Summarize this article in one sentence.
When you feel ready, go out in the forums or chat rooms to help people get to know you and your art. Please do not be rude in the process. Simply talking nicely, or even just entering a chat room is enough to have people view your page. "Advertising" yourself can get you banned or ignored. Doing this will help your popularity on deviantART showing your art to those who have there deviantART homepage on "newest". This may add a new "fan" of your work or better said, a new friend. However, make sure it is of good quality and you did your best on it because if ever it may not be that good it won't bring in much attention. See what art is most popular by looking at the most popular in 24 hours, if you have enough time try doing their themes, see if you can also do it. If ever there is a certain new trend in fan art see if you'd like it too maybe you'd like this and decide to make fan arts too! If you're the drawing type of artist, why not start your own comics or if you're a writer at heart why not post some of your stories? There are a lot of bored artists on deviantART, if it's that good you'd probably even get fan art There are many different kinds of artists on deviantART and probably a lot who share many similarities as you. Asking for requests is one way to get your own art publicized by showing your own drawings of your characters and asking others to draw them will shine some light on your characters. Paying for commissions is one way to also show your work to artists who are not open for requests, but make sure you got some money, if not look for point commissions hopefully you can save up your points through the point-llama badge trade! Try to catch a kiri ban! Kiri bans are when you try to catch a certain amount of page views, usually it's a promotion for many artists, well recommended for those who can't pay for commissions in any way. Last of all, art trades, it's a benefit for both sides yet depending on the artist you choose to trade with, you might get rejected.

Summary:
Publicize. Try to post a good amount per week/day. Widen your capacity. Start your own trend. Do requests, commissions, Kiribans, and art trades.