Promoting your own stuff is okay
2024-04-18 16:57:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Wiser and much more experienced bloggers than me have said this many times before. In a way, it's so obvious but it's worth repeating just to remind yourself. One of the reasons I'm writing this here post. To be very honest, I'm still not very good at it, even after all these years. The truth is it's difficult to get the balance right.
Your blog is your own personal advertising platform, for yourself.
That's one of the biggest reasons for not running ads on your blog. If you run ads you are competing against yourself. Every situation is different of course, but I'd say that for most people, most run of the mill normal blogs, running ads just isn't worth it.
Much better is to try and gather a loyal audience that like to read your content, so that when you do other projects they will likely be more than happy to help promote it. If your content is good enough this will be effortless, because they'll want to talk about it anyway.
There are lots of angles to take. Talk about your past experiences, your current projects, topics areas that you want to highlight in your CV, hobbies you are getting into, problems you are debugging and solving. When someone visits your site, they'll be able quite quickly to get a sense for who you are.
Dave Rupert from Shop Talk Show Ep#611:
People don’t know. […] Everyone’s too busy to care. You have to constantly be sharing the cool things about your thing. Your blog, your framework, your whatever. Keep advocating for the things you like […] If you like something you should talk about it. Then other people will know about it. And then it will get picked up.
The tricky part is to not make it sound like you are lecturing. I think in the world of brand marketing it's called something like 'native advertising'. Instead of specific spots where ads are inserted, the content actually is the ad. One way to do this is to talk about current events, but use it as an opportunity to remember relevant pieces of your past.
We are all learning after all, most of us actually like to hear relevant points of view with interesting stories.
If you are just starting out then focus more on linking to things you find interesting and why. Your point of view is valuable too. Over time you'll build up a collection of stories and you'll find a way to integrate these into your content.
I wouldn't say I'm particulary good at doing this. I definitely haven't found the right balance yet. But as you read and listen to others you'll realise those that succeed aren't afraid of talking about what they do. But they are much better at doing it than others. They have often thought about it a lot and distilled out the most valuable pieces of information.
Figuring out where your value is, amoung all your knowledge, is key. That, I think is how you go about building an audience for the long term. #