What’s Working Now For Client Acquisition (A Guide For Freelancers)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 330

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 am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time ever listening to the show, welcome, so glad to have you here. Thank you for giving this podcast a chance. There's a ton of shows out there and you decided to listen to this one, which is great. This podcast is for you if you are a creative freelancer. You offer your freelance services for money. You want to make more money from your creative skills and you want to do so without selling your soul where you can actually sleep well at night. If that sounds like you, you are at the right place. It is October 1st. As of the time this episode airs, we should be into the full swing of fall where it feels like fall. Maybe the temperature's not quite there yet, if I'm to guess, because it's like end of September right now for me. It was looking like it's still gonna be kind of hot, but pumpkin spice lattes. I got my coffee here. This is not a pumpkin spice latte. It's actually just a black decaf coffee. For those who don't know, I stopped drinking caffeine for medical reasons, and I still roast my own coffees, but they're decaf now, which is a lot harder to roast. I'm not a huge pumpkin spice guy, but I respect those. If that's your cup of tea, then pumpkin spice tea, would that be good? I don't know. I'm gonna stop yapping. Today's episode, we're gonna talk through what is working today for client acquisition, for freelancers. So again, as of October 2024, this will still be relevant 2025, I promise you. A couple months does not change what's working and what's not working. But this is what's working that we're seeing, working with tons of freelancers, well over 100 people right now that we work with closely. So we get to see inside of lots and lots of different businesses, what's working, what's not working, troubleshooting the problems. One of my favorite things on earth to do is problem solving. It is like probably my biggest superpower. No matter what problem comes up, I guarantee I will find a solution to it or a workaround, which is just another way of saying solution. So I get to do this amongst all of our clients. And it's a lot of fun. So with that, we've found out what works best right now. So what I'm not going to cover in today's episode, I'm not going to cover word of mouth. I'm not going to cover content marketing or any kind of other social media marketing or long form content marketing, whether you're posting reels, or you're doing YouTube or blogs or whatever. We're not going to talk about content marketing. We're not going to talk about cold outreach. We're not going to talk about marketplaces like Fiverr or Upwork or one of those places where you just list yourself for sale. We're not going to talk over networking in person or online. We're not going to talk through even email marketing, which I still love. All those can work. And this is a really important point here. I am not here to dictate how you run your business or your life. I am just telling you what I'm seeing working right now in today's age. Anything that I just mentioned can work. You can make all of those work for you. And it depends on whether you come from the approach of, well, none of these work for me because of X, Y, and Z, and you're just an excuse maker. Or it's like, none of these work because of X, Y, and Z. Therefore, I will figure out how to solve that problem, which again is the problem solver approach, which if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to have that approach. All of those can work. However, I'm not going to talk about any of those today because here's Brian's unfiltered opinion on each of those. Word of mouth, it's not reliable. It's a wonderful bonus to have. It is a good sign that you're doing good work and that people want to refer you to others, but it is not the thing that's going to keep your business running, especially if you don't want to have these ups and downs to feast your family in months. Let's put that aside. Content marketing, awesome, but it's a treadmill. Take it from somebody who is doing a podcast right now. This is long form content. I do this just about every week. If I don't, it's because I'm taking a retirement tour with my mom, who she finally retired, we got to spend an entire summer traveling with her. Amazing experience. I would not trade that for anything else. So yes, I will take a month off of the podcast to do that. But aside from that, over 300 episodes, this has been a weekly show for years now. Since 2017, 2018, when I launched this show, this is a treadmill. So if you do not want to be on the treadmill for a long time, content marketing, it might not be for you. Cold outreach is similar. It's like a treadmill. If you stop doing it, it stops working. It's actually worse than content marketing, because content marketing, if you stop doing it, it still works because you can do replays. You still get like SEO.