The Best Ad Platforms for Freelancers (Ranked & Explained)

**Brian Hood** (0:00)
This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 377
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. Which ad platform is best for freelancers? Whether it's Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google, PPC, one of the others, should you even advertise it all, everyone's got an opinion, and most freelancers are just guessing. It's costing you a lot of money if you're one of those who are just guessing whether or not you should be doing any of these or one of those. So in this episode, we're gonna break down all of the major platforms, when to use them, when to avoid them, how to figure out the best one for your business. And I'm qualified to talk about this somewhat because I spent over a million dollars of my own money running ads. But that's small potatoes. That's tiny, that's tiny amount of money. That's loser money. My co-host today, Dennis Schneider, he's one of our coaches here, he has spent more than $15 million on ads. He ran a performance marketing agency, meaning he didn't make money unless he performed for his clients. And he got his agency all the way up to $3.6 million. And then he sold that thing off and said, I never want to run a business again. He works for me. So hell yeah. Dennis, welcome to the show, man.

**Dennis Schneider** (1:13)
Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Excited to talk about the stuff I know. I don't know anything else.

**Brian Hood** (1:19)
He actually runs our ads. So if you've been seeing our ads for like the past two months, maybe three months by the time this episode airs, then chances are Dennis wrote the ad script, ran all the ads for it. Dennis did it all. And all I can say is it's a huge burden off my shoulders. Thanks, bro. Thanks.

**Dennis Schneider** (1:34)
You're welcome.

**Brian Hood** (1:35)
Yeah. So he's just a quick thing about Dennis. When I hired him, he was in living in Japan. He's from Germany originally. Then we train him. When we train him, he's living in like Switzerland. And then now he's living in New Zealand. He's like a true digital nomad. So maybe we'll have a future episode on just like how to be a true digital nomad. But we're not talking about Dennis much more. If you don't give a shit about Dennis, good. We're not going to talk about him anymore. We're going to talk about things you care about, freelancer. By the end, you're going to know exactly which platforms make sense for you. And if you should be running ads at all. And one of these will probably surprise you is what my gut tells me. So let's get to this stuff, dude.
You are the expert at this. This episode came from conversations we've had with our clients because this sort of stuff comes up all the time whether they should be using different ad platforms, what makes sense for them, should they be running ads at all. So we're going to cover in this again, we're going to cover Google PPC, we're going to cover YouTube, we're going to cover LinkedIn, and we're going to cover Meta ads. Those are the four biggest main ones. And we're going to start with Google PPC. What is Google PPC, first of all, Dennis, just for anyone who doesn't even fall what that is.

**Dennis Schneider** (2:29)
Yeah, Google PPC is basically, if you want to put it in simple terms, it's paying to be placed high on Google search. So whenever someone types anything in Google and searches for whatever you're searching for, the first three results are going to be Google PPC. And then there's a bunch more PPC down on the page and on the next pages. But the most relevant are the first top three. You basically pay to be ranked high on Google. And it's called PPC because it's pay-per-click. So you don't pay for impressions. You just pay whenever someone clicks on your ad, that's when you pay a few bucks, depending on how big competition is and all that stuff. Can range from a few cents to ten bucks and more depending on the niche you're in.

**Brian Hood** (3:06)
Got it. And just straight off the bat, what are the pros and cons of Google PPC?

**Dennis Schneider** (3:09)
The obvious pro is someone is searching for whatever you're providing, and you're going to show up all the way at the top. So they're already looking for what you're providing, which is great, of course, because they're already pretty far in the sales cycle. They're interested in what you offer. And another pro is you pay per click, so you don't have the risk of your ad copy is bad and no one clicks, but you pay for impressions and stuff like that, which can be a pro, it can also be a con. It's kind of a mixture.