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Linked in, personal blog, youtube, ?? What are some ways you have used to demonstrate what you are learning / doing to improve and hone your skills as a designer?
IE books ive been reading, self directed courses etc. (think Udemy etc.), projects ive been working on, new excercses etc.
It just occured to me that it might be attractive to clients to see what you are spinning your wheels on in a broad sense.
Thanks!
Portfolio websites are ideal for this.
You can of course make your own, or work with existing industry-standard ones like Behance, Deviant Art and ArtStation - all of which also support their own in-house linked website publisher tools, which will keep your separate stand-alone website (and separate URL) linked to your portfolios on their site, meaning you get easy content management and some double exposure, and the ability to add a designer's blog, or content which doesn't otherwise fit their format (photography doesn't work on artstation for example, but you can upload a portfolio which only gets published to your stand-alone website).
Artstation and Deviant Art both support internal marketplaces so that you can directly monetise some of what you do, if you wish to, through their system, without having to built your own e-commerce system - so for example if you were on Deviant Art, people can pay for your super-high res versions of images, or your personally-developed and demonstrated custom Photoshop, Photo or Painter brushes, or if you were on ArtStation you can vend your custom brushes or Substance Designer or Substance Painter materials or even 3D models.
Some of us do several of those things... which can be a lot of work to maintain, but it helps. I use my LinkedIn profile as a professionality base, and occasionally publish notices there when I've added new content to my Behance or ArtStation portfolios - including experimental stuff and skills /workflow development - and now that I've recently stepped up and gone for a stand-alone site, I've linked that to my LinkedIn as well - time will tell how effective the stand-alone site is, but the LinkedIn-Behance combination has been routinely bringing me new arch-viz client for quite some time.
Hope that helps.
Portfolio is the number one reference clients look at when hiring. A blog or twitter account might also be relevant to include this side-info related to your service: techniques, tools, skills, courses and general comments on the subject.
