1. Do cool things.

2. Tell people about them.

There's a pretty big industry surrounding how to promote yourself effectively, but ultimately, most of those things are secondary concerns. You shouldn't ignore marketing advice - there's often useful insights on what appears impressive to other people - but you'll always get more bang for the buck by actually doing things that are impressive to people rather than trying to make what you're doing appear impressive to others. Actions speak louder than words.

It turns out rather hopeless appealing people with skills you don't have.

So get skills? That seems much more productive than convincing people that you have skills that you don't.

Doesn't that usually involve giving up your passion? Not every skill is worth getting, don't get me wrong though - I am apprehensive at doing things just to please some people.

Well, it definitely helps to be passionate about something that other people are impressed by, but unless you're into incredibly obscure areas of academia or work in a bubble, there's probably somebody out there that will be impressed by a job done well.

What are you passionate about?

Programming is my passion, you are probably right about the bubble.

In your case I would try and participate in a lot of online communities, then have a link to your twitter and blog for all posts. Make sure you provide quality content for your blog and twitter.Some times when you make a good comment on a post people will check you out if you have a link for them to follow.

That should help out a bit.

Since you are comfortable interacting with a small batch of people, attending barcamps/unconferences is a good way to network and promote yourself. If you live in an area with a startup scene there are probably multiple such events a week.

Write / join an open source project.

Sure, I own few open source projects github.com/niravthaker

I also contribute to Eclipse and other related projects but that seems too time consuming.