Using Behance to improve SEO

- [Instructor] A few years back, I was at a design conference where I attended a keynote talk given by Behance founder Scott Belsky. He talked about Adobe buying the platform, and what they plan on doing with it moving forward. At the time, I didn't have a Behance account, and sitting there thought to myself, I have my own website, so Behance would be redundant. Right after that momentary thought, it hit me. That's the reason I should have one, for the redundancy. Adobe spends millions promoting Behance, that means a massive amount of traffic will come through that platform. If I'm on the platform, people can discover my art and choose to follow me. If I'm not on the platform, they won't. I don't post everything I create on Behance, I cherry pick popular projects I've posted on my own site or on social media and redundantly post it on Behance as well. For me, it's a game of averages, and I considered it passive SEO. That is search engine optimization. And since it only takes me maybe a few minutes to redundantly post on Behance, it's well worth my investing of time. So let me show you my page and explain a few things. So these are all projects you can either find on my website or that I post on social media. Now, some of these projects like this one here, an identity for our story tours, which is a great project I worked on last year, one of the funnest ones I've worked on the last decade I'd say, this is posted. The full project is posted on my site, I posted most of the images here. So if I click in to this post, you can go through and see all the various components and assets I created for this project, it was a lot of fun. I love how the vehicle came out, and some of the staff shirts that we created for 'em as well. So that one pretty much replicates everything on my actual Glitschka Studios website, and this brings up that whole sandwich board mentality that we covered early in this course. If we go over to the left-hand side, you have your profile picture, name, title, name of the studio, and look here, you have a link directly to your website. So another way people can follow you. You always want to have your URL to your own website within your profile on all the various social media accounts. And when it comes to Behance, I wouldn't really call it a social media account, it isn't. That said, it's a great platform to have a portfolio of your work and some of the features they've introduced recently, like live streaming, is absolutely great, so you can live stream through your Behance account, so it's a great way to engage as well. But since I decided to create this account to be redundant, I've had 105,000-plus people who have visited this page. That's a good amount of traffic for just somebody who's specialized in creative arts. So I just want to point that out, I have about a little over 4,000 followers, 9,000-plus have appreciated or liked, the equivalent of liked. This is the one platform that I do post all the artwork I create for my Drawing Vector Graphics course. I don't really post all of this on my website, I cherry-pick the opposite way and post my favorite images. So I have some free content, that you can watch, a lost episode here. And here is some artwork I created for an episode recently. Some other artwork, but they can scroll through here. But what I've done for each description, let's say it's the happy sloth illustration, I cover about using textures with vector illustration to make it more immersive. And so I always tell 'em this is from DVG Lab episode and the name of the episode is a hyperlink, and if you looked in the bottom-left corner, I'm using Bitly once again to push traffic to that specific page, or domain that is, where they can find that online content and see how I went about creating the artwork that they're enjoying on my Behance account. So that's how you want to kind of cross-pollinate from one social media account back to your website or from one platform like Behance and push it to my DVG Lab content within LinkedIn Learning. Here's other projects, I focus on a lot of illustration on here because that's what a lot of people are coming here to look at, is more of my illustration. That said, I'd post brand-centric work. Here's the rebranding we did for Kiwi shoe polish, so this is the brand character and all the various assets we created, including the shoe polish can, and all the various SKUs of products that it's being used on. So, once again, this isn't going to hurt you to have a redundant site, like a Behance account. So being noticed and discovered by those who can hire you to create on their behalf is like a fisherman's net, the larger the broadcast radius, the greater the chance to catch someone's attention, and to use this pun even further, reel them in as it were. I'm still using a free basic account, by the way. This is not a premium account. But if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, it includes a pro site account on Behance. So I encourage you to take advantage of that and share your work on this platform as well.