3 Tools to Overcome the Fear of Self-Promotion (And a Trick to Avoid It)
Let the world benefit from your knowledge and skills.
🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With my newsletter I want to help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business.
I talk about productivity, automation, strategy and mindset.
I asked my subscribers about the biggest obstacle to their growth. One I totally resonated with is fear of self-promotion.
I’m so shy I sometimes cross the street to avoid the people on the sidewalk. I was raised catholic. I was taught humility is a unquestionable value. Shining a spotlight on yourself in any way is a sin.
This wrong bielef stole dozens of thousands of dollars from me over 14 years as a solopreneur and content creator. But failure can be a powerful teacher.
Over time I understood how crucial self-promotion is, how to overcome the fear of it, and a few tricks to work around it. Here’s what I learned.
Build it, PROMOTE IT, and they’ll come
It usually takes people some time to really appreciate who I am. I have very few friends. They had years to get to know me.
I guess in the beginning I hoped the same would happen online. How silly I was!
No matter what you talk about, thousands creators are doing the same. Your potential audience is drowning in information. They won’t take the time to search for you and consume dozens of your articles to slowly appreciate your value.
You need to catch their attention and quickly show what you have for them.
This means providing great value, of course. But also telling your potential audience, “Look, I’m here, I can do this and that, I’m your man (or woman 😄)”.
The alternative is drifting into oblivion and letting your dream wither. While the people you could help never get the chance to know you.
There is a workaround
At its peak, my first website received 300k views per month. But I didn’t spend a second on self-promotion.
All visits came from Google because my articles ranked high. The same is happening with my current YouTube channel. My videos rank well, views grow, and so do email subscribers and clients.
The video below is a good example.
It’s a 2-hour-long Canva tutorial. I created it aiming at getting SEO traffic over the long term. In the first few weeks, views were within my channel average. But the ranking is constantly growing. So the growth curve now looks almost exponential.
SEO is the antidote to self-promotion.
But you can't always rely on SEO. Some niches are so crowded with established competitors that getting enough traffic is impossible—unless you have an SEO team or a bank account in Switzerland. This is not the case for solo creators, right?
Sometimes your content may just not be suited for SEO. For example, personal and opinion essays aren't usually built around keywords.
Also, SEO rarely is the main source of sales for solopreneurs. I made most of my sales sending emails to my list. The only totally passive, promotion-less revenue source is advertising. But you need millions of views to make a living doing that. Most creators never get to that stage.
Now, let’s see what worked for me when I couldn’t avoid self-promotion anymore.
Starts from a higher purpose
Creators need two purposes to get endless motivation:
a selfish purpose, like achieving a certain lifestyle, self-expression, leaving a traditional job, and so on,
a selfless purpose, like helping, inspiring, or entertaining an audience.
So, find your compelling double purpose. Now imagine leaving a life where you totally failed yourself and your audience. That’s what happens when you avoid self-promotion.
I know this is not the typical positive motivation you find online. But the fear of losing something is a stronger motivator than the hope of gaining something (as documented by Kahneman and Tversky).
Create something you're proud of
One excuse I use against self-promotion is “I don’t want to sound like a sleazy salesman”. I’ve seen so many sellers and marketers abusing psychology tricks and lying to trick people into buying.
But we’re not like them. We create because we want to put beautiful and helpful things into the world.
So create something you're proud of. Write an article that clarifies a complex topic. Develop a product that leads to real change.
You won't feel you're fooling your audience. Promoting that article or product will feel less cringeworthy. Even though you’ll always think it can still be improved.
By the way, don't use this as an excuse to procrastinate. To avoid endless tinkering, set a deadline and ship it.
Start small
Business gurus would kill me for this tip. They say, “Don’t have to undersell yourself. Offer high-ticket products and services from the get-go!”
I understand. I've often undersold myself. But when you can’t get over the fear of self-promotion, maximizing revenue isn’t the goal. You just need to get unstuck and take the first steps to gain attention for your content and fledgling business.
So my advice? Kick things off by promoting something that won't break the bank for your audience. Content is perfect because it's free:
publish something you're proud of,
tell people how much you worked on it and how you’re confident it can help them,
repost it everywhere,
promote it to your email list,
share it with the communities you’re part of.
After a while, you’ll get used to it. You’ll realize it doesn’t make you feel as dirty as you feared. And, most importantly, you’ll see the results. New people will discover you and become loyal followers.
This way, you’ll build up the courage to self-promote more often and to raise the stakes, for example, selling products.
Choose a complacent audience
If the resistance is too strong, lower the difficulty level. Find a community of creators. They often have a section dedicated to self-promotion.
Share your work there. You’ll find people knowing your fear, eager to support you.
Your next step
I hope these tips helped. But theory means nothing if it doesn’t turn into action.
So, don’t wait, do at least one of these things:
Find your selfish purpose, write it somewhere, feel the fear of failing to achieve it.
Find your selfless purpose, write it somewhere, feel the fear of failing to achieve it.
Create something you’re proud of in less than 2 hours. Post it and promote it to people you know and your existing audience.
Find a community of like-minded creators and share your first thing.
Tell me in the comments: what are you going to do?
Subscribe to The Unstoppable Creator to get free articles like this every week. Or upgrade your subscription to get:
🗂️ A monthly template for automating your business and boosting productivity
📙 My book: "Stress-free Niche Finding" (available Sep '24)
💬 Community and 1:1 coaching via chat