How to Build a Visibility Practice That Actually Works for Freelancers

This blog summarizes learnings from The Future is Freelance Forums. These forums are where stakeholders from all levels of the freelance ecosystem come together to surface and solve the biggest problems facing independent work. These summaries serve as a place to house our collective wisdom on these topics. As such, I want to credit everyone who attended this forum for these insights. A special thank you to our featured guests, Katelin Tiernan, Tangia R. Al-awaji Estrada, and Megan Bungeroth, whose experience shaped this conversation from start to finish.

Most visibility advice arrives as a list of channels, with a promise that the right one will fix everything. At our forum, we asked a different question: what gets in the way of showing up consistently, even when you already know what to do? Most freelancers in the room knew the moves. The harder part was building something they could sustain alongside client work, their own discomfort, and the particular audiences they serve.

Visibility Feels Draining When the Advice Doesn’t Fit

Many people who signed up described visibility as something they have to do rather than something they want to do. Discomfort with self-promotion came up again and again, and it's worth paying attention to. When a formula feels wrong, it is often because it was built for someone else’s business.

Megan Bungeroth works with people who find LinkedIn draining, and she said the platform can feel fun once people stop copying a template and start using their own voice. The rest of the room found a similar point from another angle. The forms of visibility that did not drain people were often grassroots ones, like education-based meetups and gatherings with freelancers in the same field or an adjacent one. The lesson was less about abandoning a platform and more about noticing which kind of visibility leaves you energized.

The Right Visibility Depends on Who You’re Reaching

Katelin Tiernan has spent 15 years in social media, and she made the strongest case in this area. The platform matters less than where your audience actually spends time. Most content advice was built for high-volume sellers of low-priced digital products. If your business depends on a small number of clients, the work is finding the people who already fit. “You need to talk to a small percentage of the perfect person every week,” she said.

Tangia Estrada, founder of Audacious Strategies, works with extremely successful clients, some of whom have zero social media presence. For mission-driven and hyperlocal businesses, the first question is whether their audience uses social media that way at all, and the answer is often no.

The room saw the same pattern from the other side. Many people said their best clients never comment. They read quietly and reach out once they’re ready to buy. That makes visibility feel like shouting into the void, and it is hard to tell whether the work is a slow burn or the wrong room. The chat landed on a simple idea: one view from the right person is worth more than a million from everyone else.

Client Work Crowds Visibility Out

Busy client work is the most common reason visibility slips. People described it as the first thing to go when deadlines pile up, and many ended up with no habit at all. A less obvious point came from the same conversation: outreach is easier when work is steady, because the pressure to land the next client is lower.

Visibility doesn’t have to mean being everywhere. It can mean being top of mind at the right moment, so that when someone needs what you offer, your name comes up. That requires knowing your ideal client well enough to know where they are in their buying journey.

Relationships Carry Visibility Further Than Platforms

Several people argued that the strongest visibility lives in relationships. One longtime freelancer shared that six years of skipping social media were among the best of his career, because his reputation grew through people who already knew his work. Now that meetups and speaking gigs are harder to access, the practical answer is to band together, since referral business is what keeps freelancers going.

Online presence still matters, mostly as backup. People meet you in person and then look you up, and what they find should look like the person they met. Megan described the goal as moving from a triangle to a star: strong in some communities, with more points across others, so that visibility isn’t concentrated in one place.

Peer networks multiply reach. You can only be in so many rooms, but if other freelancers know, like, and trust you, you show up in every room they’re in. 

Consistency Comes From a Practice You Revisit

Trust comes from being true to your values and consistent over time. Sometimes that means recognizing early that a platform doesn’t fit and moving your energy somewhere it does. It also means curating your feed to show what you want to see, and unfollowing freely. If you don’t set the expectations for your own feed, someone else will.

No visibility strategy works forever, and no personal brand stays fixed. What holds up is an ongoing practice of checking what you’re putting out against who you’re talking to and who you are. 

The Future is Freelance Forums are collaborative working sessions where freelancers, coaches, community leaders, and platform founders come together to solve real problems. Click here to join the next conversation.