The core premise of authentic self promotion is that showing up, serving, and thriving are interrelated. Promotion, or putting yourself forward, is part of showing up and is essential to having a successful business. Having a successful business is essential to being and sustaining an offer of service. In other words, you cannot serve if you do not take care of business.

Authenticity is the cornerstone of effective, sustainable self promotion because being authentic draws on a renewable resource, i.e., your core values and strengths. Put it all together, and you have authentic promotion.

Authentic self promotion is grounded in the conviction that you have something of unique value to offer the world and that you are willing to discover how to embody that offer, to show up and serve, and to thrive in the process.

Authentic self promotion reconciles values of service and integrity with the tools and practices of effective small business marketing. Authentic promotion of your small business rejects the easy dismissal of marketing and sales as shallow, manipulative, and inauthentic. Instead, authentic self promotion claims that marketing and sales are vehicles for creating enduring relationships and delivering substantial value. If you choose the path of authentic self promotion, you will learn that marketing your small business effectively will challenge you to evolve continually as a person and as a professional.

Authenticity is intimately involved with creativity, evolution, and change. It is closely allied with the notion of authorship, thus of owning and being accountable for one’s actions. Authenticity acknowledges that we are always creating or writing our life stories. Expressed in business, such authenticity will step up to the challenge of making strong, clear, valid offers to prospects who are likely to benefit from those offers.

When we do business in an authentic fashion, we understand that we will be affected and even changed by the processes of doing business. Authenticity is dynamic. When you extend yourself authentically in the world, you expect an authentic response — one that may touch you deeply and influence your future decisions. There are risks, then, in authenticity.

Egocentric business practices, on the other hand, declare, “I don’t need to answer to anyone. I have no intention of being changed or affected by you as we do business together. Either you like me or you don’t. You’ll either find me or you won’t.”

Often this egocentricity is masked by a pseudo-authenticity, one that pretends to stand for immutable values and unassailable principles but that is really a declaration of self-absorption, “My way or the highway.” A better test for authenticity is whether or not we are willing to be affected by our transactions. The authentic expression of our deepest values and most closely held principles will always open us to the risk and blessings of new possibilities.

Authentic marketing and self promotion says, “I’m here to connect with you. I expect that we will both be changed in the course of our relationship. I am willing to discover you and myself in new ways as we do business. Come on down, let’s see what we can create together.”

I propose that the very real excesses and evils of some business practices can be countered in a powerful way by independent professionals and artists who use their businesses as a vehicle for showing up, serving, and thriving. It’s about more than making a living. Though, unless you do make a living, you will not be able to express your gifts to the fullest.

Authentic self promotion is about trying on business and marketing practices and adapting them to fit your values, your resources, and your unique gifts. It’s about having enough integrity and courage to welcome the inevitable breakdowns as occasions for learning and platforms for future success. In order to be truly authentic — in other words, to authenticate our values and our standards — we must act in the world. We must show up to serve, and we must stop pretending that commerce is something the bad guys do. In this way, we will shine a light on unfamiliar or inadequate practices for the sake of devising better practices.

If you have decided on becoming a clickbank affiliate, then you must have come across the question: how to find the top selling products? The clickbank is a good place to start as it has a large affiliate network where you can purchase products that can be used to build internet business, list the products and offer them for sale through your own affiliate network. Clickbank is free to join and you can select the products by going through their menu.

Select Good Products:

To select the product which you can add to your list of products, you can use the clickbank marketplace tab. You have to search for a particular category of products by entering the relevant keywords. You will see information which will tell you about the product, its sales page and the place to create hoplink. You can use this hoplink to promote the top selling products. With this link, you can be identified on the site. When a customer enters the merchant’s site using your link, you will automatically receive the commission when the product gets sold.

For selecting top selling products, these terms may come as a help to you:
Percentage commission: The percentage commission you will receive if a product is sold using your affiliate link. If the percentage commission is 30%, this means for every $100 of sale, you will receive $30 as commission.
Affiliate commission: The actual amount you will receive as commission for that particular product.
Gravity: This shows the popularity of the product in numerical terms. The higher the gravity, the more popular the product is. Being more popular means, you will have lots of competition in terms of more affiliates for the same product.
Referred %: It shows percentage of each product that is referred by affiliates.

Choose Products Based On Information:

Here are some points which will help you choose top selling products on clickbank:
Typically it is advisable to choose a product you have some idea about. If you know more about the product, then it’s easier to promote it. You can reach global audiences and you can target the customers who you know will be interested in the particular product.
Select a product which is not the highest but high enough in gravity. This way you will be sure that you have a quality product which is quite popular and that you have competition which is not fierce.
The percentage commission should be not less than 25%. If you select a product which has commission as 40%-50%, then you will benefit the maximum.
Go through the sales copy and the pieces of information clickbank provides about the product. If the product is attractive and you feel like buying it, then probably the product is good and others would also like to buy it.

Choosing top selling products is not a problem. Do some research; take help of online tools and you will become a successful affiliate marketing expert.

What is the relationship between social marketing and self promotion? Recent studies have shown that the top three search engines amount to only about twenty two percent of the total business traffic. Simple mathematics tells us that about seventy eight percent of retail business is routed through other means. This is the larger portion of the pie that internet business folks should be paying their attention to. This report also throws up the relevance of social marketing in reaching the customer base. It is alright to talk about search engine optimization, but it is wise to look at the other venues.

Social Networking

One of the viable and profitable options available to internet entrepreneur is social networking. A recent analysis of online photo sharing has thrown up some interesting facts. This analysis reveals that a lot of photo sharing is done on the internet’s social networking sites. How does it help your business? This fact has got nothing to do with your business. It is stated just to drive home the point that these networks have immense power to drive traffic. Social marketing depends upon optimum utilization of these networking sites.

There are some products and services that go very well with these sites. If your product or service falls in that category, it is great for you. However, if it does not, you can still device some means to take advantage of these sites; for example, any type of business can make use of the video opportunities presented by You Tube. Just make a short promotion. Make it well. It should be funny and trendy. The potential of such a film is tremendous. It will be like a shot in the arm of your social marketing effort.

Press Releases

Another platform for self promotion is regular press releases by you. Many respected sites help you with press releases. Your job is to make your releases sharp and current. These should be relevant and offer something that people like. You may post some local success stories, or your own achievements. Sales pitches should be avoided in these press releases. Your sales pitch belongs to your website. First get people to visit your site. Once they do that, there is enough space to hook them. That is social marketing at its best!

Article Writing

There are many successful E-magazines on the net. Look out for the ones with your area of interest. Write some interesting articles. Submit them to these e-zines. If the readers like them, they will visit your site for more.

If you join all these ideas and follow them to a T, very soon your social marketing efforts will bear fruit, and you will enjoy a thriving internet business. The cumulative result of many strategies combined together always brings in more benefits. So start now. Get noticed, and drive traffic to your site.