I remember reading an article when I was kid that called Hulk Hogan (my hero at the time) a “shameless self-promoter”.
Hulk has since gone on to do a few things that hurt me even worse than that article, but I have never been able to shake the idea that self-promotion is a bad thing.
This is a grey area for these days.
Running a business requires a certain degree of self-promotion if you want to survive, and a blog and podcast require even more.
I find the people I come across on Twitter and Instagram who are only following people to promote themselves distasteful. I try to only follow people I know and who I am genuinely interested in what they have to post. I don’t sign up for blogs or make comments on things with the sole intent of promoting my work. It just feels disingenuous to me.
I get it though.
If you are freelancing or trying to create something and keep it alive, you have to find a way to get it in front of people.
But I wonder if there are more ethical ways of doing this than trying to hijack the work someone else has done or turning into a relentless self-promotion machine. I love seeing people hustle and work, but sometimes I start to avoid people selling things for those pyramidy-type organizations because every interaction with them has turned into a sales pitch. I like that you believe in your product, but it doesn’t have to be personal when someone doesn’t want to buy the seaweed and birdshit capsules. It makes me super-appreciative of the people I know who sell this stuff and don’t let it infect their entire lives.
So that’s what I am trying to balance: working to promote and boost the things I am doing, without imposing on other people’s patience and goodwill.
I don’t want to become a shameless self-promoter, but I want to build something that is useful to people. It already feels like I am spamming everyone with the daily post on Facebook, so it is hard for me to envision pushing it further.
I don’t even want to consider starting to engage with people with the sole intent of pushing my content.
If you enjoy my blog or podcast, I would appreciate you signing up for the email list, or telling someone else you think might find it useful. If you don’t enjoy them (and are still reading this for some weird reason), I would appreciate knowing why. If I post too much or not enough, I would appreciate knowing that.
Thank you for reading my blog and listening to my podcast (the new one is up on Libsyn and SoundCloud). I really enjoy hearing back from people and creating something that is useful. I am grateful for every click I see, every new subscriber and every comment or message I get, except maybe from the online advertising agency that wanted me to promote a cheating website because I had a few posts with that word in the title. I feel like they didn’t actually read either one of them.
Thank you all very much, this blogging and podcasting thing has been fun because of you.
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