How do you get more exposure/ followers in Tumblr? how is

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>>2949835
>he posts on tumblr

>>2949835
>have artist friends that reblog you, siphoning off their followers (gigantic help, depending on their following)
>tag your shit like crazy
>fanart/flavor of the month etc general public appeal
>consistency of posting

basically the way tumblr works is one dude reblogs your shit, 1000 people see it, 10 of them reblog and it just goes upwards from there.

this is why it can be extremely hard until you have a following which can reblog your shit, unless you draw fotm fanart and tag it relevantly (and be good enough to appeal to that fanbase, too)

>>2949862
I see it's something like a snowball effect, since the place is pretty over saturated this shit is going to take a while. I'll give it a try anyway, thanks brah.

deviantART is way faster to get you views, requests and commissions than Tumblr, desu. If you follow unpopular people and only unpopular people follow you, you're not gonna get much exposure in a while (like maybe in 4 months if you're pretty active). If your style appeals to the Tumblr crowd (drawing fanart of popular shit isn't enough, trust me) you'll get popular pretty quickly.

>>2949867
Find a blog that exists to reblog whatever type of art you do and ask them to reblog your shit. I did that kind of thing on Tumblr and Instagram and it worked great.

Just draw cute fanart of my waifu and I'll reblog everytime, if you're good.

>>2950406
>my waifu
Is she a furry? If not, shes not worth my time.

>>2949835
Just post decent oc, and if it's good enough you'll get popular pretty quickly, it also helps to use other social media in tandem. The good thing about tumblr is that you're not a slave to some algorithm, all you need is for other people to like your stuff and it will naturally get popular due to how easy it is to share(reblog) stuff on there.

>>2949839
>he doesnt wanna be a friendless hermit
>he doesnt want to be poor and not earn money with his drawings

yeah anon. what a PLEB.

>>2951331
>he doesnt want to be poor and not earn money with his drawings
how?
patreon?

>>2949835
Draw popular shit.

>>2949835
If you make something really good that appeals to whatever is popular, you can ride the viral train to more followers.

Appeal to one fandom and then branch out once you're established in that fandom. For me, I abuse the shit out of the monhun fandom on tumblr then rake in the likes/followers. Get popular people to reblog your shit too, that helps immensely. Also delete anything that goes below 60 notes.

>>2951446
>delete anything that goes below 60 notes
Oh my

Some advice; post on weekends. Post regularly, with a continuing style and theme. There are a lot of fashion art blogs or whatever too, not just fandom but it is harder to get followers.
Think before you begin going down the fandom track: do you want to be a slave to your followers and only draw for the people? Or do you want to post your own art and have people follow you for what you want to draw?

If you want both, you need to find a balance. Use the right tags, but not too many. Think about why someone would reblog your art. What does your art provide to their blog?
It's about viral pushing, it's not like DA or Artstation. If popular people reblog your art, you'll get everyone who follows them to see your stuff. It's like Twitter.
Use this to your advantage if you care so much about followers.

>>2949835
post often and link to everything else like twitter and shit

Would anyone mind explaining how tumblr 'groups' work? I'm assuming it's similar to what DA has, but I'm not sure how to find them.

>>2951884
There are tumblr groups?

In my experience what works to get yourself off the ground, is attaching yourself to a fanbase. It just better be relevant enough that fans are active and it better be close in line enough with shit you like that when you draw your personal shit, that people will support your personal shit because it's as cool as this other shit that you also like. Drawing a bunch of random shit doesn't seem to work. If you draw "FOTM" shit, it should actually be something you're drawing more than a once or twice, because that fandom is going to ignore your ass until you produce enough content that they think you're worth bothering for. Some will just want more of that specific fandom, some will think you're awesome overall and only needed a little push by seeing your fanworks to check you out entirely and then they become fans of your original works.

Personally, I got followers from fanart that latched on to my original work and they reblog my original stuff just as much as they do my fan stuff, and some reblog my original work more than my fan stuff now. The trick was, I have one consistent theme I chose for when I make both original stuff and fanworks, and that single theme alone seems to be what gets the crowd interested. That way, the people who like that theme of the fanwork, will stick around because they want more of that theme in general, because that's why they like the fan thing to begin with, and the best followers are the ones who want your chosen theme, you see?

I'm still learning how this all works though. Only just started this nonsense recently.

>>2952029
You are right. Only problem is
>have to stick to a theme or style
>always been an artist of many styles, from 3D work to stylized characters to realitic studies to environmental thumbnails
>doesn't help that I draw various unrelated fandoms
Is it better to separate them into various blogs or just whatever upload them to the same and make your followers suffer?

>>2952687
Various fandoms can be grouped together. People are more anal about, say, if you are a SFW blog and are suddenly drawing NSFW than if you draw Zelda one day and Kill la Kill the next. Unless they have a personal vendetta against a fandom, but that's their problem, not yours. They'll also be put off by it if you're a blog that normally draws fluff and suddenly you're making hardcore guro. So you want to stay within a certain feel, but the type of content (who from where) isn't what matters, what matters is if the feel is changing. I'm familiar with this because I'm trying to mesh two things that don't normally go together and I can see a clear divide in my fanbase. No one has unfollowed me for it yet, so I guess it's a minor enough dissonance that people are willing to suffer.

I do more character work than environments so I haven't had much time to experiment with that angle, but I would think the same would apply. As long as the feel is right and it falls in line to being similar to the rest of your work posted -- not style, but in feeling, atmosphere. I've also avoided posting studies entirely because I always thought people would take it the wrong way, so I have no experience with that either. I didn't want to be known for studies. I wasn't selling my studies.

The way I see it, you should think about what you're trying to sell, and that's what you should post. Are you trying to show off your various different skillsets? Your variety of styles? If yes, then you should post it all together. You can make something like that look impressive, if you're showing how dynamic of an artist you are. Some people would appreciate it, I think. Some people love it when their cartoony characters get a realistic rendition. If it's to get generic commission work, you go for mostly fanart and making people fall in love with your style. In which case, you might (probably) want a very particular style that you are selling. So. What are you trying to sell?

>>2952719
As a second thought, for generic commissions, you could actually use your variety of styles as part of your marketing too. You actually don't need a single style. You just charge different depending on how you're drawing. Realism for example, takes longer, so you charge more. Easy.

>>2952719
>>2952726
Thanks for the advice. I haven't put any studies of mine onto tumblr yet, so far they have only been posted to facebook.
I guess tumblr can help me streamline my art and "style", whatever that is.
What I do know is that people prefer the same thing, most popular or successful artists seem to be successful because followers know what they're getting from them.
This is a shame because many of these artists become stagnant.

>>2952752
You definitely don't need to go Ilya mode and just make portraits and nothing else. You don't have to stagnant, you can still explore. You just have to keep mood in mind, that's all. Style of drawing and style of overall mood are very different things. You can of course sell yourself as a portrait artist, in which case, you are selling pretty faces, but you can also sell your stories, your worlds, your atmosphere, your designs, interactions between characters, etc. Don't think you need to mimic other artists content. You just need something your audience can rely on you for. That one reliability factor aside, you are free to explore. So just choose something to sell that allows you to grow.

>>2951446
This. I think it's REALLY important to pander to whatever tumblr's into. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I started listening to The Adventure Zone to pander, but damn those guys are funny. It's important to reach out to other artists too. For as much crap /ic/ gives tumblr for being a hugbox, it becomes useful when it comes time to collab--the people are weirdly nice compared to /ic/. Extremely popular bloggers (such as thebootydiaries) often reblog fanart with them and the posts get, like, thousands of notes on average.

>>2952771
Ofcourse, it was just an observation. It saddens me when an artist only draws what's popular or works and never grows from there.
However, not everything an artist posts online is what they draw in general.

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Seems like the right place to ask here:

How big is your blog, /ic/? How long have you been posting to it / how regularly?

Was there a point where it 'took off' IE you suddenly started getting a lot more followers? I hit an average of around 40 followers per month and it hasn't really changed much since I started. I'm getting more notes but it doesn't seem to correlate that much.

I compile the stats real quick into an excel sheet at the end of each month and this is basically what it looks like.

Guys, what if the stuff I like isn't currently popular and I don't want to force myself to draw popular shit I don't care about?

>>2952993
But isn't that obvious? If you can't find an audience then either your shit isn't good or the crowd doesn't hang out on tumblr. I think the guys in here are more talking about getting popular for the sake of popularity itself and the money it can bring. When they talk about drawing what you like then it is only as a tool to produce quality for likes and striking a balance between sucking up and kissing ass, sry, networking.

Listen. Either you stuff is good or somewhere along the scale of not good. This thread is for those who are not quite good yet to stand alone but need to turn themselves into a concept to sell their art better. If you don't have the stomach for it then don't bother.

>>2952993
Then you obviously won't be super popular. Popularity matters only if you're trying to sell yourself, and require an audience to make money. It's not the only way to make money.

>>2952993

don't force yourself to draw popular shit you don't care about

unless popularity is more important to you than drawing you want. In which case draw more popular shit you don't care about

>>2953062
>>2953265
Well, that's the problem, I want to make money with my art.

I suppose I'll just have to suck it up and draw the shit everyone likes. That, or post my studies everyday along with the stuff I actually like. I hope it works.

>>2954172
okay, thank you for the advice too

>>2951884

I've never heard of tumblr groups. There's such things as blogs that multiple people can run, I guess? Some blogs have submissions enabled, if that's what you mean. It just means you submit a post to a blog and they choose whether to publish it, as opposed to the standard system of reblogging it from your blog. Mostly all you need to worry about when posting on tumblr is tagging.