We live in a strange place. The small community were everyone knows your name is becoming a thing of the past. There are people, so many of them everywhere, and you can no longer promote your show by just telling a few people in town who will let the rest of the community know. Now, you have to use the many powers of communication.

As cool as the close nit community was, is destruction in the place of the super uber connected society is actually a good thing for the little guy trying to make it big. First, there are a lot more people to solicit, giving you time for trial and error. Plus, the more people, the more of them that will like whatever you represent. Second, the new network allows you to connect to each person individually. You can send a personal message to everyone interested in just a few moments, were in the past you might have to go through mountains of mail.

So now that we know how things have changed, what do we do now to promote ourselves and find success in the vast sea of our society?First, you are going to need to take advantage of every tool available. Some of the tools I am going to go over are not free, but they are all affordable. I work on a very small personal budget, so my advice is going to follow along those lines.

This is a guide more for my sake than anyone, but I figured a lot of people just starting out might find this useful. I have split it up in several parts so that you can master them the same way you would if you were taking a class.

Tools of the Trade

Myspace : You should already know about this one because it is one of the most popular websites on the planet. Almost everyone has a Myspace account, and by adding these people as a friend, you can let them know everything going on with your project.

The biggest success seen with Myspace is in the music industry. Myspace allows bands to create a profile and display their music or samples to the public. People can also add your music to their profile creating a viral effect. It has become common place for people to look to Myspace to find our show dates, or even as their music player, since so many songs are available free for the listen.

No matter what your project you can create a profile on Myspace. It is important to remember that people don’t take lightly to spam, and spamming people will actually hurt your promotion efforts. Try to just make the information available, and provide something that people will have interest in. Blogging often and adding all your friends is a good start.

Add a good collection of pictures that represent what you are all about. Try to make your page look personal, and keep an honest face that people will relate to and trust. Myspace is all about meeting cool people and groups, so becoming someone everyone wants to meet will take you far.

Also, if you have the time, you can hit up the other social networks. While these sites don’t have as many users as Myspace, you can still get the word out. Some sites I recommend are hi5.com, friendster.com, and facebook.com, but there are thousands of social networks out there, so technically you could do this forever. I don’t recommend it though because we are about to move on to some other tools that will help you even more.

Craigslist : Craigslist is one of those websites I really kick myself for not inventing. It is simple, easy to use, and provides a service for free that is worth a fortune to anyone who uses it right. Craigslist takes the basics of classified ads, makes the free for anyone, and puts them out in front of the world.

Craigslist is separated into location, and then by category. It is best to post in your appropriate category once or twice a week. You can also expand by posting in other cities than your own. It is not a good idea to flood the site with your listings because they will ban you quickly. But if you post often, people who are looking for what you have to offer will find you.

Craigslist has a anti-spam system set up to protect your email address from being exposed to the public. It is a good idea to use this because your email inbox will be flooded with unwanted solicitations if you don’t.

When I needed writers for my website, I posted an ad in the gigs section under writing and got a huge response. Even writers from other cities saw the ad and wrote in (of course, writing is one of those things you can do anywhere, send anywhere so location isn’t that big of a factor most of the time).

The uses for Craigslist are seemingly endless. You can promote contests, your product, offer services, all in an ad free environment (ads from Craigslist anyways).

Digg : Digg.com is all about finding things that a lot of people like. The front page is basically a list of links to websites people have voted for. The more votes, the higher up the link.

One of the biggest industries that have taken advantage of Digg is the video game industry. If a game comes out that people are excited about, then the number of Diggs for the promos and screen shots skyrockets, and soon the entire planet knows about it.

Digg is in the top 100 websites for traffic, so getting a link on their front page is an instant goldmine. The problem is of course, they only have so many spots, and to really make it on the front page you need something that will attract everyone’s vote.

Digg takes a little more work to get it to work for you, but the end result is much greater than most promotional methods. First, you have to create content, which is an overall good thing for anything on the web. The more content your website has, the better it will rank in search engines, and the more information you have to offer people, the more people will come looking for that information.

So, if you can create something that the people of Digg really like, you can get a huge amount of traffic, which will benefit other things like ranking in search engines.

Creating content for Digg is a complex process, but learning to use this tool to your advantage will give you a great step up over the competition. I suggest looking at Digg, and reading what is popular. Try to figure out what exactly makes the things on the front page special, and then create something to grab attention.

I could write a whole article on Digg alone, but for the sake of moving on, I will add that to the articles coming soon and continue on to the next tool.

PRWeb : Press Releases are a great invention. They take a lot of hard work out of promoting your project. Press Releases go out to many media outlets, giving your project the chance to be featured in one of these many outlets free of charge.

These types of features are great promotion because they are from a third party which more people are willing to trust. They also let the readers of said publication know about your product where they might have missed your TV or Radio ad.

PRWeb is a service that distributes your press release for you. All you have to do is write a easy to read press release that will catch the attention of editors. Submit it online, and they do the rest. The best part is, you pay whatever you want. The more you pay the more people will see your press release.

When you write a press release, make sure and think about your audience. They are editors looking for stories, and so your best bet is to write something they can use. Make it easy for them to create a publishable story. Provide all the details, and write it in a way that if they wanted to cut and paste it into their article, they can do so.

PRWeb also provides a ton of cool services if you have the budget for it. They have a staff of editors that can help you create a working press release that will bring results. No matter what type of business or project you are running, the world needs to know about it, and you need to be in the news. PRWeb is the easiest way to do this.

In Conclusion

In this section we went over the basic tools to promote your project online. This list isn’t comprehensive of all the tools you need to utilize, but putting these popular tools to use will benefit whatever it is you are trying to promote. While this section doesn’t cover promoting yourself in the real world, which is also important, we do cover how to become famous on the internet.

In our next part we will dig into the process of creating an online identity, and using that online identity to gain public trust, fans, and get links from already popular websites back to yours. Its all about leaving online comments next time, see you then!

Oh, and also please feel free to share any experience you have promoting yourself using these tools. We would love to hear from you!

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