(by Braden Barty) REGARDLESS OF WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS you are in, you must learn to think and act like a marketer. The goal of self-promotion is to increase your visibility, grow your following, and attract more opportunities. Those who know how to run a successful brand campaign are the same ones dominating their field.
Self-promotion is promoting and marketing yourself, your products or services, skills, abilities, and accomplishments.
Please don’t tear up when I tell you this because then things will be awkward, but no one is searching for you. That is why it is up to you to get yourself out there. You have to bring the noise.
You have to scream from the rooftops so that people know exactly who you are and what you do. Don’t leave your success up to chance. Bring the noise! Four-Letter Word I am not talking about bragging. “Brag” is a dirty word that our society frowns on. Your brand and marketing campaigns should never be just about you. Yes, it is self-promotion, but you are promoting yourself because you have value to add to people’s lives. Self-promotion needs to be geared toward and focused on what makes you remarkable, different, and ultimately better than your competitors. Self-promotion works when people see you are doing something that benefits them. Leader: Your goal is to be recognized as a leading authority in your field. You must market yourself to achieve that. Always be on the lookout for opportunities to promote yourself. There are numerous ways to promote yourself and your brand.
-Blogs,
-e-mail marketing,
-public speaking,
-social media,
-advertising,
and I could go on and on. You must constantly campaign to increase visibility, establish trust, and make the sale. One of the best tools available to help you with your brand campaign has actually been around for thousands of years. The tool I’m talking about is . . . drum roll, please
… a calendar!
A calendar is your best friend. Use it. Block out time in your weekly schedule for marketing and promotion(just like I’m doing right now with this blog). Marketing and promotion generate leads and sales.
Elon Musk not only invented Paypal, Tesla and Space X, he taught me the power timeboxing. Here is Thomas Frank going into detail regarding timeboxing.
This is the practice of setting a fixed amount of time for each task and integrating the resulting time blocks into you schedule.
Whenever I have “free” time during the week I work in a two-hour block on each of those days with a laser focus on my marketing campaign. I get more done in those two hours than most people do all day. Imagine what two focused, uninterrupted hours a day working on self-promotion would do to your brand. Think it would have a positive effect? You’d better believe it would. Shout out to Monday.com, slack.com and hootsuite.com for offering great management tools for social media and time management. If you want to be a great brand, you’re going to have to learn how to be a great self-promoter. Being quiet will not get people to notice you.