I would be completely within my rights as both a tasteless writer and purveyor of dad jokes to open this post with a Shakespeare quote.

You know the one.

…

And just like that, I don’t even need to say it.

You did it for me.

Lol loser!

In this episode, I’m going to give you my take on what you should name your freelancing writing brand.

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Read The Transcript: What To Name Your Freelance Writing Brand

Hi guys. Welcome to Write Bites, a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing and freelancing. 

In this episode, I’m going to answer the question, “What should you name your freelance business?” .

There are two typical options that most writers are considering when they are going about naming their business. 

The first option is to name it after their own personal name, like I have. If you look me up anywhere online, I’m under the Jacob McMillan brand. 

Alternatively, you can come up with your own brand name from scratch. Some examples of this include Business Casual Copywriting, Men with Pens, Copycat, Very Good Copy—anything that you can come up with. 

It doesn’t even need to have something about writing or copy in it, but if you come up with a brand from scratch, that is the other option available to you. When you’re thinking about which one of these to choose, there are some pros and cons to each one. 

That’s what we’re going to cover in this video, and I’m also going to give you my personal opinion on what I think is objectively the better choice for most copywriters.

Reasons “for” using your own name

Typically, the simplest option when you’re first launching a copywriting business is to name your brand after your own personal name. There are some significant advantages to going this route. 

The first one is that you are building your own personal brand. And the significance here is that any amount of time you spend building your own brand—building a brand attached to your name—is never truly going to be lost.

For example, if you choose to completely pivot down the road and go in an entirely different direction, you don’t lose all that work that you’ve put into branding yourself and building your own personal brand, because it’s your own personal brand. It’s built around you; you didn’t disappear.

You may have taken a different direction. You may be working on a different business. But the people who are connected to you are connected to you personally, regardless of the specific task or career or business that you are running. 

It isn’t quite the same if you spend five years building a dedicated separate brand. For example, say you came up with Copy Team—something super generic—hopefully no one else’s name out there, so whatever I say in this example doesn’t connect to anything.

Let’s say you name yourself Copy Team and you spend five years building the Copy Team brand, and then you decide that you want to go develop an e-commerce fashion line. 

All of a sudden, all this work that you’ve put into building the Copy Team—if you aren’t actively selling anything through the Copy Team anymore—most of that branding is now for nothing. 

Most of the followers to that brand, most of the work you’ve put getting that brand name around the web—once you stop operating that specific brand, or alternatively once, even if you kept the same business but re-branded—you end up losing a lot on the way. 

Ultimately, that’s the advantage of the personal brand: Any work you put into investing in a personal brand never disappears as long as you don’t disappear—as long as it’s still you, as long as you don’t change your name or whatever.