Wednesday, June 26, 2013

4 Tips for Getting Your Online Portfolio Noticed

4 Tips for Getting Your Online Portfolio Noticed



Image source: Razeslayer.deviantart.com

You’ve uploaded all of your best artwork into a beautiful online portfolio, but something’s wrong… you aren’t getting any phone calls from prospective employers. What’s the problem? You keep waiting and waiting, but employers just don’t seem to care about your online portfolio.

You, my friend, have an exposure problem. Creating an online portfolio is just part one of a two-part equation. You also need to promote your portfolio so that prospective employers can find your name in a Google search. I’ll leave education in art to the professionals at Gnomon school. Today, I’m going to teach you a thing or two about shameless self-promotion.
1. Add Your Portfolio Link to Signatures

If you frequent forums, add the hyperlink to your forum signature. Every post that you make increases the chances that people will stumble across your website. This is especially true if you frequent forums that relate to art — people will be much more willing to check out your portfolio.

Also, don’t be afraid to create a permanent signature on your emails. You’d be surprised by how effective something so simple could be. Friends and family members will eagerly put you in contact with people who are looking for a 3D artist.


Image source: Primetimeprint.com
2. Blog on Your Portfolio

Whenever you use a search engine, you’re doing a search for words. Naturally, if you want people to stumble across your portfolio, you need words on your website that can get picked up by search engines. Whenever you make a post about texture art, for example, you increase the odds of people finding your website by doing a search for “texture art.”
3. Brush Up on SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a collection of strategies aimed at putting your website at the top of a Google search. Some of the principles of SEO are simple, while others are fairly advanced. It’s up to you how in-depth you want to go when you optimize your website, but at bare minimum you should learn the basics of SEO. Some of the techniques, like adding as secondary title, take less than 10 seconds to do and can more than double the traffic to your website.


































Image source: Visual.ly
4. Shameless Self Promotion

Don’t be so humble that you refuse to advertise your own artwork. Make forum posts. Share your artwork on social media. Ask your friends to tell their friends about your artwork. Enter (and win!) online art contests. Make a post on Reddit asking people what they think about your artwork. Posting your latest piece of art to Facebook or Reddit might only take a few seconds, but it could potentially earn thousands of views.

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