The Art of Quiet Self-Promotion Makes You Incredible

The 11 commandments of ethical self-promotion that’ll change your financial future

Image Credit: Midjourney

Self-promotion feels terrible.

I’ve always hated it. When I was told to do it in corporate it felt like bragging. Nothing worse than a Instagram influencer in a bikini drinking a green smoothie at a yoga retreat talking about how blessed they are.

In the last few years, I’ve had a change of heart. I now realize the error in my ways. Self-promotion is a survival skill. Without it, life becomes unnecessarily hard.

An unknown story about self-promotion that’ll inspire you

Most people know author James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits.

What they don’t know is he’s relatively shy and the most anti-marketing guy you’ll ever meet. Before 2012 he was a nobody. He blogged to an audience of no one.

After 2012 he made a deliberate decision to self-promote like his life depended on it. Every Tuesday and Thursday he published a blog post. Rather than post and ghost, he treated a blog post like a product.

He manually marketed the sh*t out of his posts.

His competitors didn’t do that. They were romantic artists who stood around and jerked off to each other’s choir songs about how they were going to one day get a book publishing deal and be chosen so they could get out of the writer’s ghetto.

Slightly more sophisticated bloggers would post on social media and hope they got picked up in the algorithm lottery. Or they let the magic of SEO suck off their blog posts and make them gang b*ng famous.

Not James.

He submitted his articles one by one to certain Reddit threads, and niche publications like Hacker News. He even emailed famous bloggers asking to swap shares using personalized, handwritten notes. If you look in the comments section James spent lots of time replying to every single comment. He never missed one.

He spent more time promoting his work than writing it.

With no book deal, team, or PR … James’ list grew to 400,000 subscribers over 3 years – all because of his belief in self-promotion. When he finally did go the author route he sold 10M books and made every other writer look as broke as a homeless person. He says…

"If you’re not willing to promote your work, why would anyone else?"

The true meaning of self-promotion that’s misunderstood

Self-promotion is just a fancy way to say sales and marketing.

Romantic artists hate doing that because they somehow think it’s taboo or unethical. If you break down this belief, like I have, you often find it cuts deeper.

Not wanting to self-promote is a disguise for a giant ego. People refuse to self-promote because they secretly think they’re geniuses. They think their business or book idea is so profound it’s going to change the world. The truth is it won’t because nobody knows about it.

This delusion is even worse nowadays. AI is already smarter than any Harvard PhD student, so being a genius isn’t an advantage anymore.

Not doing self-promotion will steal your family’s financial future

By refusing to do self-promotion, you’re saying yes to an evil alternative.

Those who don’t do any sales and marketing can never own a business or do solopreneurship. So they’re forced to work jobs they likely hate and outsource the sales and marketing to an employer.

This might seem smart until you realize that handing your future to an employer is more dangerous.

They can underpay you or fire you at any point. Also, a business is created to make a profit. For that to happen an employer has to find ways to underpay people so they can make more money.

That’s why you’ll likely come across so many people being smashed by the cost of living because their employer pays them peanuts and doesn’t do regular salary increases to keep up with inflation.

If you don't self-promote, then you're effectively outsourcing sales and marketing to a corporate employer or some middleman who'll take all the upside.

A life without self-promotion is one of quiet desperation

You’re forced to rely on luck.

Or get chosen by a gatekeeper to become a little worker bee in their beekeeper family. No thanks. By default, if you don’t promote what you do, then no one knows you exist. You’re invisible.

"Visibility beats ability when ability isn’t visible."— Nicolas Cole

If you don’t educate people on what you do and generate your own social proof, then people will think to themselves, “why should I trust you?”

The painful part is no one tells you that. They don’t say I don’t trust you because it’s rude. The reputation of being a no one (that you created) sounds like:

• “We regret to inform you…”

• “We don’t have an opportunity for you.”

• “Your price is too high.”

• “0 likes.”

"Don’t wait for someone to discover you. Discover yourself and make it known."
— Dan Koe

The 30-second reframe that’ll change how you think about self-promotion forever

We don’t self-promote because we think it’s bragging.

Change that mindset to “I’m informing people about what I do, so they’re aware in case they want my help or to work with me.”

We also hate self-promotion because we think it’s salesy or sleazy. But when you self-promote using tools like social media, you’re not selling anything. You’re just finding ways to help people and offering solutions.

As long as there’s no obligation to buy anything, you’ve found the cheat code to selling without selling.

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The 11 Commandments of Ethical Self-Promotion that’ll change your financial future

When you embrace self-promotion more opportunities come your way. Those opportunities turn into cash and make you wealthier than you could ever imagine.

Commandment 1 –

“People will never find my work unless I self-promote the sh*t out of it”

The threshold you need to cross to get any traction with sharing your ideas is much higher than you realize.

Writing one post or replying to three comments isn’t enough. My toddler in a poo-filled nappy can do that with her eyes closed. We’re all busy. The internet is crowded and full of polarizing politics and culture wars.

What is in your control is to make people find your work.

• Email out your work

• Post your work on social media

• Publish Youtube videos about it

• Share your work with your inner circle

• Build a small community around your work

• Share your work more times than feels normal

• Swap comments and engagement with a group of people

Whatever the romantic artists or hobbyists are saying or doing, do the opposite. These part-timers never go all in or take a risk which is why they’re invisible trying to paint Picassos worse than the real Picassos in the basement of a billionaire’s wine cellar.

Commandment 2 –

“I’m not going to attract bullies or trolls”

Say it with me now: “nobody gives a f*ck about my work.”

You’re not good enough to have haters or trolls. That happens when you have millions of followers or accidentally become famous by showing your butt in a Disney moving then signing a contract to feature in a Romcom movie where your g-string gets exposed in the elevator softcore kissing scene.

~You’re not famous. I’m not famous. You’re not famous. I’m not famous. Say it with me now!

Commandment 3 –

“My work is good enough”

Your work never starts out good.

And even when you’ve been doing it 11 years, like I have, your work still isn’t good enough. It could always be better. You could always fact-check better. The photos you take could always be better. You could always be funnier.

Just self-promote with what you have.

The barrier to entry in any field is already at rock bottom. Your work is better than you think and when you release it into the world and let people see it and comment on it, the work, bizarrely, will get better.

We’re tired of experts. We’re craving amateurs just like you and I.

Commandment 4 –

“No gatekeeper is going to magically give me distribution”

Scooter Braun isn’t going to find you on the streets at 13 with a guitar in hand singing a teenage love song and give you a $100M record deal.

These stories are fantasies. They’re not real. They’re created for show so people waste decades of their life competing to be part of show business. Or climbing the corporate ladder to play in a different type of show business (horror film).

• Book publishers expect you to market

• Youtube won't promote your videos for free

• Google won't show your work without buying ads

• The record labels won't make you famous

Repeat after me:

Real distribution is earned, not given.
Real distribution is earned, not given.
Real distribution is earned, not given.

Commandment 5 –

“Talent is useless without distribution”

There are many geniuses sitting at home right now pulling themselves over their talent and how the world doesn’t see them. That doesn’t need to be you.

If you have no distribution, you have no income.

Applying for jobs in a world of AI is a sick joke that’ll see you face worse discrimination than Rosa Parks did on that famous bus all those years ago.

Average talent with average distribution will take you further.

"You don’t have to be the best, just the best-known"— Jack Butcher

Commandment 6 –

“I will tell stories that educate and inspire”

Nothing salesy about that.

It’s a perfectly ethical strategy to help people find you and your work and decide if they want to follow you as a leader in your field.

Stories are the most persuasive form of content there is and you have thousands of those stored in your s*xy brain. It’s time to let them out.

Commandment 7 –

“I will make people feel emotion”

I’ve discovered real self-promotion is just a transfer of emotion.

It’s why I share all the silly stories from my average life. The key to making people feel anything is to say something you feel you shouldn’t (a.k.a. vulnerability). This is the difference between content creators and true creators.

Content creators share information. Creators share emotion.

They’re not the same. Both look similar but there’s a huge difference. AI can effortlessly be a content creator but only humans can be creators.

Commandment 8 –

“I will demonstrate instead of brag”

“I spent 10,000 hours doing bench press so you don’t have to and here’s what I learned.” That headline sounds better than “look at my 6-pack” that you’d see on Instagram. It’s not bragging if it’s educational.

It’s not bragging if you’re demonstrating a point rather than trying to look or sound cool. Honest self-promotion starts with intent. I haven’t felt like I’m bragging about what I’ve done online because it’s for educational purposes.

Sure, some floggers will say “easy for you to say Denning ya millionaire,” but these haters just don’t want to change. They’d prefer to be angry or envious than consider how miserable their lives are. For every one comments like this, I get private comments like “thanks for sharing the journey to millions, it inspired me.”

When I demonstrate a point using money, it’s never about the money. Only immature adult babies think financial numbers are bragging. Smart people know that money is a scoreboard and it demonstrates competence in a field.

Use your big wins to show people why they should listen to you.

"The world doesn’t reward silence. It rewards clarity and reach." — Wes Kao

Commandment 9 –

“I will leverage social media properly and stop selling myself short”

Social media used to be optional. Now it’s a matter of survival.

Employers use LinkedIn to hire people. And employers or recruiters do google searches of a possible candidate to see whether they have value beyond a job description. Soon, we will use AI to crawl the web and learn about someone.

If nothing shows up in ChatGPT or google search about you, that’s a huge red flag that is costing you money.

The solution is simple: write daily and publish daily.

It’s how you get the best ideas out of your head, and how you stumble across other people by attracting them with your ideas. We’re now in the ideas economy, because any job or skill you can be trained on, AI can be trained on too.

Commandment 10 –

“I will create a public mission to attract the right people and opportunities”

Having a passion is boring. It’s selfish. It’s ego.

A public mission is a better approach. Doesn’t need to be grandiose either. Mine used to be “helping 1000 people start writing online.” That’s more interesting than “I write blogs.”

A mission transcends you. It attracts people. It suggests your work is designed to create a change in the world. That all acts as a magnet.

Be mission-driven, not fake-passion-driven.

"Self-promotion is not bragging.

It’s a responsibility if you believe in your message” — Mel Robbins

Commandment 11 –

“I will build a personal brand”

Not a company brand because people don't get excited to consume mindless ads.

Social media divided content up by humans, not topics. A personal brand is just being yourself (minus the ego & selfies).

Final Thought

Self-promotion doesn’t need to be loud.

When you consistently promote yourself every day through writing, sharing ideas, talking about results and making predictions, your life gets easier.

Salespeople brag. Quiet self-promoters are helpful.

When you help people without any expectations of something in return, your value increases in the marketplace. When your value goes up you become wealthier.

None of this is rocket science. Promote yourself like your life depends on it, or risk becoming invisible and being whipped like a slave.

Self-promotion is the missing skill you’ve been looking for.

In the comments section below share your experiences with self-promotion and what has or hasn’t worked. I read every comment.

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P.S. Some brief news:

There's more to come on this topic of quiet self-promotion...

...as well as how to cash in on it...

In just 2 more days.

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