By Jeff Beals
By now, you hopefully know you need to market yourself to stand out in today’s cluttered marketplace. Just remember that successful self-marketing requires a big dose of healthy attitude.
You can’t market yourself if you have nothing to sell. That means you must work hard at all times. Marketing without solid performance behind it is a lie. As you promote yourself, constantly work hard. The harder you work, and the more you produce, the more confident you will feel. That makes your personal branding efforts convey better thereby creating a snowball effect – the better your self-marketing is, the more opportunities you will have to be productive. Search for opportunities everywhere. Be curious. Sometimes the best opportunities come from the places you least expect.
You must think big and take some risks. Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone. Perhaps you are somewhat shy or are new to your profession and thus intimidated by industry veterans. Don’t waste time on fear and worry. It leads to disappointment and inaction.
For many people, their first forays into self-marketing are small. That’s a fine way to gain experience and build self-confidence. Grassroots self-marketing can start humbly. The key is to keep building up your efforts. You will never gain the highest levels of name recognition and respect if you don’t do something big at some point. Once you break through the big risk barrier, all subsequent activities will not seem like such a big deal. There is an old saying that life comes down to just a few big moments. Don’t let timidity prevent you from seizing big opportunities.
Self-marketing is a positive-sum game, not a zero-sum game. Everyone can win. Just because one person becomes a rock star in an industry or community, doesn’t mean that someone else cannot. Too many people have a difficult time understanding this. No doubt you have come across someone who can’t stand hearing praise about someone else. You say something nice about someone else and that person feels compelled to refute it, bring up a negative thing about the person or at least minimize it with a quick barb or roll of the eyes. Anyone who behaves like this is telling the rest of the world that he or she has low self-esteem or a compromised sense of self-worth.
One of the most important rules of the self-marketing game is to never tear down others while promoting yourself. In fact, we should actually go out of our way to build others up as we promote ourselves. Nothing looks so bad as to come across as jealous, envious or spiteful.
Jeff Beals is an award-winning author, who helps professionals do more business and have a greater impact on the world through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques. As a professional speaker, he delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide. To discuss booking a presentation, go to JeffBeals.com or call (402) 637-9300.
You are welcome to forward this article (with author citation) to anyone who might benefit from it.
