by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 19, 2009

There is a basic fact in Internet marketing that if you don't promote yourself, why should you expect anyone else to do so? Shameless self-promotion is not a bad thing; it is rather absolutely essential if we and our business are to succeed online. We have to let our customers, those who may be interested in our products or services, know that we are here and that we have said products or services to offer them. Fortunately, there are a great many ways in which we can engage in this self-promotion on an ongoing basis, without financial outlay but merely by investing a little quality time in the practise.

In order to promote ourselves online, the first thing we should do is create a central web presence. This is usually a traditional website which perhaps you may have already if your desire for self-promotion is related to such as a business. If not, I would recommend getting one but it is not absolutely essential.

The next step is to create a blog. Put some Google AdSense on it as a revenue generating tool and determine in advance what the subject of your blog is to be. Try to make it very specific to a particular activity which you undertake r a service or product offered by your business. This will minimise your competition in the search engines and make your blog easier to find. Know in advance that blogs require to be posted to extremely frequently to be used to best effect so preserve your material for the long term by making each post relevant and informative but fairly short.

Submit the URL of your blog to blog directories and bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us. Include a short paragraph in each instance - where permitted - detailing your blog and what value it offers to anyone interested in the subject of it. Do this on as many of these sites as you can.

Sign up for MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Yuwie. These social networking sites are the platforms for the most shameless self-promotion on the Internet. Get in on the act. Write a detailed and compelling profile, linking in it to your blog and website. Make friends on the site, create an internal blog on it where applicable and join interest groups relevant to your subject. Some of these groups even have forums which you can participate in.

Forums can be found all over the Web on subjects of great diversity. Find one or more relevant to your interests and post regularly to the threads upon it. Be sure each posting is unique and adds some value to the subject being discussed. This will boost your popularity on the forums and encourage others to seek out more of your work.

Creat yourself a profile on the professional interaction site, LinkedIn. This is a site with tens of thousands of professionals from every field imaginable. Again, interact in the forums and get to know your peers. Learn from them how to further to shamelessly promote yourself.

These are just some of the methods we can employ in order to promote ourselves online, so don't delay get shameless today!

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