Ok, so you've just finished your first (or hundreth) workshop item ... now what ?!

The most logical thing to do is promote your work, so that it has a chance of getting published into the game you submitted it to. However, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to go about promoting your items, and before you go spamming your links on everyone else's workshop items you might want to give this guide a serious read.

Guide written prior to Counter Strike 2...


Ratings are appreciated!

I noticed the first links posted on my workshops just moments after I published the first set, and they all for the most part said the same thing. They basicly compliment your work, they say they rated it up, and ask you to rate theirs as well.

Yeah, well... I'm fairly observant, and what I've noticed is that most of the creators that are posting comments like this are not even rating up your items. In fact, some creators have gone as far as rating down other submissions just so that theirs have a better shot at getting into game.

Imagine that! Some random developer sees your work, gives it a thumbs down, and has the audacity to ask you for a thumbs up. This is simply a cut throat tactic, and it's one that I wanted you to be aware of so that you are not promoting the work of those that are unethicly tarnishing yours.

Now there is no way to know for certain who rated your items up or down. The Item Stats simply will not show us who is who. These observations were made after watching traffic to brand new submissions. The fact of the matter is, not everyone that says they rated up your items is actually doing so. So unless the person is someone you know and trust, don't rate up an item as a friendly exchange because your not likely going to get a rating in return.

I've also noticed that most of the workshop submissions that have a lot of ratings are those that have been link spammed heavily on other submissions. This is beacuse not only are they asking for your ratings, but because that link is there to get traffic to their submissions. It's an old school tactic that dates back to the beginning of the internet. It's all about traffic.

What I'm here to tell you, however, is that not all traffic is wanted. I had so many comments on my workshop submissions within the first day that I decided to do something about it. I went through and added a line of text in the comment section of each of my submissions, telling the community "DO NOT POST LINKS!" just so I didn't get bombed with notifications every single time I logged into Steam. I currently have over 200 submissions and counting, so you can imagine I could get a lot of comments. I certainly don't want to log in and delete comments everyday like cleaning out my inbox of unwanted mails. I'm sure you can see how that would get annoying fast.

Thankfully, telling people not to post links is enough to stop most people from doing so. However, some people like to think they are special, so they will ignore your comment and post their links anyway. I combat this by rating down any submissions that are spammed on my workshops, and in extreme cases (where I see the same link multiple times on my workshops) I report the creator for link spamming. I also delete any comments with links so that they are not taking traffic away from my other submissions.

You may not have fully considered the possibility for consequences of posting your link on other contributors submisisons. Think it over before you do your copy and paste. You certainly don't want to get your account banned by Valve for posting too many links, then your submissions will never get accepted. It's something you should seriously take into consideration.

I truthfully hope you not to fall into this link war with the other developers. Instead, I advise you use some of the promotional ideas in the sections to follow. This will help you get your work promoted without acquiring a lot of unwanted negative attention to your work.

Once you've had enough of the unwanted links you'll likely do what I did and start fighting back. I do a few things to minimize the links hitting my workshops, and it seems the most effective ways to fight it are reporting the individuals that spam unwanted links on your workshops, and blocking communications on the individuals in question.

I do a few other things as well to fight back, and I may go into that later. However, I ill advise doing anything that can get yourself into trouble with Valve (or Steam) yourself, like posting profanities or your own links on other workshops.


Update!

At some point, Valve finally added a feature to the workshops and guides to allow or disallow comments by toggling a checkbox on the content you publish.

So in the case of workshops, if you don't want to get spammed with links, you can simply toggle the check mark in the box. However, this feature unfortunately makes it to where any constructive input is also not allowed to be posted.

On every Workshop submission page there is a sidebar on the right that allows you to post links to a Facebook page and a couple other external websites. This is a great way to get some extra views on your submissions if not ratings. If you have any hardcore gamers on your friends list you'll get some ratings too. I not only created a page for my Workshop submissions, I post links to any new Steam collections on the page to keep everyone following the page updated on my latest projects.

If you have some spare money to promote with, you can use Facebooks built in promotion tool to get some extra hits to the page. Just make sure that you have some instructions on the page telling people how to join the Steam Community so that they can actually log in and give you some ratings, otherwise the traffic is wasted.

Steam also allows facebook links on the right hand column of your submissions. If you've already gone through the trouble of creating a Facebook page for your Workshop, take a few minutes to link it on all of your submissions and any collections you've created.

Ron Jester's Steam Workshop[www.facebook.com]
You can use this Facebook page as an example or log in and Like it!

If you have a Twitter account, use it! That's what Twitter is ultimately for, promoting whatever you are into. If your anything like me you also have a few hard core gamers following you. If not, start following a lot of the Games and Developers that your into and your bound to acquire them. I've gone as far as linking Twitter to my Facebook account as well, so any tweets I post also get posted on my wall in addition to whatever I've posted on the Facebook page I mentioned above.

@ronjester
Follow me on Twitter!

I know this seems obvious, but it apparently hasn't occured to a lot of developers. Why not start a Steam group dedicated to your Workshop submissions? This way you can invite all of your Steam Friends and instantly have some good attention to your work.

I reccommend setting the group to Public as well so that other Steam users and even other Workshop Developers can join and follow your work. Just remember to tell everyone not to post links, otherwise your going to have that problem in your group and on your submissions.

Posting annoucements for the group also lets anyone online know about any new projects instantly, so the word gets out fast.

Post Discussions on each of your projects and/or collections so that you can get any feedback on them as well. This will help you fix any problems with the submissions, if any escaped your attention.

If you did create a Facebook page as well, add the link to your Steam group. Don't forget to associate any games to the group that your creating the workshop submissions for.

Ron Jester's Steam Workshop
You can visit my Steam group if needed to use it as an example, or to join it and follow my work!

If you've gotten into the Steam Trading Cards and have achieved level ten, you can select the option of displaying a Workshop Showcase on your Steam Profile when you edit your profile. This area lets you choose 4 of your workshop items to showcase at the top of your profile for the rest of the community to view. In addition, it also displays the number of workshops you've created, and the number of steam users following your work. This is a great way to passively show off your workshops.

Ron Jester's Steam Profile
View my Steam Profile to see the Workshop Showcase in action.

Another way to get traffic to your many Workshop submissions is by creating a Collection for the game your working on. You can do this by going to the Workshop page, selecting the game your developing for, navigating to the Collections tab, and then clicking on the blue "Create Collection" button in the right side panel.

Keep in mind that anyone visiting a workshop item in your collection will also see the link to that collection on the submission. If all of your workshop items are in one collection you've made each of them more accessible to anyone that views the collection.

This is an example of a Collection of Workshop submissions.
http://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=201454434

You can also post about your submissions on the official forums for the game your developing items for. I've been working exclusively on weapon finishes for CS:GO until I have the time to get into more advanced workshops. The official CS:GO forum has a subforum for Workshop Discussions, and you can post your stuff there in a new discussion as a way to get the word out.

About a month after writing this guide, Valve selected it's first batch of weapons to be accepted into CS:GO with the Winter Offensive update. I looked at all the weapons closely to see what kind of weapon finishes they are looking for, and what I noticed about one of the entries confounded me.

One of the submissions didn't even have enough ratings to show a rating!

What it comes down to is that it doesn't matter how many ratings, positive or negative, your submissions have because ultimately it is up to Valve which submissions they decide are good enough for their game. This is as it should be, in my opinion.

To be honest, after viewing the ratings for the items that were selected as official content, I sincerely doubt that they use ratings as a way to select what actually goes into the game next. So take that into consideration before spending a lot of time promoting your items. The time you spend promoting would likely be better spent polishing up your items and then moving on to other projects.

Q How can I submit my item to steam workshop?
A This guide is not intended to show you how to submit items to a workshop, see the official CS:GO guide for basic instructions on submitting your skins.

Q How do you show a link to your collection?
A Right click the background of the page showing your collection in the steam browser, and select copy link. You can then paste the link in Steam to show your collection in a formatted box.

This guide was first published in 2013. See for yourself! You can check the dates on the top right pane of this guide. As we are heading into 2024, that makes this guide over 10 years old. The term for a 10 year anniversary is Decennial and I am now calling this a Decennial Guide.

If you appreciate this guide helping out the player base over the last ten years, throw it a Steam Award as a thank you! I'd really appreciate it!

Previously, I listed the many CS:GO related guides I had created here. For simplicity, I have since opted to create what I call a CS:GO Guide Index. This is essentially another guide that points to the CS:GO guides I have created. If you like any of my other guides, please feel free to rate them up!

https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2382246143&insideModal=0

If you had a workshop skin setup in CS:GO previous to the game merging into CS2, you may have noticed that it went to an incompatible status with CS2. Click the workshop and click the guide link at the top of the page in orange to see what that is all about. There is a guide there for creating skins, it may enlighten you as to why they made the last set incompatible.

I had over 200 skins created! I guess I may need to start over ... some day. Ha ha. We'll see.

I intend to do some how to guides on creating workshop items at some point in the future, and when I do they will be posted here. If you would like to see other guides I have created or contribute to myself, you can also check out the Guides Showcase at the top of my Steam Profile.

This guide here was create by Steam moderators, and I felt it deserved a spotlight here.

http://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=143962136

You can check out all of my Published Steam Guides here, the following guides I feel are related in one way or another.

https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2183349877

https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3122987327