Thread by @oliverjumpertz

There are 7.9 billion on this planet.

4.66 billion of those have access to the internet.

A fraction of those is software engineers. Many of them try to make money somehow.

If you want to stand out, you need to learn to market yourself.

A thread. ↓

1. What is marketing?

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

- The American Marketing Society

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And to state it simpler:

Marketing is the art of getting people to know you and to make them curious about you, your services, or your products.

This includes all actions necessary to reach the above.

The ultimate goal is to sell them something.

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Marketing has many sub-categories like:

- Marketing Research
- Online Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Brand-building
- Inbound Marketing
- Outbound Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- and much more

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2. Why is marketing important for you?

You, as a software engineer, no matter your skill level, have your personal relationships.

Perhaps you are known in your local community.

But other than this?

Do people still know who you are one city further?

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What about two cities further or on the other side of your country?

How is your reputation in another country?

Probably, people don't know you as soon as you leave your local neighborhood.

You are only one of many people.

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This is usually perfectly fine, but this also applies to you applying for jobs or trying to sell your services.

How should a company further away know how awesome you are if they never heard of you?

Why should businesses know that you create beautiful websites?

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No one will usually magically appear out of nowhere and ask you to work for or offer them your services.

You have to apply for jobs. And you have to show that you are capable of doing it.

You also need to send out proposals to sell your services.

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And people will be like: "Yea, I don't know this one. Who are they? What is their credibility?"

This also applies to the internet.

There are billions of people on the internet who shout into the world.

Your voice will most likely be overheard.

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Ask yourself what you do when you look for something.

In 99% of cases, you open Google and search for it or look on social media.

And you will most likely click on one of the first results and go down the list until you find a good offer for what you look for.

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When you market yourself right, people find you.

You build a reputation, usually online, and make yourself known to the world.

Clients will find you and ask for your services.

Company recruiters will come at you and ask whether you want to interview with them.

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Applied to the extreme, as I experienced, you might be able to skip much of technical interviews because it is already known what you are capable of.

And even further, people will come at you and ask whether they can buy your services.

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You will have to prove less what you are capable of and what you already worked on because people will have a way to find out for themselves.

There are plenty of resources then, interviewers or clients can take a look at to assess you and your skills.

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Additionally, new opportunities open up.

If you have a strong personal brand, you have many additional ways of earning money.

Many software engineers have released an ebook by now, sharing their expertise.

This brought them a nice additional income.

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And they were able to sell it because of the personal brand they built on the internet.

Others are regularly invited to talk at conferences because of their expertise.

The opportunities are endless. No matter what your actual goal is.

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3. How to get started

When you have realized that marketing yourself brings many benefits, you have already made the first important step.

What you need next is an actual goal you want to work toward to.

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Ask yourself what you want to accomplish and where you want to get to in the mid-term.

This influences your overall strategy.

There are many ways to market yourself, and they all take time.

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If you don't want to spend your whole day marketing yourself, you need to prioritize and create the best strategy for your specific goal.

You also need to be aware of your personal strengths.

Are you a good or bad writer?

Do you feel comfortable in front of a camera?

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How good are you at creating images (infographics, e.g.)?

Do you actually like your voice enough to make and share audio recordings, perhaps?

Are you okay with sharing your personal work online?

Are you afraid of negative comments?

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Write down:

- Your goal(s)
- Your strengths
- Your weaknesses
- How comfortable you would be working on one of a few of your weaknesses
- Topics you are good at

This is your foundation. Your overall strategy needs to be later based on this.

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It doesn't make sense to create video content if you feel horrible in front of a camera and don't actually want to improve on this in any way.

Your first steps should actually be on a medium you feel okay with and based on topics you feel comfortable in.

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4. How to market yourself

One of the best forms of marketing yourself is content marketing.

You provide free, valuable content, based on your experience or even current learning, for others to consume.

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This can be programming tutorials, how-tos, infographics like cheat sheets, tips, live streams or recordings of those, or more.

You could also talk about your open-source contributions that everyone can see on GitHub.

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It's up to your creativity to find out what actually is fun for you to do.

You need to be aware that all of those have different time investment requirements, though.

Fully-fledged tutorials need some time to be written, for example.

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Short tweets can be composed in a few minutes, but you need more of those to be really effective on a short-lived platform like Twitter.

Streams can be improvised but still take some of your time. But you can simply put their recordings on YouTube later.

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There are several different mediums on the internet you can use to market yourself.

The most important choice will be your main medium.

If you want to do this time-effective, you will need one main medium to concentrate on.

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Some possible mediums for developers are:

- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Instagram
- Facebook
- TikTok
- YouTube
- A (personal) blog
- Your own portfolio site
- GitHub/Gitlab

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Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a blog are mostly text content platforms.

YouTube and TikTok are pure video content platforms.

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook can also be used to spread video content. Short-form video content does better there, in my experience.

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Your portfolio site showcases your overall work.

GitHub and Gitlab are great for open-sourcing your code and apps, which you can then showcase on your portfolio site.

Both Instagram and Facebook also support longer-form videos and live content.

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You need to make a choice that will greatly influence your time investment.

Well-edited videos on YouTube take much time. Perhaps more than you are willing to invest.

It is best to read up on each platform and its best practices before you make your choice.

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Your main medium is the one you actually produce the content for.

You can then use other mediums or platforms to post micro-content on or to repost.

You can, for example, often extract short learnings from a blog article and put them into individual tweets.

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I, for example, write threads like this one and later post them to my blog.

I polish and refine them a little more and add further information where necessary before I publish.

I can spread the links to my articles on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Facebook.

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And I often can derive further micro-content from these threads that I can create single tweets from.

I have to admit that I put more work into building my personal brand, so this approach might not be for everyone who simply wants to market themselves a bit.

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I can, however, recommend you one thing:

Get a personal blog if you produce text-based content.

This way, it will be persisted for longer, and you can apply search engine optimization to it.

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Most content on social networks vanishes quickly and is not to be found that easy again (with one exception currently being LinkedIn).

It would be a shame if no one could see all the value you produce.

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Also, make sure to create at least a splash page for you.

This is a single page, like linktree, where you can say something about yourself and link to all the platforms you have a presence on.

This way, people can google you more easily and quickly find your presence.

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5. You need to experiment

You won't be a professional self-marketer right at the beginning of your journey.

Experiment and find out what works best for you.

Don't worry too much about followers or readers in the beginning.

Every piece of content is somehow valuable.

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If not for a broader community, then perhaps for a potential client or a future employer who sees how competent you are.

Your content will start to get noticed at some point, but you usually can't predict it reliably.

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Just write that one blog post a week, that one tweet a day, or create that live stream every Sunday evening.

And if something doesn't satisfy you, try something else.

Try out what works and what doesn't, and learn from it.

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6. Thread end

That's it for this thread. 💛

I hope you found it valuable and learned a thing or two. 🙏🏼

If you enjoyed this read, leave a like, retweet the first tweet, and follow me (@oliverjumpertz) for more content like this.

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