The $500 Ad Budget Challenge Every Freelancer Needs to Take

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 397

Welcome to the Six 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. The number one fear that keeps freelancers from trying out paid ads is that they're terrified of just lighting money on fire and getting nothing back. But that's usually not the case. So today, I want to show you exactly how to turn $500 into something meaningful for your business and when to maybe not waste any money whatsoever because maybe you're not ready for it yet. I'll talk through kind of both sides of things. And if you're actually ready for it, I'll talk you through how to get the most out of what I call this $500 strategic bet. I'll even talk about some people we've worked with to help with their ads, like Unique, who spent $258. She landed a $24,000 project, and this is her first time ever running ads. I'll talk you through what she did and give you some examples of some others as well. In case you're new here, I spent over a half million dollars on paid ads just last year alone, 2025 alone, and we learned a ton from just doing this for our own business, but we've also coached our clients through this process like hundreds and hundreds of times. So we've dialed in processes for testing, making sure we get the most out of every dollar we spend, making sure that we get as much of the upside as possible while mitigating as much of the downside as possible. And we've turned it into a pretty repeatable process, and I want to share that on this episode. If you're new here, my name's Brian Hood. I'm clearly sick right now. You know how the holidays are. You get around the little kids that are running around everywhere coughing on you, giving you their little whatever diseases they have, and then you come home and you lose your voice. Always fun stuff. But this is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It's a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their souls. We do a lot of things here differently than a lot of other people in our niche, and I'm less on the fluffy side of things and I'm more on the actual like, let's just talk numbers. Let's talk dollars and cents. Let's talk systems, processes. I take a lot of influence from other industries like the SaaS industry is a big one that I take influence from. So if that sounds remotely interesting, you're in the right place right now. Maybe I should be sick all the time. I got the low voice, the sultry tones. You're listening to Smooth Jazz 108.3 FM. So let's talk about this. Ninety-nine percent of the clients that we work with, when they first come to us, are fully reliant on word of mouth and referrals in order to get clients or repeat work from their past clients. Like that's the only business that they have. They rarely, if ever, get strangers to hire them. And when we first start working with them, we take a look at their business and we see, is there first any low hanging fruit that we can harvest? Is there like past clients that we can get to come back that you haven't reached out to? Or have you actually been following up reasonably? Do you have any past leads that you let die that actually could have been a client, but you just didn't follow up properly? Again, follow up. Is there like some people in your network that you're not tapping into properly? Or people that could be potential clients in your network? Are there even any neglected marketing assets? Like you have a large social following or YouTube following or an email list or something that you're just not utilizing to its fullest extent in order to get clients. So before we ever do anything in paid ads, we tap all these out. And sometimes those things are enough to reach your income goals, but usually not. And when that's not enough to reach your income goals, that means you need to move to the place where pretty much everyone on earth moves. And that's getting strangers to hire you. Every business on earth, except for freelancers, for whatever reason, have accepted the fact that in order to succeed, in order to thrive, strangers have to want to pay them. Virtually every business on earth is this way. And while most freelancers are stuck only working with people who already know I can trust them, they have yet to ever venture into this world of getting strangers to hire them. But when you go into that world, this is a scary place. This is new to you. You've never actually gone to the world of strangers. Freelancers have what I call a stranger danger. But if you want to move into the world where you're getting strangers to hire you, you basically have four choices in order to do this. First is turning networking into an actual viable strategy that you can deploy over and over again. It's systematizing and strategizing networking. Most people don't have the network to do it. They don't know how to do it. They don't have the people skills to do it. That's usually off the table for almost everybody. If you're doing that strategically, you're probably good and you're probably not in this podcast, but maybe you are. Maybe you're sick of the networking thing and you're like, this payday thing sounds interesting. Okay, cool. Number one, the potential thing you could try, networking, systemizing it, not just endlessly networking. Number two thing you could do is turn content marketing into a viable channel. This works for some people. Some people are great at content marketing. They're great at social media. They're great on YouTube, great on Twitter. They're great on threads, whatever. TikTok. This is a channel that a lot of freelancers are good at. There's something that they're comfortable with, and it's something that we will help people with if that makes sense for their skill set. However, there's still the majority, 75, 80% of freelancers, that is not their thing. They don't have the desire to do it because it's a treadmill. It's something you have to endlessly keep training out content. They don't have the skill set to do it because it takes a lot of charisma to do it. I don't know how I still have a podcast because I don't have what it takes. And even though we have a podcast, actually, paid ads are our main thing. The third option is doing endless cold outreach. Again, this is something that can work. I'd say maybe about 5% to 10% of freelancers I've seen attempt this have ever actually gotten a result from it, and of those have gotten a result, most of them burn out before they can keep it sustainable. But that is a viable way of getting strangers to hire you. And the fourth kind of main thing you can try is making paid ads work. Here's my challenge for you on this episode. I want to change your mind and get you to commit to a $500 paid ads test this month or next month. Call it a paid ads challenge. If you listen to this episode, when it came out January 13th, then this is an extremely good time to run paid ads. Why? Because we just got through the holidays. We just got through Black Friday. All that time is where everyone's spending tons and tons of money trying to get their bank for Christmas Day. Everyone's trying to get as much money as they possibly can. After the holidays end, then January comes, the only people paying for ads right now are like fitness and health. Almost everybody, all the people that normally advertise from Black Friday period all the way through Christmas, those people stop paying ads and they start planning for the upcoming year. So ad costs plummet for all of January, all or most of February, and even in some niches, into March and April. It's like the first quarter of any year is the best time to do this because you're gonna get the most bank for your buck. So I'm hoping by the end of this episode, you'll be like, all right, Brian, I'm gonna try this out. I'm gonna try this out. I'll let you know how it goes. The downside is you lose 500 bucks, and you can say, at least you gave it an honest try. This is something you've never tried before. You can at least say, I gave it an honest go, didn't work for me. I'm moving on to something else. I'm gonna go do the endless cold outreach strategy, or I'm gonna go dance on TikTok or whatever. The realistic downside is that you spend 500 bucks and you will at least learn something meaningful that you can utilize in future tests or somewhere else in your business, like some sort of actual data that you're like, oh, that's really interesting. I didn't get money back, but I got something back. So you can keep refining for future tests, something like that. But the potential upside is really high. Thousands or tens of thousand dollars worth of projects just from the $500 test. Let's talk about when this $500 test can work. Like I'm gonna give you three requirements that you need to have in place in order for this to work. The first is your client value has to be in the right band. $1,500 is on the lowest NFC make this work. Below that, it just doesn't work. $25,000 is on the higher end that I've seen work. Way above that definitely doesn't work because you'd have to spend so much.