The Secret to Consistent Clients | The Lead Generation Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 325

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 listening to the podcast, first of all, welcome. So glad to have you here. This podcast is for you if you are a creative freelancer, you offer freelance services, and you want to make more from your creative skills without selling your soul. That sounds like you're in the right spot for my returning listeners. So glad to have you back. Horrible week for me. I'm just going to be straight up with you. If you want to know why, let's talk about that for a second, then we'll get into what we're going to talk about on the show today, because y'all don't care about what my problems I'm encountering here. It's been affecting my business in a very negative way, and I would love any insight from any people out there who can help me on this, please, to help me get past this horrible week. On Friday, it's Tuesday right now, on Friday, my Facebook account was hacked again. And before you judge me, let me just back up and say this happened earlier in the year. And I talked about in the previous episode what happened. We found that one of my backup emails that was associated with my main account was compromised because it was an old account I never used anymore. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So when that happened, I took my security very seriously with my Facebook account because my whole business is tied to that with my Facebook business profile and our ad accounts and everything are under my personal profile. So what I did to prevent this from ever happening again was I created a unique email address that I only used to log in to Facebook. I create a 25-digit randomized password for that email address. I have two-factor authentication turned on for that email address. And the only thing that email address is used for is to log in to my personal Facebook page. So that email address is as secure as humanly possible. Was not breached, by the way. Also, for my Facebook account, randomized 25-digit password generated by one password. I used two-factor authentication for my Facebook account. And despite all of that, someone still access my account on Friday. And I genuinely have no idea how they got into the account in the first place. How they bypass my two-factor authentication on my Facebook account. And changed my password, took my email address, my phone number off the account, switched it all over their own stuff, set up their own two-factor authentication on the account. So even when I get the password reset and go through all that BS, I still can't log in because they set up their own two-factor authentication on my own account. It's been like five days since that happened. And it's been a whirlwind of me trying to get back into the account, submitting my passport and my ID to Meta or Facebook to get back in. And no luck. If any experts are out there to say, hey Brian, this is probably what happened to your account and how it got hacked. Please be my guest, send me an email, shoot me a reply in any email you ever get from me. And I would love to hear your input on how that happened. The two theories are this. One is something called session hijacking. I was at a coffee shop working on the public Wi-Fi the day before this happened, something I've never heard of until I was researching what this could be. So that's one option of what it could be. I don't understand session hijacking other than they can essentially, through Wi-Fi access and act like they're you on their browser. I don't know. I think they have to physically be in the coffee shop with me. So I don't think that happened. The second theory is some bizarre theory about how there's a security hole in meta and somebody there understands it and knows it and is exploiting it and selling kits to hackers to exploit this. That's like a tinfoil hat theory. But I'm not the only one that's been affected by this. I've been obviously doing a bunch of research and there are tons of people. Almost all of them are specifically people like me who advertise on meta platforms. Our accounts are being targeted. So if you run ads through meta, that's Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever other properties they own, you could be at risk. And I don't know what else to tell you because I literally have better security set up on my Facebook account than I do my bank account. And the reason I can say that is because, yes, I have two factor authentication turned on. Yes, I have crazy passwords that are unique to that specific site on everything. However, with my bank account, I don't even think I have a unique email address that I use just to log in to my bank account. So that's like one extra step of security that I took for meta and they still got past it. So I genuinely don't understand. But the problem with meta is even if I'm spending tens of thousand dollars a month on ads or I was my account shut off now, even though that's the case, I still can't talk to a human being and meta. So I'll keep you updated on what happens there. But that's been a horrible week for me because it's a huge part of my businesses. So after all of that, let's talk about the topic of the show today because whether or not you have access to your account and you're locked out or you're just a freelancer who's like, Brian, get on with the show. I don't care about your stupid problems, which is probably the majority of people. It's OK. Doesn't matter. Lead generation is something you have to figure out and learn to master if you want to take client acquisition in your own hands. So I wanted to create an entire series on just the topic of lead generation for freelancers because pretty much every freelancer has ever talked to. They are literally just waiting around for clients to find them. They're waiting for referrals. They're in that what I call word of mouth death trap. That is when you are waiting for people to magically appear in your inbox, asking to hire you, and you do that long enough and you go through the feast of fame and cycles where you have too many clients and then no clients and then too many clients and then no clients. And eventually you hit this really long spurt where you have a really bad down year or a really long series of months with very few to no clients and you don't know what to do. So you generally have to give up and go back to a day job. That's the word of mouth death trap. And the people who perpetuate this lie of word of mouth is the only or best way to get clients as a freelancer. Those people are the ones who are doing really well with word of mouth. And those people generally have never had to figure out how to actually do lead generation or have any sort of lead generation practices put into their freelance businesses. But that doesn't mean that that's the better way. That just means they've never had to figure it out. So those people are unqualified on telling you how to get clients for your business. And even without that, a lot of those people that are saying they kept their calendars full for 15 years with just word of mouth clients. Many of them, if you were to seriously question them, they're still taking on the bill paying work they don't want to do. So it's just the clients that come to them that they have to take on because they know they need to pay their bills. And it's not necessarily the clients that they want to work with that fill them up emotionally and creatively. So whether or not you're getting referrals right now, which you should, if you're good at what you do, you should get referrals. But whether or not you're getting referrals, if your calendar is not 100% booked solid with your ideal clients, then something has to change. And waiting around for clients to magically appear or listening to those people that say word of mouth is the only way to get clients, those people are not helping your cause. And so maybe step back and think there's got to be a better way. And there is. The better way is something called lead generation. And this episode is spurred on by a book that just recently came out a month ago called 100 Million Dollar Leads. It's booked by Alex Hermosy. If you haven't picked that up, if you haven't bought that yet, go buy it. The link to it will be in our show notes at 6figurecreative.com/277.