Behance The Shameless Guide
Everything new users need to understand to make the most of the Behance Network Your Page
This is your profile; this will be the page most users will see when they visit your page. Uploading projects is so easy a 5 year old could do it. Hence why so many people opt to use Behance and also why I am not going to explain to you how to create projects. What I will however do is give you some tips on how to utilize the sites features.
This is your frame view. What this page does is remove advertising from the outside of your page allowing it to look nice when sending your portfolio to clients or whoever else you want to see your work. Unfortunately it does not have any customization other than colour, to do this you would need Prosite which costs £60 a year.
Pro Site
This is an example of Prosite, it is endlessly customizable. The benefits of using Prosite is that you can link it to your own domain name as well as not having to touch a line of code, which for illustrators or designers who don’t no how to make websites is golden. Especially when the end result often looks better than most websites people pay hundreds of pounds to create. Now I understand you do not want to be part of something just because its easy to upload work, there are lots of other benefits of using Behance, all of which I am going to explain to you now.
Users Now first of all I want to point out that Behance has users from all over the world. I picked eight users at random and one is from the UK one from Poland the USA, Spain, China and so on, by being part of Behance you really are putting yourself in a global creative circle. It’s the most used online portfolio site in the world, and has links with TED, google, Facebook, Twitter along with many more multinational organizations. Now the people most likely to view your page will be other creatives, which you might say is pointless, however word of a good idea spreads like wildfire and you get your rewards for being a prolific worker. You also have to remember that as well as sharing your ideas you can also look at millions of other projects to inspire your mind.
Users . 2
These are the kinds of people you really want looking at your work. People like this are generally just prospective art directors looking for new talented designers. they do not upload work but instead just keep an eye out on emerging talent. Now how do you get these people to see your work… There are many ways, but in order to understand you must get a grasp of all elements of the site.
Cool
Not Cool
Project Covers It might seem overwhelming when I show you all of this, but I assure you when you start using the site this will all click in your head. You want to make your project covers as interesting as possible. The reason for this is that as soon as you publish your project, it appears on the most recent page of the network, allowing everyone all over the world to see your work. If your project cover does not look interesting then no one is going to view your work. Here are two examples. Mine is a naked girl at the bottom of the ocean - cool. The other a clipart football - not cool. You have to be smart about presenting your work.
Most Recent
Appreciations
Now this button can be your best friend or your worst enemy. This button can make you quite famous in the design world or can have you wallowing in the pits with other rubbish designers. If you ever see this button on your work, press it. get everyone you no to press it. Pay people 5p every time they press it for you. Just do whatever you can to make sure people do you the favour of pushing this button So why are appreciations so important. Well ....
Appreciation Development
As you can see when you first upload a project not very many people are going to appreciate your work. At this point it’s hard to see how you will ever develop on Behance to be regarded as a top designer. Don’t slit your wrists just yet though there is hope.
Eventually you will have a breakthrough, and a project will take off. The money business card is a project I made that because of Behance now features on 20 websites and got me countless work, as well as streams of new views coming to my page.
Search Bar
Tags When someone types something into the Behance search bar, the project with that tag with the most appreciations will appear at the top. Hence getting more people looking at your work. There is also a ranking system based on appreciations which means that the more you get the more likely you are to appear closer to the top on any number of Behnaces pages. This brings up another important point. Tags, regardless of what your project is about. When it comes to tagging your work, just put any word your mind can think of, literally anything and everything. The more things you put, the more your work is going to appear in search pages. Everyone is doing this, you can tell because type in a random word and hundreds of projects come up, its just bettering your chances of being seen.
This is the goal! Mr Joe Fenton is the most appreciated person on Behance. It is important to remember that the more appreciations you get the more likely you are for someone to visit your page and therefore appreciating your work even further. So it is a slow but rewarding process. If your completely against putting in any effort to promote yourself you may as well leave the site as it will do nothing for you. I would love to see the inbox of this guy, he probably gets job offers daily.
Location
Location. Now where you choose your location to be is very important on Behance. You have to remember that prospective clients will be looking in geographical locations to hunt out designers so there are some key things to remember. Having said that, it is also important to remember that most design work is done via email, so being true about your location is not actually necessary. Obviously do not go saying you live in New York if you’re from Dudley, keep it to the same country but be smart about it. No1. Do not say you live in a tiny village. This is soooo important, I’m from Braunton in North Devon but if I am someone looking to find designers, I’m not thinking “bloody hell the land of Ambrosia custard , sheep and the pasty” as a good place to source innovative design so opt for somewhere bigger. However be warned. No2. If your new to Behance, live in London, and you put that as your location baring in mind you only have 3 appreciations in total, then you have absolutely no chance of being seen. The ranking for location goes on appreciations so Worcester for example is a good place to start because you only need 100 appreciations to be in the top three people. Where as with 100 appreciations in London you are likely to be on the 50th page. No3. When you get some more appreciations you can venture into the realms of bigger cities. I am in a sticky situation at the moment as I have 5000 or so appreciations so I can opt for Bristol which is well known in the UK and I am third. Or I could change my location to London and I would be on the middle of the second page. On the other hand you have to remember that people from all over the world know London, where as only people in the UK are likely to know Bristol so that is a hard choice, One in which you will all have to make at some point.
Networking
Right, another very important part of using Behance is utilizing your inner circle and followers. This is your power, the more people you get behind you hear the more people no what your working on, the more people you can spread a message about your projects, the more appreciations you get and the more you fly up the ranks... its really simple ;) For example. You launch a website and post it around to a few friends and hope people just spread the word, unlikely to take off. Or …. Send the message out to 1000 creatives thirsty for blogging opportunities and innovation as a whole, then all of a sudden your website will see streams of users. You do not just want to look for anyone on this though. (This was just how I did it you may approach this differently). My approach was to search for every major city around the UK and invite everyone from the first 5 pages, this way I new I was targeting influential designers within the UK. Once I had done this I then filled it with any old randomer just so that when I send a message it goes out to the most possible people upping my chances of getting views, comments, website features, appreciations, jobs etc. I then from time to time go through my inner circle and remove people with small following, cut throat I know, but people with a small following are likely to be less influential people to associate yourself with. With this in mind I will remove say 10 people and then look to find new designers to fill my inner circle. This leads onto my next point. Follwers. Now followers are your best asset, you must look after these people, they follow your work therefore opting to clog up their news feed with your work so make sure you provide them with quality material, do not spam them with random messages and thank them for following your work at key milestones like 100 followers, 200 500 1000 and so on. By removing people from your inner circle and then continuing to add people, the people who have been asked often feel grateful enough for the invite to be part of your inner circle to follow your work, this is a good way to steadily grow your following.
Useful Tools
Behance has even decided to include so pretty nifty features. They have included a social network tab at the bottom of projects to allow users to share your work as well as analysis of your projects. What this means is you can see how many people have looked at your work, who has appreciated it, when, where their location is and so on. It even shows you who are the most active users again allowing you to target people who are essentially good to be on your team with regards to your inner circle and followers. These are just the basic functions of the site. Once used to the site, I recommend users make use of the tips page, competitions, Twitter, Facebook, Sell your work and so on. I could be here all day explaining ways to get people to look at your page but I guess the bottom line is, be smart; and help others and they will help you. I have no doubt if someone asks you a question about Behance you are unable to answer you will send them to me and this is the point about information. Instead of keeping it to yourself, even though you may not see the benefits of sharing advice, it always comes back to help you. However don’t get advice mixed up with ideas, (ideas are valuable and should initially only be shared with people you trust) make sure you publish them before you share them! This is for two reasons; one you do not want it robbed, and two, lots of people like to put ideas down. There are countless ideas out there which are taken for granted, many of which were said to never work, for example the TV. No thought is a bad thought, a shit idea is better than no idea so just keep being creative and smart and at some point you will see a breakthrough.
Just so you don’t think I am a liar, hear is a few screen shots of some of the inbox messages I have on my Behance profile.
Good Luck ;)