The Freelance Industries Where Ads Are a Waste of Money

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 399

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. Have you ever thought that maybe paid ads wouldn't work in your industry? If so, in this episode, I'm going to break down exactly where paid ads actually work for freelancers where they tend to struggle, sometimes even flop, and why a lot of freelancers are making this decision honestly based on gut or feel or vibe or assumptions instead of actual data. To be clear, what I'm going to share in this episode is not theory, it is not speculation, it is not my guessing, it is based on actual experience that I've actually seen with my own eyes, what I've seen work and what I've seen struggle and what I've seen just ultimately fail. At this point, I've helped hundreds of freelancers test paid ads in dozens of industries, and I've seen both the wins, I've seen the train wrecks, and I've seen the excuse of, hey, this won't work in my industry, hold back so many freelancers from one of the most powerful tools they could ever use for client acquisition, and that's paid ads. Because paid ads, when you get it right, is a faucet you can turn on and turn off as needed. When things get slow, you can turn it on and ramp it up. When things get busy for you, you can turn it off and ramp it back down. And compared to word of mouth, it is incredible. It is a tool worth learning because you're not dependent on someone else. You're not dependent on a hopeful referral or somebody to just think of you magically one day when they have a million other things going on in their lives. I love word of mouth, but it's not dependable. We've grown this team to 13 people, not because I rely on the hope marketing aspects, it's because I've put real actual marketing systems into this business, and I want the same for you. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. It is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their souls. I take my influence from lots of different industries, lots of different businesses that I've been a part of, industries that I look up to and learn from, and I distill those things down and bring them to you. The freelancer, the creative freelancer, the solopreneur, the person who doesn't really want to learn those things, I'm going to force, I'm going to shove it down your throat to you. Accept this. And I'm not just talking about paydads, I'm talking about a lot of different things from a lot of different perspectives. So if you like having the idea of somebody out there learning from many different industries about what works, people with big brains, they can pay a lot more than we do to figure out best practices that I can pull back to you. If that sounds good, this is the right podcast for you. We are at episode 399 We're one away from 400 at this point. My God. Next episode, I'm going to actually do a big update for 6 Figure Creative as a whole and what our plans are for 2026, as well as what's the future of this podcast. That'll be next week, hopefully. So let's dive into this. This episode is basically going to help those of you who have that objection or that doubt that paid ads could even work for you in the industry. And what I've seen is that this is rarely true from most of the freelancers that I hear this excuse from. There are a few industries where paid ads just simply won't work. I'll talk about those today, but I want to rephrase this kind of objection or this doubt that freelancers have. I want to rephrase this for you. It's less of paid ads won't work in my industry. It's more of I'm scared paid ads won't work in my industry, so I won't try them. I've actually never heard someone say this excuse who's actually tried paid ads. And even if they had, if you've ever tried paid ads and you have this excuse and you said, this won't work in my industry because it didn't work for me, literally go back to last week's episode, episode 398, where I talked about why paid ads aren't working for you. I give you seven fixes for creative freelancers. You probably made one or more of those mistakes that I talked about last week if you've even tried them before. So hopefully you're at least open to the idea of discussing this. Will this work for you or not? If you're one of the industries I'm going to cover first, which is the ones I've seen them struggle, then maybe you have a valid excuse. Otherwise, if you're not one of these industries I'm going to cover at the beginning of this episode, then you likely have either not tried it at all, or you tried it and you half-assed it. If you're being honest with yourself, you half-assed it, which we can talk about that later. So let's talk about where paid ads struggle. Where are the places that they may not work well or at all? And this can be very freelancer dependent. If you're a great executor, somebody who tends to be successful at most of the things they try, you can still make it work in some of these industries, but you may struggle. But if you are not a great executor, you're somebody who has no self-confidence, you don't succeed at all the things you try, then these are not the industries that I would try to do paid ads in. The first area is what I'm kind of lumping in together into team-based creative industries. This is a broad thing. I don't know how else to categorize this, but this is things like when you're building a crew for something. Examples are like TV and film, when you're putting together a large production crew to do a big project. That's what I'm talking about here. It could be something like you put together video editors, music composers, video colorists, audio engineers. They have all sorts of creative freelancers to build a part of this large team.