Red Lemon Club: Ideas for Fruitful Creatives

This is a post I intend to make more regular and something I think will be of great use to all kinds of creatives out there.

Every once in a while, I will get a discussion going on the RLC Facebook Page that aims to bring together a collection of Internet resources, ideas and methods real people have found useful for their own self-promotional efforts.

This post focuses on a handful of sites that enable you to showcase your work, while having all kinds of other benefits too.

The comments area at the end of this post aims to extend the discussion further, so don’t hesitate to send through some feedback. It’s great karma for you!

Society 6

A site for artists and creatives to promote their work, connect and interact with others. I like the layout and clean design of the site. I’m also a fan of the voting system, which allows people’s work to be bumped up to the front page if it is popular. Some good exposure is afforded shortly after submitting work to the site, and you can sell prints through here as well. Society6.com

Behance

The site provides a single point of contact for anyone involved in creative industries. The site is for photographers, illustrators and designers. The site is beautifully designed, with some great opportunities to share links, showcase your work, notify people of your working status, look at all kinds of stats, and interact with others. The site can even be used as your default portfolio page. Behance.net

Pinkmuse

Pinkmuse is a service for artists to present work, browse galleries, message, critique, buy, sell, and search art by specific criteria such as artist name, school, city, medium, colour, mood, genre, material, dimension and price. Pinkmuse.com

Carbonmade

Containing close to 160,000 portfolios, Carbonmade is a crowded online space, but is one of the main hubs of creativity on the web. This provides an excellent opportunity for further self promotion across all creative disciplines. Carbonmade.com

Artwanted

As recommended by illustrator Jade Boylan: ‘You get a great portfolio set up and fantastic page and visitor stats right down to individual image hits and artwork comments‘. Artwanted.com

Creative Shake

Artist Dave Hile has had good results from this site. ‘In the last 2 years it has generated around $30,000 and costs about $450 per year (it might be $600 the first year). That’s a good return on investment. I haven’t gotten a lot of jobs from it, but the jobs I did get were large ones’. The site is for all kinds of creatives willing to showcase their porfolios for a price. Creativeshake.com

FormFiftyFive

A site that scours the web for the best in photography and design work. Also a great place for network building, setting up collaborations, interaction and inspiration. Formfiftyfive.com

Everycreative

A really nice online resource to enable further networking, collaborating and pitching for designers and other creatives. You can also use the site in finding work experience and gaining valuable feedback and advice from established industry workers. This is a great one. Everycreative.com

Of course, you don’t need to sign up to all of these, but perhaps have a look through some of the sites here you haven’t heard of, try them out, and see if they mould to your own style of work, and fit in with your own self promotion strategy.

http://www.justnoey.com Parul

Hey Alex Great post! I know of a few link e Behance & Society6 but check out the others. My question to this discussion would be that how many of such websites should you put your work on? Should you select a few or just add them to all? Is there a thing called over exposure anymore? I know what one might say… Any publicity is good publicity right! Any thoughts? Cheers
Alex Mathers

Hi Parul,

That’s a great question and something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in promoting myself. I’m a strong supporter of minimizing the time creatives spend on the Internet promoting themselves and making the process as time efficient as possible. Therefore, I would recommend trying out the sites, road-testing the results you see from them for a few weeks or months, perhaps tweaking what you are doing to see different results, and then streamlining from then on based on what you have seen (i.e. chopping out sites from your strategy that don’t show any results).

You have nothing to lose with the free sites to at least register and upload some of your work, so go for it.

For the paid sites, you can spend a bit of time on each, again monitoring for results. Treat them like you would any investment of your time and money.

As everyone’s work is different, I cannot give guarantees as to what kinds of results you will see from each, but give it a go!

Alex
phantramy

Hi Alex,
Thanks for your list. I only knew Carbonmade.com site. I will try some sites of your list. Thanks again!
:-)
http://www.moopf.com/ Moopf

I’ve only tried Society 6 out of this list so far and joined about 5 weeks ago. At the moment I’m really unconvinced by it and your last sentence about good exposure shortly after submitting, well that really hasn’t been my experience of it so far. I haven’t garnered much exposure at all there and, as it gets bigger, I can see any potential new submission benefit disappearing anyway.

That brings me onto another problem with the site – one of visibility. There are basically only a few ways to browse – the new and popular lists on the front page, the discover menu option which says it’s a random assortment of “quality” posts (whatever that actually means, presumably posts with promotion votes) and the search. There’s no option to categorise work and drill-down in that fashion so once you fall off the relatively few options, you would only be found through search.

I’m going to stick with it for a little while longer However – it’s more than possible that my work simply isn’t of the right ilk for the site, or not good enough, and I’ll give it long enough to form a more rounded opinion of it. I’ll be looking into the other sites that you’ve listed here as well, some of which I’d heard of but others that are totally new to me.
http://www.harrynesbitt.com Harry Nesbitt

Thanks Alex, this is really useful stuff – I’d not heard of several of these before!

After having used society6 for several weeks now, I’d have to say it’s by far the best I’ve tried – not only for the ease of use and it’s simple chart system, but also because of the sheer quality of work floating around over there. Either the system is doing a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff or they’ve yet to attract the ‘deviantart’ masses. Either way, that place is hot right now!

Harry
http://www.justnoey.com Parul

Thanks for that Alex… will keep it in mind. Cheers
Alex Mathers

Moopf –

That’s interesting insight into your use of Society6. I’m sure different people have had different experiences with it. It does seem to cater better for artists’ whose work has been rated well and whose work is popular. A large part of this is likely down to luck, as well as what work is working with trends, so it might not be for everyone.

However, I do still think it has value in terms of getting exposure in front of those that find your work on the site, as well as providing opportunities for getting hold of grants for creatives, selling prints (another form of promotion!), and collaboration.

Harry – I’m glad that you’ve seen the positives in the site – excellent! I hope it continues to work well for you.
Jo Underhill

Hi Alex, thanks for the list. Have just joined up to Everycreative, will let you know how it goes…
http://www.simplelife-solutions.co.uk Victoria Whitney

Hello, and Thanks Alex ! Great Tips….
http://www.justzerosandones.co.uk Alex Vissaridis

Thanks for this, it’s often hard to know what to look at when trying to get some more exposure, just because of the sheer number of sites out there so it’s good to see some of the advantages and disadvantages of some of the best ones!

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