Before Spending $1 On Paid Ads, Ask Yourself These 6 Questions

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 347

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. If you've ever thought about doing paid ads, and you just weren't sure if they were right for you, or if you're ready for them or not, I wanted to talk through in this episode some things to think through, particularly six different things to think through to figure out whether or not you're ready for ads or not. Because the two big mistakes people make are, first, they either dive headfirst into ads when they really didn't need them in the first place, and they had better options, so they ended up wasting money on ads that they shouldn't have wasted because they either weren't ready for it or they didn't need it. Or two, they endlessly avoid ads for, god, a million reasons, which we're not going to get into today, but they endlessly avoid ads, even though that's their only or best option, unless they leave a lot of money on the table. They have an empty calendar, they have these Feast of Famine periods because they're not constantly refilling the cup in which they drink from. Now, whichever of those camps you might fall into, we obviously don't want to spend money we shouldn't spend on ads if you don't actually need it. But if you actually need it, if you could put a dollar into a box and get $10 out of that box, why wouldn't you do that over and over and over and over again? At least until you have better options. So this episode, I'm going to talk through an easy way to know if paid ads are right for you. If it's not a fit for you, you can avoid wasting money on ads. If it is a fit for you, then you have a way to get consistent leads, consistent clients, and if done right, as many clients as you can handle. Before I get into that, if this is your first time ever listening to the show, hello, I'm Brian Hood. I run the 6 Figure Creative. I have over a decade freelancing experience. And when it comes to paid ads, I just looked it up. I've spent over a half a million dollars on paid ads profitably. And we've really ramped that up recently. We're spending between 30 to $40,000 a month on ads right now profitably. Over the last year, I've had a 10 to 1 return on ad spend, meaning for every dollar I spend on ads, I get $10 back. And then the clients we've worked with have had a 15 to 1 or 18 to 1 return on ad spend. We even have one client who has over a 200 to 1 return on ad spend. That's $1 in, $200 out. He's only spending $3 a day. If you heard last week, you heard the strategy involved with that. If it makes sense for them, I don't know many people who would say no to that. So that's a little bit about me. This podcast is for you. If you are a freelancer, you offer creative services and you want to make more money without selling your soul. If any of this sounds interesting, you're in the right spot. So I'm going to talk to six different things to think through if you are debating or not whether paid ads make sense for your business. And to put a gist on this, we're just trying to figure out, do you have better options or not? Many people, they want to avoid paid ads, but they literally do not have a better option. So I'm going to talk through, according to Alex Hermosy, the six ways to get clients. I'm actually throwing a seventh in there because I think he left one out when it pertains to freelancers. But these are seven ways to get clients. And if you don't have the other six, then the only other option you have is the seventh, which is paid ads. And so you have to take an honest look at yourself and your business in your life to determine whether or not you have these other six. And if you don't, paid ads is literally all you got. And this is the thing we see time and time and time and time again with people. They make the mistake of having no other option, but not one new paid ads. And if that's the case, you're going to keep getting what you've been getting, which is generally what most freelancers get. And that's the first on this list today is referrals. Referrals is a viable way of getting clients. When friends or when family or when past clients come across someone who needs your services, they send those people to you, right? Wonderful source of clients. The problem with most people is it's inconsistent. It's not enough to keep you booked solid. And the most insidious part about this is most freelancers only rely on this to get clients. And year after year after year, there's these up and down, up and down months of feast or famine. I've talked about this so many times, I get sick of it, but many people still fall in this trap, and you might be falling in this trap right now. So the first way on this list to get clients is referrals. And the only question you have to ask yourself is, are referrals filling my calendar or not? Am I booked solid with I do clients from referrals? If not, I need to look to something else, one of these other six areas. If so, you're good. You don't have to listen to this episode. You're booked solid. You've got all the clients you need just from referrals. Wonderful place to be. I can't help you here when it comes to client acquisition because you don't need my help. That brings us to the second method for acquiring clients. Alex Formozzi calls this outbound. I don't like that term. Freelancers, we call it cold outreach, where you send DMs or send emails to your I do clients who don't know, like, and trust you yet, basically sending spam emails. If you do it right, you're doing it highly personalized, but even then you're going to have a relatively low response rate. You might get between a 10, 15% response rate on a hyper-personalized email, depending on your niche, your offer, your messaging. There's a billion factors that could be involved here. But this is something I've seen so many people try and fail at for multiple reasons. First is they're not prepared to be on a treadmill. If you're doing cold outreach as your main client acquisition strategy, you've got to have this system so dialed in with clear inputs, clear outputs. You have to be willing to do this an hour a day, every day, or batch it into like five hour days once a week, which is also very tough. But does this feel like something you want to do every day? Sourcing potential leads to reach out to, crafting customized messages that will resonate with them and get them to respond to you, nurturing any leads that are interested until they actually book a call with you and take the next step and potentially become a client, tracking the metrics involved with this, with how many emails you send and what your response rate is, split testing different approaches. This is a really involved process to do correctly. And yes, it works, but it's something that most people fall off the wagon because the second you stop doing this, you lose this source of clients. So even though this is a consistent way of getting clients, the same feast your famine thing can happen because you'll do this when you're in famine periods, you'll reach out to a bunch of people, you'll get clients from it, then you'll have to fulfill in that work, you'll be busy doing the work, you'll stop doing the hour a day of cold outreach because you're so busy with the projects you're getting paid for that one, two, three months later, the projects thin out and you're back to where you were months ago, another famine period. So if this isn't something you want to do or have the capabilities of doing, or this is something you don't have a proclivity to do, then this is probably not a viable strategy for you. And my least favorite part of this is that fact that when you stop this, when you get off the treadmill, your flow of new leads and clients instantly stops. So if referrals aren't keeping your calendar full, cold outreach either isn't working for you or it's not something you're interested in doing every day. That leads us to method number three of getting clients. And this is something you don't see in the freelance world very often, but can still work. It's affiliates and partners. That is where you say, hello, person who has control or attention of my ideal clients. It could be an influencer on TikTok. It could be a YouTuber. It could be your local accountant. It could be anyone who has a lot of your ideal clients in their sphere of influence that can send people to you, lead some clients to you, essentially on a pay for performance method where they get 10% finder's fee. It can be as high as 20, 30% in the online course world. You see this all the time, 50-50 splits. If you have the customers and I have the product, you get 50%, I get 50%.