Or know people personally. There's two people I promote because they actively helped me do my own work, pitched in open source code and did development to support my project. There's another guy who lives in my town, so he gets some mention just because of that (his work's good, but that's my angle for mentioning it). And a microphone company got a shout out not because they give me microphones, but because the guy running the company noticed and liked my ethos and did a repair for free for me. That counts as a form of sponsoring so I talked him up, am already a fan of his work.

Make friends and work with people where possible. I get that some of this only works for us open source types, but the microphone guy isn't, he just did good work. I initially heard of his company through a pro sound engineer website, and ran with it when the advice turned out to be good.