How to Market Yourself - ***How to Market Yourself - source - [swyx Writing | How to Market Yourself](https://www.swyx.io/writing/marketing-yourself/) - [[Literature notes]] -  - **Having a distinctive site design is yet another point of personal branding that, because you are a dev, costs basically nothing.** People come to my site and they remember my scrollbars. - I used to have a very crude, kinda sexist name for this idea: "Be The Guy". This is because I noticed how many guys were doing this: - [The Points Guy](https://thepointsguy.com/) is the Internet's pre-eminent authority on travel perks (It is now also a 9-figure business - pandemic aside) - [The RideShare Guy](https://therideshareguy.com/) is who Wall Street called upon when Uber and Lyft IPO'ed - Science communicators have definitely caught on to this. Neil deGrasse Tyson **always** introduces himself as your Personal Astrophysicist. But he's completely owned by Bill Nye - The **Science** Guy! - This effect is real and it is **extraordinarily powerful**. - You get there by **planting a flag** on your domain, and saying, [this is what I do](https://microconf.gen.co/patrick-mckenzie/). People **want** expertise. People **want** to defer to authority. People don't actually **need** it all the time, they just want the option just in case. People love hoarding options. - Most people also define "expertise" simply as "someone who has spent more time on a thing than I have" (The bar is depressingly low, to be honest. People should have higher standards, but they just don't. This is a systematic weakness you can - responsibly - exploit.) - Be an internal expert at your company for your domain. This also helps you focus on things that bring value to a company, and therefore your career. It's also a very natural onramp to being an external expert when you leave. - Picking your domain is 90% of the journey. Most people don't even get that far. To **really** clean up, be prolific around that domain. Show up. To every conversation. I kind of joke about this as "High Availability for Humans". - your goal, as a brand, is to make it in. You do that by being Highly Available. - By the way, we also have huge [Availability Bias](https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/availability-bias) when it comes to recall. We conflate "first to your lips" with "being the best". We're also really good at backwards justifying what we just called the "best" by pulling up a bunch of bullet point reasons that have nothing to do with being "first to your lips - You signal commitment by giving up optionality. This is 100% OK - what you lose in degrees of freedom you gain 10x in marketing ability. - . [Cory House saw a 15x increase in enquiries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4wnbkatj20\&feature=youtu.be\&t=1311) ) when he went from "general dev consulting" to "helping teams transition to React". Same dev, different pitch, 15x opportunities. - it is just a good general principle to own your own distribution - your only role and value to the company is to Grow Revenue or Reduce Cost (or Die Trying?). I call this **Marketing Your Business Value**. This is, of course, technically correct: Technology is a means to an end, and ultimately your employer has to make ends meet and justify your salary. It is **especially** in your interest to help them justify as high a salary as possible. - have an expansive definition of Coding Skills - even if you've done something totally unrelated, they'll easily assume you can pick up what you need later. Others need something closer to home - that you've Done Cool Shit in a related tech stack. - . The best **Cool Shit** will be stuff you have been paid money for and put in production, and that people can go check out live. If you don't have that yet, you can always Clone Well Known Apps (automatically Cool) - or win a Hackathon - You can and should **buy** designs if design isn't a skill you're trying to market - it gives your projects an instant facelift which is generally worth multiples of the <\\$100 that a premium design probably costs. - Some people plan their projects by how it will look on a Portfolio - the dreaded "Portfolio Driven Development". That lacks heart and it'll show when you have to talk about your projects at interviews and talks. Instead, just pursue projects that seem most interesting to you, and then figure out how to present it later. - You can market your coding skills through any number of more relevant ways, from doing major contributions to Open Source, to being Highly Available surrounding a Domain, to Blogging. The most general, default marketing skill is definitely Blogging. You can write about any kind of technical topic in your blog. - The better you have a handle on your Personal Brand, your Domain, your Business Value or your Coding Skills, the easier time you will have marketing in public - . Facebook charges you to reach your own subscribers, LinkedIn is full of spam, Reddit and Hacker News don't show an avatar so you don't get to imprint your personal brand. I think Instagram and YouTube are **huge** areas of opportunity for developers - Borrowing from Hubspot's [Inbound marketing](https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing) and Seth Godin's [Permission marketing](https://seths.blog/2008/01/permission-mark/). **Outbound Personal Marketing** is what most people do what they look for jobs - only when they need it, and trawling through reams of job listings and putting their CV in the pile with everyone else. **Inbound Personal Marketing** is what you'll end up doing if you do everything here right - people (prospective bosses and coworkers, not recruiters) knowing your work and your interests, and hitting you up on exactly the things you love to do. - _do a little more than you're comfortable_\* - If you're not getting complaints about how you're showing up everywhere, you're not doing it enough. This makes sense to some people, and is way too upfront and annoying for others. We all have to find our balance - it's your name on the line after all.