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

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 327

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 the 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. 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, right? So that will 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 or 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 the 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, subject to 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, poo poo 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 poo poo 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 going to be better off by staying on the platform. And this 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 want to 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 Hormozzi'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. And I also just, from my own experience, I shape things differently, including what we're going to talk about today when it comes to promoting a lead magnet. So episode one of this series, which was two weeks ago, episode 277, was what is the one narrow and meaningful problem that we can fully solve. Episode two of this series, which was last week, episode 278, was determining how we can solve that problem. And we talked to the four different types of lead magnets that actually work for freelancers. And here's the surprising thing about last week's episode, if you haven't already listened to it, lead magnet can include a paid service. A paid service can be a lead magnet. It's not your core service, but it is a paid service that solves a narrow and meaningful problem. again, go back to listen to last week's episode if you want more on that. But that's a surprising thing that people don't think about. And this week, we're going to talk about, we found the narrow and meaningful problem. We've created the lead magnet, or at least the outline of the lead magnet, or the test service we want to try out, or the actual PDF, or whatever it is, video, course. There's a million ways you can solve these problems, but we created the thing. Now, how do we get it out into the world to start generating leads? AKA, how will people find this? And this is where we run into the same roadblock that you probably have as a freelancer if you don't have a calendar chock full of clients that you want to work with, like your ideal clients are filling your calendar. You run into the same problem trying to promote a lead magnet as you do when you're trying to promote your core service. And that is you have no idea how to promote things. You don't know how to self promote your service. You don't know how to self promote your lead magnets. Therefore, you're stuck. You've created this wonderful thing, just like you've created this wonderful skill set in the service that you sell as a freelancer. But now you don't know how to promote it. So this episode will be relevant whether you're trying to promote a core service and you're saying, screw you, Brian, I don't want to create a lead magnet. It doesn't work in my industry, AKA, you're a snowflake freelancer who believes that these other core concepts that work in pretty virtually every other business model in the world can't work for freelancers. That's a lie. That's a myth. You got to get that past your head, get past your thick skull because lead magnets can and do work for freelancers. Whether or not you're promoting your core service or lead magnet, this episode is for you because this is basically just all about distribution methods or promotion methods. Now, there's something from Alex Ramosi's book called The Core Four. That's when he's talking about promoting lead magnets in his book. I have my own Core Four and it's based on the exact same principles that he talks about himself. They're all based on something called the six traffic types. As far as Alex Ramosi has ever said and as far as I can find, there are only about six types of traffic when it comes to promoting something. Traffic just means like if you're promoting a lead magnet, you generally have a landing page or a funnel, and maybe that's worth discussing separately. Maybe I'll talk about that really quick because that wasn't part of my outline today. But you generally have a landing page or a funnel that you're sending people to put in their name and email address or name and phone number or some sort of contact information because we have to be able to contact them in order for them to be considered a lead because a lead is merely somebody who's contact information that we have that we are able to reach out to and contact in some way shape or form. That could be email, phone, it can be social media DMs, it can be WhatsApp. But when it comes to traffic, we're talking about how do we send traffic to that landing page for them people to sign up. And that's where we get into the six traffic types. It's the same thing that works if you're just trying to send traffic to your main website. These same six things apply. And I'm going to quickly run through these. I have a video that I'm going to link to in the show notes page. It's a video on YouTube. It's called The Six Methods For Getting Website Traffic As A Freelancer, which you can always get to the show notes page for our episodes. This one specifically is just sixfigurecreative.com/279, because that's the episode number for this podcast. And that will take you directly to the show notes page, where this link and anything else I mentioned for this episode will be shared. These are basically the six traffic types. And I'm going to breeze over these, and then we'll go deep dive into these throughout the episode. Method number one to generate traffic to a website is paid media. Number two, earned media. That just means things like you've earned an audience, like this podcast is earned media, a YouTube channel is earned media, a social media following is an earned media, it's something where you've earned the right to be in front of somebody. Traffic type number three is owned media, that's where you like own the asset, like a list of phone numbers, an email list, things like that where you actually own the asset, whereas like a YouTube channel or an Instagram or TikTok, those platforms own your leads basically, they own your eyeballs, whereas an email list, you own those. Number four is affiliate, so that can be someone else promoting your stuff. Number five is outbound, that's where you're manually reaching out one-to-one. And number six is referral slash word-of-mouth, and that's where people are sharing your stuff. And again, I'm going to go deeper into these in this episode, but if you want another deep dive from a YouTube video that I did, just go to our show notes page for that. But here's my core four. This is actually from my client acquisition toolkit, which you can get by going to sixfigurecreative.com/toolkit. And I have my own core four on there. This is when you think through, how do I actually get somebody to hire me or get my lead magnet or consider my lead magnet and sign up for it if it's free or pay for it if it's a paid lead magnet? What are the ways that I can essentially self-promote this thing?