The Only 6 Methods For Getting Clients in 2025

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 345

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. Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome. Thank you so much for giving this podcast a chance. This is for freelancers who are creatives, who are trying to earn more from their creative skills, and they want to do it without selling their souls. If that sounds like you, you are in the right place. We had an episode a few back called What the Heck is Marketing? And we just talked through what marketing even is. And there's something called the Four Ps of Marketing, and this episode is going to talk about one of those four Ps of marketing, it's promotion. This is the thing that's going to keep your calendar full if you know how to use it. It's a tool that is mostly ignored by most freelancers, and the reason it's ignored is because most freelancers just feel like, if I'm good enough, people should hire me. All my successful friends that I know or all the people that I look up to, they're booked solid just from referrals, just from word of mouth, just repeat clients. And while there's nothing wrong with referrals, there's nothing wrong with that being your main source of clients, it is not realistic for most people, especially early in their careers. And if you rely on referrals and word of mouth, I call that the word of mouth death trap, and that's what leads to the Feast of Famine cycle that most freelancers never get out of. This lack of leads in clients leads to fear-based pricing, which means it's a race to the bottom because you're always desperate to get clients, or at least you go through seasons of desperation where you have to lend that client because if you don't get that, you're not gonna pay the bills this month. And speaking of bills, lack of promotion, if you don't understand promotion, which we're gonna talk about today, this is what leads you to take on those bill-paying clients. And for those who don't know what that means, it just means you're taking on this client just because you need to pay the bills, not because you're the best option for them, not because that you actually wanna work with them, but you simply have to pay the bills.

And this is the quickest way to burn out, lack of satisfaction, and I'd say it's not quite there. We've all done it. There's no shame there, but it's so close to selling your soul. We're talking about, we try to earn more money without selling our souls. When we take on clients that are not a good fit, that are what we call bill-paying work, I think a little bit of your soul dies every single time. So this episode, we're gonna try to avoid ever having to take on bill-paying clients again. But before we even get into promotion and these six ways to promote your freelance services, before we even get into that, I do wanna mention something that is worth noting. I call it the 1% rule of thumb. I call it a rule of thumb because it is a rule of thumb. It is not the rule, and it can vary wildly from niche to niche, industry to industry, freelancer to freelancer. But the 1% rule of thumb just says about 1% of the people who know you exist will hire you each year. And you can do the math quickly. If I need 100 clients this year to hire me, then I need about 10,000 people to know I exist as a freelancer. And again, this is just a rule of thumb to give you the aha moment you need to understand that promotion is something I should take seriously. Not just dabbling in different areas, not just waiting for people to refer me to others, but actually putting promotion in my hands as something that I do as part of my business every single week, every single month, every single year, to get my name out there as a freelancer so that people know that I exist. So that 1% adds up to a sustainable amount for my business. And for those of you who are not getting the number of clients that you want, not always, but a lot of times, it is because people just don't know you exist. Now, there can be other things. It can be that you're just really bad at what you do. If that's the case, there's other things to work on. But if you're genuinely good at what you do, and when people hire you, they come back to you, and when people hire you, they refer you to others, but it's just not enough to stay busy all the time at the rates that you want, that's where it's a promotion issue. And if you get this right, where you understand the numbers and you understand how to promote, and you've mastered one or two of these six methods I'm going to talk about today, that's how you get consistency in your business, day to day, month to month, year to year. That's how you get more clients so you're never desperate. That's how you can charge more because you have, you can cherry pick the ones you actually want to work with, and you have the money you need to solve problems. There's like a saying in sales, I don't know where this comes from, but it's basically the saying is, sales solves all problems. And the other way of looking at it is, money solves all problems. It's ridiculous to say as a creative, it's not realistic, but I will say this, money solves money problems. So if there's a problem in your business that can be solved with money, then figuring this stuff out so that you have more money to reinvest in your business to solve some of the problems that money can solve is a wonderful thing, because it takes the burden off of you, the solo freelancer, who's trying to figure out all things with just your elbow grease, and you can throw some money at the problems. And I'm telling you, when you have excess money in your business that you can reinvest to hiring your own freelancers to solve problems, getting an assistant, getting a coach, whatever thing you want to throw the money at to solve the problem, when you have that opportunity, it is a godsend to say, okay, this is no longer my problem. Someone else can solve this for me, or this tool can solve it for me, or this person can come in and take this off my plate so I never have to do it again. That is the sort of stuff that money can solve problems with, and you cannot get there unless you get the promotion piece sorted out. So in this episode, I want to break down these six ways to promote yourself as a freelancer. There may be more than this, but this is the only six ways that I know. And these are ranked from my least favorite to my favorite. So my favorite is number six. My least favorite is number one here. Now, all of these are viable. Every single one of these, 100% guaranteed it works for the right person if done correctly because all six of these methods have been utilized either by me, people I know, or people that I trust, that I follow, that utilize one of these six methods. So it's not a matter of which one of these works. All of them work. It's a matter of which one of these is right for me, or really you as the freelancer who's listening to this episode or watching this on YouTube. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment, say hi. Hi, Brian. Hi, YouTuber. All right, number one are the first method. This is my least favorite, by the way. These are reverse order from one being the worst, six being the best. Number one is outbound promotion. First of all, what is this? This is things like cold outreach, cold emails, cold EMS, cold calls. You could even if you wanted to lump networking in there, depending on the kind of networking it is. But this is where you're going out and finding the people that you want to work with on a one-to-one basis. So you're going out, outbound. I didn't come up with this name. It is what it is. Now, there are pros and cons of this method. Some people have worked wonders with this sort of method, and they're actually, we had an episode 239, where we had Becca Kingsbury, where her agency called Dingus and Zazie or something, it's like a really weird name. They've built their agency to over a half a million dollars per month, mainly through cold outbound. So again, this is stuff where I know it works, but they work with another agency called HyperGen to send out something like 50,000 emails a month, cold emails a month. It's insane. I don't know how they do it, but it can work, and the pros are it's very process driven. So if you have a process you put into place, you can hand it off to someone else to just do it for you over and over and over again. It's a rinse and repeat process. So go back to the episode, listen to it, if you want to hear more about that. They did that amongst a bunch of other things. They're a crazy agency. That is one of my favorite, most underrated interviews, by the way. If you want to go back to episode 239, go check that out. And it can also be pretty dependable. So if you set up a system that works on repeat, you have steps that they go through, meaning consistent inputs, and you know the outputs, meaning for every certain number of emails or certain amount of DMs or whatever that I send out, I get X number of leads or replies, and I can turn X number of those into clients. It can be dependable. The problem is it can be time consuming, especially if you are still trying to do it yourself instead of outsourcing it, and it's a very low trust way to start a relationship. So again, I don't like doing this. I've never done it myself. I know people that do it and they succeed well for it. I'm not going to say I'm never doing it, but this is for those of you with thick skin and those who like clear goals and clear steps with clear outcomes. One thing worth mentioning, by the way, as far as who this is for, this is actually a really bad process to use for promotion. If you have a really low, what I call, average annual client value, if a client is not worth very much to you, doing this method is actually pretty pointless because you're going to have such a relatively low take rate percentage-wise, this is going to be way less than 1%. I promise you that, depending on how you're doing outreach. But you're going to have a really low take rate. And if clients are not worth very much to you from a lifetime value or an annual value to you, this is going to be not that fruitful. So Dingus and Zazie, they're a monthly recurring retainer for like unlimited design and creative services. That was their agency's model. And they're charging like $2,000 to $10,000 per month. So when your clients are worth at a minimum, like $2,000 per month, then getting one client is worth up to $25,000 a year on the low end if they stick around for a full year. So their approach for cold outreach can work because the deals are worth so much. So if you're doing, for example, mastering, I'm sorry to pick up my mastering engineer today. If you're doing audio mastering for $75 to $100 per song or per track and your average client's doing one to two songs, I don't know of any way to really make this work. So that's the first thing is outbound promotion. The second method is partnership promotion. You've heard me talk about this on the podcast before, but this is where partners are promoting you and your services to their network, their friends, their client lists. So this could be other freelancers. And this is where you've heard me talk about on the show, where we create what we call a referral network. Your referral network are people that serve the same client as you, but they don't offer the same service as you. So if you're a podcast producer, for example, I use that as an example in this show a lot. If you do podcast production services, you might find a videographer who serves the same type of client, you might find a graphic designer who serves the same type of client, and you refer work back and forth with each other. So for every client that you work with as a podcast producer, you're sending regular work to that freelancer, that designer, and that designer is referring work to you all the time for podcast production services. Now, there's a million ways this can look. You can also work with influencers where they're sending clients and leads to you, and you're paying out a referral fee for each lead or for each client. There's a million ways to set this up, and you can even do this through competitors. I remember back in 2015, I had deals set up with other people because I had too many leads. So if I had clients coming to me that either there were like the bill-paying works that I didn't want to do, I would cherry pick the ones that I wanted, and the ones that I didn't want, I would refer out to other people and get a referral fee for those clients that I was sending out to those other freelancers. So these were technically competitors because we were in the same space, offering the same exact service, but it worked out really well because I'm able to monetize leads and clients that I can't take on. This sort of process is really good for people who are good with building relationships because you need a network around you to build a referral network. And this is kind of similar to number one, you have to have a good pricing model, healthy margins in your business to be able to support this. And the reason being, generally, partnerships for referring work back and forth, they can be just like I scratch your back, you scratch mine, but generally speaking, they're going to have some sort of fee associated with it. It might just be 10% considered a finders fee for the lead. But if your leads aren't worth very much, then you can't afford to pay out a big enough commission for them to send work to you for it to be worth their while. So again, if you're doing nickel and dime projects, you have to do a lot of them for them to add up for any sort of monetary advantage for the person referring to you. And you still have to have enough profit at the end of the day to make it worth your while as well. So again, the numbers have to work in pretty much all of these methods. But that's just kind of one of the recurring themes in having a healthy business is pricing. And so if you go back to last week's episode where I talked about pricing, there's a lot of stuff in that episode that's going to help you when it comes to getting enough margins in your projects to be able to do some of these things. So if you're going to do partnership promotions, you need to understand the pros and the cons. The pros are it's affordable. Like you don't have to pay out a bunch of money until you get the clients. Because typically someone refers a lead or a client to you, you take them on, you get paid. From that payment, you pay out the referral or the affiliate or the partner, their little cut of it, the finder's fee. It's also higher trust. Whereas if you're doing cold outbound, which I was talking about earlier, where you're sending out emails or cold calling or cold DMing people, people have their guard up. They have that wall up or like, what the hell does this person want? What are they trying to sell me? But if it's a referral, like a referral from some of the, that lead knows like in trust to you, they're coming in in a much higher trust factor because they were referred to you. It's just a paid referral essentially. The cons of this are it's time consuming to get this all set up, to find referral partners who are even worth working with, who have a deal flow, that are going to be happy to send people to you and building that relationship and that trust. It's time consuming. I'm not gonna lie. That part takes a lot of time. Once it's set up though, it runs a lot easier. The next thing is you have a little control.