Personal branding for people who get googled.

Personal branding is the deliberate building of an expert brand, so that clients know and trust a person before they ever speak to them. It needs clear positioning and regular visibility on the channels your audience uses, in B2B usually LinkedIn. It has little to do with self-promotion. Personal branding is groundwork for sales: anyone thinking of getting in touch looks at your profile first and googles your name. If they find little there, or contradictions, no preference forms. Your name is the most important search query, and you never type it in yourself.

A personal branding agency builds business owners and experts into visible personal brands, from positioning to regular publishing. Typical services are a positioning workshop, profile optimisation, ghostwriting, video and photo production, distribution and reporting. Unlike a social media agency, the focus is on a person rather than a logo, and the copy has to sound like them. At Maze & Friends, strategy and production come from one team, and success is measured by profile visits and enquiries rather than likes. Your approval remains mandatory for every post.

You build a personal brand through focus and repetition: decide what you want to be known for and show it over months. Start with two or three core topics on one channel instead of everything you know. A mix of expertise and insights from real projects works; success posts and motivational quotes help little. Comments under other people’s posts often bring more visibility with the right people than your own post. The last step decides. Visibility has to turn into conversations and contracts, or it remains an expensive hobby.

What personal branding costs depends mainly on whether it stays at the set-up or includes ongoing production. The main cost drivers are the strategy share, the number of posts, video and photo production and the amount of coordination with you. Ad budget for LinkedIn Ads only comes in once the organic foundation is in place, and ongoing support starts with a three-month minimum term, then becomes cancellable monthly. Our guide to the costs of LinkedIn ghostwriters explains which factors move the price. For you, we put together a fixed-price quote with no hidden items after the free initial call.

With us, personal branding takes one focused content session a month plus quick approvals. We handle the rest, from writing and editing to publishing. Your stance and professional opinion can’t be handed over completely, though. That is exactly what the session is for: we draw out the knowledge you take for granted and your audience is looking for. A lack of content ideas is therefore no problem, because the topics emerge in the interview. For comments and direct messages, a few extra minutes a week are worth it, so conversations there stay personal.

For personal branding videos, you only need to be on camera once a month, at the focused content session, and it works without being a permanent talking head. We develop formats that suit you: short interview clips, photos from your working day, text posts, graphics or podcast-style conversations. Video conveys personality and voice, but it doesn’t have to feature in every post. If you dislike the camera, start with text and photo and grow into it through calm interview formats. For the design agency PIXIT, we produced a series of personal branding videos and images.

Your LinkedIn posts sound like you because they come from your interviews, never from templates or an AI. Every post is based on what you said, goes through a senior writer and is only published once you approve it. We use AI for research and variants, never as the author. Your audience spots generic AI copy quickly, and that would harm your brand. If a sentence doesn’t sound like you, it goes, and your corrections feed into every following text.

Personal branding shows its first results as visibility from the first month, while qualified enquiries in B2B usually take several months. Early signals such as profile visits and direct messages often appear sooner. Long buying cycles need patience, because decision-makers watch you for a while first. Consistency over months works better than individual posts that go viral. For Milan Milic, reach tripled, and his channels bring in enquiries with order values between €7,500 and €48,000. We make no firm promises about the number of enquiries.

For B2B personal branding in the DACH region, LinkedIn is usually the right main channel, because decision-makers are there in a professional capacity. Expert content still gets good organic reach there, and your profile is often the first place prospects look before getting in touch. One channel is enough to start, as long as you use it consistently, because anyone who starts on LinkedIn, Instagram, a newsletter and YouTube at once often gives up everywhere within a few weeks. We only add further channels once your audience actually makes decisions there.

Whether a personal branding coach, a ghostwriter or an agency suits you better depends on what you are missing: clarity, time or execution. A coach helps you clarify positioning and presence but doesn’t do the work. A ghostwriter writes copy, usually without video or strategy. An agency like Maze & Friends combines positioning, copy in your voice, production and reporting. If your personal voice is itself the product, as a creator for example, you are better off writing yourself or working with us in a hybrid setup. We tell you that openly in the strategy call.

Corporate influencers are employees or executives who become visible on LinkedIn as a voice of their company, with their own profile and their own tone. Besides individuals, we also build entire leadership teams and employees into brand ambassadors. The company page and the profiles of the people behind it then interlock. A shared topic architecture matters, so every voice pays into the same brand without sounding the same. Participation must be voluntary, because posts people are forced to write show. A programme like this also strengthens employer branding, because applicants believe colleagues more than job ads.

All content from your personal branding belongs to you: copy, videos, photos and concept. Your LinkedIn profile remains your profile, and we only have the access you grant yourself. If the collaboration ends, the topic architecture and content templates stay with you so you can carry on yourself, and we hand over the raw material from the content sessions on request. Where you may use portrait photos, for press and talks for example, is set out in the quote. That way your personal brand never depends on an agency.

At Maze & Friends, ongoing personal branding has a three-month minimum term, after which support is cancellable monthly. Positioning and the first posts need three months before it becomes reliably clear which topics work, and we don’t tie anyone in for longer, because a personal brand that only continues because of a contract doesn’t work. Every month, the report shows you what the work has delivered, and you decide accordingly. Content and templates stay with you even if you stop. If personal branding isn’t the right lever for your goal, we tell you beforehand.

LinkedIn ghostwriting is legitimate when the content comes from you and someone only helps with the wording, as with speeches or non-fiction books. It becomes a problem when a ghostwriter invents opinions or experiences you don’t have. With us, every post comes from your interviews and is only published once you approve it. The substance stays with you; your audience simply gets it more clearly phrased. Comments and direct messages are best handled by you, because that is where the personal conversation begins. Our guide compares what a LinkedIn ghostwriter does and costs.

An optimised LinkedIn profile says immediately, in the headline and About section, what you stand for and what people can approach you about. The headline is more than your job title; it names your topic and your audience. A professional portrait and a banner that carries your positioning shape the first impression. In the Featured section, link your best posts or talks. The visitor’s view is what counts: anyone who opens your profile after a post should understand within seconds why they should contact you. We handle this alignment at the start of every engagement.

You need personal branding photos so clients see you the way they should experience you: in your working environment and in conversation, not just against a grey backdrop. They are used for your LinkedIn profile and posts, website, press and talk announcements. A classic business portrait is enough for the profile picture, but regular posts need variety, so we take photos at the monthly content session instead of holding one big shoot a year. What the photos cost depends on the duration and the number of edited images. More on that in our guide to business photographers in Vienna.

Thought leadership means being seen in your field as a leading thinker whose assessment decision-makers actively seek out. On LinkedIn, it comes from your own positions and insights from real projects rather than from reach. Anyone who only shares industry news remains a curator. Thought leadership takes the courage to hold an opinion and the evidence to back it, such as cases or figures others don’t have. Personal branding is the framework; thought leadership is its most demanding level. Our guide to thought leadership on LinkedIn shows how to get there.

How often you should post on LinkedIn depends on what you can sustain for months; for most decision-makers, a fixed weekly rhythm is realistic. Regularity beats frequency: posting daily for three weeks and then going quiet for two months loses more than it gained. Comments under posts from your audience are just as important, and they often bring more visibility with the right people than your own post. Quality comes before quantity, because every weak post feeds the wrong picture. A monthly content session produces enough material for a fixed rhythm.

You measure personal branding by enquiries and conversations, while LinkedIn Analytics supplies the earlier stages, such as profile visits and followers from your audience. Reach is a means, not a result. More telling are direct messages with a concrete request and initial calls in which the other person already knows your posts. Ask every new enquiry how they came across you. From us, you get a report every month that counts enquiries above all, and we align the next month’s topics with it.

Maze & Friends offers personal branding from Vienna and works with founders and experts across Austria and the DACH region. Copy and approvals work well remotely. Video and photo are produced at the monthly content session, ideally in your real working environment. Examples include the design agency PIXIT from Wiener Neustadt, with a series of personal branding videos, and the Swiss start-up 79degrees. For clients in and around Vienna, the content session is especially easy, because no long travel time needs to be planned. LinkedIn remains the main channel, wherever you are based.