6 great ways to promote your work online

Having your own place on the web to display your work is an absolute must for someone in the Digital Media industry. As with most creative or technical disciplines the proof is always in the pudding. Potential employers don’t care too much about education or what software you can use, they want to see what you can do. Having your own portfolio site with your own domain is pretty standard these days and for a nominal cost you can register a domain and get your site hosted.

So we know that having your own web portfolio is essential, but is it enough? Why limit the exposure your work can receive to simply the people that stumble across your web portfolio? Why not try to maximize the audience and the reach that your work could potentially have?

I’ve compiled a list of some of the places to promote your work in addition to your own website. Doing so will not only get your work in front of more people but will help drive traffic back to your own website.

Here are some of the best places to get started.

The Behance Network

I’ve long been a fan of the Behance Network. Not only is it a great place to host a portfolio and get exposure it is a fantastic resource for exploring and finding inspiration. The service is free and the community is supportive and thriving.

http://www.behance.net/

Carbon Made

Carbonmade is a very simple and well done service for easily creating an online portfolio. You add and organize the content and it gets presented in a very clean interface with your own yourname.carbonmade.com sub domain. The free version allows you to host up to 5 projects with 35 images. For $12/month you can upgrade and get 50 projects with up to 500 hi-res images and 10 high quality videos.

http://www.carbonmade.com/

Pink Muse

Pink Muse isn’t so much a hosted portfolio site as it is a huge collection of art and design work from different contributors. You can create a free account, customize your profile information and upload examples of your work. Your submissions will then be included in the searchable user gallery.

http://pinkmuse.com/

Society 6

Society six provides a platform for people in the creative industry to promote their work and potentially connect with opportunities. You can create your own page at society6.com/yourname and add examples of your work and links to your other websites. They have also built some great community features that allow you to follow and explore the work of other members.

http://www.society6.com/

Coroflot

The coroflot site offers both a job board for designers as well as a hosted portfolio service. The Hosted portfolio service is free and includes a personal URL unlimited file uploads and detailed traffic reports.

http://www.coroflot.com/

Krop Creative Database

The Krop Creative Database service is in my opinion the most feature rich and well built hosted portfolio service. The basic package is free but is limited to 10 images. This package gives you a custom URL and your choice of a number of very nice layouts .
For $9.99/month you can upgrade to unlimited images, domain mapping (So you can use your own domain), RSS and Video embedding.

http://www.krop.com/creativedatabase/

If you have any additional resources that I’ve overlooked feel free to leave a link to them in the comments.

This entry was posted by Daelan Wood on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.