Discoverability for illustrators

How the hell do potential clients find us?

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So, this message appeared when I logged into Instagram on Friday.

I don’t normally do knee-jerk reactions and share them to Stories (I don’t often share things to Stories, to be honest, as they’re not my ‘thing’), but I did with the annotation ‘WTF?’. A friend (also an illustrator) did exactly the same, without seeing mine. And I’ve seen a few more similar reactions since.

It felt like another nail in the coffin for Instagram as *the* place to share your work as an illustrator. For a really long time, Instagram was one of my favourite places to hang out. And it did feel like hanging out. I’d see beautiful artwork from friends and from illustration and pattern design heroes. I’d often post multiple times a day – with work in progress, (really badly photographed) sketchbook snaps (usually taken in semi dark, because I my sketchbook play time is usually the evening). We’d have little chats in the comments. People would share snippets of their lives, too, and studio photos and out-and-about snaps and inspiration. My feed was 85% people I had chosen to follow and 10% hashtags I followed, with maybe 5% ads – actually might even have been lower than that. I didn’t mind the occasional ad, because we got all this for free and seeing the occasional ad (and even purchasing from some of them) felt a perfectly reasonable price to pay for that.

As the years progressed into my practice and business, I started getting approaches from clients via Instagram – sometimes in DMs, but usually by email with a mention of something they had seen of mine on IG. I licensed a few patterns that way and got a few jobs that way. Not loads, but I know plenty of people for whom it was their main source of new clients. And, of course, there are a lot of people who sell merchandise with their illustrations and patterns on to the general public and huge proportions of their sales came from Instagram.

Frequently, clients would be using hashtags to discover new voices, but also to search for illustrators who would do well at specific topics. Hashtags were great for community building, too. We used them for our challenges, we used them to search out new work within our niches, we used them to follow people offering tips and tutorials.

The last couple of years have seen my feed change hugely. I follow thousands of accounts, the vast majority of them other illustrator, or agents, or publishers and other brands that use a lot illustration. While I do still see lots and lots of illustration in my feed – pretty much all of it, except for the ads – every two or three posts is a ‘suggestion’. They’re not bad suggestions. They are usually fellow illustrators, often showing process in reels, because reels are hot, right? I do love process videos, actually. I love watching someone else put together an illustration or a pattern or paint a canvas, or, one of the recent suggestions (who I did follow) was someone painting their childhood dollhouse furniture – so freaking gorgeous!

But I really, really, really do not need to follow anyone else. Especially as it’s touch and go whether Instagram will actually show me anything from them! I was scrolling this morning and I counted for a bit…

• 1 post from someone I follow

• 1 sponsored ad

• 3 posts from people I follow

• 1 sponsored ad

• 3 posts from people I follow

• A row of suggestions of people to follow

• 1 sponsored ad

• 1 post from a hashtag I follow

• 1 post from someone I follow

• 2 sponsored ads

• 1 post from someone I follow

• 1 suggested for you (reel)

• 1 reel from someone I follow

• 1 sponsored ad

• 1 suggested for you (post)

• 1 sponsored ad

• 1 reel from someone I don’t follow with a ‘subscribe’ button

• 1 post from someone I follow

• 1 sponsored ad

• 1 post from someone I follow

• 1 sponsored ad

NOTE: It does look like you can get a more curated thread by choosing to view ‘favorites’ rather than ‘following’, so maybe that’s way to go, at least in terms of consuming Instagram. (I will need to dig in and curate that list and test it out.) You can’t do that on the web version, though.

Everywhere does still seem to ask for your website, email and IG handle – including agent submission forms. And you can still search by hashtag, both by clicking on it and by typing it into the search/explore bar. But it can be weird about what it will show there. So I do think we probably still need to maintain a presence there, but I think making it the main marketing we focus on is not going to be sustainable now.

• LinkedIn I find LinkedIn really good for this and have got work via my network there. The more contacts in relevant industries that you have the more discoverable you will be. People get shown posts that their first-, second- and third-level contacts share. Yes, there is an algorithm that will push some things more than others and will push the people with high engagement more than those with none. But I find I see a lot of relevant posts. I see a fair bit of educational publishing content, as well as illustration content, because I’ve been on there with my educational publishing hat for longer than my illustration one, but that has a benefit in that I get good reach further out to other publishing contacts who are more useful for my illustration business.

• TikTok I have heard and seen, but not experienced, that illustrators selling their own products have been able to do really well on there – wall art, stickers, printables and I think quite a lot of print-on-demand drop-shipped type products. I cannot begin to understand or explain how TikTok works. I have an account that my kids set up for me, but I have done nothing with it; the idea was I was going to provide them with stuff to share and then they would create some TikToks for me, but I haven’t done this. Maybe we will try next year to get something set up.

• Threads is Meta’s Twitterish platform. You can post just words, just pictures, or both. There’s a growing illustration community on there (#illustrationthreads), but I have no idea whether or how many art directors and other illustration commissioners are on there. I think it’s probably going to be a while before this is a high-level discovery source.

• BlueSky is another Twitter alternative. This one seems to be getting more of the KidLit community (#kidlitart) and I think there are definitely art directors with presence there and who are viewing posts. I have barely used it so far, but may try to be a bit more present there.

• Mastadon I don’t know much about this one and haven’t tried it myself. It sounded far too confusing to me with the different servers and so on, and I have no idea whether there is any illustration community on there or art directors. If you know more, please feel free to leave a comment and I can update this bit.

• Pinterest Not sure Pinterest counts as social media; I think it’s more of a specialised search engine, almost. But I know a lot of people find it a really good place to share; though I was chatting with an old parent blogger friend the other day and apparently it’s changed a lot and where she used to get loads and loads of click throughs from Pinterest there are hardly any more now.

• Notes (I know Notes are being weird at the moment, but in some ways that weirdness seems to be adding to discoverability because it’s pushing people notes from days, weeks, or even months ago and suddenly someone subscribes or follows you via a note you wrote ages ago.)

• Recommendations (I think these are still really useful, and I need to be more intentional with mine and add some more – I especially need to add some over on The Illustrated Plant Kitchen to dig in more to the foodies substack community)

• Stacks (e.g. SmallStack, FoodStack, ThreadStack and I am sure there are a bunch more; also, see the end of this newsletter for more about ArtStack/IlloStack, coming soon(ish!) to an inbox/Substack app near you)

Substack is obviously particularly useful because it can be both a traditional newsletter that lands in your inbox but with the added bonus of social discovery, but you might prefer to keep a separate traditional newsletter in addition to your Substack. I don’t currently, but I do feel that this might actually be something to do in future – to have a separate one purely for actual traditional News and New work.

There are loads of newsletter platforms out there, including:

• Mailchimp (this is the one I used before moving over to Substack – it seemed perfectly fine to me, and I just had the free version)

• MailerLite

• HubSpot

Behance and Dribble – I know there are others, but can’t think of any off the top of my head, I’ll add to this list if anyone has others to suggest – both have free options and Pro versions that you can upgrade to. I’m on Behance, and have been for years, but never tried Dribble. Let me know if you prefer either and if there are any others you use. I’m sure there must be more!

I am actually quite in favour of paying for a presence on some of the paid portfolio sites, particularly now that social discovery is getting harder. I think that they have the benefit of some good SEO, especially the ones that have been around for a while. I think some are more useful than others, and how discoverable you are on them, will depend on how people can search there. But for a lot of them your images or profile can also show up in search engine searches if you are using the right words in your profile bios or image descriptions. Here are a few (again, I’ll add to this list if anyone has other suggestions):

• Illustrators for Hire If you look today 17 November, you should see my illustration on the home page – they use a different illustrator’s image on the home page each week. This is curated list. You have to apply and be invited to join. They are really good on SEO and come high up on lots of illustration related web searches. They also send out regular newsletters to lots of art commissioners and will feature different members’ profiles and work. And they are very good at sharing on social media, too.

• Hireillo They have an almost free option (one-off fee) and then a subscription that gives you more. This is run by Darren and Morgan Di Lieto. They offer the option for commissioners to say what they are looking for from an illustrator and Darren or Morgan will provide them with a list of their members who would be suited to that requirement. So there’s an element of curation there and additional potential discoverability above what you can search for on the site. I’ve not personally noticed individual images of mine appearing in general search engine searches, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t for others. They also do some social media sharing and send out newsletters and will do a bit more if you submit news.

• The AOI This is a professional organisation for UK illustrators, but I believe they accept global illustrators, too. They have lots of free resources and additional resources for members and offer a lot of in-person meetups and online webinars and so on. The Inside Illustration series is particularly good, with different seasons for different illustration markets, with podcasts, four online talks/classes, practice briefs and a variety of resources (most for members only, with a few available to everyone). You can pay a slightly higher membership fee to have a portfolio on their site. They’ve just updated their website, and it looks like the folios are looking pretty good and with good searching abilities.

• The Directory of Illustration You get a 10-image page on there with an AOI sub (I think that’s still the case, anyway). But they also have paid subscriptions available – some that come with paying to go in the directory (this used to be a really major way that illustrates marketed themselves, before blogs and then social media became much bigger; I do wonder if it, and others like it, will become more relevant) and others that are online only, I believe (the rates don’t appear to be transparent, and when I last paid for it (online only) it was close to $100/month, which was more than I was prepared to pay for single marketing channel. They also have various add-ons for standalone emails and home page features and the like. They do have a huge email list, so there might be potential from a paid mailout through them.

• Childrens Illustrators I had a portfolio on here for a year, I think, and did get a couple of contacts, however, honestly my work was not particularly geared enough to children’s illustration to be there. They also send out newsletters and share work on social media. As I recall, you have to make sure to submit news in order to get things shared on social media.

This one I think is now really, really important, and I would personally suggest that you should have your own domain and a hosted Wordpress site, because then it’s fully yours (you can move your host and change who provides your domain, but it would still always be yours). You can monitor and track who (not down to the individual, but geographic location and some other data) is visiting your site and when and from where, using the Jetpack and also with Google Analytics (this has changed recently and I’ve not fully got to grips with how it works now). I think you can use Google Analytics if you have a site via one of the platforms, but I am not sure as I’ve not really done this. (I did use it to track my Adobe Portfolio site when I used that, and it worked fine, so I imagine it would be similar for other platforms).

Nate at Illustrators for Hire is kindly offering the first seminar in the Pro Series that he and Salli ran recently for free. This is the one all about finding your niche, which I would definitely say is really really useful. The whole series was great, but this one and the SEO one (Optimising your Website) were the most useful, I would say. Here’s a link: www.illustratorsforhire.com/the-pro-series-finding-your-niche-freebie

A lot of illustrators use platforms for their sites, especially if they don’t have Wordpress experience, as it can be a bit difficult to set up otherwise. I’ve been using Wordpress for decades now and ran a (at the time) popular parenting blog for about a decade, so it was simplest for me to go with the familiar. A Wordpress site opens up a multitude of potential themes, many free and many paid-for and plug-ins. It can be very powerful, but also very overwhelming.

Some platforms that I know other illustrators like, include:

• Squarespace seems to be the most popular one among illustrators and I’ve heard that people really appreciate the simplicity of set-up and also of uploading new work.

• Wix also seems to be quite popular with illustrators and again I think it’s simplicity and clarity that are appreciated.

• Adobe Portfolio is the one that I have actually used in the past. For a few years I hosted my portfolio there and had a link from my website and blog to there and another one back to the blog from Adobe Portfolio. I loved it for a lot of things, one of which was the ability to pull in Behance projects, because I was very good at updating Behance and I just then needed to choose which category each post would go in. I also loved the simplicity, but also found it a bit limiting, given I was used to Wordpress’s customisability. You get Adobe Portfolio included with Creative Cloud subscription if you have one and you can get your own domain (I am not entirely sure how to do this but I know that others have done it), so it’s definitely a useful option. I don’t remember whether it provided the ability to add alt text and so on or not. My old site there does still appear in some search engine results, so I guess it couldn’t have been awful on SEO.

If you’re going to use any of these platforms, you need to investigate how good they are for SEO (search engine optimisation). Because one of the biggest discoverability engines for illustrators is going to be your own website, via SEO. Things you need to be doing to improve your SEO (and therefore discoverability), include the following:

• Use meaningful filenames for the images you upload (e.g. bright_colourful_maximilist_bathroom_illustration-tasha_goddard.jpg rather than IMG_2367.JPG) making sure that there are key words that will help describe the image and that might be used for someone searching for that type of work. You need to be thinking in terms of what someone might type to find the type of work that you want. So someone might be typing ‘illustrator who can draw rooms’, ‘colourful food illustrator’, ‘vector illustrator who draws good monkeys’, ‘collage illustrator with newspaper experience’, ‘picture book illustrator, elephants’… Do some tests (in incognito/private mode) to see what or who comes up for keywords relevant to your illustration work, then think about tweaks you can make to your text to help you come higher in those results. (Don’t expect immediate results, though. How long it will take to embed into the search engines will vary between them and depending on what their search algorithms are doing at any point.)

• Fill out the Alt text, title and description fields for images you upload. Again, make sure to include (but don’t keyword bloat – i.e. throw in tonnes of different keywords) relevant keywords, as search engines will use this information to serve up relevant results.

• Include text on your site that talks about the kind of work you do, again, including relevant keywords.

• There seem to be some changes going on with search engines that means, whereas previously, regular updates and very recent content would come in higher on search results, these days longevity seems to be becoming more important. I have a page with a gallery for my portfolio (and it’s the home page(). I also have a blog post from May 2022 about illustrating everyday objects that gets almost the same hits as my main (portfolio) page. I don’t really add new blog posts these days (though am considering trying to build in some kind of integration with here, because most of what I post here would be relevant for my site, too), so it might be that some newer content would still come up high, but it’s still interesting that it’s posts from a couple of years ago that would be served up in search engine results.

There is a huge amount more you can learn about SEO to improve the discoverability of your site and there are also lots of people you can hire to help you with this. (TIP: Don’t reply to any of the ‘Get great SEO’ emails that land in your junk mail folder. Do some research and ask other illustrators for recommendations before hiring someone.)

While emailing is more about outreach than discoverability, I have heard that art directors and art commissioners will actually use the search facility in their email app (e.g. Outlook or Gmail) as a first point of call after any in-house databases – so they might type ‘room illustration, colourful’ or ‘collage illustrator, newspaper’ etc. into the search bar to see if they have been sent any work by a relevant illustrator. So make your subject lines and the small amount of text you add to those outreach emails work for you! Don’t just put ‘Sharing my portfolio’ as the subject line or, as I tended to do until recently ‘Illustrator with capacity now’. Put ‘Lifestyle illustrator specialising in room illustration and food illustration with a colourful and whimsical style’ or something else that niches you, such as ‘Pattern designer with luxurious floral style and experience working with drink brands’. And then add a few other keywords in when you type your message.  

Are you still putting effort into Instagram? What other social media do you use and is anything working particularly well for you? Do you pay for any portfolio sites? Do you work at your SEO for your own website? Who hosts your website?

(or IlloStack perhaps?)

I’ve started a chat thread thingummy to discuss an ArtStack (or IlloStack as I’m more veering toward). If you’re interested in getting involved, please take a look and leave a reply about when/if you could do a call.

You can see more about this, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here:

What should an Art Stack include?

This week’s illustrated recipe (printable version for paid subscribers) was a good one, and I really enjoyed drawing the illustrations for it. Coming up midweek will be a post open to everyone, and I’m not sure what it will be yet. (One day, I will get ahead with these posts. Maybe.) But it will have some yummy food illustrations and probably a recipe of some kind and some talk about plant-based healthy food.