Self promotion for the technical consultant

I've been a self-employed consultant for just shy of 20 years now, and I'm often asked how I promote my consulting practice, and for years the answer was "Nothing, really, it's just word of mouth".

But the internet has changed this: though there are many avenues for promotion - banner ads, Google adwords, etc - for consultants this is an expensive way to go, and not always so effective. "Consultants" are often regarded in the same strata with "lawyers" or "used car salesmen", and it's very hard to counter that with "advertising".

I believe that the most effective way for "just one guy" to promote himself is really clear:

Produce and publish original, technical content.

The goal is to generate "exposure", whether it be writing for a technical publication or simply creating content on your own website. This is a long, slow process - writing "just one paper" doesn't do much - but over time, a substantial body of quality work creates the perception of competence that's much more powerful than creating a flashy banner ad or a slick marketing piece.

I've been publishing my own Tech Tips for years now, and as of this writing have 45 papers of varying degrees of depth and quality. A few are considered some of the best sources of information in their (narrow) area on the internet, and I'm gratified by the occasional email saying "Thanks for writing the paper on $TOPIC - it helped me solve a problem".

What's important is that these are technical papers, not marketing papers: my goal is to create a free resource that helps others solve a problem I had once, and I don't make references to "I sell my time for a living" on them.

Curiously, my primary target audience is "Google". Though occasionally I will post a paper in a specific forum (for instance, malware research usually gets posted to BUGTRAQ (and always announced in my weblog), but most of the time I just post the papers and wait for Google to index them.

Eventually they get picked up, people find them, and occasionally others link to my work. This increases the my PageRank the right way: by allowing the internet to vote "that's a good paper". I have never done any specific search-engine targetting.

Even today, the great majority of my work comes from existing customers, but more and more people are contacting me with what amounts to "You seem to know a lot about $SUBJECT - are you available for hire?" This certainly doesn't always result in an engagement, but it's nice that Google is doing my marketing for me.

"If you write it, they will come."

Comments

[Verna]

Thanks a lot Steve for this little article!

I've always believed in referrals. I've tried many different campaigns, but these seem to yield little or nothing. Now you have given me a great idea.

Cheers
Verna x