How do you promote your product without coming off as spammy?

Representing yourself as a helpful expert allows you to build a better reputation which makes promoting anything easier. The more you are seen answering questions and helping others with knowledgeable insight will get more eyes on you and then onto the projects you are working on. Identify where people that could use your product/service spend their time and be a helpful resource.

I really like the idea of side project marketing. You basically create a side project that offers some kind of value to your target market and quietly plug your product throughout (or in a few key places). They benefit, see your branding, get curious, click, learn, buy (hopefully).

Here is an example of one I am starting right now for QuickCut.io: https://coursebase1.webflow.io/ (it's a work in progress and as you can see it's mostly empty). Why did I start this? Because online course creators need a way to market their courses and most just do so with their website. A discovery site helps them get discovered, but also gets them curious about QuickCut. There is one persistent link on every page. They can come learn about the tool, hopefully sign up and I provide them with some value (hopefully a lot of value once the website launches and grows).

What are you promoting?

One way I "promote" is simply by sharing helpful/educational information, but that idea doesn't always apply, depending on what the business is.

I've also found that different groups have much different ideas of what's acceptable with regard to self-promotion.