The 10 Most Brutal Client Acquisition Mistakes That Are Wrecking Your Earning Potential

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 304

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'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time ever listening to the show, glad to have you here. I don't know why you chose 304 as your first episode, a little bit of a random choice, but you're in the right place right now. If you are a freelancer, you offer creative services, and you want to make more money from those creative skills without selling your soul, that sounds like you, you're in the right spot. For my returning listeners, glad you're still here.

Thanks for showing up again.

For those who don't know corporate terminology, we are now in the Q2. It's the second quarter of the year. There's four quarters, if you didn't know. A little past, I guess the time this episode airs, we're a little past the quarter waypoint of the year. So there's an exercise I like to do, it's fun to do right now. You should probably be able to do this if you know how much you've made so far this year, is look at how much you've made so far this year, and look at how that multiplies by four, and what that number is gonna be at the end of the year, and you tell yourself, is this something I'm happy with, or something I'm sad about? Is this happy face or sad face? The good thing about being in Q2 is we still have a ton of time to solve whatever issues are causing us to be sad face right now, if we're not happy with the number that we have right now after the first quarter of the year. So if you're stoked, keep doing what you're doing, you're doing awesome. I'm glad you're here, even though you probably don't need my help if you're happy with that Q1 results.

However, if you're unhappy, today's episode I hope is gonna be something that's going to enlighten you on ways to potentially fix that. Because something closely tied to income or revenue for your freelance business is something called client acquisition. And more specifically, client acquisition strategies are how you actually get clients as a freelancer, something very important. This episode specifically, we're gonna be diving into 10 brutal client acquisition mistakes that are crushing your earning potential as a freelancer. You see, most freelancers, they do not take client acquisition seriously. And so when we get to this point in the year where we're one quarter of the way through, one fourth of the way through, we're not happy with that number that we see. Or you might actually be happy with that number, but you know that was a feast season, and we're about to hit that famine season. And so you hit this constant cycle of feast and famine, feast and famine. So if you feel like you're in that kind of cycle, maybe right now you're in a feast or a famine, but you know you've been in that before, you wanna solve it.

I'm gonna talk through those 10 mistakes in this episode, and I'm going to bet that you're gonna fall into at least four or five of these mistakes.

And here's the thing. If you solve those mistakes, things will get better. It's an inevitability.

We all got into this freelancing game. I think most of us got into it because of the, if you look at the sign behind me, because of the passion piece. For those who are listening right now, there's a sign behind me that says, it takes more than passion. We all got into this because of passion. And so in a perfect world, we have a consistent flow of clients, the perfect types of people we love to work with, not those bill-paying gigs, but the ones that actually fulfill us. There's only feast. There is no famine. But to get there, we've got to avoid these 10 mistakes. So let's get into this. The first mistake, I'm gonna quickly just breeze over. It's what I call the obvious basics. And it's stuff I've talked about again and again and again on the show before.

If you are just waiting around for clients to magically appear, that's called a word of mouth death trap. That is a disaster waiting to happen if it hasn't already happened. It is literally the reason you get through Feast and Famine, because you get a bunch of referrals, you have a ton of work to fulfill on, you get busy doing all that work, you neglect client acquisition even more, and you actually probably get a little overconfident because of those clients coming in from referrals. And then as you start to do the work, and time passes, all of a sudden fewer and fewer inquiries are coming in, fewer and fewer referrals are coming in. And then you have a long season of famine where you start hustling for client acquisition. It's that feast of, this is literally the roller coaster. This is the bare basics. So if you are here and you are new, and this is the first time you're hearing about this, we do not just wait around for referrals in this community. We take proactive actions to get more than just referrals. Referrals are fantastic. They're an inevitability if you're good at what you do, but they're not how we get clients exclusively. So that's the first obvious basic that I'm just gonna breeze over. If you want more on that, we've got plenty on the podcast backlog. Just go back to episode 182, called The Word of Mal Death Trap and How to Avoid It. That's probably a good place for you to start. The other kind of obvious basic that I talk about all the time in this podcast is you're trying to appeal to everyone. And finish the sentence, if you've heard this before, if you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. There's this weird counterintuitive thing as freelancers that when we are desperate for clients, then we try to appeal to more people, because if we could just get one of each little niche that we're going after, and one for this service, and one for that service, and one for this type of client, and one for that type of client, that it'll all add up to enough clients to pay the bills. And it couldn't be further from the truth. The more broad you are in your appeal, the more you will just be like water off a duck's back. You are ignorable. You are not specific enough for people to want to actually hire you. So that's the first mistake is just falling into the obvious basics. If you're new here, then maybe you're falling into those. If you've been around a while, then you're probably not falling into these mistakes, which leads us to mistake number two for client acquisition, and that is you're a dabbler. This is another almost obvious basic, I almost put this in the obvious basics area, but it's still worth really, really diving into, is you hear something on the show, another creator out there who's telling you what to do. A good example would be Christo from the future. He tells you something really smart, because he's really smart. And you're like, damn, I should really do that. And you start to do it. But you kind of half-ass it, or you just kind of dabble in it for a while. Maybe you get bored, maybe it didn't work well, maybe it did work, but you just stop doing it for whatever reason. This is one of the most insidious things freelancers do. We want to focus on what we love, and we want to ignore those things that we don't love, even though when you start a freelance business, there is a bunch of stuff that you're going to have to do. You don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, no one wants to do it, but you have to do it. And this is one of those things. If you find a great strategy and you only dabble in it, it's a recipe for disaster. An example I see all the time in our community is the boosted posts.