Self Promotion: How to effectively promote yourself without looking like a shmuck

Schmuck

Ten years ago the web was a completely different world. The landscape included only one or two vlogs and an extremely small group of individuals discussing marketing and strategy. Today, we have at our disposal thousands of podcasts, millions of blogs and thousands of those blogs with content focused around social media, branding and marketing. The majority of these blogs receive less than fifty visits a day and are on nobodies radar besides the writer and their network.

So how does one get their work out there to the masses? It’s not an easy task.

It takes time, patience and some effective self-promotion.

The reality is, within a market so saturated; we all rely on some form of self-promotion. We rely on self-promotion to get more readers, followers and potential business opportunities. So how does one do it without looking and feeling like a shmuck?

First, don’t feel like a shmuck.

Anyone who has become successful has done so using an element of self-promotion. Realize that it is not an option, rather a necessity to finding success. Be confident in your work. But most importantly, be confident in yourself. Once this happens, the possibilities are endless.

5 Ways To Improve your Self-Promotion Efforts

Make Real Relationships
By developing deep and authentic relationships you have a greater chance of having your information shared across a variety of different channels. People are more likely to do favours for people they like. Make people like you, like them back and watch what happens. You’ll be happy you did.

The “so-what” test.
What you’re actually promoting needs to have value. If you’re sharing a link to your most recent ebook; the book better be good. When you’re writing the document you need to ask yourself – “So what?” Will people actually find this post valuable or are you just writing for the sake of writing? If it’s the latter. Go for a jog, come back and try again.

Pay-it-forward
I’m a firm believer that if you treat life good it will treat you good back. The same can be said when discussing business. If you help other people achieve their goals, they’ll help you achieve yours. Promote others more than you promote yourself. Trust me, it works.

Thoughtful Commenting
If you’re familiar with the world of blogging you know the importance of comments on a blog. When someone comes across a great comment they’re very likely to click the user-name to get a little more information on the commenter. Anyone can leave a simple; “great post” or “wow, love this!” – But it takes a dedicated individual to stop by and leave a thought provoking comment.

The “who cares?” test.
Ask yourself – when you write a blog post, who cares? When you tweet, who cares? Take out a pen and paper and actually draw a picture of the people who care what you do. Once you can identify these individuals, you must recognize that these are the people who actually believe your content has value. With this information, you’ll be able to promote yourself to those who are actually relavant rather than those who could care less about the latest tech-gadget.

With that you should be well on your way. In case you want to dig a bit deeper, I suggest checking out these  five ways to be better at self promotion from Penelope Trunk.

photo credit: bark