(This post is part of a bigger list of rules that I have found helpful for thinking about a career, and beyond. See this post for an explainer).
As indicated at the end of the last rule (networks, networks, networks), talking about your work and ideas is very important, and it gets more and more important by the day.
Some of us have grown up in a culture that is deeply rooted in the exact opposite idea. When I grew up, I learned proverbs like "Reden ist Silber, Schweigen ist Gold" (speech is silver, silence is golden), or "Eigenlob stinkt" (self-praise stinks). I've written before that I think modest chronic under-confidence is much more harmful than modest chronic overconfidence, so here I'll focus exclusively on my belief that being quiet about your own work, in the hope that it'll be discovered because of its own merit, is a bad idea.
Ultimately, in order to be recognized for your work, it needs to be known. You need to be known. The traditional route is to publish in good journals, present at good conferences, and network with the right people. These are still very good ideas, precisely because they help you and your work be visible. But they are by no means the only routes. Today, there is a multitude of options that you can add to that arsenal, and amplify the effects of the traditional route. The most obvious one is public social media - in other words, Twitter. I didn't care too much about Facebook before the CA story, because at the end of the day, I don't need my "friends" to hear about my work - I need to reach everyone else. I strongly advise you to tweet, and tweet regularly; not just about your work, but generally interesting stuff. People follow other people if they think they are a good source of information. Try to be one.
The other extremely good way, and completely underutilized in my opinion, is to do interesting things on the web. There is no science that you could not somehow make more attractive on the web. Most of the work I do these days is fundamentally web-based, which makes things a little easier - it's already online by design. But even if you work in, say, molecular biology, you're only limited by your creativity with respect to what you can do on the web. Why don't you create that amazing website where you list your work, blog about it, blog about other people's work, create interactive visualizations of your models, write short tutorials on certain aspects about your work that you know is relevant to others? When you put in consistent effort into such things, you'll grow your visibility dramatically - often explosively, if something you did on the web goes viral for one reason or another.
Naturally, there is trade-off here, in the sense that you can only invest so much time in such visibility efforts. But when you think about it, the kinds of skills you'll learn doing that - mostly in the form of getting proficient with web technologies - are highly marketable, and will be extremely useful for the rest of your career. For PhD students, I would recommend to spend at least 10% of your time on doing this. It'll be worth it.