The REAL “Secret” to Consistent Clients (and Income) as a Freelancer

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 315

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.

You ever have one of those mornings you wake up and you're just like, hey, I really want to piss a lot of people off today.

I outlined the episode today, and I think it's going to ruffle some feathers, most likely. If you feel personally attacked from this episode, I apologize in advance.

Let's get into this. We're going to talk through the real secret. I use secrets and air quotes here. I probably used it in the podcast title as well. The real secret to consistent clients and income as a freelancer. We're going to talk about this today.

I looked at some data, and over the last year, we've talked to over 800 freelancers one-to-one to talk through learning about their business, seeing where they're at now, where they're trying to go, what that gap is, the whole kind of thing.

And because of that, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast.

I mean, 800 people is a lot of people. If you imagine 800 people standing in a room and they're lined up to talk to you one-on-one-on-one, hey, that's a lot of conversations. It's also a lot of things that you've learned over that time. So this episode is going to kind of serve two parties. One is those people who want the best for their freelance businesses, and they're going to take this episode and say, gosh, I needed that today, and you're going to be better for it. And then there's going to be the other camp, the victim mentality mindset. You're going to hear this episode, you're going to feel personally attacked, you're going to send me some hate mail, which you can email brian at 6figurecreative.com or podcast at 6 Figure Creative, it all goes the same place.

You can email me there all your hatred, you can spew that to me. Brian, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm a special snowflake, and you'll never tell me how to run my business, in which case I will say au revoir, thank you, goodbye, I don't need you in this community.

But let's talk to this. So 95% of the time, maybe 99% of the time, but like probably conservatively 95% of the time, here's the scenario of the type of person that I've talked to in one of these 800 conversations. They're struggling with feast or famine. They're taking on gigs that we call kind of bill paying work is the terminology we use here at 6 Figure Creative. Bill paying work, things you don't really want to do, but you gotta do because you gotta pay the bills. Beals, that's the Southern, bills, bills, sorry. You gotta pay the bills. You're underpaid for the value that you usually provide, the skill set that you have, usually because you're offering some sort of what we call commoditized service. It's the same thing that everyone else in your area offers, packaged the exact same way, price in a similar manner. And because of that, your prices are driven down. You're relying 100% on just word of mouth referrals, repeat clients, friends and family, your immediate network for gigs. No stranger has ever hired you, most likely. So that's the basis there.

And if they've tried anything at all, other than word of mouth, it's usually just a dabbling, a little smattering here and there of like, dab it on social media, they post sporadically.

They've dabbled in like, cold outreach or cold pitching. They've sporadically sent emails here and there, or DMs or whatever your method is. They've dabbled in paid ads, half-assing, like hitting the boosted post button on Instagram, or maybe they've spent a few hundred bucks on Google ads and it didn't work. They got nothing out of it.

Not even thinking about the fact that like, yeah, you spent a few hundred bucks, which is not even a small testing budget, to try to go land a $5,000 client for your very first foray into ads. Again, if that sounds like you, you were either going to love this episode or you're going to hate this episode. If you were brand new to this podcast, hi, my name's Brian Hood, freelancer for 10 plus years.

This podcast is where I help freelancers who offer creative services to earn more money from your creative skills without selling your soul. And if you're brand new, this is a great episode to figure out, do you love me or do you hate me? We'll find out in this episode today.