6 Methods For Promoting Your Freelance Business | Back To Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 258

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome. Thank you so much for giving this podcast a chance. This is for freelancers who are creatives, who are trying to earn more from their creative skills, and they want to do it without selling their souls. If that sounds like you, you are in the right place.

If you're a regular listener, well, then you already know. We're in the smack dab middle of what I'm calling my Back to Basic series, where we're going back and re-exploring all the things that we may have skipped or looked over as freelancers when we're just getting up and running as solo producers. We're not really taught these things. We had an episode a few back called What the Heck is Marketing?

And we just talked through what marketing even is. And there's something called the Four P's of Marketing. And this episode is going to talk about one of those four P's of marketing. It's promotion.

This is the thing that's going to keep your calendar full if you know how to use it. It's a tool that is mostly ignored by most freelancers. And the reason it's ignored is because most freelancers just feel like, if I'm good enough, people should hire me. All my successful friends that I know or all the people that I look up to, they're booked solid just from referrals, just from word of mouth, just repeat clients.

And while there's nothing wrong with their referrals, there's nothing wrong with that being your main source of clients. It is not realistic for most people, especially early on in their careers. And if you rely on referrals and word of mouth, I call that the word of mouth death trap. And that's what leads to the feast or famine cycle that most freelancers never get out of. This lack of leads in clients leads to fear based pricing, which means it's a race to the bottom because you're always desperate to get clients, or at least you go through seasons of desperation where you have to lend that client, because if you don't get that, you're not going to pay the bills this month. And speaking of bills, lack of promotion, if you don't understand promotion, which we're going to talk about today, this is what leads you to take on those bill-paying clients. And for those who don't know what that means, it just means you're taking on this client just because you need to pay the bills, not because you're the best option for them, not because that you actually want to work with them, but you simply have to pay the bills.

And this is the quickest way to burn out, lack of satisfaction. And I'd say it's not quite there. We've all done it. There's no shame there, but it's so close to selling your soul.

We're talking about, we try to earn more money without selling our souls. When we take on clients that are not a good fit, that are what we call bill-paying work, I think a little bit of your soul dies every single time. So this episode, we're gonna try to avoid ever having to take on bill-paying clients again. But before we even get into promotion and these six ways to promote your freelance services, before we even get into that, I do wanna mention something that is worth noting. I call it the 1% rule of thumb. I call it a rule of thumb because it is a rule of thumb. It is not the rule, and it can vary wildly from niche to niche, industry to industry, freelancer to freelancer. But the 1% rule of thumb just says about 1% of the people who know you exist will hire you each year. And you can do the math quickly. If I need 100 clients this year to hire me, then I need about 10,000 people to know I exist as a freelancer. And again, this is just a rule of thumb to give you the aha moment you need to understand that promotion is something I should take seriously. Not just dabbling in different areas, not just waiting for people to refer me to others, but actually putting promotion in my hands as something that I do as part of my business every single week, every single month, every single year to get my name out there as a freelancer so that people know that I exist. So that 1% adds up to a sustainable amount for my business.