How do you promote yourself?

[PaperGriffin]

Thanks for the replies folks, very informative.

I used to be on DeviantArt many moons ago, but the people I followed and groups I was involved with moved on to other platforms (mostly ArtStation I believe), so I used it less and less. Perhaps it's time to blow the dust off and get it working for me again. My only issue is that I mostly used it as a sketchbook dump, so it is a bit of a mish-mash of different subjects, styles and degrees of completion.

[Meton]

This is a very interesting topic, I have been thinking exactly the same questions. Thanks a lot especially J. Edward for sharing your thoughts!

I'm also slowly starting to get professional with mapmaking and promoting yourself is something I still have to learn. I've been active only in Instagram and I think it's a really good tool. It works well with visual work, including maps. I've always thought that an own website is the next step and I'm building the site at the moment, in fact. Instagram is quite fun, I think, but I have to agree it lacks the community side and getting work circulated is not easy.

Reading this helped me realise what is the role of a website and that I really have to get to know other places. Maybe DeviantArt would be the next thing to try, it seems to be a good place.

[yaro]

This is also a topic I'm interested in, as I'm gathering more and more portfolio pieces, and I'm having a hard time figuring out where to put them all for easy viewing. I think that finding communities like this, or any of the other art communities touched upon is a good way to grow your brand. Having a website also seems like a good idea, but I would probably stick to the free ones (wix/wordpress, ect) until demand becomes high enough that having your own professional url becomes a concern.

[Cirias]

I've been making maps semi-professionally for a long while now and I have always marketed via my Facebook page mainly. I also get a lot of hits to my website but I think because I've build up a large portfolio of work and got good reputation from my clients. It's a difficult thing, but my main advice would be to do this because you enjoy it and just have fun making maps, before you know it the rest will fall into place.

[Startraphell]

I was literally just about to ask this question. Thank you for answering the unanswered!

[Gamerprinter]

Honestly, after my second win at a monthly challenge map, Dog House Rulez, the first publisher I worked with commissioned me for 4 maps, so my initial exposure was the Cartographers' Guild. After winning an Iron Crown Enterprises map contest, I got another commission. One might say winning map contests is a great way of getting exposure. Since 2008, I've got over 1000 published, commissioned maps. I frequent Facebook and use to frequent Google +, and I have long running thread on ENWorld - that's about all I do to self-promote. I've never contacted a publisher for work - they find me.

[Tiana]

I've never contacted a publisher for work - they find me.

Samers. I don't even bother with social media, with a couple of miniscule exceptions.

-Sometimes I post on the Reddit worldbuilding/fantasy mapping subreddits and give advice and talk about my work.
-I periodically go onto a Facebook group for board game design, which has brought me a few commissions.
-I went onto Twitter like three times this year and somehow one of those times I got a commission because I found someone asking if they knew anyone who did fantasy maps, and one of my friends knew what I did and tagged me in a reply.
-I have gone onto DeviantArt and posted a couple of my pieces of art, though I don't think I have this year, it's not really a priority.

Pretty much the most important place I participate is here, and I haven't shared any of my finished maps on this forum or won any awards. Still, I get many emails from people who found my work here. A dominant amount of my website traffic comes from search engine traffic. You might not think that would be the case if you visit it because I made my website very, very focused on being a visual-forward portfolio, but every single piece of art is a blog post rather than an image gallery piece, and I have used that blogging space to create keyword dense articles which pull in traffic.

I've also done something crazy, which is create a list of all the generators for maps I can possibly find, a page that brings me quite a lot of traffic. It has an 88% exit rate right now–but that means 12% of the people who encountered the page considered taking a look at my art and hiring me instead. Instead of hiding the fact that there are free ways to design your own map, I'm boldly saying, "Okay, you try it if you think you have the skills. I'm here if you give up." This brings in search engine traffic for all kinds of key phrases. I suppose SEO and forums have been my main angle of choice. Maybe Patreon is the way of the future, I have some vague ideas of doing a monthly map that the small monthly donation would get you, and if you choose the higher priced one you get to vote on/make suggestions for what the map will be.

I suppose if you like social media you should use it but if you don't you shouldn't bother, because it seems hardly necessary if you take a different angle.

[PaperGriffin]

Thanks for all of the replies. Interesting to see where people's promotions over-lap and how different people find success with different outlets.