Marketing yourself and blowing your own horn

Right, first off I would like to say I am by no means a big player on all this, and have no qualifications that allow me to write this, just what I have done myself, and what I have found to work!

Right the Disclaimer said, I'm just going to run through a few of the things I have done to help Market myself and self publicise my work.

I have always been quite pro active when it comes to Marketing, I think for what I do, paying google for some add words, or for adverts on Bike sites just isn't worth the money, I'm much better off advertising myself via actual content.

I will do this with Bullet points to make it easier...

Advertising:

I do this by watermarking every image that I put online, be it on twitter,Flickr, my blog, my site, everywhere! people see the images and they see my name at the same time. I know people say they are off putting, and take things away from the images, but if you don't want the watermark on the images, put your finger over that corner ? Don't make them bold, and large and put them in the middle of an image, but on the bottom, or in a corner is fine IMO.













































Social media and networking:

Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Facebook are all Forms of social media and networking and they are all amazing tools for marketing yourself.

Most people are on a few of them, and its just being aware of how to make the most of them, don't post the same things on both, use them in conjunction with each other.

Post on Twitter about an idea, Follow that up with a FB post with a bit more detail telling them about a full write up coming up on your blog ?

With flickr and blogs, don't just post photos regularly but also comment on other peoples work, its called social for a reason!

Branding:

This is the most important part as far as I'm aware. It affects everything you do online with regards to your business.

Get a website, logo, colour scheme that's all the same, use the same things, in the same ways, in the same places every time you do it so it looks uniform and coherent.

Look at my site, watermarks, video idents etc all the same fonts and colours, was that by accident, no...
























video:

For me personally this is a HUGE part of my marketing, its a skill I have that not a lot of other people have, being able to produce high quality work with both stills and videos. So I combine them with slide shows etc but also the idents on the start and end of every video I make is great adverting for me with most of my videos that go online getting anywhere from a few thousand to 100,000 + views... that's a lot of eye balls seeing my web address...

Jacob Gibbins 2010 Showreel from jacob gibbins on Vimeo.

If you don't make video, you have lots of other places you can put your name:

Forum signatures
PB,Fb,Mpora profiles
Blogs
Flickrs

make sure they all have good up to date info on them that's relevant to what your trying to do...

I think that just about sums up what I wanted to say in this post anyway.

If you have any more questions or things you want me to cover, jot them down in the comments on this post and If there's enough to warrant another post, You shall get one!

Thanks

Jacob