The same advice turns up in every article about personal branding: post three times a week, find your editorial line, shoot videos. It assumes you have hours to give to it. You are a consultant: your hours are sold.
There is another way of going about it, which the entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk summed up in three words: document, don’t create.
Creating or documenting: what changes
Creating means starting from a blank page. You need an idea, an angle, a script, sometimes a shoot, then an edit. Every post is a small project, added to your week.
Documenting means starting from what has already taken place. You explained to a client why their offer was not selling. You answered an objection about your price. You corrected a mistake you see in every other client. All of that was said, out loud, to someone who needed it.
The difference is not only a matter of time. Created content talks about what you think a client would like to hear. Documented content shows what a client actually asked.
Why we believe the people we have seen at work
People do not trust everyone in the same way. In the survey Edelman ran in 2025 among 15,042 people in 15 countries, France included, 80% say they trust “someone like themselves” to tell the truth about a brand. The brand’s employees come in at 63%. Its chief executive and influencers, at 58%.
In other words, the voice that convinces belongs to someone close to the work, not to someone speaking from a stage. A consultant filmed while answering a real question is exactly that.
Business buyers say the same thing in other words. According to the Edelman and LinkedIn report on thought leadership, nearly three decision-makers in four judge a company’s capabilities on its expert content rather than on its marketing materials. Your brochure says you are good. A precise answer shows it.
What you already document without knowing it
Take a look at your calendar. A professional spends 14.8 hours a week in meetings on average, according to the survey by Reclaim.ai, a maker of calendar software. For a consultant, a good share of those hours is spent with clients.
On those calls you do, without thinking about it, what a content creator spends hours preparing:
- you answer real questions, put in your clients’ own words, which are also the words they type into a search engine;
- you give concrete examples, drawn from real engagements, which nobody else can tell;
- you correct common mistakes, the ones you come across in one client after another;
- you explain your method, because you have to justify what you recommend;
- you state your price and stand by it, which most freelancers never dare to put in writing.
Each of those moments is a subject for a post. You do not have to go looking for it: it has already happened.
The method in four steps
1. Choose the conversations that lend themselves to it
Discovery calls, advisory sessions, progress check-ins, group Q&As. Leave out whatever is confidential by nature: a negotiation, a dispute, a sensitive case.
Tell the person you are talking to that you are recording, and why. We have set out how to bring it up without awkwardness: one sentence at the start of the call is enough, provided you say it.
2. Spot the passages that stand on their own
A good passage does not need the rest of the call. It holds one idea: a question, then your answer. It rarely runs longer than a minute and a half. If you have to explain the context for it to make sense, it is not the right one. We have described the six kinds of passage that stand on their own.
3. Take out what belongs to your client
Their name, the name of their company, their figures, their face. Keep your answer, not their problem. Anything that shows your client, lets them be heard or quotes them is posted only with their agreement.
4. Post one passage at a time
One passage, one idea, one post. Regularity counts for more than volume: two posts a week for six months are worth more than ten in January and nothing afterwards.
What not to document
Documenting is not the same as showing everything. Leave aside:
- what a client told you in the belief that it would stay between the two of you;
- anything that makes them recognisable, even without their name: a very narrow sector, a precise figure, a one-of-a-kind anecdote;
- your off days, your hesitations, your digressions. To document is to choose.
And why video
Because that is where the attention is, and because there is room. On LinkedIn, video uploads rose by 34% in a year, according to Microsoft’s results for 2024, then the time spent watching them rose by 36% the year after, according to those for 2025. We have gathered what you need to know about LinkedIn video in an article of its own.
Yet the people who post remain few. On TikTok, a quarter of American adult users make 98% of the public videos, the Pew Research Center found. The others watch.
Video has another advantage for a consultant: it shows how you talk to a client. That is what a prospect is trying to find out before they call you.
That leaves the difficulty everyone knows: filming yourself. A call gets round it, since you are already on camera there, with no script to learn and no take to redo. That is the idea behind Dailies: the extension records the call you hold in Chrome, spots up to eight passages that stand on their own and turns them into captioned vertical shorts. One switch blurs your guests. Dailies handles calls in French and in English, and its extension’s interface is in French. You then choose what you post.
Key takeaways
- A consultant’s personal brand rests on proof of competence, not on a persona.
- You give that proof every week, on calls. All that is left is to make it visible.
- A passage worth posting stands on its own, is short, and says nothing about your client without their agreement.
- Short video is the format where the attention is, and where almost nobody posts.
For the full argument, with the figures to back it up, read our manifesto.
Sources
- Edelman Trust Institute, 2025 Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust, 2025.
- Edelman and LinkedIn, 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 2024.
- Reclaim.ai, Smart Meetings Trends Report, 2024: a software vendor’s survey of professionals.
- Microsoft, quarterly results FY2024 Q4 and FY2025 Q3.
- Pew Research Center, How U.S. Adults Use TikTok, 2024: 2,745 adult users in the United States.