Last week I attended a really insightful webinar lead by a very clever lady. Sarah Mitchell from Global Copywriting spoke about content marketing and how businesses can use it to grow. If you’re interested in promoting and developing your business I really suggest you have a look through the presentation – it gave me lots of great ideas and sparked this post.

Sarah mentioned something that I’ve been mulling over for a while. She talked about businesses having a post and hope attitude to the information they put online. They produce some form of content but they don’t tell anyone about it. It sounded really familiar because I do it all the time. To me, self-promotion has always been a little….ewww.

Bragging is bad

When I was younger it was drilled into me that bragging was not good thing. It was something you didn’t do. It wasn’t an attractive quality in a person. If you bragged you’d never have any friends because you were up yourself.

Over the years you learn to stifle the desire to shout about your successes. You get so good at stifling that pretty soon no one really knows what you actually do or how good you are at it.

After years of stifling, I had an epiphany. Self-promotion does not necessarily equal bragging. Here’s why.

A person brags to feed their ego. They want to let you know how great they are.

A person self promotes to help others. They want to let you know they have experience doing or creating something that may help make your life or business better.

One is self-serving. The other serves a purpose.

What stops us from self-promoting?

In the end, it all boils down to fear. We worry about what our peers may think of us. We worry about sending the right message. We worry that no one will be interested in what we’re doing. This fear blinds us to the fact that even the smallest bit of self-promotion is a good thing.

Baby steps to self-promotion

For anyone averse to self-promotion, I suggest starting with some simple baby steps.

1. Share some successes with your social media stream. Twitter, Facebook, Linked In – it doesn’t matter. If you’ve got followers, you need to connect with them.
2. Be confident. Talk about your business with confidence. You work hard and it’s ok to let people know about it.
3. Don’t promote everything. This is a surefire way to turn people off. If you won a big contract or recently finished a project, let people know. Let them know what your goals were and how you used your skills to achieve them.
4. Fine-tune your elevator pitch. Make sure you can articulate what it is you do and why you do it better than anyone else. This will come in really handy as more people start to ask about what you do.
5. Start believing in yourself. A lot of us have a big issue with self-belief. If you’re doing what you love you need to start believing in it or you’ll never be successful.

I have no doubt that there are many ridiculously creative people out there that I will never connect with, which is a real shame. Unfortunately, these days if you don’t actively promote yourself, a lot of people will never know you exist. That’s just the nature of the Internet. My advice is to start small and get over the initial embarrassment/fear that a lot of us have about self-promotion. If you want to start really small, just tell me one of your recent successes. I’d love to hear all about it!