3 Tips to Market your Graphic Design or Photography portfolio

Are you a serious graphic design artist or a photographer that has a mind-blowing portfolio, but nobody can seem to find it?  Here are tips that are vital to getting noticed in cyber space.

1.) Get on social networks and start promoting right away!  Now I don’t exactly mean spamming.  You want to be careful with how you promote your work because you can quickly damage your brand and reputation with nonsense.  Promote yourself with dignity and class; give your audience information they want to read.  This is where your creativity should really come into play.   In my case I am on the following 3 social networks to help market my graphic design and photography portfolio:

1. Twitter:  The first thing that you will need to do here is set up a Twitter account with some name that is relevant to either your business name or the industry that you are working in.  Setup your profile and take the time to truly customize it with graphics of your own.   In your bio, state something simple like “Graphic Designer” or “Photographer”.   Then when all is said and done, start searching for and following people related to your industry.  Retweet information that you find relevant and post quality tweets that will keep folks interested in following your tweets.  Any time you make an update to your website, ensure that you post it here on twitter.
2. Facebook:  Yes, everyone and their mom is on Facebook and I know you have an account.  What you want to do here is start up a fan page account for your business.  This will help keep your business to be more professional, allow Google to index more content you release on facebook related to your business and really allow you to focus in on keywords to improve your organic search results in search engines.  Take your time to really focus on providing a lot of content for your info tab.  Don’t forget to say often you are a photographer or a graphic designer (be liberal with those words).
3. Deviant Art:  There is nothing like the love of a Search Engine crawling a site that has been around for years.  In this case we are talking about the largest artist community on the Internet, Deviant Art.  It does not matter if you are a graphic designer or a photographer, Deviant Art is a great way to network and drive traffic to your website.  Be sure to be thorough when filling out your profile and try participating in the forums and commenting on other similar artist such as your self.  Try to upload your artwork slowly and often, this will help spread out your incoming traffic.  Believe it or not, everything you do on Deviant Art gets indexed on Google so as Ernie Anastos stated “Keep Plucking that Chicken!”

2.) Build a Blog for your website.  Yes you heard me, a BLOG!   If your portfolio is all pictures with no text, how do you expect Google to understand what your website is all about?  Google loves text, it thrives off of lots and lots of text so you may want to break out Microsoft Word and get to cracking on some articles that talk about your work or is related to the industry that you are working in.  Now if you are thinking about copying and pasting text from another website, you may want to think again as Google does not think kindly of duplicated content and neither will your readers.  Your readers should read articles and look at content on your website that will keep them there and encourage them to come back for more.  This means you need to write quality content and post new content often; both users and Google bot enjoy the overwhelming sensation of fresh content!

3.) Google Places. Have you ever noticed that when you type in a business in Google, a Map will come up with a description and customer opinions of that place?   Get your freelance business registered with Google places and get your friends to write some 5 star reviews about your graphic design or photography business.  

Keeping these 3 tips in mind is no easy task and there is never an end to it.  It is an endless cycle of being creative and providing content to both your audience and search engines.  If you keep both happy, you should have a popular photography or graphic design portfolio in no time!