Make sure that your profile is complete
First, ensure that your profile is complete and that you add your skills and software. The Pro Search feature is used extensively to find artists, and thousands of artists have found freelance jobs through it. But it works best when your skills and software are all complete.
Add proper categories and tags
In addition to a nice project description, properly categorizing your project by adding the medium, subject matter, software and tags will help to increase its discoverability and visibility towards potential clients, recruiters and fans.
Engage the community
Typically artists who contact ArtStation concerned about their popularity show signs of non-engagement:
- They publish only a few artworks.
- They do not follow any other artists.
- They do not engage with the community by liking other people's artwork or commenting.
The ArtStation community gallery is a social network and you generally get what you put in.
From what we have observed, artists who are successful in the ArtStation community show the following signs of engagement:
- Publishing consistently over time. E.g. new work every week.
- Engaging with other artists by following them, liking their works and commenting. Other artists follow you back because of this.
- Sharing ArtStation work on other social networks. E.g. when publishing artwork on ArtStation, it offers to publish the work to Facebook and Twitter as well.
It is important to gain a following, as your followers are notified when you publish new work. This typically results in your work trending upwards as your followers Like your newly published work.
Post breakdowns
Generally, artwork that includes breakdown shots will get more views likes and views. ArtStation supports multiple images, animated gifs, videos, and 3D formats such as Marmoset and Sketchfab.
Create a Blog
Premium members can post blogs which will enable them to share their news, WIPs, updates and more. A great way to let your followers know about a new project is to share some thoughts or behind-the-scenes work that might be too much for just a project description.
Share to Social Media
The world is multi-channel now. ArtStation is built to be a centrepiece for showcasing your work and we hook into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to help promote it further. We recommend sharing your work to sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, linking back to your ArtStation project. We make this easy to do - when posting your work, we can automatically do this for you.
What not to do
Don't post overly sexual artwork - nude men or women, etc. Some artists think that posting this kind of sexual material will get more visibility - it really doesn't and we actively moderate this kind of content.