Why Freelancers Need to Stop Believing These 6 Paid Ad Myths ASAP

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 344

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 listening to the show, first of all, welcome, thank you. You're in the right place right now if you are a creative freelancer and you're trying to earn more from your creative skills without selling your soul. In today's episode, I'm going to change your mind about paid ads. Freelancers unanimously don't believe that paid ads are for them. Well, every industry on earth does paid advertising in some way, shape or form, but freelancers, the special snowflakes, the creatives that we are, we don't need to do paid ads. It's not for us. And if that is your mindset, first of all, I understand it. It is a mindset that I had for years. And some of these myths that I'm going to talk about today are things that I perpetuated over the years. If that's your mindset and that's your approach, and you've never done anything more than dabble with paid ads, then you are missing out on one of the fastest ways to have more leads and clients than you could possibly know what to do with. And the only thing I ask you, if you're fully opposed to paid ads as a freelancer, or you just don't see the benefit of it, or you've tried it, the only thing I ask is just to keep an open mind during this episode. Be open to the ideas and the things that I bring to you and the myths that I tried to bust in today's episode. The cool thing about paid ads is you are the one that's in control of it. It's not like referrals where you have to wait for somebody to refer someone to you. It's not like cold outreach or getting into a gatekeeper industry where there's somebody that holds the keys to all the projects and you have to win that person over. It's not like social media where you have to deal with finicky algorithms to hope that the content gods put your stuff up in front of everybody and that you're dancing your little, shaking your little butt on TikTok or whatever you do. Maybe they don't. I don't know. I don't use TikTok.

I'm just saying this is bypassing all of that, and it puts the control back into your hands. And there are very few things where I think you have full control. I've mentioned this on past episodes before, but I've spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars profitably on paid ads. I've helped others run a profitable paid ads, and we're going to talk about some of the stuff today. But these are the numbers based on my past. You could put your ad in front of a million eyeballs this week. That could get you around 5000 leads this week. A couple of hundred sales calls this week, and more clients than you could probably manage in a year's time this week. Now, logistically, you don't have any capability of servicing that many sales calls and managing that many leads, but that's what I talk about when this is an opportunity for you to have more leads than you could possibly know what to do with. That's a position that no freelancer that I know is in right now. Even the ones who are in pretty high demand, that are booked solid, there's still a lot of like bill-paying work they're taking on. We're going to address some of these things today that I want to talk about. But I know people that are really against paid ads, and I'm not saying paid ads is the best way for everybody. It's definitely not for everybody, but it is the fastest way and something that most people ignore. So if that's starting to tickle your fancy a little bit, whet the appetite, let's talk about the myths that freelancers need to stop believing ASAP. Myth number one. All the successful freelancers I know never advertise. I'm going to use whiny voices for this. This is kind of part objection, part myth. I say this is a myth because I know a lot of freelancers that use paid ads, and they use it profitably, and they use it well. So already, it's a myth. It's busted. I know people that do it. You might even know people that do it, but just because you don't know people that use paid ads doesn't mean that's a reasonable myth that holds you back from doing paid ads. Here's the secret. I hate to throw our entire industry under the bus. In most cases, especially with paid ads, most freelancers have no idea what they're doing. Definitely with paid ads and in a lot of other areas, especially around marketing in general, most of our listeners are awesome at what they do, but they struggle to get clients. And it's because they just don't know what they're doing from the marketing front. And so when you look to the entire industry and say, this isn't the norm in this industry, the designer world, they never run ads. In the photography world, no, you don't run ads. Music producers, oh, you can't run ads for music production. When you look around and the most common method that people in the freelancing world get clients is through word of mouth and referrals. That's based off something called the survivorship bias. And I've covered this on an episode, episode 182, the word of mouth, death trap, and how to avoid it. So if you want more details on what this means and how deep this goes, go listen to that episode. But in general, survivorship bias just looks at the people that have survived to this point, where they are booked solid with their ideal clients, the people you might look up to in your industry. Every creative field has some big names and big people that they look up to. And those people made it to where they are generally because of word of mouth and referrals. Word of mouth and referrals is the path of least resistance for getting clients. It is the easiest way to get clients if the flow is high enough to keep you booked solid with your ideal clients. The problem is, in most cases, especially when you're starting out, referrals are few and far between. So when you are a brand new freelancer or somebody who's earlier in their career, or somebody who's moonlighting on the side and you got a day job, you generally don't have enough client pool and a big enough network to keep yourself booked solid, just some referrals. I call that the word of mouth deathtrap. The people who survived that and made it to the level that you look up to them, the successful people you know, those people survived the deathtrap. This is where survivorship bias comes in, because all the people that survived the deathtrap, you look to them and you saw, oh my gosh, this person, they just did word of mouth. They just did referrals, and they got to the level that they're at right now, but they ignore the millions of dead bodies left along the way of the freelancers who bought into the word of mouth deathtrap lie and never made it to the level that these people you look up to. So that's survivorship bias. You're only looking at the survivors as the example of what to follow, and you're ignoring the cautionary tales left in the wake of people who just waited around for clients to find you. And if you were to hear from those millions of people in the creative freelance industry who just couldn't make this work because they couldn't get the momentum going, the word of mouth snowball built up big enough, if you talk to those people and heard from them, they would probably tell you, I just couldn't make it work. Word of mouth wasn't enough to keep me busy. Word of mouth wasn't enough for me to leave my day job. Word of mouth led to a drought in the Feast of Famine life cycle of a freelancer to where I just couldn't weather and had to go get a job. That's where I'm at now. Am I happy? Who knows? Maybe they are, maybe they're not, but they definitely didn't make it work. That's why we can't look to the rest of the industry as an example, because a lot of them don't know what they're talking about or doing. And B, survivorship bias paints the data set. So that is myth number one. All of the successful freelancers I know never advertise. Myth number two, no particular order, by the way. But myth number two, this is a big one when it comes to paid advertising. If you're good at what you do, you shouldn't need to advertise.