IMHO building a personal brand is a long run thing, like a marathon. You can do all sort of things: talk at meetups, write guest blog posts, be active in commun

IMHO building a personal brand is a long run thing, like a marathon. You can do all sort of things: talk at meetups, write guest blog posts, be active in community, have strong presence on social networks, etc. All of this requires time. Maybe there are some limitations due to a nature of your contract? In one of my contract it explicitly said that I have a right to showcase the work that I've done as a contractor in my portfolio. I guess that this means that maybe in some contracts people get the opposite thing. I've never tired to build my personal brand beyond basic presence on web. The main reason is lack of time. I wish that I've been smarter and build it along the way, if nothing else for myself. I've started forgetting all of the wonderful things that I've worked in past decades.