Last week, I shared my 300-Level Guide to Career Internals post & video. We talked about how the world is changing so quickly, and how it’s a great time to adapt your career to accomplish the things in life that are important to you. One of the possible outcomes that we discussed was working for yourself.

If you want to work for yourself, you need to be able to sell yourself.

I know, I hate it too – it feels gross when I write it that way. As kids, we were taught to be humble, but that only takes you so far when you need to bring business in to pay the bills. You’ll have an easier time selling your services if people recognize you by name, seek you out by name, and associate your name with high-quality work. Very few other people are going to toot your horn for you – you’re gonna have to do a little tooting yourself.

Customers seek out brands like Lego, Adidas, and Coke, and that’s not just because of the quality of their products. It’s also because of the b-word: branding.

In this video, you’ll learn my 3-word exercise for building your brand, and then learn how to become known for that brand in our industry without spending any money on advertising. If you use this exercise and then stay true to it in your blog posts, tweets, and presentations, you’ll have customers pouring in without having to make a single phone call or email.

Feel free to ask followup questions here in the comments. I don’t get notified when folks ask questions in the YouTube comments on the SQLBits channel, so I don’t respond quickly there, but I respond here.

If you like this video, check out the SQLBits YouTube channel. They’re releasing all of last year’s conference videos online for free in YouTube. When you subscribe to their channel, you’ll automatically get notifications as new videos get uploaded.