Self-Evangelism
At first glance the title of this post may be a little confusing for you but don’t worry since I’m going to talk about this term and describe it here!
In the past two years and since a short while before starting my military service to now I’ve been trying to keep my skills up and train with them to avoid the disaster that has happened to many other young men in the country after the service. Beside studying and writing, I also defined some small and big projects for myself, started them, developed them and also released them. Luckily these projects could be done very well mostly on time or with short delays and with a good quality. I’m also proud to say that they got successful overall and gave me some energy to keep them (and other projects) up!
These projects are so important for me because let me manage a whole process with different facets from the beginning to the end myself as an individual. This kind of skill is not something easily achieved and I could get much from these projects indeed! But this isn’t something related to this post!
One common element of these projects is a part that is not much related to the software world and that is marketing and promotion! When you do a project, even with the best quality, without a good marketing, advertising and promotion stage it can’t get its deserved success. I don’t think you have any doubt for this!
But as an individual who was almost alone in the projects I didn’t have much opportunity to promote my projects in a professional way. Thus I had to think about a good way to promote my projects in a satisfying level.
Thinking about this, I finally ended up with a simple way that could be very effective in my opinion. I decided to apply a self-evangelism method based on my own capabilities. I tried to use what I had and what I could achieve before. Somehow this was very similar to a self-learning algorithm that uses the existing data to improve its future quality.
What I did was a simple promotion method using my previous rank on the community and all the means that I had in hand to use such as my connections on the community and in the business world!
For someone who didn’t have any experience with this method this wasn’t easy especially because I couldn’t find same experiences from others to learn from their mistakes and methods. This was a little hazardous since I had to spend from myself for my projects at a high level of risk. So any failure was almost equal to missing something! I didn’t care about this point very much because I don’t start any project until I can be certainly sure that it can be success. Hypothetically there is always a good logic to study and find the failure possibility for any project but like many things it requires you to spend some time and study about it!
Fortunately I haven’t experienced any failure with this kind of marketing and promotion that I call it Self-Evangelism! The term self-evangelism is already used for a different purpose in the business world but I want to redefine it in this way! Who knows, this may become more known after some more works! Many of the current strategies are such experienced methods that could become success!
Happily I’m now able to say that I’m a guy who can do much in this field as well and this is a plus point for my future (if there is any future!).
But how can I classify this self-evangelism for others?
Definition
Self-evangelism is an experimental promotion model for a project that I experienced in some projects and felt that it can be classified and developed to become a good model for projects with the same scale.
In self-evangelism an individual or a small group of people try to promote a project without much budget in a professional level.
Requirements
I found the self-evangelism is not possible in many cases. There are some requirements to this that should be considered carefully.
The first requirement is having a certain level of confidence about the project and its success to accept all the risks because the downsides may duplicate the side-effects of any possible failure.
The second requirement is having a good position on the community that you are going to target (this is not necessarily a software community). This is comparatively and based on the level of your project and its target community this requirement may vary. But the important point is that you and your group should have a very good position in order to use it for promotion.
Having enough connections on the target community and in the business is the third requirement. These let you move on with the help of others whenever you got stuck with something hard! These also let you bring more resources to your projects.
And the last requirement is that you need to have a proven level of success in the same field to persuade others about the success of your project. This is mandatory. When you have done very well in the past, others can trust on the future of your projects and this can help you a lot!
Pros
The pros of this method are the chance to promote a project without spending a lot of money as well as the chance to gain more opportunity for the future projects if you can get success in the current one. Somehow your success can support your future projects as well!
Cons
The cons of this method are the difficulties to achieve requirements and the high risk of the method as well as the side-effects on the future. That positive point can also be a negative point.
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1 Comment : 07.04.08
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