The 6 Key Ingredients to Powerful Self Promotion

October 11th, 2009 | Alex Mathers

Building an exceptional brand and a positive image that reflects you as a creative person, freelancer, even office worker, is crucial for those expecting long-term success and growth.

Getting your work and your brand out into the world is the flip side of the creative freelancing coin.

I believe that those who make use of the following 6 elements, can achieve self promotional greatness!

Here they are:

1) A network of relevant people

2) A database of accessible contacts

3) Direct marketing

4) A referral system

5) A regular flow of unique visitors to your work

6) Radical Strategic Visibility

–

1) A network of relevant people

Establishing and growing an accessible network of people online will be massively beneficial to you as an independent (or not) worker. Those vital people in your network are those who:

a) are fans of and love your work;

b) have worked with you in the past;

c) share your interests;

d) respect and admire what you do, and;

e) are your prospects themselves.

Fans will inevitably go out of their way to spread the word about you and your work. A large proportion of those you have worked with previously are likely to want to use your services again. People who share your interests will pay attention to what you have to say, as well as providing inspiration to you, if you choose to listen to them. Those who respect your brand and admire what you are doing will do the same, as well as provide referrals for you and will support you.  Your network, particularly a substantial one , will contain prospective clients. However, a network will only be fully effective, if contacts are ‘seized and captured’. This is where ingredient number 2 comes in:

2) A database of accessible contacts.

As well as an address book to store your contacts, for example on your Google mail account (which acts as a great mail storage centre), an excellent system whereby you are regularly updating members of your network with news and information, comes in the form of an email mailing list. This allows you to not only keep in touch with contacts as long as they stay subscribed, but to allow them to be regularly reminded of you. For those non subscribers and potential subscribers, social media sites like Twitter act as a great aggregation of what I call ‘secondary contacts‘, who can be drawn to your mailing list eventually.

3) Direct marketing

Direct marketing is actively advertising your services and products to potential clients. This means contacting people and organizations with the intent of building a relationship with them in the least aggressive and spammy ways possible. In my view, self-promotion today, and actually marketing in general, is all about creating, building and maintaining relationships, as cheesy as it sounds, with those who may eventually use your services. Direct marketing is advertising without selling.

For freelancing professionals, contacting individual potential clients directly through their online contact details, ideally building rapport and directing them to your portfolio and mailing list (they will join if they are interested in your work) is a perfectly viable demonstration of this. Having a mailing list (or even emailing individual members of your network not on a mailing list) will allow for continued direct marketing.

4) A Referral System

Having a program in place involving active referral creation is often overlooked in my view in self promotion methods. Very often, people avoid asking prior clients and members of their network for referrals. According to referral guru Vince Golder, 80% of companies get 70% of their business through word of mouth marketing. This undoubtedly applies to freelancers too. I’ve found a large proportion of my work through referrals from key people in my online network.

The reality is, most people are happy to get referrals for you if asked, and especially when you have gotten them a referral already (in which case you don’t have to even ask, as most people are keen to return good favours).

5) A regular flow of unique visitors to your work

In order to build up a network, find new clients, and find new fans to rave about you, it is important to attract new eyeballs and/or ears etc to what you do. Whether it is a trickle or a torrent of new people coming to, and experiencing your work, it is all important in the world of self promotion. Even if you have created art to rival the masterpieces of Picasso, this doesn’t guarantee lots of new people seeing your awesome work.

You need to build the bridges to allow people to get to you. One of the best ways of doing this is to provide intriguing content in some form, such as a blog that focuses on your interests that will attract visitors to your content and eventually your work. Better still, would be to become an expert at something, ideally related to your super-focused niche, whereby people would be drawn to you and your services. An example is for a safari photographer to set up a blog on African wildlife photography, drawing interested people in who would add to your network, create referrals for you, add to your mailing list and employ you and so on.

6) Radical Strategic Visibility

This is a term coined by Facebook marketing specialist Mari Smith. Radical Strategic Visibility involves strategic steps taken so that you are seen everywhere (more feasible online) and you actively appear in the ‘peripheral vision’ of particularly key influencers in your industry. What this means is that, using the Internet as a tool, you create subtle and constant reminders that you exist, that you are active, relevant, and that you care about your work, your industry, your friends and helping others. This doesn’t have to be in your face advertising. This involves doing small things here and there including commenting on other people’s blog posts, updating your facebook status, ‘tweeting’ on Twitter and writing guest posts on other blogs.

When I read about this, I felt that the concept really added the last necessary ingredient to this self promotion cake by binding it all together.

–

Does anyone think there are other key elements of self promotion? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Please use the comments below to contribute your thoughts.