Posts Tagged “self-promotion”

One of the first tasks that journalism students tackle in class is to write their own obituary. That sounds a little macabre, but there’s a method to the madness – writing about yourself is considerably more difficult than writing about someone else. (In fact, the trick to writing your own obit is to pretend you’re writing it about someone else.)

Marketing yourself is a lot like that. For some reason (false modesty, a societal proscription against bragging, whatever), it’s a lot harder to market yourself than it is to market someone else. 

Recently, I’ve had the challenge to market myself, in order to build bookings for live, musical performance. It’s interesting, because while I am typically fearless when recommending marketing ideas to clients, when you’re doing it yourself, it’s a lot harder. But why? I have a theory (what a surprise!)… Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I’ve gotten restless, and I’ve decided to begin playing music professionally again. Trouble is, I don’t have a lot of contacts here in Amarillo. So I’ve decided to apply the same techniques I recommend to my marketing clients to my own situation. That means I’ve got to find ways to get myself noticed around town. What you see at the left here is a poster I whipped up in an hour or so this evening. I’ve secured a one-night gig – kind of a “let’s see if this works” kind of thing. Obviously, I’d like this to turn into a regular gig. So I’m doing everything I know how to do to make that happen. First, we’ll start with promotions. I’m going to print several of these posters and give them to Pizza Hut. I figure that the combination of a nice-looking poster along with taking the initiative to promote my appearance there will go a long way towards helping them see the possibilities. It won’t cost me much to do it, and it will help serve my larger goal of getting my name out there as a musician in Amarillo. With only two days before the gig, I don’t have much time to self-promote, but I figure that anything I can do is better than sitting around and waiting for something good to happen. Read the rest of this entry »