If you get confused or overwhelmed by all the possibilities for promoting yourself and your work online, keep this one rule in mind: focus on value. Only after you have something of value to give away — a Firefox add-on, sample web design templates, useful ideas wrapped in nicely-written blog posts, stock photographs, mp3 recordings from your jazz band, lists of carefully curated links on a niche topic — should you start worrying about search engine optimization, relationships with web VIPs, and other online games.
This week, journalist David Strom offered his top ten ways to promote yourself on Web 2.0 as a riff on the NY Times article about musicians promoting their work online. On his list, Strom includes making yourself reachable by email and other online contact mechanisms, using attention-grabbing headlines, and getting your fans to help promote your work. But the two points I found most important were these, about providing something of value to your community:
3. Give something away for free. Really. You do this to build credibility and also to give people a taste of what you will charge them for. Ginsberg is giving away his latest book on his blog, and he is so comfortable with doing that because he knows this will build word-of-mouth and drive sales. The indie musicians profiled in the Times are giving away MP3s. Some have taken this a step further and are even experimenting with demand-based pricing that turns out to net them more than the 99-cent download standard at iTunes.
4. Think about lists of useful stuff that you can offer others. I have a page of links to various Web conferencing tools on my site that used to be in the top four sites when you searched on Google (today is down to #13, I guess I am slipping up). I have had this page on my site for about a decade, and started it on a whim. Now I get vendors who want me to list their stuff there. Squidoo has institutionalized this with their “lens” approach, and Pageflakes has something similar with their shared pages (You can see my RSS feeds and sites that I frequent here). Each of these approaches takes something that you know, and filters that you apply to the Wide World, and puts a very small amount of your own stamp and value to it.
You need to show value to your community to raise yourself up in that community. That’s consistent with Steve Pavlina’s ruminations on being an A-list blogger, where he says that if you want to join in the A list of bloggers you should “Focus first and foremost on providing value.”
Now if you do create something of value, can you just sit back and wait for the world to notice? Absolutely not. Whatever we might like to think, the web isn’t a flat meritocracy. Still, you will be left at the starting gate if you have nothing of value to offer the web world. The trick of self promotion is this: you shouldn’t simply be promoting yourself. You need to promote your work. Start with making it excellent and useful and you’ve taken the most important step towards building your professional profile online.
[Links to David Strom and Steve Pavlina via Jeff Barr]
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