How not to promote yourself
The other day as I opened my phone I went into LinkedIn, I have all notifications off so I manually check it about once a day. I noticed that I had a new connection request, I clicked on it, it was from someone I had never met before. I man from Australia, who had done quite a few cool things. I was hesitant at first, should I? Should I not? He doesn't look like a recruiter, fine ill give him an add and see if he has any interesting content. Within 10 minutes of the add, I get a message (LinkedIn and it's pesky emails) from the guy promoting his podcast which is completely unrelated to what I post on LinkedIn, not even in my field (although you can most certainly argue sales is necessary for everyone and it is). Yet it was this message from someone I've never talked to in my life, never met, had only just added and here he was jamming some podcast down my throat and “hoping he can bring me some inspiration”. Being an inspiration is one thing but sending me your podcast minutes after I accept you is something else.
If you want to promote yourself that's fine, I do it all the time. I post irregularly, promoting blog posts that I've written, but at no point am I adding random people and saying “Hey Mr accountant, here's my article on JSON decoders”. Hell maybe I'm adding other developers because they have the same interest but good lord the fastest way to annoy someone is to send them stuff for no reason. It's like junk mail, sure you might buy stuff from Big W occasionally but them ramming your mailbox with catalogues isn't going to make you buy it anymore than you do. You simply pick them up and put them in the recycling.
Marketing isn't about spamming people all shapes and sizes your latest gizmo or gadget. Marketing is about building a relationship with YOUR customer, the customer that actually has an interest in your product. Marketing is about narrowing down to the most atomic buyer, the buyer that has a problem that your product solves. You have to decide what problem you're trying to solve and find the people who need that problem solved. Facebook is an excellent example, you can spend millions of dollars on it, targeting people from 15-90, of every race, interest, political view and country. Yet how many of those people care about the latest golf magazine? Very few. Instead you have to target the exact person who would buy it. After you have targeted that exact person Facebook will do the rest. Your next step is to build trust with that person, over and over again you build trust. Providing value greater than any of the competition, this trust boils over into a sale. This process gets repeated over and over again but it won't happen unless you target the exact type of person for your products.
The same goes for building a brand, I could spam my website on every social media site on the planet, to all my friends, to their friends, to everyone but the time, the energy and most importantly the money will end before I make a considerable return on investment. The best approach is to find where those people who will absolutely benefit from your content reside. Spend time on that platform, build trust, show vulnerability and pump out content for that type of person. As time goes by, the pool of people grows organically, more and more people become interested and not only from that one type of customer but others too. Sure, you might have a very niche product or type of content and that's okay. There are 7.2 billion people on the planet, you won't run out of people who are interested in what you sell or talk about. Unless you become mainstream famous, then you've got bigger problems.
Marketing isn't about spamming as much content to as many people as possible, it's about providing as much value as you can to one person and then growing from there.