This Trick Will Help You Promote Yourself Without Coming Off as Self-Centered The first rule of talking about you: It's not really about you.

I've always struggled with self-promotion. Sure, I've done plenty of it -- you pretty much can't work in media without hawking your own work. But I've always felt awkward about it. Self-promotion feels a little like begging. I've always worried that it's a burden -- as if I'm saying, Here's something I'm forcing you to care about. So I tried to mask that awkwardness with self-­deprecating humor. When I recently launched an Entrepreneur podcast called Problem Solvers, for example, I emailed all my friends with the subject line, "In case you're not sick of my voice."

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Over the past year, though, I've been repeatedly struck by how gracefully entrepreneurs promote themselves. There's no fuss. No apologies. No little dance. They instead worry about how to reach their audiences most directly, and how to be as useful to that audience as possible. The concept started to sink in: useful. I needed to think of my self-promotion as useful -- not to me, but to the people I'm reaching.