Mastering The Art Of Self-Promotion | The Lead Generation Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 279

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.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time joining me on the show today, first of all, welcome, so glad to have you today. You're in the right place right now. If you are a creative freelancer, you offer freelance services, and you want to earn more money from your creative skills without selling your soul, if that is you, you're in the right place, because on this podcast, we talk about all the things we need to know and do in order to earn more money from our creative skills. But before we get into the episode, I have awesome news for my recurring listeners who have been following this journey of my compromised, aka hacked Facebook ads or meta ads account. After 19 days and a lot of back and forth, and a lot of BS, I finally got my account back this morning. I talked about this at the end of last episode, but the advertiser was advertising elderly women's bras on my ads account. And they had the ad budget up to like $9,000 a day, something like that. So they spent thousands of dollars on my ad account promoting an elderly women's bra. All those charges have been wiped from my account. And as of right now, my ads are back live again. So two thumbs up to that finally. And I'm going to do a full episode. I plan at least right now to do a full episode on like cybersecurity basics for freelancers because this is something that my account was compromised, not because of a stupid password, not because I didn't have two factor authentication on, I had all those things, but because of something completely unrelated. And I want to talk about some of these things that we need to do as freelancers to secure some of our most important accounts.

Because what I learned through this entire process is that you can lose business crucial accounts that your entire livelihood depend on or a huge part of your livelihood depend on through something that doesn't seem completely apparent. So that'll be a completely other episode in the future. I've got another series planned after this one, so I might just squeeze that in as the next episode between this series and the next series. I've found that I really like series for some reason. Hopefully the listeners like it. You can tell me if you like these series and not just email podcast at thesixfigurecreative.com. All that to say, the account's back. It's a glorious day.

I even have my, I'm showing you my video right now, my Positive Optimist sweater on today because it's sweater weather finally here in Nashville. And I like this sweater. I also heard a really good quote that I want to say that just caught my ear this morning on my podcast walk. That's where I do a long walk, like 45-minute walk and listen to podcasts on my walk. The quote was some of the effect of pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich.

For some reason, that's stuck with me, and I like the sentiment of like pessimists can like, papoo everything, and they're right more often than not. But there's nothing to be gained from being right when you're a pessimist. But when you're an optimist, there's a lot to be gained from when you're right in business and investing and things like that. I'm kind of like a contrarian optimist. I do papoo a lot of things, but I've also missed out on some opportunities in my life because I was more of a pessimist than an optimist. So wearing the sweater today, positive optimist as a reminder after I heard that quote I put this on.

And maybe I'll have a whole episode. I'm just like when to be pessimistic about something and say it will never work versus when you should be optimist because there can be a lot of difference in how successful you are based on how optimistic you are about things. Like I could have just given up on this ad account for like just being frustrated by complete and lack of ability to talk to a human being by their horrible automated systems that allowed a hacker to, after I flagged the account as being fraudulent, they still bypassed and got the ad account reactivated without having to verify credit card details or anything and spend thousands of dollars on my credit card. I could have just been like, Facebook's a joke, meta advertising is a joke, I'm never using them again. And I could have been right and I could have just moved on in my life, but I think I'm gonna be better off by staying on the platform. And this is actually ties in to the topic for this episode today, which is the conclusion of the Lead Generation series. The first two episodes, we talked about creating a lead magnet. And the reason we create a lead magnet is because pound for pound, it's cheaper and easier to get a client by using a lead magnet than it is just by promoting our services. We can also promote a lead magnet and stand behind that a lot easier for most people than we can to stand by promoting our services. It feels less desperate when we're promoting a lead magnet versus promoting ourselves or our services or the fact that we need clients. Even if you are desperate, you don't wanna show up as desperate. It's that the lead magnet helps alleviate a lot of these things. And we've loosely based a lot of this series on Alex Hermosy's $100 million leads book that came out last month or a month and a half ago, where he talks through a lot of these frameworks that I'm talking about, but I'm trying to reshape this based on what makes sense for freelancers and creative freelancers.