Billions of dollars are spent on marketing each year. Celebrities of all sorts enjoy fame and fortune that isn't necessarily related to theirs skills. Why? Because marketing works and like it or not, if you want move beyond a basic career and really open up opportunities for yourself, you've got to learn how to market yourself as a software developer. In this session, I'll teach you some quick and easy things you can do to enhance the marketability of your skills and personal brand immediately and talk about some long term plans you can put into action so that everyone will know your name.

1. Marketing Yourself To
Boost Your Career
John Sonmez
http://simpleprogrammer.com

2. Why Listen To Me?
I actively managed my personal brand to go from relative obscurity to a
pretty big following in just a 3-4 years
2009
• No blog
• Relatively unknown
2013
• Blog gets 100k views a month
• 55 Pluralsight courses
• Podcasts
• 3x Hanselminutes
• Windows Developer Show
• 2x Tablet Show
• Dot Net Rocks
• Yet Another Podcast
• Several Hacker News front page appearances
• Big social network presence
It doesn’t take a long time to build a big personal brand

3. Why Marketing Yourself
Is Important
“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!”
- Jay Z
How come this guy gets
Paid so much to speak?
You need style and substance

4. The Game Plan
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Building a personal brand
Building brand recognition
Creating social proof
Creating the right connections
“Be everywhere” – Pat Flynn

5. Getting Started
Your blog is the best place to control your image and message

6. Your Blog
Social media
Resume
Your home base
Branding
Books, Articles, Podcasts, etc
Everything you do you should lead back to your home base

7. Creating a Blog
• Options
– Free service: wordpress.com, tumblr, blogger, etc
– Paid hosting: Bluehost, Hostgator, etc
– Virtual Private Server: Digital Ocean, Linode, etc

8. What I Suggest
+
This is a good balance of simple and powerful

9. Branding
Branding is more than just a logo

10. Creating a Brand
• Overall message
– What is your mission statement?
• Logo
–
http://britfitzpatrick.com/15-super-fly-personal-branding-logos-toinspire-you-and-me/
• Consistency
– Use the same message, same images
Don’t be the guy who works for company X

11. Cheap And Easy Branding
• Fiverr
– http://fiverr.com
• oDesk
– http://odesk.com
It is amazing how cheap talent is

12. Social Networks

13. Twitter

14. Facebook

15. Google+

16. LinkedIn
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•
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Add your complete resume
Make lots of connections
Ask for recommendations
Join groups
LinkedIn can be one of the most important networks

17. Managing It All
I use buffer (bufferapp.com) to do frequent posts

18. Resume
If you get this wrong, it could hurt you real bad…

19. My Resume Advice
A resume is like an ad for yourself

20. Getting Your Name Out
It’s all about creating value

21. Blogs
• Write good content that gets linked to
• Guest post
• Syndication
– DZone (http://dzone.com)
– InfoQ (http://infoQ.com)

22. Articles
Developer publications are always looking for good submissions

23. YouTube
Great way to deliver a personal message, or tutorial

24. Books
• Self-publish
– Leanpub
– Kindle Direct Publishing
• Traditional publisher
Writing a book is hard, but publishing is surprisingly easy

25. Online Courses
• Create your own
• Pluralsight
• Udemy

26. Speaking
• User groups
• Code camps
• Conferences

27. Podcasts
• Be a guest on someone else’s
• Start your own

28. Open Source
• Contribute to projects
• Start your own project

29. Don’t Forget To Search
The first thing a potential employer or customer will do is Google your name

30. Networking
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•
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Join user groups
Talk about famous people
Comment on blogs
Reach out and help someone

31. Wrapping It Up
Try to view yourself how others view you