16 witty tips to get six-figure clients on Dribbble

Dribbble

Dribbble is a customer journey touchpoint where the rules of sales & marketing govern. This article will teach you the fundamentals and tricky tips to get to the Dribbble top and stay there.

Whether you’re an individual designer planning to start your Dribbble profile or an agency who has already started but thinks “something is wrong,” — this article is for you.

Who are we, anyway, to teach you? 

Well, we launched our Dribbble profile like a year ago. Since then, we’ve got 1,5K followers and a stream of six-figure clients.

Is our experience valuable? 

You tell us at the end. 

Let’s face it, anyone discovers Dribbble as soon as they try out design. That’s why it is usually considered to be a place saturated with competitors, literally a red ocean. And that natural fear comes along with all sorts of questions, including:

• What impact can another design agency have on Dribbble?
• How to stand out among hundreds of thousands of other people?
• Does it make sense to compete with famous guys with tens of thousands of followers?
• Will anyone see our work if we don’t have our own community at all, which means we need to start from the ground up?
• And the key question is, are there real clients with full pockets on Dribbble or designers only?

Obviously, the main concern is whether there is money on the platform. Because if there is, it's worth rolling the hard six.

So, I'm gonna answer all those questions and dispel the doubts about the platform by sharing our insights and conclusions.

1. Novelty of work: how important is that

Although a standard recommendation is to publish only the freshest works, our experience breaks this stereotype. We've decided to publish mock-ups of completed projects from 2018-19, putting speed as a priority. And it worked just fine! Another design studio we know launched their Dribbble profile alongside us, but they published strong and trendy works. 3 months later, the number of their subscribers reached almost the same level as we had. Sure, if there is an opportunity to publish the freshest cases, do it. But if you lack them, don't postpone just because of that.

2. Motion design: don't overdo!

When creating motion for Dribbble, focus on micro animations. 

Initially, we tried to cram as many transitions and screens into one shot as possible, but it turned out to be our stupidity. Dribbble audience needs something they can apply in their projects, not flying tricks. Remember to freeze your video so other designers can see the details of a project you present.

And more importantly, the project essence should be clear from the preview in the general list of shots. This is especially important for animated shots. If you want to amuse the audience with incredible animation, which appears at the third second, your shot will most likely get fewer views than a usual static shot.

3. Types of shots: what to show on Dribbble

Surprisingly, the most popular static shot (and the second most popular among all shots) was a showcase of an interface element — it got 138k views. It confirms the previous point: the basis of your content should be techniques that designers can apply in their real projects.

Well yeah, gray text on a white background with a turquoise hover might not be the best example of Product Design. But the fact that so many users liked this shot confirms the assumptions we've outlined above. The more the shot looks like a Behance cover, meaning it contains enlarged interface elements, the better. 

It’s also important to have contrasting details so that your shot somehow stands out among others. And here is one more hint - make a screenshot of the Popular Feed and insert your shot there. Why it works? Firstly, you visualize your dreams and make them happen. Secondly and more importantly, you see how your shot looks alongside other works. Seriously, we did it so. It helped us analyze our work and fine-tune it if needed.

So, with the above said in mind, here is how to do:

And here is how not to do (please, don't do it):

4. 3D vs your expertise: should you mix it all?

Initially, we thought that shots with 3D animations would attract users best. But comparing the amount of time spent to produce such shots and the number of views we finally received, it was not worth the effort. Supposedly, this is because we mixed up everything, forgetting about our real expertise, which is Product, not Motion Design. So the advice is to focus on your area of expertise and show only relevant shots.

5. To boost or not to boost, that is the question

There is a functionality for boosting posts on Dribbble. The more you pay, the more views you get. But, having tested different options of boosting our shots, we saw no increase in likes, buckets, or followers. So, what's the point if it gives only fruitless views, not juicy followers?

6. Likes, views, buckets: I want it all, I want it now

The most common advice is “publish cool content, and it will end up in the Popular feed”. That’s fine, although there’s a big “but” — Dribbble is primarily a social network, which means that social mechanics work the same way as on any other social platform.

Look, each of our shots gets the first likes, comments, and buckets from our team. Dribbble sees that activity and shows the shot to other users. How quickly it gets to the top depends on how many likes and buckets the shot receives right after being published. Users add shots to buckets less than they like them, but buckets are the thing that decides whether your shot gets in the Popular feed. Don't forget about comments, they also affect the ranking, but to a lesser extent than likes or buckets.

7. Wakey-wakey, it's time to publish

The second-most-popular question among those who decided to conquer the Dribbble is “when to post ?”.

Wednesday is the most active day, so it's easier to get to the top on Tuesday or Friday. The Popular feed displays the most favored works of a pending day, keep this in mind when deciding how many shots to publish per week.

The screenshot shows the activity of Dribbble users in the Ukrainian time zone UTC + 02: 00. To be honest, we hoped that the shot published at 10 am Ukraine time would get appreciation from the European audience and by 10 am NY time will already sit firmly at the top when US people wake up. In fact, it’s still difficult for us to compete with profiles that have tens of thousands of followers and get more likes. Alas, by 10 am NY time, we’re usually squeezed out of the Popular feed :)

We're still looking for the best posting options, but we've learned one thing for sure. If you've published a project but see its small coverage , don't be afraid to delete it and republish it. The same project may show different results at different times.

By connecting Google Analytics to your Dribbble account, you can get a lot of insights. Pretty useful statistics can also be found in the Similarweb service simply by inserting Dribbble into the search bar.

8. Content plan and frequency - it’s worth it?

Only the lazy one hasn’t said that the key to success on Dribbble is the frequency of the publications. As Peter Deltondo from Unfold said, one needed to post at least 3 times a week.

Several times we noticed one company publishing a few shots on the same day, which appeared in the Popular feed. That case brought us to a pretty clear idea that frequent hitting the top makes you recognizable within the platform and your follower growth rate increases. 

You need to treat Dribbble like any other sales channel: without prepared content and a publication schedule, you’ll most likely get pushed out, and then it will be more challenging to raise awareness. The more often you’re seen at the top, the more followers you get.

9. Multi-shots and attachments: some statistics

Pro profiles benefit from Multi-shots, which allows them to upload up to 8 images or videos in 1 Shot. And they also have access to the statistics of views of attachments and multi-shots. Well, we also have a Pro profile, and our statistics figures are equal to zero. 

We've seen other agencies inserting parts of the interfaces or asking to subscribe. Given our experience with zero views of attachments, we decided not to publish them at all. 

10. Real projects vs concepts: what performs better

Our experience shows that concepts are taken better than real projects. Most likely, this is because we’ve been publishing only archived projects so far. 

Some popular profiles show design concepts only because it’s easier to show techniques that can’t be implemented to solve actual business problems. As a rule, such shots get more likes. That's because most Dribbble users are creative designers, not business owners seeking to solve their problems. 

So, to be successful on this platform, you need to astonish with aesthetics. We tend to mix our feed to make it 50/50: some shots will present visual components, and others will show our UX solutions for real projects. 

11. Feed and Projects tap: design principles

The Projects tab can be structured in different ways. One collects their shots into folders by topic, while another combines them according to the principles of visual style. We collect our shots from a specific project and group them into a folder.

It’s also worth paying attention to the general appearance of your feed: visually, the shots should be designed and structured logically.

12. Shot descriptions: what to write

The title of a shot should be laconic and accurately describe the functionality shown in the shot. “Design concept for banking” is a bad example, while “Card screen of a banking app” is a good one. 

We also include our company name to each title for indexing in the Pinterest search — Dribbble posts the best works on its official Pinterest profile. 

The description of the shot should contain the step-by-step process you went through and the call to action with the transition to other social media of yours. The screenshot below shows that your profile description will be pulled up on Pinterest or other social networks.

13. Tags, tags, tags!

When looking for a contractor, clients either review shots at the Popular feed or use a search bar. 

To stay at the top, you need to have a large army of followers and publish daily, considering that the Popular tab is updated every single day. 

On the contrary, clients can run into the shots you published months ago using Search. But to make it happen, your shots should comply with clients’ search requests. 

And guess what, they tend to look for similar product functionality or interface elements. For example, a client is unlikely to insert "interaction" in the search bar, but "finance onboarding" seems more plausible. Therefore, when putting down tags, choose the most similar ones to the potential clients’ requests. Make a semantic core for the queries and promote your posts with core tags.

14. SEO: never underestimate

Oh, last but not least, the more your shots stay in search results because of the tags, the more traffic you’ll get. It’s impressive how this long-lasting effect works. After posting the shot, in three months, views on most of our shots doubled. So be ready as this is a long long-term game. 

Afterword

Over the last couple of years, Dribbble has changed the UX, and now the number of followers is shown in a separate tab, not right under the profile name. The community has changed a lot too. 

Everything we found on Dribbble on the web stated that it used to be easier to get followers earlier, but the quality of work dramatically affected the ranking. However, our experience shows that one doesn't need 100K followers to get real customers on Dribbble.

Thanks for reading to the end. Our journey on the platform has just begun. But each of the insights outlined above has come to us through pain, tears, and numerous experiments. The results make up for that: a new stream of leads and new deals, including this six-figure contract. 

And we wish you that!

Follow our Dribbble. We didn’t write this lengthy article for nothing!
Just kidding, but anyway, we’ll leave it here — https://dribbble.com/lazarev_