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.

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

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.

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