I spend a wee bit too much time on the Internet, and much of that is sort of dual use for my personal enjoyment and marketing. I have participated in HN and a few other forums for about fivish years now, and that has been a great opportunity to meet people. I try to get out to conferences and meet ups to meet folks outside of the massive Ogaki tech mafia. I also have a blog which has been fairly popular.
The most important thing I do for marketing is helping people, frequently. It opens a lot of doors. It also means there are a couple of... thousand, maybe? (crikey) ... people who will say nice things about me even when I'm not in the room. That has lead directly to consulting work (and business opportunities) in the past.
Can I say one heretical thing? Contribution to OSS is not by itself marketing. It is a fairly low ROI way to reach decision makers unless you are identified with a popular project. (You can easily spend many hours on a commit that no one but you or the mainainer will ever know you wrote. Spend the same amount of time directly solving a problem for someone and you have a fan for life.)
P.S. I truly love Github, but would not host my OSS on it, because it encourages use patterns which are extraordinarily suboptimal for marketing oneself. YMMV.
Your comment about leveraging an OSS project as a marketing tool is theoretically valid but, even when you follow best practice, it still doesn't always monetize as you might hope.
I have an active open source project, hosted on CodePlex, but also with its own supporting website, complete with dozens of tutorials and other resources. Traffic to the site is respectable (thanks to a few widely-read articles) and the downloads from CodePlex run into the thousands.
The majority of the users are corporate, so there is potentially lots scope for consulting projects and I never fail to follow-up opportunities. However, despite all of this, the only return I have so far earned from my efforts is the right to spend much of my spare time providing free support.
Put it on your own website, and actively market it to people who need it (including productization steps that OSS often doesn't take like having a logo, an install guide, etc). You'll be identified as the relevant expert.
I'm a developer, and to be honest, not a ton. For better or for worse, I spend the majority of my time building cool[1] stuff. Some things, like Forrst, have taken off and garnered me some nice exposure. Other things have ended up being duds. Other than that, I do blog[2], albeit infrequently, but I'd like to change that; I think it is important to speak up if you feel you have something thoughtful/insightful to add to your community/industry. However, I've found that I much more enjoy the passive recognition that comes as a result of creating neat stuff, because it feels much more "real" than trying to promote myself for the sake of it. I really don't care /that/ much about my reputation[3] insofar as I'm not out to be the #1 anything; I'd rather build amazing things than worry about what top 10 list I'll (never) end up in.
This is a great question. I've been spending a lot of time recently building a personal landing page, getting more established on public social media, etc. It's incredibly time consuming and I feel really torn - I'd much rather be learning new tools and languages. However, I've definitely gotten the impression that if I can't somehow advertise the tools and languages that I already know, I may as well not bother. Offline presence is also really important - but I recently turned up to a meetup without any business cards to swap and won't ever make that mistake again.
I moved from an academic background in the UK to the startup world in California, so I feel like I've been born naked into a new world. I didn't even use my Twitter account until recently. I'd like to hear from some "veterans" about this - who has gotten a real impact as a result of their self-marketing efforts?
The key is this: realize that everything you do is marketing yourself. Any time you interact with someone else, it's marketing yourself. Every time you post to HN, every time you tweet, every time you blog... it's all marketing.
Now, that doesn't mean 'be dishonest,' or anything like that. Reputations are incredibly important. Just be aware that you're doing it all the time, even if you don't know you are.
That's a pretty good question. I spend most of my time doing client work, so my self-marketing is mostly limited to:
1) Posting code and rants on my blog whenever I feel like it
2) Contributing code to open-source projects that I use
3) Chatting with people at the bar or going to tech mixers (also at the bar)
4) Posting on various websites like HN
I get about 70% of my client work from #3, 25% or so from word of mouth (friends, family, or past clients), and 5% or so from posting online. #1 is mostly just vanity and #2 is out of necessity, but they probably help too without me directly seeing the effects. I've never advertised or gone trolling for clients since I started freelancing.
Also, my company website is terrible and hasn't been updated in about 4 years, but it doesn't seem to matter. I'll get around to it eventually :)
Edit: I forgot to mention giving talks at Ruby groups and Ignite and things like that. I've gotten a couple of clients from that but it's mostly just challenging and fun.
I'm a SysAdmin, not a dev, so things are somewhat different; still, the marketing is probably pretty similar.
I wrote a book about some of the things I more commonly SysAdmin. By far, this was the best marketing I've ever done. (It's also the most expensive marketing I've ever done. No-starch paid to have it printed, but god damn, that was a lot of work to write.)
Now, as for an online presence, in my field, being visible on mailing lists and the like is pretty important. A nice website? much less so. Of course, if you are a frontend dev, the opposite probably applies.
Eh, I do think that contributing patches back is pretty important. Good decision makers consult good technical people before making such a decision, and having some patches on public mailing lists shows that you know /something/ (which is usually good enough for a SysAdmin. Nobody expects me to be able to re-write apache, but I am expected to sometimes make some small change to mod_auth_*)
Still, writing a book (and having it published by an established publisher) might not be the cheapest way to reach decision makers, but it's one of the more effective ways to do so, I think.
It's something I've been trying to fix lately. It's not only about your online reputation, you should care of your offline reputation as well. I don't mean it in a tricky way, by deceiving people : You should try to provide value for others via your blog, etc... Do some projects, talk about them.
It's important because, as a developer, you usually don't make a lot of connections with others. If you don't do anything your only connections will be your peers and little bit a variety is better. Even if you and I would like to be valued on our technical knowledge, it won't bring you very far. If you don't talk, nobody is gonna to know you.
I use my blog more like a platform to share stuff I made, or thought, or to clear my mind about some idea. It's also something I can point potential employers to when I'll need it. It doesn't really matter if you don't have readers, it'll put your resume apart in most interviews.
Also I added many local folks in my twitter, and it leads me to some meet up that gives connections with new peoples around me. I live in a medium city in the south of france, if I can met people there, you can probably too.
My startup hasn't launched a website yet (we've very, very young). When we do, there will be a blog where we post the nastiest challenges our team has faced, and the solutions we devised. The work we're doing is highly technical, but there's also a strong artistic component, so we'll have a broad range of topics that should be accessible to many. Ideally, by exposing our struggles and how we've overcome them, we'll be benefitting others who face similar woes, and opening up the discussion to include their solutions. Ultimately, I feel that the best promotion will come from creating value for others, especially if we can get our blog's readers to offer value of their own.
On a personal level, I engage in other projects in other industries (music, web comics, computer animation) and use my communities there to cultivate interest in my startup.
I spend a lot of time at it, though hopefully not too much. Maybe 5-10% of my working day.
You absolutely must start with a blog or a website for your home base. Then you go to YComb, LinkedIn, Stackoverflow, and ask and answer questions. Be sure to use the same user name for as many sites as you can so you become recognizable. First initial, last name is actually preferable - when dealing with your field you don't want to hide behind an anonymous user name (like AnM8tR - groan....). You can use fancy user name for movie sites.
I use http://clubajax.org to write my blogs, and while they are informative blogs, I learn an incredible amount; because I do research before hand to ensure that I'm giving correct advice.
Personally, I've found it difficult to get much attention online. I guess I've just been off doing weird stuff for too long to interest most programmers.
Every time I hear stories of so-and-so making a website that caught on like wildfire overnight, it's often times attributable to a good network of contacts who already knew that person and all tweeted for him.
I think having contacts is very important, and those people who can conquer that fear of sharing too much are the ones who'll build the best relationships, and by doing so, have more frequent successes.
I think this issue is at the heart of why many devs (me more than most) fail to live up to their potential. The mindset that makes for a great developer is very different from that of a successful marketer, as is illustrated in this recent post:
The commercially successful devs are those who manage to balance these two essential challenges. I think it's also one of the key reasons why sole-founder startups find it harder to win funding.
I've had a web site since 1995 and a blog since 2005. I never really thought of it as marketing, but of course it is. Online presence has some importance in terms of finding out who your peer group are and acting as a starting point for discussions. Probably most of the jobs I've held though have had no connection to what I've published online, although in many (but by no means all) cases employers tend to view personal open source projects positively.
Yes and yes. But I don't spend any/enough effort on them.
Very. I live in a pretty remote low-population part of the USA. The people I want to work with will probably only ever get to know me online, until I move somewhere more in line with my goals. Offline presence is important, too, but there's not much opportunity for that here outside of the 3 or 4 possible programmer workplaces.
Old fashioned? I'll say! Startups these days don't often have offices, and at this rate they won't even have humans for much longer! Get your head into the clouds.</teasing>
In reply to the main topic: promoting myself (as a person distinct from but representing my startup) is an opportunity I'm weighing carefully. Given that we're a rather small shop, we have the luxury of exposing the personality of every member of the team, given they've got something charming to expose. I see this as a great way to differentiate ourselves from the larger corps in our industry. As I see it, ever member of our team has the occasion to be a hero, someone our fans could be interested in as an individual. Especially so, if a connection can be made between their personality and their contributions to our product. In a larger company, most employees won't ever get the opportunity to say, publicly, "That! I made that!" and have customers respond, "Yeah! That makes sense, because you really love ______ and it's always reflected in your work."
For example, every hardcore Apple fan knows Jony Ive's aesthetic, and Jobs' sense of perfectionism. They're the heros of Apple, and Apple has a bit of a "hero" culture, but they're too big to make everyone a hero. In a startup, you have the unique opportunity to make everyone a hero, if your products are good enough to win hearts.
I see well-considered self-promotion online and offline as a great way to expose the heroic qualities of each team member. It's a risk, of course, but taking on such challenges is why we're starting a company in such a competitive industry.
The most important thing I do for marketing is helping people, frequently. It opens a lot of doors. It also means there are a couple of... thousand, maybe? (crikey) ... people who will say nice things about me even when I'm not in the room. That has lead directly to consulting work (and business opportunities) in the past.
Can I say one heretical thing? Contribution to OSS is not by itself marketing. It is a fairly low ROI way to reach decision makers unless you are identified with a popular project. (You can easily spend many hours on a commit that no one but you or the mainainer will ever know you wrote. Spend the same amount of time directly solving a problem for someone and you have a fan for life.)
P.S. I truly love Github, but would not host my OSS on it, because it encourages use patterns which are extraordinarily suboptimal for marketing oneself. YMMV.