Toadsquare is a site for those working in film & video, music & audio, the performing arts, phorotgraphy & art and writing & publishing.  Think of a comibnation of Vimeo, Soundcloud, Behance, Lulu and LikedIn. It's a place to come and network across creative industries and to tell people about all your creative activities: online and offline.

Toadsquare is here to help you strucure your online presence and to showcase yourself and your creative works. It also fills in the gaps in your online presence.  For example, you know you want to blog but don't want to make it a full-time occupation.  On Toadsquare the Blog section creates a creative blog.  You post in one of many, so you don't have to blog every week to get traffic.  Or do your online activities lack an explination of your creative aims and drivers.  Tell people all abut them on your Showcase Homepage, so your fans can relate to you.

3 ways Toadsquare Supports You and the Creative-Arts Community

1. Showcases you with a mini-website.

Toadsquare provides a series of online tools that allow members to build a Showcase, a mini-website.  Members can:

• Put up their Homepage: introducing themselves through video, images and text.
• Showcase their media: videos, music, audio, photos, artwork, writings.
• Sell their media.
• Blog.
• Create a private, multimedia CV and portfolio with Work Profile and Portfolio. 

The pluses about putting up a Showcase:

• They look good and everyone online can view them.No one has to join our site to see your content.
• We guide you through the set up with simple-to-use wizards that you access from the Your Toadsquare menu.
• You can edit, delete or hide sections of your Showcase as and when you wish.  You own all the rights to anything you put up (which of course means you’re responsible for anything you put up).

Mix and match the tools that Toadsquare provides.  Have a website selling your media and have great media sales on Amazon, but don’t have a blog?  Put links to your website and Amazon page on your Homepage and start your blog on Toadsquare.  Choose if you want to put up your media for sale on Toadsquare as well.  Remember, the more places you can be found online the more chance you have of getting fans and sales.

Your Toadsquare Showcase is there to link all your online activities.  

Your online activities should paint an engaging, well-rounded portrait of you and your creativity.  Many people are going to meet you online through google before they ever see you face to face.  Your Showcase allows you to fill in any missing pieces in your online presence.

Think of your Showcase as a puzzle you can put together slowly over time.  Add a piece have a cup of coffee and come back and add more.  Then as your creativity flows in a different direction come back and add some more pieces, edit others and possibly even delete one.

The con is that is that putting up a Showcase is going to take you longer on Toadsquare than on most other sites, as you can put up a lot of content and information.  It is your mini website. 

Toadsquare isn't here to contain you through it's here to promote you, so if you already have a website simple use Toadsquare to direct people to it.  Links to your site help search engines find you.  In the offline and the online world the name of the game is to be found, then you can thrill your fans.

2. People coming to Toadsquare want to share a love of creativity and engage with each other.

Creative pursuits can be lonely, and at times, such as during development hell, a supportive network of people who understand can be a saving grace.  Or even better a network can help you find someone with the skills to save you from development hell. 

Fans want to get to know the creatives behind the work they consume.  Knowing the creative increases their their loyalty and influences their buying decisions.  If you like two paintings, you're going to buy the one painted by someone you know and can relate to instead of a stranger’s.  If this wasn’t the case, entertainment news outlets would disappear. 

Also, creatives can always benefit from feedback from their fans and collegues to help their work develop.

Toadsquare is designed to help you build an online network.

It has a series of features designed to help other members find you, encourage networking and interactions between members:

• Our search is very targeted; we guide you to describe your work in the terms our search uses as you set up your Showcase.
• Crave someone or their work and receive notifications about similar projects they put up.
• Rate:  It’s a quick way to leave your opinion.
• Reviews and News.  If you have more time, review someone’s work or write a news article about them or their work.  Ask for a review in return.Recommendations.  Worked with someone?  Add to their Homepage by recommending them.
• Put up a classified to look for:
  • Collegues
  • Work
  • Creative Products
• Advertise to each other.Chat on the forum.
• Use Tmail, our internal mail system, to contact members if you don’t want to publish your email address.
• Share your favourite sites about different creative endeavours with other members.
• Let people know about an event near you with Event Notices.

3. Toadsquare helps people find you.

You’ve built your website and it looks great!  It shows off your work brilliantly, but no ones visited it, which makes you think you wasted your time and money.  So, you start looking at how to promote your site. 

The web offers millions of articles on how to do this.  Promoting your site, although time consuming, is cheap.  Simply search for terms such as: SEO (search engine optimisation), SMM (social media marketing), content marketing (putting content like blogs instead of adverts up so people come to your site), growth hacking (finding ways to grow the number of people that visit your site).  You’ll find loads of great suggestions on how to promote your website.

However, this may not be what you want to do with your time.  So instead you join a network as you know this will help other find you.  LinkedIn and Facebook are built around enabling you to be found.  LinkedIn helps you be found as a business professional and Facebook helps you befriends people.

Toadsquare is a network for creativity.  It aims to fill the needs of a creative commnity, not a community of friends or professionals.

Toadsquare is designed for the Creative Industries.

Join Now

As an incentive during Toadsquare’s re-launch and testing period we’re giving away annual memberships.  Go to the Membership Options page join with an annual membership.  Enter the code TOAD1year when you get to the payment page. 

In return, we want feedback.  Send feedback either from Your Toadsquare or from the link in the footer.  Or email us at info@toadsquare.com.  Toadsquare’s aim is to build an online creative netwrok that is easy to use.  We want to know what facilitates you want.  What works and doesn’t work on the site.  We want you to help make Toadsquare the online Home of the Creative Industries.

Join either as a:

• Creative
• Professional in the Creative Industries
• Business in the Creative Industries
• Fan