Case Study: The Solo Freelancer Earning $1 Million Per Year (It's Not What You Think)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 217

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 an 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'm your host, Brian Hood. And if this is your first time listening, welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. We talk all about how to earn more as a creative without selling your soul and without doing something you don't necessarily love to do. We're here to inspire you, to bring you new ideas from outside sources that you may have never had been exposed to. And that's actually kind of the theme of the episode today. So before we actually get into the topic, I've got my co-host for the day, Mark Eckert. Say hey to everybody.

Mark Eckert (0:47)

What's up, everybody? How's it going?

Brian Hood (0:49)

Glad to have you back here, my dude. I'm always thankful when you show up here today. And I wanted to ask you something before we even get into the episode. You recently had a kerfuffle.

That's a good word.

Mark Eckert (0:57)

Oh, yeah, I called you up crying, basically.

Brian Hood (0:59)

You literally called me up not crying, but you were like, let me just back up really quick. Mark has multiple business says, we'll probably talk about some of those today because they're relevant to what we're going to talk about today as creatives and inspiring you to grow a bigger, better business. We have at least one shortcoming with that, and that is your major source of client acquisition or customer acquisition was tied to a single source. You had a single point of failure and that single point of failure failed on you.

Talk about what it was that happened when you called me that I had to talk you off the ledge, just briefly go over that, because this is relevant to people that are doing what you're trying to do.

Mark Eckert (1:32)

Yeah, so I'm a producer.

Brian Hood (1:34)

Music producer.

Mark Eckert (1:35)

Yep, music producer. I have a bunch of businesses that help producers and artists and music licensing companies and all that stuff. So I have a Facebook ads account where we run all of our Instagram ads, and I ran an ad for one of my businesses, thatpitch.com. I ran it to our customers, and it was for a referral system, and it just said, hey, you can sign up for this. If you do this, I'll pay you $30. But I worded it as, get paid $30, just hook up your friends.

And Facebook, I literally pressed publish, and just my face was paused. Whole thing refreshed, I was blocked out. Facebook thought I was soliciting sex because I said get paid and hook up friends. So I thought I was paying people to hook up.

And yeah, I got completely kicked off overnight. I lost probably about 80% of our daily traffic.

Brian Hood (2:28)

It wasn't a complete single point of failure, but it was like a three-legged stool and one leg just got knocked out from it.

Mark Eckert (2:34)

No, I'd say one and a half legs, so I was kind of just diagonal.

It wasn't great, man. Like it was a mess. So yeah, I called you up.

Brian Hood (2:41)

That was like a month or more ago, and just fast forwarding through it, like you just got your account back like this week.

Mark Eckert (2:48)

Yeah, literally a couple days ago, and I'm like on cloud nine, baby.

Brian Hood (2:53)

Yeah, but in the meantime, this is the advice I gave you, which is good for listeners to hear just in the future as our audience grows, becomes more successful, expands what they're doing with their businesses, and starts digging into paid advertising.

My advice to you was, while this is down and you're figuring out, go learn a new ads platform. And you did, you learned Google ads and YouTube ads.

Mark Eckert (3:12)

So I started running YouTube ads, and also we built out this really badass content engine. So we post reels every single day, started a podcast, built out like a new email funnel and all this stuff. And like, again, I feel like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.

Brian Hood (3:29)

It's actually, it's actually interesting. So like, I forget the name of the concept, but like basically when we were restrained by something, like we have restraints, borders around us, it forces us into new areas we wouldn't otherwise think about, because like you were reliant on Facebook ads, it was doing the job of sending as much traffic and leads and clients and customers to your businesses as you needed.