Trying to get exposure to their work is the most challenging situation that freelancers or fresh design graduates face. This exposure is needed to land on a good design job and especially to get the attraction of the clients and to make their brand name recognized in the industry.
There are so many talented designers out there and competing with a new brand name with them is no short of a big challenge. In such a case, getting exposure can be a daunting task. Our article today aims at letting these budding designers know of some of the best known practical ways which they can use to gain exposure. Even implementing a few of these ideas can take you on the road where you can build a name for yourself, land on your desired job or attract the clients.
Your Peculiar Portfolio:
Being a new entrant in design work, you should know that your work speaks the best for you. It is not only your portfolio that will attract clients; it is also the design of the website that brings a lot of exposure. There are a number of web design galleries that showcase the work of top quality designers which is a great source of inspiration and exposure.
In the same way, some design blogs often come up with posts where they showcase the inspirational work of other designers. So if you can get your work to be displayed in any of such popular blogs, it will gain you a lot of exposure. Gallery sites like Carbonmade, devianArt and Behance allow you to make a profile and display all of your work there.
Making a Guest Post on Major Blogs:
There are countless blogs for web and graphic design out there that love guest posts and look for such submissions. If they are not paid posts, the incentive of getting exposure and name out there is attractive. If you quickly want to gain exposure, writing for some major blogs as guests is the best way. It gives you a chance to display your skills, show your abilities and present your expertise through teaching or talking about a particular topic.
Blogs which have a visitor-ship of hundreds and thousands of people per month holds in them a lot of opportunities. While you may think that only writing for a design blog will help you reach other designers, it is not so. You’ll be surprised how many clients find bloggers through their guest posts.
Give Out Freebies:
One way of picking up a lot of links to your site is by releasing freebies and that in turn leads to more visitors and more exposure. Though may not be a good option to lead to a lot of client work, freebies can help build your name recognition.
What you can make for freebies have limitless options. Photoshop brushes and textures, vectors, icon sets, WordPress themes and PSD files are some of the popular freebies. Readers like to use free stuff from websites and bloggers like to link the free resources.
To promote your freebies, here are a few things that you can do:
Reach out to different bloggers and send them your link; contact ardent social media users and ask them to put your link up on their pages; ask your friends to send out the link to their friends so that the network grows; link the freebie resource to the guest post that you are writing; distribute the freebie from your site or from some popular site.
Teach Others through Your Experience:
Teaching others is a good way to learn new stuff, implement stuff you have learned and meet new clients. When you are guest posting for some other blog, teaching is what you are doing. A way of doing it directly is to teach online through portals like webinars.
You offering training to designers are certainly going to help you improve exposure to your target industry and find people who would fall into that category. You can also offer this training in a seminar or in person whereas webinars are easier to set up and conduct. More clients will come when you give more valuable information and that to for free. Further you can put up a specialized service for offer that is for a price other than the free training. Your good salesman skills will come to use in making this free webinar attractive.
Consider Publishing a Book:
Publishing a book on a subject of your choice is an outstanding way to gain exposure for your work.it gives you a nice position as an expert on that particular subject and gives you a credibility that speaks more about you then would anything else. E-books are a modern way to do this while published books also serve this purpose well. Because anyone can pick up and publish and e-book with ease, it does not give you as much credibility as a nice and traditional published book would give. However, in case you want to attract visitors to your website, an e-book might well come in handy.
Such free e-books are linked to own sites as well as other blogs and websites. So if an e-book is informative, it will get a lot of recommendations and valuable exposure for the author. Costs associated with publishing and distributing is only nominal when you consider the incentives it will bring you.
Social Networking Sites:
Some new kinds of social networking sites have raised their heads up in recent times and two of them are Forrst and Dribbble. These are the sites from where you can not only get exposure for your work but can get inspired by the work of others. Such sites work with you getting the invitation. So look them up, join the contest or send the request to them that you want to join, wait to get lucky and then you will be on your way to getting yourself out there in the design world.
To Wrap Up…
You may notice that a number of these ways include taking help from social media and blogging so if you haven’t already started participating in these projects, now is always a good time to do that. The thing goes without question that you have to put your best efforts in your work and keep it fresh at all times by taking inspirations from others. If you do that, you will have no problem in getting the exposure in a short time using these practical steps.
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