One Month, Zero Self Promotion

05	Apr
	2012

Personal Branding

Back in mid-January, a Tweet from Niall Doherty popped up on my radar:

I asked him if he'd write us a guest blog post to report back on his "Month of Generosity" and he agreed to keep us posted on his experience. Last week Niall sent in his report on what happened when he shifted his focus from his own success to helping those around him achieve more. Here is his story. By: Niall Doherty While reading Never Eat Alone for the first time earlier this year, I was particularly struck by the following words...

“You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people’s success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.”

Throughout the previous months I'd come to realize just how addicted I was to self-promotion. I would often get so caught up in telling my own story and sharing my own ideas (either via my blog or in-person conversation), that I'd usually fail to find out the interesting stories of others and learn from them. Keith's words above were the nudge I needed to finally go ahead and take steps to remedy this. And so I came up with The Month Of No Self Promo. The idea was to flip everything for the month of February. What would happen if I held back on all forms of self-promotion and instead devoted my time and energy to helping others succeed? What would happen if I resisted the urge to tell my story and instead encouraged other people to tell theirs? I crafted a handful of rules to abide by for the month:

Listen more than I talk in conversation.
All tweets and Facebook updates have to help promote someone else’s work.
Reach out to at least one person every day and ask how I can help them.
Actually follow through and help people, without any expectation of reciprocation.
In every blog post that I write, highlight some cool things other people are doing.

I posted about the experiment on my blog and asked readers what I could do to help them become more successful during the month of February. The requests came flooding in. In fact, so many people reached out to me that it's now mid-March and I still find myself with a long list of folks to follow up with. Helping these people has led to an abundance of great new relationships, strengthened friendships, a significant build-up of goodwill, and an awareness of dozens of cool projects I'd never have known about otherwise. Accidental movement Perhaps the best outcome of the No Self Promo experiment though was the mini-movement it inspired. While I had those scores of people take me up on my offer to help them out however I could, I also had a bunch of people rally around the idea and take on the challenge for themselves. One such person was web designer and blogger Janet Brent, who found that foregoing self promotion led to much goodness...

I honestly found so many positive results from this. It helped me get that spark for blogging and networking that I had lost for a long time. I'm excited again at what blogging can do for me and how having an online business is completely possible.

Kevin Post, relatively new to the blogging scene, also reaped the benefits...

I would say that the most positive result regarding my participation was the fact that it gave me a sense of community in the world of blogging when before I never saw it that way.

Ditto for Katie Benedetto, another web designer/blogger...

More than anything, the challenge gave me a real excuse to reach out. I asked a few different people if they'd like to be featured on my blog, and they were really delighted/flattered I'd asked. I've been afraid to bother people by reaching out to ask them about themselves - afraid I'm prying, or I don't know them well enough - but actually, most of the time, people really like it.

Failing forward I must admit though that not everything was sunshine and rainbows during The Month of No Self Promo. For one thing, I failed often to follow the aforementioned rules I set for myself. Despite a conscious effort to listen more than I talked, I'm pretty sure I still ended up doing most of the talking in my February conversations. I did better than usual, but found I still had much room for improvement. I also didn't do a great job of reaching out to people every day. I too often found myself reactive instead of proactive, responding to random help requests instead of taking the initiative to touch base with specific people I wanted to build relationships with. Other No Self Promo participants also reported that they became a lot busier and sometimes overwhelmed on account of the experiment. The upside of all this though is that we've emerged much more familiar with our weaknesses and inefficiencies, and through that awareness we can now work to improve appropriate systems and skills. For example, thanks to my increased email usage in February, I could no longer ignore the fact that my typing skills simply weren't up to par. As a result, I've committed to learning proper touch typing once and for all. Increasing my typing speed from 40 wpm to 80 wpm (entirely doable), means I'll be able to respond to emails and write blog posts twice as fast as before. What goes around... Let me wrap this up by getting back to that original inspirational quote from Keith that started me off on this journey. Once again...

“You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people’s success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.”

I have found this to indeed be true, and one particular blog post I wrote in February drove the lesson home. On account of the aforementioned rule #5, I found myself having to get a bit more creative with my posts than usual. In order to promote the cool doings of others, I came up with the idea of putting together a massive list of 100 people doing extraordinary things. It was the ultimate no self-promo article, with dozens and dozens of tempting links to take people away from my site. And the result? That post received far more shares than any other I'd ever written. People absolutely loved it. My traffic got a nice boost and readers were spending more time on my site than ever before. Plus, many of those cool folks I linked to genuinely appreciated that I included them in the list. New relationships formed, old ones strengthened. A win for all involved, and undeniable proof that being interested in other people's success is a sure-fire way to grow your own.