How To Market Yourself As A Developer

Every programmer needs to know how to market themselves, and here’s why.

No matter how good a developer you are, if people cannot find you, you will not have a Job. At the end of the day, that is what we want right? In this blog, we will discuss about how you can market yourself as a developer.

Lets see what we will be discussing in this blog:

• Why is it important to market yourself as a developer
• How can you market yourself as a developer.
• A few FAQs

So, without further ado, lets jump right into it!

Why Is It So Important To Market Yourself As A Developer?

You might be wondering that why should I even care about marketing myself as a developer, and this is a question which even I had in my mind earlier. Most people blindly focus on their technical skills, but I believe that soft skill play an equally important role in one’s career, if not more.

Even if you are the best programmer in the world, you won’t be noticed if you do not market yourself. People do look for programmers, and the world is not such that you will get jobs without yourself applying to them.

Think about a situation where Linus Torvalds was to release Linux, without telling about it to the world. In that case, I am more than sure that we would still be stuck with windows, even though we had a far better option.

How do most software developers grow?

They grow through Marketing Themselves Well

By hearing the term “Marketing”, I am sure that most of you guys must have thought:

“Oh, this is DEFINITELY not for me, I am a programmer, not a businessman!”

That is a hundred percent false.

It is not hard to market yourself as a developer, as long as you know how to do it.

Lets look at the different ways how you can market yourself as a developer.

Different Ways To Market Yourself As A Developer

Social Media

Building a social media presence is by far one of the most underrated yet one of the most powerful ways to market yourself. If your targeted clients find out about your content, and if they like it, then trust me, it makes an impact. Even though it is quite counter intuitive, through social media, you can actually land clients!

This happened to me once.

I was working on some JavaScript stuff, and I posted about it on Instagram, and there were a few people who reached out to me and asked me to teach them!

And guess what?
I only had 200 followers back then

Even right now, I get messages and random people who ask me to teach them, and I only have 400 followers.

Of course, this did not just happen because I was there on social media. This happened because I was consistently posting about programming.

I am only taking my example here, but of course, there are countless others who have gotten clients like this.

What is another really important point while building your social media presence is through initializing the conversation with the client.

Most likely, in the beginning, you will hardly find much business. What you can do is DM random people on their Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and tell them how you could help them. Offer them a reasonable rate, and try to build trust. What this does is 2 things:

• Helps you develop your soft skills
• Reduces the effort done by the client to find a developer.

I think that the first point is quite self explanatory, but the second point might confuse you. How are we helping the client by just talking to them? Well, what we are doing is reducing the time it would take them to firstly upload a job posting on sites like upwork or fiverr, and then reading through the cover articles of all the people who applied, and also read through their resumes. With you initializing the conversation, you basically reached out to the client before he reached out to you. How cool is that? This might just be the difference between you getting or not getting the job.

If you are able to deliver high quality work to your client, I am sure that you will at least get a testimonial.

Use the social media to your advantage, and if you know how to use it wisely, and improve your network, then you will surely grow.

And this leads me to my next point:

Build Your Network

Many people who start off with programming hardly even consider this to be an important factor, but trust me, it is.

Personally, I have seen my friends get offers from big tech companies like Google and Facebook just because of a referral.

Remember this KEY point always:

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

This stands true because the more people you know, the more referrals you can get. The more referrals you can get, the more work you get. The more work you get, the more money you make.

I have seen people start off with freelancing just because of some sort of a referral from their friend or family.

Lets look at some platforms from where you can increase your network:

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Facebook (groups)

Of course, these are just some examples which are also bound to change with time. What I would say is that you should try to find where the crowd is, and where you can find your ideal client. If the crowd moves to snapchat, maybe its a good idea to move to snap chat.

Remember that the most important thing while building your network is to make sure that you are providing value, or are being helpful in any sort. If you are helpful, people will always look up to you and you’ll have a better network, where people trust you. Maybe you can help them with debugging their code, or talk to them generally.

Networking gives you an immense amount of power. Not only do you get the chance of getting a referral at a big tech company, but also, overtime, you improve a lot on your soft skills.

Your Own Portfolio Website

This might be something you have not yet heard, but it establishes a lot of trust in the client’s mind. I will tell you how

If you are dealing with a client, they might want to know more about you. Most of the times, the client will google you up, and check if you are worth what you charge, and if a beautiful portfolio website shows up, there is a really good chance that they will get back to you.

Portfolios are extremely powerful. I have had several people who contacted me through my own portfolio site.

There are a few things to consider while making a portfolio site, so that it looks exclusive:

• Add a perfect head shot photo of yourself: clients want to work with humans, and the best way to show them that you are human is by adding a photo of yourself with a smile.
• Add the projects which you are most proud of: If you are not proud of a project, it is a good chance that other people might also not like it. You want to add projects which are unique to you, or at least in some form amazing.
• Add a “contact me” form: If the client likes the portfolio site, and would like to contact you, he should be able to do that in the website itself. How easy would the life of that client be if he did NOT have to open an entire new page just to contact you?
• Make the website look as wonderful as you want it to: The first project that the client looks at when he opens your portfolio site, is the site itself. If you had a museum, with 10 of the most beautiful and rarest articles in it, but the museum itself was poor in its build quality, I can guarantee that most people would never go in the museum. Same thing with your portfolio site
• Get Your SEO Done: If I were to google your name, and the first thing that I see is your portfolio site, trust me, I will most likely visit the site. But if your portfolio site appeared in the 12th page, I would never even get to your site. Most people go through only 2–3 of the top links that appear on a google search, and hence you want to make sure that your portfolio site is one of them

Having a portfolio site can really give you that slight advantage over your competitors, and that makes a huge difference.

Blogging

Blogging is by far one of the strongest ways to market yourself as a developer. Not only do you capture a huge audience, but also, you get the opportunity to tell the world about your thoughts. It blows my mind how much potential there is in blogging, and the best part is, you can make money out of this too. Many people read an article every morning. Grab this opportunity, and start making amazing blogs which influence other people’s lives. If your blog reaches out to many people, and if you can target an amazing audience, your name will spread. I have often found myself talking about the writer who wrote a blog which blew my mind, and you might too.

There are numerous things that you could blog about:

• Technical skills
• Soft skills
• Your day
• An encounter with a client

And more.

If you genuinely like teaching, I am sure that you will love blogging, and might take it up as a side hustle in the future. Even if you’re not a big fan of teaching, there is a really good chance that you might find blogging an amazing task to do.

Personally, I enjoy blogging and sharing my knowledge with the world.

YouTube Videos

Making YouTube videos might seem to be a lot of work to put in to something which has a lot of chance to fail, and I know that this is not for everyone. But if you learn how to speak in front of the camera really well, and if you can get good with it, I am sure that your soft skills will boost up. Of course, that’s not the limit to it. You can do anything that you want to with your YouTube channel, anything that inspires you.

My advice regarding starting a YouTube channel is to be consistent.

Even if your camera right now might not be amazing, but it is a long term process. It is possible that you will improve over time.

If you plan to be a full time YouTuber, that’s amazing, but for developers, I would say that think of this to be documenting your journey. Maybe some day you learn about git and GitHub. Well, that is something which several people do not know about, and this will get out to more people. Again, the more people you can reach out to and help, the more your name spreads, and the more business you have.

YouTube is something which might take a lot of time to work on, but trust me, people do get a lot of business with YouTube. It does not have to be your main priority, but for sure it can.

If you do not find enough time to make an entire YouTube video, well, just make a time-lapse video of your entire day and share it.

Countless videos have gone viral with the tagline of “A day in the life of a software developer”. I cannot guarantee that yours will be the next one, but it is possible.

These were some of the best ways to market yourself as a developer. There is a high chance that I might have missed out on something, so, do let me know in the comment section about your opinions.

Lets answer some of the FAQs that I have gotten a lot of times.

FAQs

1. Which tools can I use to make a social media post?

Answer: Use a tool called Canva and make your posts with the help of it. Here is the website’s Link. You can also use Photoshop for this.

2. At what frequency should I make content?

Answer: There are 5 working days in a week. Try to do something each day. Maybe blog one or two days, Make posts twice a week, and one YouTube video a day. This might seem a lot, but it only takes an hour or two a day to do all this. During weekends, try to talk to people and work on your soft skills. But it totally depends on you. This is just the schedule which I follow, and you might have something else.

3. Which Camera Should I use for my YouTube videos?

Answer: Initially, even your phone’s camera can do the job. Do not invest too much into it, because we only want to market ourselves, not become full time YouTubers. Although if you do wanna become a full time YouTuber, then go ahead and buy a decent camera for now, maybe by canon. To be honest, you probably will know more about this field than I do. I do not have any particular recommendations, but start with your mobile camera, and then move ahead and crush it.

4. Where should I start blogging from?

Answer: My recommendation would be to start off with Medium, see if there is any success in it, and then probably move towards starting your own blog, where you can put Google ads and all the fancy stuff you want.

That’s gonna be it for this blog! I hope you enjoyed it!

Thank you

Priyanshu Saraf.