Whether you’re a graphic designer, photographer or even a writer, you probably need an online portfolio to present your work to a wider audience. With Calaméo, you can digitally publish documents such as magazines, books and much more. In this article, we’ll explain how to publish your portfolio online with Calaméo.
Create your portfolio
The first step to publishing your portfolio online with Calaméo is to create your portfolio. You can use graphic design softwares such as Adobe InDesign or Canva to create your portfolio. Make sure your portfolio is well structured and showcases your work. Once you’ve created your portfolio, export it in the format of your choice.
Publish your portfolio on Calaméo
Once you’ve created your portfolio, you can publish it on Calaméo. To do so, create a Calaméo account and log in. Click on “Publish” in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Select your file and upload it. Calaméo will automatically convert your file into an online publication.
💡 TIP: Thanks to our EDITOR tool, personalize and enrich your document by adding internal or external links, animations or even sounds.
Share your portfolio
Now that your portfolio is published on Calaméo, it’s time to share it with the world. You can share your portfolio using the direct link to your document, or by embedding it on your website or blog. You can also share your portfolio on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Make sure you promote your portfolio to your target audience to reach as many people as possible.
Conclusion
Publishing your portfolio online with Calaméo is a great way to showcase your work to a wider audience. By following the steps above, you can create, publish and share your portfolio in a matter of minutes. Don’t forget to update your portfolio regularly to showcase your latest and most impressive work without even having to change your sharing link, thanks to Calaméo.
Digital design is always evolving and in recent years user experience has been a major focus. Also known as UX, user experience involves improving how people interact with digital products and services. And it’s become a key investment for modern businesses. That’s because a great user experience can encourage visitors to spend more time on your website, help them view your brand positively and even increase sales.
Luckily for our publishers, Calaméo offers an exceptionally user-friendly HTML5 reader that allows their documents to shine on every device. But there are a few simple steps you can take to create an even better experience for your online audience! Learn about four essential UX principles and how to apply them to your digital publications.
Use consistent visuals
A top rule for ensuring great user experience is committing to one, coherent graphic design. Whichever fonts, colors and layouts you have chosen for your documents, they should match the visual identity of your business. Otherwise, too many different graphic elements risk overwhelming your online audience and can negatively impact UX.
So how do you create a seamless visual transition between your brand and your digital publications? To start, you can customize the appearance of the viewer. For example:
Choose a background for the viewer to harmonize with your website.
Build a custom theme and fine-tune the viewer right down to the font.
Reduce friction
For UX designers, “friction” is anything that gets between users and their goals. For digital publishers, this often means not ensuring optimal readability for their online documents. When publishing on Calaméo, take a moment to select the best options for your publication in its properties. Easy ways to reduce friction include:
Thanks to decades of digital culture, certain features of user experience are already understood and expected by just about everybody. For instance, Internet users expect that clicking a logo in the top left-hand corner of a web page or window will return them to the home page.
The publication above from County of Brant shows a great example of this strong UX element. With Calaméo, it’s simple to place your logo directly in the viewer and add a link. Take advantage of it in your digital publications to increase traffic to your site!
Encourage action
Do you wish you could:
Let your readers follow your business’s social media accounts in just one click?
Modify a button in the viewer to include a call to action, such as “Download now”?
Create a smart contact button in the viewer to help generate leads?
Then you need to explore Calaméo’s custom themes feature. Because of its unique flexibility, you can adapt the user experience of your digital publications to best serve your business’s goals. Check out this example from Office de Tourisme de Bordeaux Métropole:
We’ve put together an illustrated tutorial to show you how to get started customizing your theme. But to discover the full range of possibilities, take a look around our Developer resources.
From one-click options to made-to-measure themes, Calaméo gives you powerful tools to create the best possible user experience for your digital publications.
Our PLATINUM plan includes all the must-have features to boost your digital publications’ UX. Request your free, two-week demo and try them out today!
In the world of social media, Pinterest stands out. Instead of a chronological feed of posts, Pinterest shows its users a mix of content curated to reflect their interests.
Pinterest users can follow friends or topics like “Travel,” search for more specific subjects and create their own posts called “pins.” Then they save ideas for later by organizing posts on personalized boards. And there are a lot of them: more than 200 million Pinterest users have posted over 100 billion pins.
Although Pinterest is a little bit different it can be a great place to promote your business’s online publications. In this article we’ll explain three opportunities for digital publishers on Pinterest and how you can take advantage of them.
Drive Traffic
Don’t underestimate the power of pins to drive traffic: in 2017, Pinterest was the biggest social source of referrals after Facebook and has continued to show impressive growth. Creating pins that feature your publications is an easy way to help Pinterest users discover them.
First set up a Pinterest profile, then get pinning! Since each pin on Pinterest has an image, a short description and a link, every post is a golden opportunity to bring more readers to your publication. Here’s an example from Wedding Vibes pinned to Calaméo’s page:
You can create posts in Pinterest or pin a publication directly from Calaméo—it’s a breeze! First, go to your account’s Publications tab, select Share for the title you want to pin and click on the Pinterest icon. This will take you to Pinterest, where you’ll be able to choose an image for your pin and add a description.
We recommend that digital publishers dedicate a board on their Pinterest profile to pinning every issue of their publication. This example shows how 95° Magazine encourages curious Pinterest users to browse its archives:
Get Audience Insights
Posting your digital publications to Pinterest as pins can grow your audience by bringing in new readers who find them in their feeds. But establishing a Pinterest profile for your business can bring you valuable insights about your existing audience, too.
Chances are, your publications may already have been shared on Pinterest by your readers! Find out with the advanced statistics in our PLATINUM plan: our analytics include a breakdown of your publications’ social media shares by platform, so you can see how many times they have already been pinned.
The results might surprise you!
To get more information about your audience on Pinterest, we suggest that you set up your account with a business profile. This gives you access to statistics about your audience on Pinterest, including gender, location and interests. Armed with insights about your Calaméo readership and Pinterest reach, you can tailor your online publications to build stronger connections with your audience.
💡TIP: Connecting your Calaméo account to Google Analytics lets you analyze traffic from Pinterest to your publications in detail. Upgrade to PLATINUM to enjoy this feature!
Engage New Clients
Pinterest is a destination for users researching purchases. It has been estimated that 87 percent of the social network’s users have bought something that they saw on Pinterest first. This makes Pinterest a natural platform for posting products, but it’s also a reason to post inspiring content. Inspired users are more likely to become readers, who are more likely to become customers.
To make the most out of your business’s Pinterest presence, pin a variety of interesting material. Pinterest users look for vacation and travel planning, recipe ideas, professional development materials, home design and more. Try posting individual features, photos or articles from your publications to different boards, like in the example below from Hamilton Island:
Organizing your content by subject maximizes the appeal to potential readers and helps engage potential buyers.
These basics should give you some ideas for how to get started sharing your business’s digital publiations on Pinterest. We can’t wait to see you there!
We love covering social media here on the blog. Check out our tips for digital publishers on Facebook and YouTube, or have a look at our guide to polished shares on any social media network.
