Do you share your work? Sometimes feel a little hesitant? Don’t want to feel like you’re spamming people with your links? Don’t worry you’re not alone. Many bloggers feel the same and have to learn how to overcome their fear of self-promotion. They have you overcome it, as not promoting yourself would have negative consequences to the success of your blog. In an online space if you’re not sharing your work, believe me others will be sharing their’s, driving traffic and expanding their audience. You need your work to be out there too; people can’t discover it if you don’t.
Sometimes we hold ourselves back from self-promotion; we don’t want to be judged as cocky or overconfident and we tend to feel it’s more gracious to be humble and hide our light under a bushel. This is NOT how to grow your blog or your business.
How to overcome fear of self promotion;
Firstly, I am not suggesting that we lose all sense of social awareness and turn into those people who won’t stop talking about themselves; we all know people like that don’t we?! However, you need to be your own cheerleader, promoting yourself and your blog when and where appropriate.
Often our blogs are personal and I think that’s where the difficulty lies for many of us, but we need to remember it’s work.
1. Know your target audience
If you aren’t confident about your content, it follows that you won’t be confident about promoting it and yourself. Drilling down who your target audience is means you will be creating content specifically for them. That way you can be confident that you are producing great content which your audience needs.
2. Ignore negative self-talk
We are often our own worst critics. So when that nagging voice appears on your shoulder saying you’re not good enough, make sure you smack it off by countering it with something you like (or appreciate) about yourself. You are JUST as good as everyone else. Don’t let these nagging voices win. Also don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.
3. Identify your fears
What scares the most? Are you worried about what others will think? Of being rejected? Do you feel more vulnerable when you share your work? To rid yourself of these fears you have to know what specifically what they are and where they stem from.
4. Love your flaws
This won’t happen over night, but start to be more compassionate towards your own flaws. Give yourself the same levels of compassion that you would give others.
5. Be your own cheerleader
How do you feel when someone gives you a compliment? I’m guessing you feel happier, maybe even more confident. As grown adults we shouldn’t have to rely on others to give us this validation. We need to do it for ourselves by being realistic, but positive.
6. Take the ‘sell’ out of it
Promoting your content can feel like hard sell, especially if you have a virtual product to sell such as an ebook or a course. Just remember why you wrote the ebook or why you wrote that last blog post. It was to help people and to give them information they want or need. So by reaching out to them, you are in fact helping them.
7. Push your comfort zone step by step
Don’t expect miracles overnight, but do remind yourself that there are people out there who need what you have to offer. Your job is to let them know where the content is that can help them. Write down 7 promotional activities that would make you feel apprehensive and do one each day for the next week. These could be writing a guest post, getting a collaboration going, sharing posts more thoroughly on social media.
8. Rote learn your elevator pitch
Imagine you’re at an event and your dream brand asks you about your blog. If you can’t quickly summarise what your blog is all about, it will be hard to feel confident. Stumbling over your words will make any confidence you have quickly evaporate. So write your elevator pitch; a couple of sentences which epitomises the ethos of your blog. Now learn it rote. Memorise it until it trips off your tongue without you even having to think.
9. Support others
Learn from the people you know who are confident with marketing themselves. Enjoy being in the presence of these amazing people and start believing that you’re one of them, rather than feeling that you don’t belong in their company.
10. Believe in yourself and your blog
She believed she could and so she did
Our minds are a very powerful tool and while they can negative impact on our lives, they can also positivity affect them, if we work hard and believe in ourselves. If you’re not confident about your content, whether that is vlogs, podcasts, posts or ebooks, no-one else is going to feel confident in you. You’re producing great content, you are worthy of the success you want, believe it and show people.
Do you ever feel nervous about promoting yourself? What will you do to overcome your fear of self-promotion?
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