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How to Promote Yourself, When You Hate Self-Promotion

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Nowadays, everyone has a personal brand — even people who cringe every time they hear the phrase. So how can you show the world what you have to offer, without feeling like a spotlight hog? Get creative.

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(Photo Credit: vuhung/Flickr)

In a recent post on Medium, Austin Kleon, author of Show Your Work!, shared a few of his thoughts on influencing others and getting discovered. Among his tips:

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1. Think process, not product.

“Traditionally, we’ve been trained to regard the creative process as something that should be kept to ourselves,” he writes. “We’re supposed to toil in secrecy, keeping our ideas and our work under lock and key, waiting until we have a magnificent product to show before we try to connect with others. But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do. By sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.”

2. Share something small, every day.

Ask any blogger or social media guru: the way you engage the world in conversation about your passions and projects is by participating on a daily basis. You don’t need to be finished. In fact, you shouldn’t be. By talking about what’s on your mind today, you’ll giving people an opportunity to care about you and your work on an ongoing basis.

3. Tell good stories.

You should be able to explain what you’re doing to everyone — your partner, your mother, your best friend, your neighbor’s kids — in a way that they can understand. By asking yourself how you would describe what you do, you’ll answering the most crucial question in anyone’s life or career: who am I?

Practice telling your story, and you’ll become a good storyteller. That’s an essential role for any project, from a presentation at work to your memoirs.

Kleon offers lots more tips here.

Tell Us What You Think

What are your tips for building a personal brand? We want to hear from you! Leave a comment or join the discussion on Twitter.

Jen Hubley Luckwaldt
Read more from Jen

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