Dribbble is a design/illustration community where people share their work, you upload small images of their work. You need an invite to be able to sign up on Dribble which can be a bit tricky to get, but it really helps the spam and bots away. What I did when I first wanted to sign up on the site is that I used these two sites to help me get an invite. Cribble & Draft.im. On these sites, you simply upload one image of your work (pick a good one!) and then other members will decide if they want to send you an invite to Dribbble or not, I got an invite quite fast using these sites.

Everyone is on Facebook, so creating a Facebook page for your work/business is a great thing to have. After you created your page make sure you don’t start harassing your friends and family with too much posts about your Facebook page, let them know that the page exists and from their only post on your page. You do what you want of course but it’s nice to keep the annoyance level low in my experience. In the beginning, it can be hard to get followers on FB outside your circle of friends so there are a few things you can do to share the knowledgeable about your page.

You can log in as your page and interact as your page (instead of your personal Facebook account), try and find other pages in your niche/interest and interact with them in various ways, comment, like or even propose a collaboration somehow. One other thing you can do is to embed and promote your page on your website/portfolio, you can create a box that you can put on your site over here, it’s really simple, you create the box over here, then just place the code that you get where you want the box should be on your site.

Deviantart one of the oldest online art/creative communities around and I would say the site has a strong focus on photography, fan art, anime and cosplay, to summarise Deviantart you could say nerd culture, in general, is a big thing. But there’s of course also a lot more than fan art and anime over there,I would suggest that you head over to the site and have a quick look what other artists are posts there and what seems popular, and then you can decide for yourself if your work would be a good fit on Deviantart.

It also has a great active community where people shares ideas, gives advice/critiques and helps each other, which is something I feel the creative fields need more of!

It’s up to you on how many of these sites you want to use, but uploading to every one of these can be a lot of work. So either you pick on a few of these to focus on and promote your art on, and the rest you either ignore them completely or just post there now and then. There’s also another option that many artists uses and that’s to use the service IFTTT (if this then that), what this service does is that it let you set up these chains of actions between different sites & services, so, for example, you could make it so when you post something on your Facebook page that post will be shared on Pinterest automatically. That’s just one example, but there’s endless of possibilities with IFTTT and can really help you share your work to different platforms easily.

Also, IFTTT is free to use. but not all the sites on the list is available in their service, but most are.

Most of us have a Pinterest, but what we sometimes forget is that we can pin our own work too, I wouldn’t recommend overdoing this because you don’t want to bore your followers with your work being posted each and every day and it can easily feel a bit spammy if your only posting your own work, but keep in tasteful and Pinterest can be a great place to spread your work on.

Always remember to give your pins a good description so people easily can find it when searching on Pinterest, and always make sure your pin is linking back to your site/blog or a portfolio, it’s nothing worse then pins that are missing their source. (that’s something I would recommend for not only your own work on Pinterest, always pin with a source to the original content).