Last week Chris Wilson opened up his newsletter ‘Learn, Create, Share’ with the following quote.

“Your problem,” my brother explained “is the same as mine. We’re bad at self-promotion because we were taught not to be boastful.”

Undoubtedly this isn’t the reason I never made it as a writer or content producer, but it is something that I really don’t want to ever do. Sell myself to an online following is great if you can make a living out of it. However building a brand and resorting to clickbait titles, or constant self-promotion online is just not anything I ever want to resort to.

My online persona is the same as my real one, and I don’t see any reason to change. Fair play if that’s your thing, but too often I see great people I follow online build a following and then become boring bots of shameless self-promotion and shape themselves into something different.

Can it be self-promotion if you’re not being yourself?