One of the most challenging products you’ll ever market is yourself. Whether you’re working for someone else as an employee or as a consultant, you need to think of yourself as a product to be marketed. Fortunately, the same techniques that work for marketing other products and services can be put to work to market Brand You.
Marketing yourself requires as much discipline as marketing any product or service—perhaps more, in a way, because it’s so hard to be objective and think in a disciplined way about ourselves.
So when you think about how to market yourself, try to take a step back to gain some distance and perspective. Pretend you’re doing a marketing consultation for someone else (who happens to be exactly like you). Ask others how they see you, your strengths, your weaknesses, and your unique abilities.
Get Back to the Ps
As with any product or service, the best place to start is by going through the six Ps of marketing.
Product — Does the product (that’s you) need improvement? Should you study accounting, marketing, or AI in greater depth, for example? Should you improve your speaking or presentation skills? Should you develop a more distinctive point of view or way of presenting yourself?
Remember that today, people hire people, not skills. What’s your story? What’s your unique perspective? It matters how you talk about your journey and your values. So make sure what you stand for, and how you express it, are memorable and authentic. In a world where AI can match technical skills, your humanity, judgment, and unique point of view are your real differentiators.
Place — Are you in the right place—both geographically and for the industry you work in or market to? With remote and hybrid work now standard in many fields, “place” increasingly means choosing the right companies and industries rather than just the right geographical location.
People easily fall into a rut and are afraid to venture somewhere new. But remember, things are never universally good or bad. An industry or business can be Wall Street’s darling one minute and on a downward spiral the next. Stay on top of business trends and industry news, so you can pivot as needed. (And why not consider starting your own full-time or side business in a growing niche? Today, technology such as AI and platforms such as Shopify, Gumroad and Substack make it easier than ever to start making money.)
Price — Are you pricing yourself too high—or too low? Would a different way of pricing yourself be more attractive to a potential employer—for example, a contingency arrangement where you are paid based on performance and results?
Remember, too, that your remuneration is more than how much you are paid. It’s also the satisfaction, learning, experience, and contacts you receive, plus any referrals you make.
Promotion — First, make sure that you’re promoting the most saleable things about yourself. Are you focusing on the benefits that are important to those in a position to pay you? Next, take advantage of opportunities to expose and promote yourself through LinkedIn posts and articles, YouTube videos, TikTok, podcasts, newsletters on Substack or Beehiiv, and at industry events. Building an audience through consistent, valuable content is now essential to professional viability.
Today, your online presence is your resume. A personal website or portfolio showcasing your work, a well-optimized LinkedIn profile, and a track record of sharing insights in your field carry more weight than traditional credentials alone. Consider “building in public”—sharing your learning process, projects, and expertise as you go.
Personnel — Who are the people who can help you accomplish your objectives, whether those objectives are finding a new job, rising higher in your company, or promoting your products or services? Build relationships with those people. Network with those who can help you and introduce you to others who can help you (but remember to consider how you can be of help to them. It’s important to remember, in networking and in many areas of life, you have to give to get.)
Remember that your network is your net worth. Cultivate relationships with peers, potential partners, clients, and employers strategically, not just reactively.
Process — Process in marketing yourself is having a definite plan for marketing yourself and following it. For example, make a plan to send three emails or make three phone calls a day to your network of contacts. Find out what they’re up to so you can be helping them and share what you’re looking for. Be specific. If you know that small- to medium-sized businesses in a certain industry or in your city are your sweet spot, tell them, so people in your network know exactly how to help you—and they know your perfect prospect when they see them.
Unfortunately, the processes related to fulfilling your own objectives are the easiest to overlook. Don’t. Set aside a definite amount of time each day to work your plan and monitor and evaluate your progress (and modify your plan accordingly).
Put This Book’s Techniques to Work for You
When putting together your plan, go back through previous chapters and think about how the insights and recommendations could apply to marketing yourself.
Here are some examples from various chapters:
- Give Something Away — When you give of your talent and your time, the energy and goodwill you put out there will return to you—in contacts, in opportunities, in visibility and experience. Be as free with your time and your resources as you can (while balancing demands on your time with activities that bring in money and prospects, too).
- Unleash Your Marketing Mind — Use the brainstorming and other suggestions in this chapter to learn to think more objectively about yourself.
- Increase Your Knowledge — The current boom in technology, automation and AI offers an endless supply of programs, apps, plugins, extensions, and platforms to market yourself and make yourself known to—and keep in touch with—more people more effectively. AI is a powerful personal marketing tool that can help you to create content, optimize your LinkedIn profile, generate ideas, draft newsletters, increase your writing quality and productivity, and personalize outreach at scale.
- Listen to the Numbers — More than anything else, building your brand is a numbers game. How many new people know about you today who didn’t yesterday? How many people did you follow up with? How many folks in your network have you recontacted and started fostering a relationship with?
- Get Others to Do Your Marketing for You — Make sure you’re well stocked with testimonials from others about your past successes and current abilities. And take advantage of the fact that an endorsed referral from someone else is a powerful way to differentiate yourself from others.
- Take Advantage of Disadvantage — Having to look for another job or way to make money often turns out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to that person. Make that be the case for you. Use the opportunity to think about what you really want from life and how to get it. Be sure to consider ways to use the disadvantage of the economy—or a potential employer’s current situation—to your own advantage by offering a much-needed solution.
- Generate Quick Cash — Use the techniques in this section to generate quick cash for yourself to “tide you over” anytime you need it. Or generate quick cash for others for a cut of the revenue.
- Divide and Conquer — Just as a product or service shouldn’t try to be all things to all people, neither should you. If you’re looking for a job or trying to sell your services, don’t try to be all things to all people. Consider targeting a specific industry or specific businesses within that industry. Learn all about them and then go after them. Learn how to define your perfect prospects so people in your network will know them when they see them and will keep you top of mind in order to connect you with each other.
- Find and Exploit Your Uniqueness — Just as each business must find and exploit its uniqueness, so must each individual. Find what you have to offer that no one else does.
- Take the Risk Yourself — One of the most powerful ways to sell yourself, or any product or service, is to make someone an offer they can’t refuse. Consider guaranteeing that if they’re not happy with your services after a certain time, they’ll owe you nothing.
- Add Value — Your services will always have value as long as you can find ways to add value to someone’s product, service, or life.
As you’ve seen, there is no shortage of things you can do. The only question is, when will you start?
Probe Questions
- How can I use the “6 Ps” to market myself?
- How can I use the other techniques in each chapter of this book to market myself?
- What am I going to do today to more effectively make myself better known to more people?
Million Dollar Resources
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, Donald Miller — Essential for clarifying your personal narrative and value proposition
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, Eric Jorgenson — Modern wisdom on building leverage, personal branding, and creating value in the digital age
Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered, Austin Kleon, Workman Publishing — The definitive guide to “building in public” and content-based personal marketing
he LinkedIn Playbook for Professionals: Insider Tips for Job Seekers, Career Climbers, and Business Leaders, Donna Serdula — Current, practical guidance for the platform that matters most professionally
Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, Paul Jarvis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — Rethinking career paths and building sustainable solo businesses
What Color is Your Parachute? 2025, Richard N. Bolles and Katharine Brooks — The classic, continually updated for current job market realities
Return to the Million Dollar Marketing Secrets home page.
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