Self-promotion is just what it sounds like: promoting yourself, your events, your accomplishments, your victories, and even your defeats, problems, and lessons you have learned. You do it so you can increase your visibility to and awareness by others, increase traffic to your website, increase sales, and get more speaking opportunities, exhibitions, and gigs—more of whatever it is you’re looking for.
You promote yourself so you can get even more opportunities, which you can then tell people about.
Self-promotion is also called “branding yourself,” because that’s really what it has become. (That, and it’s what we wanted to call the book.) In fact, we prefer to think of it as personal branding, because you need to think of yourself as a brand, just like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Google, or Facebook.
Why Is Self-Promotion Important?
You can’t count on people calling you out of the blue to hire you, buy your service, or book you for an event if they don’t know about you. The only way to get people to know who you are and what you do is to tell them. And you want to tell as many people who are actually interested as you can.
Self-promotion will help you make those important connections that will further your career and improve your professional standing. It can be as simple as introducing yourself to the organizer of a conference and telling her you are interested in speaking at her next conference, or it can be as involved as writing a book or two and then spending a day emailing every conference organizer you can to get as many speaking deals as you can.
What Self-Promotion Is Not
Self-promotion is not bragging or boasting. It’s not being something bigger than you are. It’s just letting people know who you are and what you do.
It’s perfectly acceptable to promote yourself without looking like an arrogant jerk. People are going to be out promoting themselves and their personal endeavors and small businesses. If you’re not, you’re missing out on good opportunities, and others are going to beat you in the competition. They’re going to sell their art, get their speaking gigs, get more web traffic, or whatever they’re competing with you for.
What Can Self-Promotion Do for You and Your Career?
Without question, self-promotion can make you successful. And if you’re already successful, it will make your personal brand huge. You don’t get to be a success without knowing a lot of people and having a lot of people know you. If you want to be stuck in a little gray cubicle for your entire career, never rising above lower middle management, keep your head down and don’t attract attention. Actually, put this book down. Stop reading! But if you want to make a name for yourself, establish a good reputation, finally get that corner office, or even own your own successful business, you need to promote yourself.
To do that, you need to be passionate about two things: the work you do, and yourself. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, find the thing you’re passionate about. If you’re not passionate about yourself, seek professional help. The person you should love the most, admire the most, and treasure the most is you. And when you have that confidence in yourself, others will see it, too. When you share that confidence with other people, they’ll feel confident about you as well.
So don’t sit in your cubicle any longer. Figure out what you want to do, make it happen, and then start telling people about it. Let them know that you are good at what you do. Let them come to you for answers and information.
This is an excerpt from my book – Branding Yourself. The second edition was released on Wednesday and is available for your reading pleasure. 🙂
spsullivan007
Branding Yourself is a great book! It is easy to read and gets to the point. I thank Kyle Lacy and Erik Decker for constructing such a book to improve your noticeability!
ryankmisener
Great article! After reading your book Branding Yourself its crazy to believe more people are not doing this. Personal Branding is a great way to get yourself noticed and open yourself to new opportunities.
matthewfry
This is a great article and Branding Yourself is a great book. I am always fasinated that more people are either too lazy or unaware of the benefits of branding yourself. I am graduating from UNR with an MBA and i was previously unaware of the value to be gained through branding myself. Once again, this is a very informative article and book. Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy are geniouses!
renodogrescue
"Branding Yourself" was a great read. It's packed full of so much information about social media and branding. It's amazing how social media has transformed our society and the way we function. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us Kyle. Hopefully I can use what I learned in this book to free myself from the "little gray cubicle".
Sadia T
If you think that the excerpt posted is powerful, you should read Chapter 9 of "Branding Yourself" which is about how to network. This read transformed my strategy on how I will handle networking situations in the future. I think that the message of being passionate about what you do and about yourself is a great perspective.
tibia money
Thanks for sharing your knowledge on this particular aspect and making it easier for us.I’d love to see an update but this data appears to be pretty far and few between. Thanks for the post.
Análisis de un Entrevista : Kyle Lacy « Giraldo : De Todo un Poco
[…] Research de ExactTarget, además escribió libros acerca como Twitter Marketing para Dummies y Brand Yourself : How use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself, los cuales ya los leí […]
LinkedIn Profiles Are For YOU, Not Your Business –
[…] Another great one is Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself by Eric Deckers and Kyle Lacy. I especially like their explanation of self-promotion as, “…not bragging or boasting. It’s not being something bigger than you are. It’s just letting people know who you are and what you do.” To find out more, go to: http://kylelacy.com/how-to-use-social-media-to-invent-or-reinvent-yourself/ […]