Introduction: Marketing Yourself
Explore how to market yourself effectively as a software engineer by understanding personal branding and career marketing strategies. Learn when and why to promote your accomplishments and projects, and discover approachable tactics to stand out in your field without the pressure to become a celebrity.
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When to use this tactic
Ideally, you are constantly marketing yourself, but it’s understandable if you don’t want it to take over your whole life. So: pull up this tactic when:
- You have done something significant that you are proud of or enjoyed
- Just before some major professional move or project launch (job hunting, getting a promotion or even when trying to pitch an idea)
For the rest of this essay, I will primarily talk in terms of marketing yourself, but the tactics here also work for marketing your ideas and your projects.
Marketing is important
Marketing is important for your career. This isn’t earth-shattering news: according to a recent survey, 91% of you already agree.
Equating marketing with celebrity
However, people tend to doubt their ability to effectively market themselves. They see “tech celebrities,” and then they look at themselves and say: “I’m not like that; when I put out a blog post, I don’t get a billion likes,” or “I don’t want to be like them — that seems hard.”
The mistake here is equating marketing with celebrity. It’s like saying your favorite restaurant shouldn’t bother trying because McDonald’s exists. They’re two different (but related) things!
You are a product
You work really hard on making yourself a great product. You owe it to yourself to spend some time on your marketing even if you don’t want to be a “celebrity”. Like it or not, people want to put you in a box. Help them put you in an expensive, high-sentimental-value, glittering, easy to reach the box. This box is preferably at eye level, near checkout, and next to other nice-looking boxes.
Be better than 95% of dev
It’s not that hard to be better than 95% of devs at marketing. The simple fact is that most devs don’t do the basic things that people tell them to do. I think this has two causes:
- It’s not code. Code is black and white, while marketing is shades of gray.
- A lot of advice is very generic, like “Blog more.” Devs often need more help transpiring this to actionable instructions.
Let me try.