DEV Community: Shyam Bhardwaj

How to Stay Ahead with Creativity When Trying to Build Your Brand

Shyam Bhardwaj — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:08:57 +0000

Building a strong personal brand is all about consistently sharing what you’re passionate about and what you’re working on. And blogging is one of the easiest ways to make that happen.

But dated or hard-to-read blog posts may push people to skip reading your insightful stories and miss out on all you have to offer.

You must integrate pictures or graphics.

Your blog posts should always include a main picture or graphic.

Why?

Posts with visuals receive 94% more page visits than those without. We’re visual creatures, and a good picture will draw us in much quicker than a good headline.

Luckily, there are plenty of sites out there that offer high-quality pictures for free. I like sites like Pixabay, Unsplash, Little Visuals, and Pic Jumbo – because they offer high-quality pictures that don’t require attribution.

This means you can download the pictures you want, add them to your post, and you’re done. You don’t have to worry about finding the right way to give credit to the site or photographer that provided the pictures. You just download and go.

If you can’t find the right picture to fit your post, then create a graphic for your main post image instead. Don’t worry. Thanks to Guy Kawaski, marketer extraordinaire, you don’t need Photoshop or any other fancy (expensive) tools to create a nice graphic. You can use Canva.

Canva lets you create amazing graphics for free!

It’s very easy to use and makes you look like a pro by giving you great templates to work with. Canva also offers high-quality pictures to add to your graphics for $1 apiece. That’s a much better deal than you’re going to get other places, but there is enough free stuff to help you without having to spend that $1. Especially since you can upload your own pictures (the ones you’re downloading from Pixabay and Unsplash) and use those in your graphics.

More visuals

While having a main post image is a must, including other visuals in your blog posts will take your blog to the next level.

Why?

Because 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. So adding motion photography, videos, GIFs, or infographics make a greater impact than writing alone.

To find these visuals for your posts, start collecting any pictures, videos, and other visuals you find interesting.

You can use an app like Evernote, which connects to your browser, to save them all easily in one place.
Just remember to always link back to the place where you got the video, image, or graphic from if someone else created it.

Headers set you apart.

If a post is more than two or three paragraphs long, use headers to break it up. It’s a simple way to make your posts easier to read while making you look like a pro. It can also make the writing process easier since headers provide an outline for your posts.

Stick to a content schedule.

Decide on a schedule and stick to it. I’ll admit this one isn’t easy for me, but it definitely makes a huge difference when you’re first starting a blog. A good way to start on the right track (or get back into it after a break) is to write about 5-10 posts at one time. Then you can simply schedule them to be released weekly, biweekly, or monthly.

Since your blog is about building a brand, you don’t have to blog daily to make an impression. But you do want to blog consistently enough that you have the chance to build and maintain connections with those reading your blog.

BONUS: Below are 3 additional blogging tips you can try this year to not only refuel your blogging fire but help your blog grow, too!

Start a YouTube channel –

The last couple of years were all about videos on social media. More and more, readers are choosing video over text. They are not only quicker to watch but more engaging. So why not start a channel of your own? You can do live recipes, make-up tutorials, or travel tips. The intimate connection your readers will experience with you by being able to see you live will make them want to keep coming!

Network with fellow bloggers –

If you haven’t already, creating a relationship with other bloggers and getting your blog some free promotion is something that I’ve learned mainly from Ryan Biddulph. Normally, if you share other people’s content, quote their wise words in your content – you’re simply helping out them. And probably, they won’t feel shy in showing the same care and love to you.

Sell digital products –

This could be tricky depending on what you blog about, but definitely something that’s worth a try! Do you make your own crafts? Bake your own goods?

Online courses?
Ebooks?
Be creative and think of products you could sell online.

You could also become an affiliate and sell products on your site that way. Not only will you make an extra buck, but you’ll help your readers find the things they need!

What do you want your personal blog to say about you?

What kinds of things could you share to show your expertise, passion, or insight?

How to Employ Portfolio Website as Your Campaigner in Today’s Competitive Freelancing Era?

Shyam Bhardwaj — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 12:23:28 +0000

Personal websites function as a convenient tool for displaying recent work, testimonials, and telling individual stories. On another note, resume, alone, isn’t enough to identify the potential and competitiveness of the candidate.

Readers, who want to polish their portfolio website to get substantially hot leads, can inherit ideas and elements from professionals doing notably well with their online lead generation.

Recently, I came across one of Tom May's posts, which highlighted some of the 2017's best portfolios trends. Though we are reaching towards the end of 2019, these trends are still the best options in terms of effective UI, conversion ratio, and search visibility.

Will is a London-based photographer who has been featured in magazines, newspapers, and exhibitions worldwide. He presented his work in an eye-catching manner. Though he was not SEO obsessed and I guess, he doesn’t need of this – He wants to showcase his best work to the world.

This post (Creative Bloq's one) made me think about how freelancers can showcase their expertise, credibility, and their best work to their potential customers. Most of the freelancers are aware of Upwork, Freelancer, 99 Design, and other portals, which are great to get started with their freelancing career. Not to mention, some of the agencies, only rely on these platforms, which shouldn’t be the case, for long-term survival. We need to digest this theory that not all businesses hire professionals through these platforms. So, if this is the case, being an activist only on freelancing portals will never allow you to knock the door of potentially larger clients.

Experts agree, there’re countless ways to reach out to new businesses. One of my friends, Richard Barker, is a professional SEO/web designer, and he is pretty much active on Upwork. But besides Upwork, he also runs a great marketing blog (covering a diversity of topics) along with his portfolio website. He is in the branding business, so he finds joy in writing for him too.

So, he actively blogs on his sites, because -

It gives him joy and a good feel.
It capacitates him to make new industry connections. The best side is – he gets new contracts, out of it, most of the time.

Is it a Necessity to Build a Freelancer Portfolio Website?

YES, if you want potential customers to locate you! While the web is already full of thousands of freelancers worldwide, it’s absolutely a rigid market, and getting lots of eyeballs on your work is quite a challenge. Remaining isolated in this overly crowded market depends on lots of elements, and impressive UI/UX is one of the most important ingredients.

A few reasons to consider it:

Seriousness – Personal websites hosted on your domain (with your name) seem highly professional. It shows you’re a tech-savvy and are here for long-term commitments.
Transparency – Clients can see your previous work through it and can decide whether you can be a real asset to them.
A Road to Become an Influencer – If you blog regularly or update the website with interesting news, people might be interested in subscribing to you, and thus, you can grow your email list.
SEO Ready – You can easily build the knowledge of SEO and Google's core algorithms, including the theory of EAT. What is keyword difficulty? How to rank for competitive as well as easy keywords? White Hat SEO tactics. Meta Tags, ALT tags on images, the load time of the site, rich media content addition, and allowing users comment – all will be possible on your portfolio website.
With affiliate links, you can additionally generate regular passive income. Though affiliation is a long-term process, marketers have embraced it to earn incredibly high.

For example, "building a strong portfolio as a voiceover actor is essential to showcase your talent and attract potential clients," says Rich Willmott, a leading voiceover agent.

Record a demo reel: Your demo reel should showcase your voiceover skills and highlight your versatility. It should include samples of your voiceover work in different genres such as commercials, narration, animation, and video games.
Choose your best work: Be selective when choosing which samples to include in your portfolio. Pick the pieces that best showcase your range and abilities.

How to make a portfolio website from the start?

Dance with Kailee knew they needed a website to tell the world about their mission, what people can get from it, and update people about their upcoming classes. They didn’t have coding knowledge. They bought the domain name and used SITE123 to create the website on their own.

Here is what you need to do:

Purchase the domain name and a hosting plan.
Plan out the hierarchy of web pages – Home, About, Portfolio, Blog, and Contact.
Prepare Graphics, Images, Screenshots, and/or Videos.
Choose the website builder (if you don’t want to hire a professional designer) or the HTML template, or the WordPress theme (free or premium).
Configure the website.
Don’t miss optimization – SEO is the key to get improved visibility of your website.
Start social media marketing. Reddit, Contently, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Quora are great platforms to get a start. Connections matter and that’s what you need to work for.

How Can You Put Everything on the Board?

Design – Designing side of the website is important in every aspect: Your SERP rankings, your website’s readability (make sure you use a pleasing font, size, and visuals), your visitors’ experience, and thus conversion, indeed.

Several studies have proven the fact that design is something which brings visitors trust, your credibility, and keeps SEO efforts alive.

Previously, I’ve talked enough about the relevance of responsiveness to the result of the ranking. With the immense user-base growth on smartphones and tablets, you can’t ignore cashing-in mobile users, and it’s mandatory to optimize your website on different resolutions and let your work be recognized by a multitude of users.

SEO – Pay close attention to the volume of keywords you’re covering on your website. Localization v/s Globalization understanding will help you out deciding your ideal clientele and overall online marketing success. Several times, you can leverage the power of maps and local optimization to get better visibility on the web. While you can build credibility globally, just like Kristy Hines or Aleyda Solis did with their websites.

There are many other advanced SEO configurations aside keyword mapping – Metadata optimization, speeding up your targeted pages, compressing images, utilizing best-suited plugins, linking-in-and-out authority resources, and lots more.

Content Architecture – Plan and then structure your Home, About, Contact, and Portfolio Page. Home is the best place to show your work – that’s the basis of this website, simple as that. Some minor things which are easy to implement but can do a lot more for you:

a) Show your real identity – Your name, profile image, Social media links, and your real clients.

b) Reviews matter a lot – Put the real words from your clients – either text testimonials or videos. Though text testimonials can appear somewhere fake so video testimonials or real-time case studies are the better approaches to show the experiences of your previous clients.

c) Leverage the power of numbers – Users do not treat websites as most of the marketers think. Visitors are not bots; they are humans. And they feel morose just going through your content. Numbers and statistics keep your web pages alive for them – How many projects have you successfully completed? How many social media posts have you uploaded? What’s your average client review rating? The answers to all these questions are digits, and this small portion of your web page appear significantly most alluring.

d) Free Give Away – Most of the bloggers and marketers use it; this acts as a secret weapon for their lead generation, email marketing, and social media conversation. If you don’t have anything to offer to your readers – they’ll probably not subscribe to you and will not engage with you. Create awesome resources according to your industry and build your email list as a procedure for collecting their emails to circulate the free resource.

Over to You

Two things are pretty sure – first, you don’t want to go for another 9 to 5 job; second, you want to grab awesome clients to work with. So I can interpret that you’re ready to invest your time, your resources, and your full energy to be succeeded. That’s what this entire procedure needs – your devotion and full efforts. Start building your portfolio website and set the benchmarks your own. This small website could be the single cannon for the foundation of your online business model. Best of luck!

How to Employ Portfolio Website as Your Campaigner in Today’s Competitive Freelancing Era?

Shyam Bhardwaj — Sun, 13 Oct 2019 06:00:27 +0000

Readers, who want to polish their portfolio website to get substantially hot leads, can inherit ideas and elements from professionals doing notably well with their online lead generation.

So, he actively blogs on his sites, because -

It gives him joy and a good feel.
It capacitates him to make new industry connections. The best side is – he gets new contracts, out of it, most of the time.

Is it a Necessity to Build a Freelancer Portfolio Website?

YES, if you want potential customers to locate you! While the web is already full of thousands of freelancers worldwide, it’s absolutely a rigid market, and getting lots of eyeballs on your work is quite a challenge. Remaining isolated in this overly crowded market depends on lots of elements, and impressive UI/UX is one of the most important ingredients.

A few reasons to consider it:

Seriousness – Personal websites hosted on your domain (with your name) seem highly professional. It shows you’re a tech-savvy and are here for long-term commitments.
Transparency – Clients can see your previous work through it and can decide whether you can be a real asset to them.
A Road to Become an Influencer – If you blog regularly or update the website with interesting news, people might be interested in subscribing to you, and thus, you can grow your email list.
SEO Ready – You can easily build the knowledge of SEO and Google's core algorithms, including the theory of EAT. What is keyword difficulty? How to rank for competitive as well as easy keywords? White Hat SEO tactics. Meta Tags, ALT tags on images, the load time of the site, rich media content addition, and allowing users comment – all will be possible on your portfolio website.
With affiliate links, you can additionally generate regular passive income. Though affiliation is a long-term process, marketers have embraced it to earn incredibly high.

How to make a portfolio website from the start?

Here is what you need to do:

Purchase the domain name and a hosting plan.
Plan out the hierarchy of web pages – Home, About, Portfolio, Blog, and Contact.
Prepare Graphics, Images, Screenshots, and/or Videos.
Choose the website builder (if you don’t want to hire a professional designer) or the HTML template, or the WordPress theme (free or premium).
Configure the website.
Don’t miss optimization – SEO is the key to get improved visibility of your website.
Start social media marketing. Reddit, Contently, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Quora are great platforms to get a start. Connections matter and that’s what you need to work for.

How Can You Put Everything on the Board?

Several studies have proven the fact that design is something which brings visitors trust, your credibility, and keeps SEO efforts alive.

a) Show your real identity – Your name, profile image, Social media links, and your real clients.

b) Reviews matter a lot – Put the real words from your clients – either text testimonials or videos. Though text testimonials can appear somewhere fake so video testimonials or real-time case studies are the better approaches to show the experiences of your previous clients.

c) Leverage the power of numbers – Users do not treat websites as most of the marketers think. Visitors are not bots; they are humans. And they feel morose just going through your content. Numbers and statistics keep your web pages alive for them – How many projects have you successfully completed? How many social media posts have you uploaded? What’s your average client review rating? The answers to all these questions are digits, and this small portion of your web page appear significantly most alluring.

d) Free Give Away – Most of the bloggers and marketers use it; this acts as a secret weapon for their lead generation, email marketing, and social media conversation. If you don’t have anything to offer to your readers – they’ll probably not subscribe to you and will not engage with you. Create awesome resources according to your industry and build your email list as a procedure for collecting their emails to circulate the free resource.

Over to You

Merchant Accounts & Payment Gateways for eCommerce Websites

Shyam Bhardwaj — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 10:58:42 +0000

I was discussing with my old-time friend Ekta recently who is a jewelry designer, we were discussing her online business activities (She sells her product line through Amazon and Ebay) and the end goal, sales turned to individual ecommerce websites.

As of now, Ekta doesn’t own her website as she has been selling through major online selling platforms quite well and getting her margins, she is actually considering building one for her so that she can put her information, contact information and showcase her product line. I wanted to help her but due to my current assignment loads, I can’t. But I recommended her SITE123, an easy choice to create fast and responsive websites.

She also mentioned being able to list products that she uses and recommends to her clients, allowing them to be purchased online.

We discussed her options and whilst I was explaining what would be needed to get up and running it struck me that there is a lot to understand and it’s not exactly straightforward, hence this post…

Two What is a merchant account?

Anyone wanting to accept credit cards (or debit cards) as payment methods for their online store will need a special type of bank account called a Merchant Account.

Merchant accounts are different from standard bank accounts in that they are only used to accept card payments, they are issued by merchant acquiring banks and are subject to their own terms and conditions.

The merchant acquiring bank is responsible for collecting funds from purchaser’s credit or debit cards, it then deducts any transaction fees and deposits the balance into your standard business bank account.

Once you have a merchant account set up and running it is a fairly automated process and there is no need to check it on a day to day basis, funds just ‘magically’ appear in your normal bank account a few days after the purchase was completed.

All merchant accounts have transaction fees associated with them, the exact fees are often a small percentage of the transaction value and can usually be negotiated based on things like average transaction value and monthly volume.
I’ll put together a post detailing the rates of some of the more common merchant accounts shortly.

Three Where can you get a merchant account from?

A google search for merchant accounts brings up a wealth of options. I currently use Streamline and whilst it was quite a long process to get it all up and running, for me the transaction fees are pretty good.

Before Streamline I was using Paypal, this was fairly easy to setup but the transaction fees were quite a bit higher. Other notable merchant accounts I have either used or had clients use would be NoChex and HSBC.

Three What is a payment gateway?

In conjunction with a merchant account, you also need a payment gateway, these are responsible for authorizing credit card details when they are entered into your online store.

When a customer enters their details they are encrypted and are passed on to the cardholders' bank for authorization, if successful the payment gateway instructs your merchant account to collect the funds from the customer’s account.

Most payment gateways have an online admin area where you can log in, view and manage transactions. Some go further and give you fraud warnings or scores for each transaction, you can often also see failed transactions and the reasons for the failure.

Some merchant banks have their own payment gateway and some require you to use a 3rd party one, these often have their own fees.

I use SagePay as my payment gateway because my number of monthly transactions is below 1,000 the cost is just £25 per month and there are no additional fees applied to transactions.

If you go with an option like PayPal or Nochex then they have their own payment gateways built in so you will not have to bother setting up a 3rd party one. Hopefully, this gives you a clearer understanding of exactly what these two key services are and why you need them.