Productive people are self promoters. Now don't get me wrong. I didn't say a shameless self promoter. You don't have to walk around all day long beating your chest saying I am the greatest. But productive people realize it's a big world out there. There are a lot of talented people out there a lot louder, productive people out there.
Good work in and of itself doesn't necessarily or even usually speak for itself. The person who created that productive work has to speak. This is true in every field. Now you hear so many marketing and media experts these days say Oh, advertising is all dead. Nothing matters anymore than what people say your own clients and customers say about you. Well, word of mouth is important and it's perhaps more important than ever.
But look at a product like Apple like the iPhone, and this is the The biggest company in the world in terms of market cap at the moment, most profitable company, products people love. I certainly have a ton of them. And yet they still spend a fortune on advertising billboards, TV. So they still are promoting themselves. What are you doing to promote yourself? So here's the thing that's important.
Number one, you got to get over this idea that somehow Oh, I'm just going to do the work. And I'll let other people say nice things about you got to get over that. You have to figure out how can you comfortably promote your own work, promote your talents, talk yourself up in a way that feels authentic to you. The next thing you got to do is figure out what are the venues that are going to help you promote yourself because you can in this modern day and age, spin your wheels going on Facebook here post Except on LinkedIn, a couple of tweets, talking about some new product or service or book or app you've created, and it just amount to nothing. So it's really a two step process, you have to, first of all make the decision you're going to tell the world how great your productive product or service is.
Next, you got to figure out what's the best way of promoting yourself for example. For many years, I would go to networking parties Chamber of Commerce events, at the time young professional networking events in New York City, and it was fun, I would meet people and I would exchange business cards and I'd put them in my database and follow up. Guess what, none of them ever hired me. That simply wasn't the venue. The right way for me to promote my particular services and my products and books and way back then the video And CD, it just wasn't the way to do it. So guess what, I don't go to general networking events anymore.
I only go if it's to hear a speaker I'm particularly interested in. And if I happen to meet someone where there's a business connection, that's just an extra, I don't fool myself into thinking, I'm now going here to promote my business. He may have a different experience, networking events may be the greatest thing in the world for you, especially if you have a service that is widely applicable to everyone, accountant, lawyer, a dentist, those can often be great places to market your services and let the world people know about what you do. That is productive. I spent an entire year for a full every single day doing a podcast. It was fun.
It was interesting. People told me they liked it. didn't do anything to bring in new business for me So I stopped it. You've got to constantly put yourself out there and you have to constantly evaluate and figure out what works. For me what works is good search engine optimization, so people can find me for the keywords that are relevant to my business. And that means creating new content, videos, text blogs that are relevant to that subject matter.
That's what generates high rankings in Google and generates the right sort of person, finding me What else works creating more and more high quality, highly reviewed, highly rated popular online video based courses because the more My Courses are out there, the more people find me and reach out to me for other things that I do or they want my courses on other platforms too. So those are the things that work for me. None of those things might work for you. But something that you've got to figure out how to promote yourself. And for many people, they got to get over this idea that, Oh, I'm shy or I'm not self promote. I'm not a marketing person.
Show me someone who says I'm not a marketing person. I don't like marketing and sales. I'll show you someone who isn't productive generally, and isn't particularly successful and has to spend a lot of time doing other things they don't like to do like all their cooking and cleaning and schlepping around because they don't make enough money for other things. So I need you to get over it. In this modern age, everyone has to be involved with marketing and sales, your marketing and selling yourself. I don't mean this in some mercenary way and that every single personal transaction you ever have has to be towards some bottom line and getting money out of people.
I don't mean it like that. But if you want the world to pay attention to what it is you Create your product, your service, your business, whatever it is, you have to sell. No one can sell it better than you. And you can look at any one big Hollywood star and think, Wow, they've got it easy. They got agents, managers doing all that work for them. before they ever had their first agent or manager.
They were out selling themselves every day, typically tryouts getting rejected 100 times telling people how great they were before they got the first casting before they long before they ever got an agent who did their marketing and sales for them. So productive people just get over it. You might not enjoy, it might not be the most enjoyable part of what you do, but you're gonna have to learn how to market yourself, promote yourself, but you got to find something that's comfortable for you. If you hate making YouTube videos, then figure out another way. If you hate Giving public speeches but you're comfortable going to network events and talking to a few people at a time and maybe that does work for you. You got to find something that works.
Mere productivity is not enough. You got to tell the world about it.