Hello and welcome. I decided to write this as I frequently browse models looking for hidden gems. Yes yes, I can bathe every girl in oil if I use hassaku and Wai is nice (although seems to have dropped off the face of the planet) but there are a bajillion (scientific number, trust me) other models on civit. Many will go completely ignored! I have a few tips to help you stand out from the crowd.
1. Sell your model!
The #1 thing I look for when I browse for models is an explanation of what this model does. Why did you bother making yet another realism model? Why is your anime styled model any better than base illustrious? Why should people want to use your pony model? If the only description of the model is "I hope you like it as much as I do" then I'm sorry I probably will never know because I don't have the time to download and troubleshoot your model to see what it does better than the 500 other models I have downloaded. Despite not getting paid, you are competing with all the other models out there - if you can't care enough to write a compelling summary of the benefits of your model then people will not care enough to download it.
2. Make a model worth selling
Generally I've noticed three different model types lately
2.5d that all look roughly like SmoothMix (or SmoothMix looks roughly like something else)
Generic anime
Realism
These are all popular model types but why did you make a 2.5d model? What does it do better than SmoothMix (did you finally get males to render in the images :D ) ? I say generic anime and I'm a little annoyed so it might be translating to my description but what I mean is - a lot of these models look just like base illustrious. The point of a checkpoint merge is to apply styles or stabilize things wrong in the base model. I'd LOVE more stylized checkpoints but it seems like most checkpoint merges are just like a giant inbred family instead of bringing anything new to the table they just cannibalize themselves. The most interesting one I've seen lately is Shock or Surprise and it's basically just an applied style LoRA over Illustrious 2.0 (which is nice since you can gen higher res pics)
Realism - for the love of christ vary your dataset and don't pull from synthetic datasets of Flux outputs. It's always super obvious when the outputs have been generated from Flux as you can simply look at the chin. Also if your model generates the same girl or some boy every single face - that's a problem!
3. Represent yourself truthfully and honestly in your cover photos
"I can never get my faces to look like yours"
"I can't get that character to generate"
"How did you get that style"
"Can you provide the prompt for the first image?"
These are all probably real comments I've read :). Your cover photos should be real outputs of what your model can provide. If I look at a cover photo and see three different loras in the prompt that's not a good sign! If I look at a cover photo and there's no prompt information - that's not a good sign! If there are only two cover photos - you guessed it, not a great sign! Create a mix of photos that highlight #1 and #2. They should show what users can expect from your model. It's tempting to use animation and I wouldn't say no don't use it as it definitely can create eye-catching images but ensure that the outputs are representative of your model. Animation models can change the style of your inputs sometimes so it's important to match the quality of what your model outputs. This gets into my next and final point
4. Explain how to use your model
This can be a simple "Sampler: Euler A, Scheduler: karras, steps: 24, cfg: 4". But explain the best way to get results from your model. If your cover photos use adetailer or some other manipulation to get the result explain the steps you took to get them. If users can't recreate the quality that you are presenting in your cover photos then you have essentially lied to them and mis-represented your model.
4.5. Explain updates
Sorry, thought of this one a day later after I'd published the initial article. If you make a v1 and then a v2 for the love of all that is holy explain the rationale behind the update, what changed, what you tried to change (why did you embark on updating the model in the first place), and any plans for the future. I'd add not to name your updates something stupid and obtuse but that's just me being a cranky guy - I don't need the updates called version cafe, version latte, version mocha. Just name them sensibly either v1 v2 v3 if they're sequential, or by some name that denotes what the versions are for in one word. That one is just my own pet peeve. Yes we all think you're quirky and cute now where's the spreadsheet to decipher your 14 different models and what the different names mean?
5. Bonus
The cover image is a list of some of the more unique models I have found recently. Good job!
https://civitai.com/models/1734917/velvet-paradox?modelVersionId=2033487
This model is very neat and also the model page did a great job of explaining why you may want to use it.