Self-promotion is just a vain exercise, indulging your own personal ego, right? Not if you want to build a career. If you do any kind of creative work, build an audience for yourself to give yourself more opportunities to find a job.
Photo by Open Hardware Summit.
As productivity site 99u explains, in the modern age jobs can come from anywhere. Sometimes it comes from a job listing site, but it can just as easily come from a guy on Twitter who saw your work and liked it (in fact, that’s how I got my job!). By building an audience for your work, you’re giving yourself a safety net for when you need to go looking for a creative job:
This is why building an audience is job insurance. There’s a reason the creative crowd flocks to Medium and Twitter. The “premium” for this job insurance isn’t money. It’s being transparent in your process, having resolute beliefs, and sharing these both with the world and doing so regularly. Usually, though not always, this means writing. But it can also mean capturing email addresses of those who like your work. Or posting case studies of everything you work on. Or directing people to follow you on a specific network (we suggest Bēhance, but we’re biased). Too often, creatives do this after the fact, only when they are in need of a new gig.
It might feel vain at first. It’s easy to slip into the trap of boosting follower numbers and focusing on hashtags and analytics rather than genuinely sharing the stuff you do. You don’t need to turn into an “SEO guru” or anything. But by giving yourself a platform for your work, you’re letting everyone else know where to look when it comes time for them to start hiring.
The Most Defensible Thing You Can Do for Your Career: Build an Audience [99u]
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