Get consistent so you're memorable.

We're covering your color palette, brand journey, and more.

Branding, at its core, is just about creating an association in the minds of your leads. A link between what they know (themes, values, products, outcomes) and what they don’t yet know (you and your product).

It’s that simple. And with solopreneurs, you make things muddy if you overcomplicate things.

The aesthetics of branding are super seductive—logos, colors, fonts— but these aren’t the elements that will make or break your business. Particularly in the early stages.

I remember gathering up a bouquet of cute colors, picking out stock photos, finding a cool vector of a queen chess piece for a logo, then patting myself on the back for coming up with such classy “branding.”

Problem was, it didn’t actually support my brand.

The colors were pretty, but they were hard to read when I used one as the text color and one as the background.

And the “logo” gave me some consistency – but not where I needed it (ahem, my client experience).

Branding’s way more important for the basics that support your growth and client engagement.

Plus, many of the branding elements you think you need will naturally emerge as you consistently work within your niche and engage with clients.

For example, I had a mentor who quickly scaled his business to five-figure months without any traditional branding—no logo, no color palette, no “brand message,” not even a website.

His aesthetic (if he even had one) was a black tee shirt and a backwards baseball cap.

What he DID have was consistency and a clear, relaxed approach to his work.

His offers were high-ticket, and his business decisions were driven by simplicity and premium service delivery.

For instance, he’d skip on building a website because he was finding clients fine without it. Yet he didn’t hesitate to drop money on transcription services that let him dictate his writing instead of typing it out.

His branding wasn’t built on visuals. It was based on strong associations with marketing, simplicity, and premium quality.

Those themes made it super easy to add upgrades and premium touches as he scaled.

Ironically, this twenty-something backwards baseball cap dude has a more potent brand than those who’d invested heavily in perfecting their visual identity. He’s built a strong association between what he does (marketing) and how he does it (simple & premium).

Was it because he “decided” those elements when he “built his brand message?” Yeah, no. He would never.

They showed up organically as he ruthlessly focused on making money as efficiently as possible. Those associations baked themselves into his messaging and client experience. And into my coachee experience.

Much of your brand’s identity will reveal itself through your consistency and the value you deliver. And I want this blog to give you a shortcut to starting off strong.

I spent a ton of time on branding in the beginning of my business, but not in a way that turned out to be useful.

I want only the useful stuff for you. That’s why this blog covers:

Your brand elevator pitch (which naturally packs in a bunch of core brand components, and is insanely practical for outreach & copy)
Your brand experience (brand operations that give you consistency and your clients confidence in you)
Your brand visuals (colors, fonts, the stuff that is great to have as a reference so your online presence isn’t a total mixed bag)

And to make this even easier, I’ll introduce you to Bree, a GPT chatbot I trained to help you build your brand basics kit. Have a conversation with Bree, and she’ll guide you through creating all those brand foundation.

You can have a robust (and actually useful) brand kit by the end of the day.

1. More Than Simple – Keeping It Essential

Trying to curate the perfect branding early is one of the most fun ways to procrastinate what you actually need to do to move the biz forward.

Why do boring cold emails when you could be pouring over a Pinterest board?

At this stage, basic branding can be incredibly valuable, but only if it's making your client acquisition and client experience more efficient.

Could you tell me what Chick-fil-A’s exact branding strategy looks like? Probably not.

But you could probably recognize it if you saw billboards of illiterate cows begging for their lives (client acquisition), and you received your food to a “my pleasure” greeting (client experience).

Think of basic branding like picking out a sensible signature outfit. It’s about having something you can rely on daily.

You know you’ll upgrade over time, but for now, this outfit saves you from decision fatigue and helps you stay focused on what matters most—growing your business.

Over-branding in the early stages is like spending money on getting your car detailed — when what you really need is gas. A lot of brand elements, like a brand voice guide and icons, aren’t useful until you’re delegating, and team members need a more in-depth reference.

For a solopreneur, the focus should be on branding elements that support your immediate goals: clarity, consistency, and client engagement.

It lets you concentrate on delivering value and testing your offers. After 5 years in the biz of copywriting/marketing, that’s what I’ve found to truly be essential.

As you gain more experience and feedback, your branding will naturally evolve. Plus, the organic growth tends to make your brand feel more authentic and become more aligned with your business’s actual needs.

2. Creating Consistency (Why We Care About Branding At All)

Branding is not a magic wand that attracts premium clients. Seducing clients with an aesthetic isn’t the most sustainable mode of client acquisition if you’re a freelance copywriter/marketer.

Your brand’s reputation is more influenced by your integrity and consistency than by any visual element or clever tagline. Especially in the beginning.

People driving in the American south (where I’m at) love stopping at Buccee’s gas stations. Is it because I love getting road snacks with a beaver logo (branding visuals), or I want a million slushy options (unique selling point)? Those are cool, but no.

People love those gas stations because their bathrooms are always clean. That’s integrity and consistency.

Buccee’s has absolutely wild billboards. Things like “Potty Like a Rockstar” and “You Can Hold It.” But my very favorite (and some of the cleverest marketing I’ve seen) is the one that says–

Top 2 reasons to stop at Buccee’s:

So what does that kind of branding look like for us entrepreneurs?

Clarity in your offers. Talking about your offers over and over. Delivering your offers in the same quality SOP, over and over.

We’ll cover how to tactically do that in the next section.

So what’s Buccee’s brand voice, brand message, brand values, brand fonts? Who cares? We’re here for the bathrooms.

That’s why trying to nail down your brand voice too early can be counterproductive. It’s like getting a custom pair of jeans made for your future self—you don’t know how you’ll change or what will suit you best as your business grows. You need something that works for right now.

Same with the branding. Pull together something that works well now (so you’re not totally directionless) then refine it over time based on real-world feedback.

3. Your Brand Elevator Pitch: a Whole Stack of Brand Elements

I know I started entrepreneur-ing to give myself the freedom to actually scale my income and time freedom (I was an RN through the Covid year. Enough said.)

But for as tough as it was being a corporate cog, it’s still really tough being a one man show.

So how was I going to cut through the internet noise as some rando sitting on her couch with a laptop?

I remember the moment it clicked. I was at a mastermind where the session was on creating your brand’s elevator pitch. A surprisingly tough exercise, since there was no room for fluff.

But that’s what made it so powerful – the brand elevator pitch was essentially a raw sandwich of your brand offer, unique selling point, target audience, and brand promise.

It’s a statement that answers three crucial questions:

What do you offer?
Who is it for?
Why should they care?

You can use it in your copy on your website. Social media banners. Discovery calls. When you’re out and about talking to people about what you do. It’s insanely versatile.

And since it’s the first impression your leads will get of you, it does a lot of heavy lifting for your brand.

Here’s the formula:

“[Business name/You] offers/does [product and/or service].

We help [ideal customer] [avoid pain point] so they can [deep desire].”

That’s it. But it covers several brand essentials in one place:

Brand Positioning. What the heck do you even do that’s so special? It’s elementary, but think about the buildings or websites you’ve come across that feel professional – but you have no idea what they sell.
What would you think if you say the elevator pitch: “We’re committed to equipping female-owned small businesses so they can market themselves successfully.” Cool, so is it copywriting? An ad agency? A warehouse of blazers?
A solid elevator pitch is a great tool for taking out the corporate-ese and bringing it down to earth. Like, “I write email copy for personal fitness trainers so they can stop having launches flop and instead build a list that’s thrilled to pre-buy whenever a new product is dropped.”

Target Audience. Your ideal client should know you’re talking to them. Not whatever generic client will hire you. Targeting specific people (and leaving others out) tells them that you target specific problems. You know, the ones so relevant to those ideal clients that they’d pay you to fix them.

Brand Promise. You’re clarifying the Big Relief from the get-go. The pain point. People don’t buy stuff as much as they buy relief from frustrations and problems. You’re connecting the dots for them with the [deep desire] section.

So once you’ve got your killer brand elevator pitch, you’ve basically clarified yourself. That puts you ahead of every business that’s getting lost curating the perfect brand kit!

4. Your Brand Journey – Clients Never Forget How You Made Them Feel

This is an unconventional branding take. But your client’s experience working with you is a MAJOR component of your brand.

After all, we can talk about brand values, brand messaging, brand purpose…but the client experience is where they all show up.

That mentor from earlier? I doubt he had a whiteboard that said “My brand values: simplicity and premium service.” But those certainly showed up in how he closed people on 50K services right on the call, no formal proposal (does it get simpler/more premium than that?).

So instead of gazing at our navels and crafting fancy statements for our brand – let’s just turn the client journey into a standard operating procedure (SOP) we can continue to improve over time.

From my experience, there’s 3 main parts of your client experience:

Onboarding
Communication during the project
Offboarding (delivering the product and communication afterwards)

We could add the client acquisition process, where the client is more of a lead at that point. I’ll talk about that in its own blog.

Onboarding

What’s the steps you and a client go through to get things set up pre-project?

Right now, for me, I have a discovery call where I feel out whether they’re a good fit for my offer. Then I pitch’em. I tell them what they get, what the process looks like, and what it’ll do for them.

If they’re on board, I ask if there’s any reason they couldn’t sign a contract and pay the deposit today. If they’re ready to roll, I gather needed info for the contract and send the contract via a Honeybooks email, which also includes a payment link (Stripe) and a rehash of the call and what they can expect next.

I often have this all pre-drafted before the call so I’m not spending hours afterwards getting my poop in a group.

Project communication

Do you send updates? Do you need anything from THEM during the process? And when?

When my work was more with blogs and websites, I made the mistake of going radio silent until my work was delivered and I needed their edit requests. I figured that telling them I’d get back to them in a week was fine. I was being low maintenance, right?

In hindsight, I wish I sent a quick mid-week update to feel like a quick win for them (and to remind them I’d need their edit requests within a week after delivering the first draft).

I believe this would have kept clients from feeling so antsy about having deadlines met. And helped them get their edits in on time.

Offboarding

How do you like to deliver your stuff? Do you follow up, and when?

You’ve got a ton of goodwill and momentum at this juncture. I love delivering stuff via a link in an email. I tell them whatever they need to know, and I include a Loom video where I walk through their actual deliverable.

Right now, I’m also adding follow-up checkpoints to see how things are going. And to see if they need anything else! That’s bonus work.

Standardizing these client experiences does SO much to strengthen your brand. It lets you stop reinventing the wheel and give you something to reference when you forget what to do next.

It gives you expectations you can share with the client – and as you fulfill them, it builds their trust and satisfaction.

Plus, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Just write down what you do for each part in a Google Doc.

List the relevant software you use.
Include links to where you set up contracts, arrange payment, etc.
Update it if certain tweaks make the process better for you and your client.

This is the kind of thing that’s amazingly helpful to have as a reference when you bring a VA on board.

What’s also great is that as you refine your SOPs, your brand values, purpose, and messaging organically come through. Instead of trying to come up with them at the beginning, they’ll float to the surface.

That’s how I discovered mine. Another mentor listened to my process, and mentioned “It sounds like ease and integrity are really important to how you work.”

She was right. It clicked. Those were my brand values, and the services I offered were to give my clients ease and integrity in their organic marketing (brand purpose).

5. Your Brand Identity – It’s Easy to Avoid Looking Like a Mess

This is the stuff that *feels* like real branding. Color palette, fonts, imagery, logos, etc. It’s more of the outfit you wear. It’s not the thing that sells people on your product, but it sure can help.

I come from a family that has very intense opinions on design. Kerning was a household term (it’s the spacing between letters).

It boils down to making your look clear, consistent, and not distraction.

You don’t want text that’s hard to read (either by color issues or funky fonts)
You don’t want stuff that’s not relevant or implies something different than what you want (like having too much going on visually, or having a logo that looks like you offer a different service)

Clear and representative. That’s all.

From my experience:

Your color palette needs to have the margin for text to be readable. A cool stack of colors isn’t going to help if you can hardly read any combo of text/background. A primary, secondary, accent, light neutral, and dark neutral will have you well taken care of.

Your fonts need to pair well and be readable. 2-4 is fine. A serif font for titles and sans serif font for the body text will put you way ahead of your peers. Make sure both are legible when you look at them on a phone.

Your logo isn’t super important, but if you opt for one from Canva or something (it can be nice to stick on contracts, websites, whatever), make it clear enough to see as a teeny thumbnail. Don’t add loads of words or make the lines too thin. Simple is your friend. That’s why I’ve got a queen chess piece.

Your images (photography, icons) aren’t going to launch you into a pile of premium clients if it's good – but if they suck, it can deter them. Don’t get complicated with this. You do not have to go on Canva and pick out a bunch of cool stuff that feels on brand. The best look with the lowest budget I’ve seen for streamlining your brand look is getting a single photography session from a BRAND photographer. The editing and elements are naturally cohesive. You’ll have options across the board. It’s also a bunch of fun.

But don’t forget. Using default colors, default text, and a great selfie also work great for your brand visuals.

But what if you DO want these elements – but you’re overwhelmed? Hang tight, I made a chatbot that’ll handle it for you.

Brand = Reputation.

Branding For a Solopreneur is Nailing Down Integrity.

Basic branding is like picking out a signature outfit—it’s practical, saves you time, and helps people recognize you. And you’ll naturally gravitate to most elements, you don’t have to build it all from the ground up.

You don’t need to overcomplicate it in the beginning. A strong elevator pitch, quality SOPs, and solid visuals, you can create branding that serves you well now and gives you room to grow.

Remember, your brand won’t land you the gig or guarantee success, but it will help maintain your impression when you’re not there. Your integrity, consistency, and the experience you deliver will have a louder, more positive impact on your brand’s reputation than any logo or color scheme.

As you continue to grow, many of the branding elements you think you need now will naturally come to the surface through your work and client interactions. Stay focused on what matters: delivering value and being consistent.

To help you get started, I’m introducing Bree, a GPT-powered chatbot that can assist you in building your brand basics kit.

Those three essentials we talked about? She covers that with you in a conversation. Brand elevator pitch, brand journey, and brand identity basics.

Bree will guide you through crafting your elevator pitch, defining your brand’s core elements, and ensuring your branding is practical and effective. Whether you’re just starting out or refining your existing brand, Bree will help you stay on track without getting lost in the details.

Drop your email and I’ll get you connected.