When you get to work, you will realize that you are in a dog-eat-dog world. The ideals you may have about jobs and promotions may not be the same as realities.

However, that should not leave you disheartened. Rather, you have to focus on two things: promoting and motivating yourself.

The Process
The truth is, there is no specific step-by-step guide on how to start marketing and motivating yourself to pursue your goals. However, there are certain implied rules that you may have to follow if you want to ensure that your strategies will work. These rules include the following:

1. Determine your strengths and promotional reasons.
Which areas are you good at? What is your level of education and skill? Most of all, how are your strengths different from others? The key here is to find your talents and qualities that will make you stand out among the rest.

Keep in mind that quantity does not matter. You can have a gazillion list, which may not really do you good since they are also strengths of the competition.

After you have determined your strengths, you then have to think about the main reason why you are promoting yourself in the first place. Do you want to land a job? Would you like to get promoted? Would you like to increase your credibility in the industry you are in? Knowing the reason allows you to craft the best self-promotional methods.

2. Identify your marketing methods.
When you already know your strengths, identify the ways on how you can promote them to your colleagues and, most of all, to the company you are currently or planning to work in.

Thanks to technology, you can utilize various social media tools available in the World Wide Web: social networking and HR websites, blogs, micro-blogging platforms — the list is endless.

Unless you have all the time in your hands, though, you will never be able to make full use of all of them. Thus, determine the tools that will bring you a lot closer to your goal. For instance, if you’re a website designer, the best promotional material will be your own website, where you can upload your designs and showcase your portfolio.

3. Motivate yourself to perform the marketing methods.
This can be considered as one of the hardest parts in self-promotion because it needs a long-term commitment.

Fortunately, there are many ways on how you can keep yourself motivated to achieve your goals for self-promotion and stick to the plans you’ve made.

For one, ensure that both the objectives and the marketing methods you have determined can be achieved and tracked. Yes, you need to know which of the strategies worked and which ones do not, or else, you may end up spending more time and money on the latter.

Arrange the objectives and marketing ploys in different milestones. This will ease out the burden accompanying self-promotion, make progress-monitoring more convenient, and get things easily done because you don’t multi-task.

One of the best motivators is reward. Don’t forget to provide yourself an incentive every time you accomplish a milestone. It can be as trivial as a massage in a well-known spa to something grand like a party or a travel to your dream destination.

Most of all, keep in mind that unless you start taking the first step today, you will never reach anything. The beginning will always be the hardest. However, if you set your sights on the goals you have just listed, you can surely proceed to that one big leap.