s not only that.

A brand is the overall impression a business, project, blog gives off, and it’s created subtly, bit-by-bit. It’s created through your logo, the way you write, the colours and style of photography, yep. But it’s also just naturally created through every little thing you do.

If you ask me though, I’d say your brand is the way you make people feel. I’d say it’s also the way it makes you feel. And that feeling’s usually a good one or you wouldn’t embark on all this to begin with.

But how do you know what your unique brand is? How do you connect with that feeling, your brand, and name it, unpack it, explore it, express it?

How can you figure out what your brand feels, looks, sounds like?

For me, I always felt a certain feeling working on this project, almost like a very particular frequency on a radio wave and that feeling to me was The Travelling Light. I so desperately wanted to depict this feeling in form, share it in any way I could. That feeling was everything I wanted this site and brand to represent. That feeling was all I wanted to communicate to anyone who interacted with these channels.

Luckily I had a background in marketing and business to guide me in how to somehow translate that feeling into something tangible.

I spent weeks in 2013, when I started this site, trying to get this feeling into words, pictures, fonts, concepts, photography styles. I spent so much time imagining who I would be creating this for and why they would find it useful or special, how I could delight and surprise them, creating website mock-ups, story ideas.

And I think strengthening all this, taking the time to imagine all this and set it out in stone helped clarify the meaning, for me and for the people I wanted to reach.

Our Create Your Own Brand Manifesto Workbook gives you a framework to explore your own brand, feeling, what it looks like, sounds like, who it’s for, why you’re doing it.

How can you stay connected to your brand?

A mentoring client I’ve been working with (info on mentoring with The Light Studio here) over the last few months asked me something important recently in an email. She asked ‘How can I stay motivated and inspired to keep going (with her blog)?’.

I knew exactly how she felt. Often it takes long periods of consistency – and that has certainly been the case for me – to start making connections, sales, headway in any project, even if Instagram makes it look like everyone’s an overnight success story with a Vogue feature.

The journey to independently-directed work is a challenging one. Not just practically, but also mentally, emotionally, spiritually. There’ll be days when you feel like you don’t remember why you’re doing this. There’ll be days when you feel like no one cares, like you’re shouting in an empty room.

To keep it all up, the energy, the effort, over the months and years, I think it has a lot to do with staying connected to your brand, that unique feeling, your why (you’re doing it), who (you’re doing it for) and what (you’re actually doing). But finding this connection can feel out of reach at times.

For those moments, when you need to connect with the feeling, a brand manifesto is your best friend.

And if this is just the beginning for you and this brand, this is a great framework to dive in and start making things more real and tangible.

A brand manifesto can be just the thing to lift you up to that golden feeling you get when you think about your dream project or business, and can help you to translate it into whatever you do so everyone else can feel it too.

Free Create Your Own Brand Manifesto Workbook

We created this free workbook so you can create your own brand manifesto and easily connect to the unique light of your brand whenever you need to.

Sign up below to receive the link to download the workbook as well as emails from us with creative lessons, links and tools, marketing and social media advice and more free resources as we create them.

CREATE YOUR MANIFESTO

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The Light Studio supports heart-connected solopreneurs + creatives to beam their unique light and make their unique gifts into their job through 1:1 mentoring. More on working with us here.