The Freelance Mum: A flexible career guide for better work-life balance. Annie Ridout
work and effort into building a solid brand. Putting your work out into the world can be scary but don’t cave under the pressure or dilute your message or product in order to try to please everyone. Keep your vision and stay focused.
iii. Enjoy it! Brand building can be number/research heavy but it’s also meant to be fun. Don’t stress about having everything in place and completely perfect from the moment you start. Allow yourself time to learn and finesse your style as you go along and grow with your brand.
Anna Jones agrees with this organic approach, building her one-woman brand in the same way from her initial vision:
‘I had a strong idea of how my food should look – the food pics, and the style of cookbook. Especially when writing about vegetarian food, as there was less of it around at the time. And I didn’t want my stuff to be all “hemp trousers and brightly-coloured cafes”. I wanted something calm, clean and well considered. So that’s what I went for. But I’ve never had a brand person advise me, it’s been really organic. I have a group of friends and people I’ve worked with, including my sister, whose creative opinion I trust. They’re engaged in culture, art and design. So I come up with the ideas I think are right for me, that suit me, then I send that out to a limited group of people and get their opinions. That’s how the visual side has grown.’
Spreading the word
You’ve decided what work you’ll be focusing on, bought the domain, built a website, set up the social media channels. Now what? You need to launch: both online and in the ‘real world’. After all, no one will know what services you have to offer unless you tell them. If you’re a perfectionist (I’m not), you might never feel you’re ready to show the world your wares. But remember, you’re at the beginning of this journey. You will be tweaking and improving all the time. So bite the bullet, set a launch date and stick to it. Here’s how to launch as a freelancer …
i. Tell your friends
Hopefully, your friends will be engaged enough with you and your life to know that this has been bubbling up for some time. But don’t be afraid to slip it into new conversations. It can feel awkward for some people, particularly introverts – of which I’m one, I’m more comfortable asking the questions than giving the answers – but you need to learn to talk about yourself. It doesn’t need to be braggy, just saying: I’m so excited, my website’s just gone live! is likely to lead to a conversation about it all. And you’ll then be in your pal’s mind the next time someone asks her for a recommendation in your field.
ii. And your acquaintances
Facebook is a great way to put out feelers. I often have friends announcing their re-branded website, or newly launched business on Facebook. It will usually be followed with: please have a look and let me know what you think, and a request for any copy errors to be brought to their attention. Putting it out on social media like this means no one’s being put on the spot. If someone is interested in your area of work, or in you, they will have a look and give feedback. People tend to like being asked for help – and giving it. It takes so little effort on their part but could be very beneficial to you.
iii. Build excitement on social media
You’ve set up your social media handles but how do you use your channels to announce that you’ve launched? Before going live, upload a series of posts. Not too many, because people probably won’t go back through and read them all, but enough to create a profile that doesn’t look empty and boring. And then do a countdown on all of your channels. This can be a visual countdown – on Instagram and Facebook, with photos of the numbers, counting down from ten days to launch – each day, adding a caption about your business or services, or just about you. Or a written countdown on Twitter.
As an example, let’s take Emma Grant. She recently set up a brand called Binibamba, selling sheepskin rugs and buggy-liners.
On Instagram, she uploaded loads of images, ahead of the launch, so that when you visited her profile, it looked like an established brand. There were photos of the beautiful, luxurious sheepskin rugs, cute babies trialling the buggy-liners, all snuggled up, and behind the scenes shots. Emma introduced herself, and the details of her products (e.g. that they are handmade in England, and hand-cut from 100 per cent merino sheepskin. Also, that each order comes with a free 100 per cent cotton dustbag). And then she started a ‘launching soon’ countdown, getting people excited.
Using Twitter, you can put out a tweet a day, in the lead-up, building the momentum by counting down:
Only five days to go until my website is live … if you sign up to my mailing list now, you’ll be entered into a competition to win a sheepskin buggy-liner with which I’m launching my new brand.
Tomorrow the website will be up and my shop will be open. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s on the lookout for the softest, most beautiful, baby-friendly sheepskin buggy-liners …
It’s about getting people to engage with your brand before you launch. Introducing yourself and your business or services before they are available so that people are thinking: I need a piece of this; I want in.
Do a skills exchange
If you’re starting out with little or no budget, one great way to get professional help without taking out a loan is to do a skills exchange. I did this with the photographer Penny Wincer and it worked so well. I’d gone to Penny asking if she’d be able to take some headshots for me. She offered to do it for free, but I said I’d like to pay her – if not with money, then with my skills. After listening to me being interviewed on a podcast, talking about blogging and writing for the online platform, Penny said, would you be able to help me with my blog, looking at the direction I’d like to take it in and how to get there? I agreed, and after doing a photoshoot together, we had lunch and I gave Penny ideas for taking her blog forward (SEO, content strategy, pitching for related articles in nationals). You have skills that could be very useful for other people, so bear this in mind if you’re looking for help but can’t afford to pay the full price.
Switching from mum mode to work mode and back
If you start out by working when your baby or young child is napping, you’ll find yourself cramming a lot of work into a very small window of time. Just as you get really stuck into what you’re doing, you’ll hear their cries on the monitor. It can make your heart sink. Not because you don’t want to see your kid, but because working can feel like such a nice escape and to have it abruptly cut short is frustrating.
So it can then be hard to switch your mind from work back to motherhood. You will inevitably find yourself quickly rattling off an email while giving your baby their post-nap bottle, or popping on Peppa Pig for an hour so that you can finish a pitch. I think this is fine, though, don’t forget, you’re doing this to support your family, and you’ve chosen a freelance career to fit around family life. It’s not selfish, and it won’t damage them. I remember reading an article about how work and parenting should always be totally separate and then panicking, as mine were very much blended. I now realise this is OK; it’s unrealistic to aim for these two parts of your life to be completely distinct – particularly if, like me, some of your work has a family or parenting focus.
Womenswear designer Kelly Eckhardt agrees. She says that mothers need to feel comfortable