The Best Ad Platforms for Freelancers (Ranked & Explained)

377. best ad platform for freelancers with lil cutie dennis

===

Brian: [00:00:00] Which ad platform is best for freelancers, whether it's Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google, PPC, one of the others, should you even advertise it all? Everyone's got an opinion, and most freelancers are just guessing and it's costing you a lot of money.

Brian: If you're one of those who are just guessing. Whether or not you should be doing any of these or one of those. So in this episode, we're gonna break down all of the major platforms, when to use them, when to avoid them, how to figure out the best one for your business.

Brian: And I'm qualified to talk about this somewhat because I've spent over a million dollars, of my own money running ads. But that's, small potatoes. That's tiny. That's tiny amount of money. That's,loser money. My co-host today. Dennis Schneider, he's one of our coaches here. He has spent more than $15 million on ads. he ran a, performance marketing agency, meaning.

Brian: He didn't make money unless he performed for his clients and he got his agency all the way up to $3.6 million.

Dennis: and then hesold that thing off and said, I never wanna run a business again. And now he works for me, so hell yeah. woke up to the show, man.

Dennis: thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Brian: So, uh,

Dennis: About the stuff I know, because I don't know anything else.

Brian: Yeah, he actually runs our ads. So if you've been seeing our ads for like the past two [00:01:00] months, maybe three months by the time this episode airs, then chances are Dennis wrote the ad script. ran all the ads for it.Dennis did it all, and all I can say is it's a huge burden off my shoulder.

Brian: So Thanks bro. Thanks.

Dennis: You are welcome.

Brian: Yeah. So he's uh, just a, quick thing about Dennis. when I hired him, he was inliving in Japan. He's from Germany originally. Then we trained him when we trained him. He is living in like Switzerland and then now he's living in New Zealand. he's like a true digital nomad.

Brian: So maybe we'll have a future episode on just like how to be a true digital nomad, But, uh,we're not talk about Dennis much more. if you don't give a shit about Dennis, good. We're not gonna talk about him anymore. We're gonna talk about things you care about Freelancer.

Brian: By the end, you're gonna know exactly which platforms make sense for you. And if she should be running ads at all. and one of these will probably surprise you, is what my gut tells me. So let's get into this stuff. Dude, you are the,you're the expert at this.

Brian: this episode came from conversations we've had with our clients because, this sort of stuff comes up all the time, whether it should be using different ad platforms, what makes sense for them, should they be running ads at all? so we're gonna cover in this, again, we're gonna cover Google, PPC.

Brian: We're gonna cover YouTube. We're gonna cover LinkedIn, and we're gonna cover [00:02:00] meta ads. Those are thefour biggest main ones. And we're gonna start with Google, PPC. what is Google, PPC? First of all, Dan, it's just for anyone who doesn't even follow what that is.

Dennis: Yeah, Google. PPC is basically, if you wanna put it in simple terms, it's paying to be placed high on Google search. So whenever someone types anything in Google and searches for whatever he's searching for. The first three, results are gonna be Google, PPC, and then there's a bunch more PPC down on the page and on the next pages.

Dennis: But the most relevant are the first. Top three, you're basically paying to be ranked high on Google and, it's called PPC 'cause it's pay per click. So you don't pay for impressions, you just pay whenever someone clicks on your ad, that's when you pay a few bucks, depending on how big competition is and all that stuff, can range from a few cents to 10 bucks and more, depending on the niche you're in.

Brian: Got it. And just straight off the bat, what are the pros and cons of Google PPC?

Dennis: the obvious pro is someone is searching for whatever you're providing and you're gonna show up all the way at the top. So they're already looking for what you're providing. Which is great of course, 'cause they're already pretty far in the sales cycle, interested in what you offer. [00:03:00] And another pro is you pay per click so you don't have the risk of your.

Dennis: Ad copy is bad and no one clicks, but you pay for impressions and stuff like that, which can be a pro. It can also be a con. It's kind of a mixture.

Brian: Don't they use like AI or algorithms or something to even rank who gets shown because it'slike an auction

Dennis: Yeah, it's an auction. Exactly. basically, it's who pays the most per click, who bids the most? It's kind of a bidding system, so the more competition you have, the more expensive it gets. And that's why prices on Google have gone up over the years and they keep going up. Like when it started, you could buy a click for a few cents.

Dennis: Now most clicks are like $3 plus, at least more like five to 10.

Brian: there's some niches where it's like a hundred dollars per click or more. you Google like a lawyer,you can do some damage to them by just clicking ads. 'cause that's like a hundred bucks lost from them.

Dennis: Yep. People use that as strategy. No, there's a bunch of stuff in there to prevent click fraud is what it's called. But uh, yeah, in theory you can actually do stuff like that

Brian: back whenever we were the six figure home studio, which was like. pre pandemic. I was searching to see who was running PPC [00:04:00] ads in the Nashville area for like recording studios. And found a guy, I liked his ads a lot, so I just like asked him out to lunch and I bought him lunch 'cause I was just like, I wanted to learn what he was doing.

Brian: I wanted to just meet him. I'm a marketing nerd, so like anybody like that I just wanted get to know and meet. And I paid for his lunch. 'cause I was like, I feel bad for clicking your ad and charging you for the click. So I'll buy your lunch.

Dennis: That's nice. That's

Brian: Yeah.

Dennis: All right.

Brian: So like, what are some of the cons here then? So, like, the pros are, again, just to recap, pros are you're harvesting demand, meaning people are out there searching for what it is that you offer. In some cases, not all cases, but we'll get to the cons in a second. And so if people are already searching for it, you could do SEO, which is a long term game, and a lot of work to get your stuff ranked to the top for certain terms.

Brian: So like if somebody is saying, web designer Nashville, or whatever they're searching for, you wanna maybe show up at the top of that with SEO. Well, if you can't rank for that. Or it's too competitive or you don't know how to rank for that, then you can also just do PPC and your ads will show up above all the search results.

Brian: So that's, that's kind of cool. but let's talk about some cons now.

Dennis: there's one obvious con is you can't create demand 'cause you're only targeting basically people who the demands [00:05:00] already there. And that's just a tiny, tiny little part of the market is already actively searching for it. So you can't really hook people in or do any proactive marketing.

Dennis: The other really big one is, is AI is taking over search. Which means ads become less relevant because people just go to chat, GPT and search for that kind of stuff.

Brian: I'm guilty of that too. Like I, I've basically for the most part, stopped using Google, except in rare cases where it's just way easier to hit command t to open a new tab in Chrome and quickly type out the question or the thing, and it shows. The top results. Almost always AI there too, so it's not even showing ads to me for that.

Brian: Although I do have ad blockers on, so maybe there are ads on Google now. I don't know. I'm bad with that stuff. I don't wanna see ads in those cases. In other cases, I'm the weirdo where all, all I wanna see is ads, so,

Dennis: yeah. And the AI part, since you have ad blocker, I can talk on this cause I like seeing ads.

Brian: only block certain sites and Google's one of those and YouTube is one of those as well, I think.

Brian: Yeah, but the, AI summary basically shows up before the actual ads. So,currently, AI is in, in front of the actual ad thing. make no mistake, there will [00:06:00] be, Chad, GBT and other generative AI ads in the future. they're trying to prioritize growth and get people hooked on it first before they start charging new money and showing you ads. And you know how it goes. Those who are early in the YouTube days, you know how YouTube is now compared to back then.

Dennis: Yeah, that's it. And then, comparatively, it's just more difficult to stand out. 'cause all you have is text. All you have is a copy. You write to stand out. There's no video, there's no real images and stuff like that. So you have to have real good copy, which is hard to do if you have competition, So that's a big one too. and in general. To kind of sum that up a little bit, it's usually more expensive than most other platforms to get a click and to actually be successful with it and have a roas. It's also. More complex than other platforms. 'cause like if you think about the bidding, other platforms have bidding systems too, but they're simpler.

Dennis: It's a lot of work that goes into actually running Google ads and a lot of stuff you have to do and have to test more than other platforms where you have to test too. which makes it harder to learn and to get a roas, a good roas.

Brian: I think one other big issue that people don't think about when it comes to Google PPC [00:07:00] ads is, although it's demand harvesting, meaning, hey, there's demand out there, people are searching for it. It's usually more button seat type work, where they don't necessarily care who it is, they just wanna button seat.

Brian: And those type of clients generally aren't a pleasure to work with. And in most cases it's not always the case. But in a lot of cases Let's just say you are running a web design agency, or you are a well-known music producer and you are still looking for clients to fill in those gaps in your calendar.

Brian: Well, through Google, PPC, you're gonna get a lot of, like the bottom feeders looking for the a thousand dollars website or the, local band who's trying to hit it big. You know, it's like you're gonna get a lot of those out there and it's, it's not like you can't get qualified clients to there, it's just generally Just a different game to be played. I know this experience because my old co-host, he ran his entire business. Most of his client acquisitions was through Google, PPC, and, he very much ran a button seat kind of gig. It was like he set up his entire business to be.

Brian: Wholly automated in the most crazy way possible. Like, it's almost like he wasn't even, he was a mastering engineer. He wasn't even in the mastering engineering business anymore. He was in the automation business and he was so good at [00:08:00] automating and taking as little time as possible to do the actual work that he could afford, to.

Brian: Be hired by those,bottom feeder clients that are paying 50 to 75 bucks each, for a gig, like a tiny amount of money. He just found a way to make that work. So that's the rare exception of it working. And it's still, he,you know, built it to be over six figures a year.

Dennis: if you wanna put that simple, it's People are looking for a certain service they don't really look for a solution to a problem. They look for the service itself, which is mostly the bottom of the barrel. People that are not willing to pay as much. 'cause they don't want your expertise, they just want you to build a website.

Brian: They just want you to make the master of the track. and if you do this, a lot of times you're gonna be. Lumped in with the Fiverr type people. And a lot of times what you'll see is Fiverr or these other kind of job board platforms are the ones advertising on these sorts of things anyways. a drives up the cost per click

Brian: Yep, exactly.

Dennis: and five has more money to spend than you do. So

Brian: they do, they're like half a billion a year, something like that. I don't remember. Probably more now.So that's Google, PPC, I can say [00:09:00] we don't have any clients using it. Do you know of any freelancers using it successfully? Currently right now, like as a main acquisition engine?

Dennis: No, actually not. for most freelancers we did sometimes in very niche cases, but mostly to. Added to an existing strategy that was already working on other platforms. That was the main focus.

Dennis: And I think especially for a freelancer who's doing it by himself, it's just too much effort to do that by yourself and manage all that while still running your business and doing what you actually want to do, which is really productional website design and stuff like that.

Brian: And the creative things you do and not sitting in an app platform all day Yeah. Google, from what I've seen, is like a lot more high maintenance and you have to optimize it yourself versus some of the other platforms we're gonna talk about where they're kind of self-optimizing. that's a big part of, it's like actually managing a platform.

Brian: All right. Let's talk about platform number two.

Brian: So that's Google, PPC. Another Google platform we're gonna talk about is YouTube. YouTube ads are slightly different. And we already kind of talked about 'em today, how I have a wonderful ad blocker on and there's YouTube premium. So maybe those are things we can talk about within this, but explain the YouTube ads platform or YouTube ads in general for anyone living [00:10:00] under a rock.

Dennis: So, yeah. Yeah. YouTube ads is,very similar to search stuff. So, 'cause basically YouTube, if you look at it, is the second biggest search engine that's out there. It does belong to Google, so basically if you put it together, it's one big search engine, but YouTube is the second biggest search engine, so people are also actively looking for stuff, they're looking for solutions to their problem, mostly to DIY, the stuff or to get information.

Dennis: and. these days. Like I honestly, I probably average like. 20, 25 minutes a week if that on all social media. Like I'm very diligent about that. But I spend a lot of time on YouTube for like my downtime. I like wind down just entertainment stuff.

Brian: So I don't even really use it for a search engine that much compared to just like an entertainment engine.

Dennis: Yeah, I'm the same. I also use it mainly for entertainment stuff. But a lot of people still use it for search engine stuff and that's what the data shows. But they're basically mostly looking for DIY stuff. So they would be searching for stuff like, how do I mix and master my own song? how to use certain.

Dennis: Platforms like Webflow or WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or something [00:11:00] like that. So they'll mostly look for stuff like tutorials, information and specific solutions for specific problems they run into. But also they'll be looking at general stuff that influences produce people like Alex or Mozy or other business people, Gary V and whoever's out there.

Dennis: People also look at that stuff, which makes it a platform that it's worth looking at. I would say for freelancers but maybe take a step back and get into the explanation part of it. 'cause YouTube ads is kind of a special thing in the whole ad world. 'cause basically when you run ads on YouTube, the main placement is in front of video.

Dennis: So when someone starts a video. Before the video actually starts, you have an ad going and the first seconds on the ad are not skippable. So you have to watch for a few seconds until you can actually skip the ad. And then that's when the little button comes up of skipping the ad. So you have a few seconds to hook people in without them being able to jump off, which is a good thing 'cause you can hook them in before they have the opportunity to even exit or scroll past it.

Dennis: But also it works in the same fashion as the other Google product. The PPC stuff you pay per [00:12:00] click. But you also have a bidding war basically going on. And depending on what niche you're in, that can be really expensive. And it's usually more expensive than, Google, even to get a click.

Dennis: Google, PPC.

Brian: there's the quote, I don't know who said it, probably Abraham Lincoln made the quote, and that is, uh, he who can spend the most on ads will always win. And so it comes down to like, how good are you at monetizing the leads? And that again, comes down to how good your funnel is from a conversion metric standpoint.

Brian: So the higher the conversions, the more you'll be able to make each lead worth. How good is your sales process as far as how many strangers can you turn into clients how good that number is will determine how much a client is worth and then the lifetime value of that client. Do they come back to you again and again and again?

Brian: Or if the retainer client, how long do they stick around before they, leave you? Like all these sorts of things come up to the, big thing of what's my ratio between client acquisition cost or customer acquisition cost or cac. Versus L-T-V-L-T-V to CAC ratio is kinda the golden ratio, also known as roas, ROAS, return on ad spend.

Brian: So that's why in certain circumstances, some brands and some industries can just afford to [00:13:00] spend out the ass for a click or for a view, or for high CPMs, meaning cost per milli, meaning how much am I willing to spend to show my ad to a thousand people? How much is that number? And that's a, that's a kind of good number to look at as far as how expensive a platform is or how competitive it is.

Brian: that's YouTube. And the cool thing about YouTube, I guess you could have talked about this, but I'll bring it up, is it's very much focused on video, right? Where Google, PPC is all text, this is all video. There's very little text at play here. There is some copiesshowing up here and there sometimes, but it's mostly all video and what you say in the video, how you show up in the video.

Brian: So there's a lot more room for creativity and differentiation from there. How else does this differ from PPC?

Dennis: the main difference, obviously is people are looking for videos to solve their problem. if you look at PPC, it's mostly people looking for services. It's necessarily their solutions or videos explaining how to solve something. And that's where YouTube differs, which can be good and bad depending on what your service is.

Dennis: But in general, I would say. When people are looking for a solution to their problem, it's harder to transition them to a service ' [00:14:00] cause they're like, I wanna mix and master my song. How do I do it? I wanna build my website. How do I do it? It's hard to transition them into, I'm gonna build that website for you when I'mgonna mix a master or produce your song for you.

Dennis: That's a hard sell to do. Uh, 'causethey're already in a state of mind, which means. It's a better platform for anything that's more like coaching and consulting type of services, but not as good for actual service providers like most freelancers are. and also when you're a freelancer and you provide a service, you compete with these people who do the coaching stuff on YouTube a lot.

Dennis: 'cause that's what's a lot on YouTube, especially for these type of things. And that's hard to compete 'cause coaching offers usually have a higher margin than a service.

Brian: let's just say for example, you are going after B2B. you're a freelancer in the B2B space, meaning business to business. You're going after, let's just say like a one to $3 million a year business is what you're shooting for. you may want to target people who are watching lx, XM OZ videos.The problem with that is there's a lot of other businesses out there that also want to target that audience, and those businesses are probably better at monetizing those leads and those clicks than you are as a solo [00:15:00] freelancer. So this is similar to one of the other platforms we're gonna talk about today.

Brian: It's like you just can't afford to advertise on there just straight up because of the way that it works. It's like part search, engine part demand creation. Whereas PPC is demand harvesting. You're just harvesting the demand that's already there. You're just taking the rushing River and you're just channeling a little bit over to your world.

Brian: Whereas this world is like, I'm gonna make my own little pond over here. Like, this is like this group of people doing their own thing and I'm just gonna scoop the water out. Like I'm, I'm just creating demand for myself, in this own little niche pocket. Again, in the B2B world, that's very difficult in the B2C world.

Brian: It can work. I could see someone like in the music production space, targeting clients on there potentially. It's gonna be just cheaper CPMs and less competition, but not always the case. So it could be a case by case basis if this is the right platform for you.

Dennis: Yeah, as was all of these, Honestly, honestly speaking, all of this is case by case, but there's some general rules, of that apply to most people.

Brian: what sort of issues do we have with YouTube?

Dennis: first of all, as you kinda said, it's hard to get in. It's more expensive. It's hard to run as well. Kind of similar to Google. It lives on the same ad [00:16:00] platform, like you run it from the same ad platform as Google PPC.

Brian: Uh, it's hard to stand out 'cause there's just a lot of people on YouTube that advertise are really good at advertising. And there's just a lot of coaching offers that will pay a lot more for click and for a client than a freelancer and service provider can't afford to do.

Brian: Sonot only that there are like the SAS or startup world, when they have funding behind it. They may have a horrible LTV compared to your services. They just have a ton of money to burn, so they're just willing to outspend everyone because they're trying to get market share. I'm using that in quotes.

Brian: They're trying to capture market share, so it's not just coaching offers. Like Dennis, you see a ton of those because that's the world you're in and like, you've just seen it a lot. But like in the real world, like I think a lot of it's behind funded companies.

Brian: Public companies are spending a ton of money. Political ads during political seasons, that sort of stuff will just eat up ad spend in the auctions.

Dennis: and the auctions on YouTube are a little bit harder to do, as well as a Google search. And there's other platforms. 'cause if you think about it, how many videos does one person watch a day? Obviously there's power users that watch like a bazillion videos a day, but the usual average person is gonna maybe [00:17:00] watch two to three videos a day, if at all.

Brian: So that's two to three options to show the ads basically in front of the video, which is not a lot of ad space they have mineral now, so like longer videos will have like multiple mineral ads in it,

Dennis: but most people, if they watch a video, they skip through it. So most people are not gonna really watch the mid-roll. They get a pre-roll and then maybe they'll get some other ads in the search and stuff.

Dennis: Of course. there's also videos that you can add,put ads into the search when someone's searching for something and stuff like that. And recommended videos, we'll have ads in themand so on. But the most efficient one are usually the pre-rolls. it's just Hard to get in there and expensive to do so.

Brian: Next one's LinkedIn. This is one that I.I think it's interesting to talk about because if you're a freelancer, you're in the B2B space. This seems to make the most sense 'cause you're going after businesses. May not be the case though. So let's just get into what is LinkedIn ads?

Brian: it, how does it work compared to the others?

Dennis: Yeah, so LinkedIn ads obviously different than search 'cause if you're not advertising to anyone who's searching anything you basically have a social media platform where people are active and they are chatting on there. They're networking on there. They might. Scroll through the [00:18:00] feed, even though it's rare on LinkedIn, but you basically have different parts of ads that go into the feed or that are like direct message ads, basically, which looks like a cold outreach message,

Brian: But you

Dennis: ad basically.

Brian: You don't doom. Scroll on LinkedIn.

Brian: Not really. I wanna see all the cringe content of like, thought leaders and,

Dennis: there's a lot of that out there,

Brian: what my engagement taught me about B2B sales.

Dennis: So yeah, there's not a lot of scrolling on LinkedIn, which is the main problem that the platform has right now is 'cause users don't spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. And that's a problem for the platform. 'cause the more time someone spends on the platform, the more ads they can basically display to them, the more ads they can sell and the more money they can make.

Dennis: So that's a problem that LinkedIn. Has to solve. They're trying to solve it, but they're not really doing the best job of it as of now. So it's not really getting better right

Brian: What was the, what's the monthly average usage on there? Like you, you gave me a stat earlier that was like, kind of mind blowing.

Dennis: yeah, so the average user on LinkedIn spends 45 minutes a month

Brian: 45 minutes per month.

Dennis: Per month, that's [00:19:00] one and a half minutes a day. Um, it's not a lot and it's, most people just go in there and basically use it to network, or to post something. LinkedIn is more of a platform where people, they rather post something or send someone a message than scroll through content and consume themselves.

Dennis: So it's not really a platform. People consume a lot, which makes it hard to one. Get a lot of placements for ads. Like there's not a lot of ads space on LinkedIn, which then makes it expensive on top of the target groups that are on LinkedIn being expensive already. Cause it's B2B only, basically. and then on top of that it's also that people are not really in the state of mind to consume in click stuff.

Brian: Which is a big thing, of course, in displaying ads, if people are not in the state of mind of actually looking for stuff or clicking on ads and watching videos, it's hard to get their attention to watch video, is there any data on like where people use it the most? And the reason I ask this is because like I use it the most when I'm hiring. So like if I'm hiring somebody, I'll be on LinkedIn all the time looking at their [00:20:00] accounts, looking at their profiles to see like. Where they've worked before, like

Dennis: Yeah, that's the big ones.

Brian: I would imagine if you're looking for a job, you're using LinkedIn a lot, thenis there any data around that?

Dennis: yeah, so the most, the stuff that most people use it for is, number one is jobs.So mostly searching for jobs. And then obviously people are hiring, but the second most is networking. So just reaching out to people, finding people that they've met on an event or something. So actively searching for people.

Dennis: But job search is the biggest one, and it's good for hiring. Like you can put job search ads in there, you can post your jobs. So it's very, very good for that.

Brian: we get a ton of applicants from LinkedIn for sure, likeone of the job boards we use syndicates out to likeLinkedIn jobs or something. And so we get a bunch of applications from there. But either way, we always ask for the LinkedIn, link in the application so we can go check out their, profiles and see I like it better than a resume.

Brian: To be honest with you. I can learn a lot from someone's LinkedIn profile.

Dennis: Yeah, it gives me a lot of context as well. And that's the same in the, business world, it's if you wanna work with someone and you might wanna look at their LinkedIn or they have a link somewhere, it tells you a lot about the person you might wanna work with, [00:21:00] or might wanna hire for service or whatever.

Dennis: It has a place. But people don't really use it to scroll. And that's, as I said, the big issue that LinkedIn has that's how thelow daily usage time, how that happens. 'cause people don't go in and, doom scroll and get lost in it like you're doing other platforms.

Dennis: But they go in there with a specific goal in mind. So they have a goal in mind. They open the app with a goal in mind that they have, which is texting someone, looking for a job, putting a job ad on there or whatever. And they do that thing and then they leave the platform ' cause there's no point in scrolling.

Brian: what sort of price point, how expensive is it to run ads on LinkedIn?

Dennis: So on LinkedIn you have to, if you want to run ads B2B even B2C, but it is mostly B2B is obviously more expensive, but you'll spend probably 80 bucks and more as a CPM to reach a thousand people, you'll spend $80 and more.

Brian: just to show you out,

Dennis: do, you pay 80 bucks to get a thousand people into a room that you can talk to.

Dennis: That's basically what you have to imagine it, itbeing, and compared to all other ad platforms, that is really expensive, it's not gonna get much more expensive [00:22:00] than that. Except obviously if you advertise in stuff like magazines or some executive. marketing website.

Dennis: Like there's obviously online magazines and blog that are more expensive, but LinkedIn is one of the most expensive platforms to advertise on, which makes it hard for anyone with a limited budget. 'cause you have to spend much more to test your messaging. You have to spend much more to actually reach your audience into all this.

Brian: So it's just more expensive especially if you've never run ads before and you don't know what's gonna work and what's not gonna work. You'll spend a lot of money before you even know what's working. just to put this into context, $80 CPM. That means you're gonna spend roughly, if you have a decent ad, roughly $8 per click just to get a click. So like, unless you're willing to spend at least eight to $10 per click, you probably need to stay away from there. And even when you get a click, now you gotta hopefully convert them on the next page.

Brian: And a lot of people when they first launch something, they'll have a very low conversion rate, five, 10% on their landing page. 'cause they haven't nailed in who they're targeting. They haven't nailed in their messaging, like all sorts of things. So now you have like a hundred dollars [00:23:00] lead, so you can see how expensive this gets.

Brian: one lead, you don't even have a phone that's just an email address. You don't even have like a phone number or a, inquiry form or a book call. You've already spent a hundred bucks. it's cost prohibitive for most people, unless they've really dialed things in.

Brian: To do this, and I think part of the issue is just the supply, demand and balance. LinkedIn has a ton of people that people want to advertise to. A ton of demand for that. Like they command the eyeballs of probably billions of people in the B2B world. So highly valuable, But the supply of actual eyeballs is very low 'cause they're only spending 45 minutes per month on the platform.

Brian: So, so much demand, so little supply that's gonna skyrocket the price of what they're gonna do. And so it's gonna be on the upper end and it's gonna be usually way more than any freelancer can spend. Not to mention you're up against very sophisticated businesses and business owners who are advertising to these executives and employees and.

Brian: All sorts of products and services that they can afford to outspend you because of the way the, the platform works

Dennis: And on top of that, if you want to take that a little bit further [00:24:00] LinkedIn also, due to people not scrolling a lot and not interacting a lot has limited data about all the users that they have on the platform especially compared to Meta, which is obviously the biggest platform out there, but that have less data per user on their platform, which makes it harder for them to display the right ads to the right person.

Dennis: Because other platforms like Google as well, they have the data on what content are you as a user most likely to interact with. And LinkedIn doesn't have that. So that's the data they're missing, which makes their ad platform not really good. I would say even bad it's, not a very good adplatform.

Dennis: 'cause basically if you think about it, the only thing you can basically target, I mean they have more data points, but the most basic thing you can target is job title company. Niche, that's what you basically go off.

Brian: obviously age and sex come into play as well, but that's like table stakes on any ad platform.

Dennis: Yeah. Yeah, agreed. that's what it is on LinkedIn and there's actually data on like how many data points the ads platforms have on each user that's on the platform. And obviously the more data the [00:25:00] platform has, the better it's gonna be at displaying the right ads to that right person.

Dennis: LinkedIn has around 5,000 data points per user on that platform. Sounds a lot until you hear the number that Meta has, which is 52,000 and more per user on their platform.

Dennis: a lot more data, to go off.

Dennis: And that includes stuff like search histories, where in the world you are, what you're interested in, what kind of messaging you react to, what you want to hear. if you're a person who's just looking, if you're a person who's actually opting in somewhere and putting this email address, if you are a person that's shopping online a lot or not, that puts their credit card info on random places or does not.

Dennis: So that's all the,data that Meta has. And obviously as an advertiser, your end goal is to actually get leads

Brian: so let's actually get to that. We're talking about meta right now, so like, let's get to theAds platform. Like, we obviously say this last for a reason. if you can't tell already, it's our favorite platform, but really quick, Meta is more than just Facebook, people think. Facebook ads. I'm not gonna run Facebook ads. It's only actually, I don't know why I'm using the southern accent. 'cause that's really who you think of predominantly as [00:26:00] like a boomer with a southern accent talking about Trump or whatever. but you've got Facebook, Instagram, Instagram threads now.

Brian: So like, a Twitter kind of competitor WhatsApp. Uh, you've got, we're laugh about this. You got the Metaverse. I dunno if they run ads in the Metaverse or not, but I, I wanna kind of try it.

Dennis: probably not very efficient.

Brian: but like, let's talk numbers on that. So you talked earlier, it's like,I don't know what LinkedIn's daily active users are.

Brian: It's probably much, much less,

Dennis: is definitely much less. I would have to Google the exact numbers, but it's much less.

Brian: Yeah. But the average meta user uses the platform for about 70 hours a month. And you said, Dennis, that's not even including WhatsApp, that's just on the likecore social media platforms. 70 hours a month compared to 45 minutes a month.

Brian: That's a massive difference. And As of the first quarter of this year, first quarter of 2025, they averaged 3.43 billion daily active users. Meaning a third of the world. More than a third of the entire world used a meta app every day this year so far. That's crazy.

Dennis: If you want a comparison, I just did a quick Google search. LinkedIn has [00:27:00] 134 million daily active users.

Brian: Man, the question, what's the difference between a million and a billion?

Dennis: too much?

Brian: about a billion. It's so far off from a billion that it's. 999 million. So it's basically rounded up. It's about a billion is the difference between a million, a billion.

Brian: So between a hundred million and 3.43 billion. That's a, big difference. Like 20 x, it's not quite the same as a million to a billion, but it's still pretty crazy. what are the good things about this? There's obviously gonna be some negatives we'll talk over, but what are the good parts of meta ads?

Dennis: the obvious good part is meta has a lot of data. It's probably the app platform with the most data about the users, and not only about where they work, what they do, and all that stuff, but also about how they interact with content and what they wanna see, what they don't wanna see. So that's a big positive of the meta platform.

Dennis: And then CPMs are relatively low compared to almost all other platforms. So you're probably starting off with meta ads. You're going to start off somewhere around like 20 to $30 CPMs in the B2B space. Obviously B2C, you can get like $9 CPMs or even five

Brian: yeah, we've had [00:28:00] clients as low as like eight to 10 bucks. CPM, meaning you can show an ad to a thousand people for like $8, which is compared to 80 on LinkedIn. That's 10 times less. Again, it depends on the niche but we have seen that.

Dennis: Yeah, we have seen that and that sometimes happens. And there's a lot of factors in play that impact CPM of course,

Brian: Yeah, the quality of your ads, how relevant they are, how the messaging is, like all that stuff has more to do with it than anything else. I've seen as high as a hundred CPM on Netta before, like I've seen very high, but it's almost always because the messaging sucks. The creative sucks, the targeting sucks, the offer sucks.

Brian: Like it's just like a lot of little issues that add up. And then you solve those issues one at a time and all of a sudden you're down to the 20, 30, 40 range.

Dennis: Yeah. I recently saw one of our client's old ads that he was running. He had $130 CPM on meta,

Dennis: was he in an expensive B2B niche no. He is a music producer actually. So it's not, it's not an expensive,it's usually a very cheaper niche to be in. But his CPR m now is like $20. So we

Brian: still, that's still high for that niche. when I was talking aboutniches that I've seen, I've seen in the music production niche, I've seen like [00:29:00] below 10multiple times.

Dennis: that's meta. It's just very cheap to advertise there compared to other,platforms on top of all the data that you obviously have about people. Plus targeting, and ease of use I would call it.

Dennis: It's way easier to use than almost all other platforms out there. I mean, the interface is still not perfect, but it's easier to use and to run. Compared to Google and LinkedIn and stuff like that. 'basically in the state we have now, meta does the majority of targeting and stuff for you.

Dennis: So basically your a creative and your messaging create your targeting. So if your messaging is on point, the targeting is basically done for you. 'cause the algorithm is that sophisticated. And LinkedIn doesn't have that opportunity to do that. Google obviously works on, search terms, same as kind of YouTube, even though there's other options there.

Dennis: But it's just the ease of use compared to other platforms. It doesn't need as much maintenance. You can set up ads, obviously you still need to test and still need to do stuff. It's not like it's completely hands off, passive income or whatever. [00:30:00] Um,you still have to do shit, but, it's just so much easier to use than all the other platforms.

Brian: I think the big winner. Meta wins from an advertising perspective is because the amount of data that they have, we all know about the, Cambridge Analytica scandal that went on like back in the day. They had likeway too much information about you and like our privacy concerns.

Brian: I understand all of that, but from an advertiser's perspective, that is a gold mine. And like back then it was the heyday for advertising. It was so.So awesome back then. 'cause I started doing meta ads around that time and it was like there were so many more options for targeting et cetera. But now you have tons of AI and machine learning helping out all the time to make it easier to kinda make up for the fact they don't at least show you all that data.

Brian: They still have it, don't pretend like they don't have that data. They just don't let you know what that data is. I'll give you one example of likehow much data they have on you. we've all felt the thing where like you talk about something and then the next day an ad shows up for that.

Brian: That literally happened to me. I was on a date night with my wife, for her birthday actually, and we talked about something and then the next day that came up, I'd never searched for it or anything. It just came up on an ad and you're [00:31:00] like, what the hell? Still don't understand what happened there.

Brian: Let's just say they're listening to our conversation, so maybe that's how they get data from us. But there was a woman who started to get ads. For pregnancy related things before she even knew she was pregnant, and it was because of the behaviors and things she had done. Meta could deduce that she was pregnant before she even knew she was.

Brian: And that's a wild thing to think about. Like they know more about you than you know about yourself. Sometimes that's scary and you can hate on it all you want, but

Dennis: you can use it.

Brian: or you can use it, you can do both.

Brian: Advocate for change, advocate for privacy, advocate for like. All the things you hate about it to go away, but also profit off of it while you can.

Dennis: Yep. It's the same thing I do. I don't, I'm notthat active on social media, but I just like to do it to see what ads are working and

Brian: true. And that's the one place where I'm weird. I'm a weird, I have aplugin on Chrome where take off my entire feed and only show ads. Because sometimes I just wanna see ads. I wanna see what's working out there. And I'm a nerd like that. Dennis is the same way. I flew him out here to Nashville for a couple weeks when he was first kinda taking over ads and just like seeing him [00:32:00] obsess over ads too.

Dennis: I was just like, ah, one of us, one ofA weird person.

Brian: Yeah, another a fellow weirdo. But um, just kinda like talk about the morals of advertising really quick, If you have a, massive moral objection over ads, you just shouldn't do 'em. there's other ways to get clients, there's other ways to generate leads. You don't have to do ads. But generally speaking from the perspective of,how Meta Ads works, it is very good at targeting me with ads that I actually care about.

Brian: And nothing is more frustrating than, watching YouTube on my TV where we're not signed in and it has no data on me. I have to watch ads 'cause there's no ad blocking unless you pay for YouTube premium on the TV and seeing ads that I just don't give a shit about. I'm not gonna ever go to Taco Bell.

Brian: So stop showing me Taco Bell Ads, irrelevant ads to me are truly the worst. That's why I hate linear tv. Linear TV ads are non-targeted, non-specific generic ads in no way, shape or form that I care about. Whereas meta ads could show me something I truly care about that to me is a good thing.

Brian: So if you are targeting people. Meta will usually put it in front of people who [00:33:00] need the thing that you offer. And if you offer a service that you truly believe in and it transforms people's lives or businesses or websites or music or whatever in some positive way, why not put yourself out there in front of them so that.

Brian: You can transform what they're doing in a positive way. That, to me is a net positive. The same way we advertise heavily to help freelancers with their client acquisition because I believe every freelancer who's good at least deserves help with that. And if you're not good, I can't help you.

Brian: I'm sorry. But yeah, that's like my little tangent on, the morality of ads.

Dennis: Yep. I agree. that being said, obviously the most important part in ads is messaging. So whatever you do with all the tech, you can be the master of tech. If your messaging is not right, it's not gonna work.

Brian: truthfully, meta ads, you can do what they call wide open targeting now, which means you don't target, you just target the entire world, or an entire state, or an entire country. And if you have good enough messaging on your ad, The algorithm will optimize for your people.

Brian: the term I've heard over and over again is the creative is the targeting, meaning the messaging is the targeting, whichever way you wanna put that.it's so easy to, target the people now. It's just like put basic filters in [00:34:00] narrow down to a few million people and meta will do the rest for you.

Brian: you don't have to be good at all the tech side of things and finding the right audiences and geeking out on all this stuff. Like we don't really nerd out on the platform itself. Dennis,

Dennis: And that's what the platform wants. they want to make it aseasy to use as possible. They want you to be able to run ads even though you don't know what you're doing. 'cause that's how they make money. It's the same thing where if you look at it that way, it's like the platform wants you to run ads profitably, which is why they have all the algorithm and help in place.

Dennis: 'cause they want you to make money off of it. 'cause then you spend more on ads and they make more money. So the platform wants you to succeed And Net's doing a really good job with this.

Brian: if you were walking into a casino. They were like, we want you to win. We want you to win. We want you to get like 10 bucks back for every dollar you spend here. We're gonna do whatever we can to help you win, buddy. you would probably be at casinos more. I've spent a total of like maybe a hundred bucks in my life at casinos and I've won like four $50 back

Brian: It's a good return. But that was a, that was like a fluke on a Will of Fortune game. And like I won a bunch of money on it. It was like after losing 80 bucks to [00:35:00] blackjack. I just know not to go to casinos. even though I,I go to Vegas all the time for like,acquisition.com events. Spend time with Ramzi out there and I stay at the Fountain Blue, which is amazing Casino hotel there.

Brian: And I've spent $0 at a casino despite staying at the casino multiple times a year. But I have spent a lot of time and effort, energy and money on meta ads because it'sthe slot machine that keeps on paying off.

Brian: me and Dennis don't geek out on the meta ads platform and all the ways to hack it. We geek out on messaging. We geek out on,the psychology of things we geek out on like creatives.That's the stuff we geek out on, and that's the only stuff that really matters in ads, no matter what platform you use.

Brian: And if you suck at that, no ad platform will work for you. that's basically it.

Dennis: Yeah, a little comparison of the platforms. If you imagine you pay a certain fee to speak in front of a room of relevant people for you, you give them, let's say on meta, you give 'em 20 bucks and they fill a room of a thousand people for you.

Brian: And you can hold a presentation in front of these people. or you can just manically shout out them and say, Buy my shit. You can do whatever you want.it's your crowd now, but

Dennis: Exactly. Yeah. You just buy the eyeballs basically, and it's your [00:36:00] crowd and you can,tell them whatever you want. And on meta you play 20 bucks for it. On LinkedIn, you pay 80 bucks for it. And on Google, you just have to be lucky that people are gonna walk into your room. You just pay for every person that walks in.

Dennis: But the messaging is what you control and what's gonna, in the end, make and break it. And with meta platforms, you can just. Test more messaging and find the right messaging. Like you can test your messaging four times for the one time. You could do it on LinkedIn for the same amount of money. So that's just the power of cheaper CPM, basically.

Dennis: And more data, more relevant people,

Brian: and a better platform. So like what we do with our clients is we'll rapidly test a bunch of different ad hooks is what we call them. Like the hooks are like, what do you say at the beginning of an ad to see what people most respond to. And then we see again, can we push the dollar all the way down the funnel to the end where you get a return on ad spend.

Brian: And then once we figure that out, you can theoretically take that message to any other ad platform to see how it performs. Now in most cases people don't wanna do that because like, getting one ad platform is enough work. And truthfully, like how many clients do you need a year as a freelancer to make six figures, a multiple, [00:37:00] six figures.

Brian: Like no more than a hundred, that's for sure. No more than a hundred clients, probably less than 50 a year, or even 10 depending on what niche you're in. you don't need multiple platforms to do that. we bring in hundreds of clients a year just with meta alone. Only now we're kind of venturing out to something like YouTube.

Dennis: Which is one of the reasons to hedge the risk of meta adss performance going down, because there's always a risk involved in stuff. And if you have employees like you do now, you have to make sure that that risk is as low as possible. So at a certain point when you have employees who take care of and stuff like that, you have to think about adding other platforms to diminish the risk.

Dennis: But in general, we could just probably scale to 6, 7, 8 times the company we have now just by. Running more matter. That's a new cruising to budget.

Brian: Yeah. At this point, our bottleneck as a business is not lead generation. It is not book calls, it is not clients. It's more of the operation side and like.Growing the team and like making sure you're doing things right, making sure the product's better, like all the sorts of things on that end.

Brian: So like in most cases for freelancers, I would want that to be the case for you. It's like your bottleneck is [00:38:00] not lead generation. It's not bringing enough eyeballs, it's not staying consistently booked up. It's like the bigger issues that you should be focusing on, which is how do I deliver a better end product for my clients?

Brian: over deliver? become more efficient on the delivery side without diminishing quality? maximize my ROI, how do I raise rates at the right time? Like, those are like the good problems to have and those are way more fun to deal with than the problems of like, oh shit, how am I gonna pay my rent this month?

Brian: Like, that is a terrible place to be. question we haven't answered yet is, should you even advertise at all? What situations have you seen or thought of, like where it doesn't make sense to advertise? I have a few, but I'm just curious what's on top of mind for you?

Dennis: Well say the first thing is if you don't have any type of portfolio yet, if you don't have any experiences or service yet, don't advertise. 'cause you, you don't even know if people want what you have to offer. if you don't have a portfolio, people are not gonna trust you. You're putting your message out to people who've never heard of you.

Dennis: It's different than getting your, referral or something. So that's the big thing is like you need a portfolio. You need to actually be good at what you do and can prove that, to convert these people. Then obviously you need some sales skills. 'cause [00:39:00] converting cold traffic into actual clients on a call is harder to do than converting a referral.

Dennis: 'cause they're basically sold already. You just have to tell 'em the price and they're sold.

Brian: That's called taking orders. That's not called sales. That's all you're doing is an order taker at that point,

Dennis: Yeah. And that's one thing that I see with clients over and over. I just had a client recently who, he had like 30 something calls he went through, didn't close a single one of them. I reviewed some of his sales calls. Three days later he closed I think four or five deals. So it's like just gotta get better at that.

Dennis: It's a

Brian: doing dumb things

Dennis: and to clarify, he wasn't recording his calls. It was only until the recent calls he recorded that we were able to review them. See the glaring issues of a sales process and then coach 'em through it to fix it. So,

Dennis: Which was easy to fix and quick, and now it's working. So, That's a big one. I see. All the time.

Brian: yeah. So for me, like when I say don't do advertising is like. At least not at first, is when you already have some other weans of getting traffic to your website, especially like when you're in the early testing phase. So like, we'll have a number of clients that'll come in with like a large following somewhere, whether it's social media or YouTube, and ads are wonderful for long term and they can really [00:40:00] supplement what you've done.

Brian: And especially with retargeting where you're like, Hey, you've got like a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube. That means that probably hundreds of thousands of people know your face and know who you are. And if you start showing ads. The algorithm's gonna catch on that these are people that, already know me, or they've already been in my site.

Brian: I can show ads to those people. That can be a wonderful place, for long term. But if you already have a large following, I wouldn't start with ads. I would try to utilize that large following or, that email list or some other marketing asset that you have. on top of that, you mentioned if you don't have a portfolio, also, if you're just not good at what you do, like you can have a portfolio out the wazoo.

Brian: But if it sucks, it's kinda like Just try to sell a box of shit online. Put a million dollars of ad spend behind it, see how much you can get for it. Like, you're not, you're not gonna get that analogy's lost. 'cause we bleeped it out. So let's just say it's a box of poop.

Brian: You're selling a box of poop online. How much can you get for that? you can nail the messaging. It's Fresh poop. It's organic poop. It's uh, it's not gonna sell, man. I'm sorry. No matter what you say or what you do, it's a box of poop. You know, I'm not trying to equate your portfolio to a box of poop, but like, read between the lines, like some people are just not good at what they do.

Brian: And no [00:41:00] matter what we do to market your, business is not gonna work. Which is why we reject over half the people that apply for our coaching program at this point. That's not the only reason, but that's a, big reason.

Dennis: one other thing is if you really have zero budget to spear, if you spend 200 bucks this month and then you can't pay rent, you're probably not at a place to run out yet.

Brian: Yeah, I mean tell that to Alex Ram Moey, like Alex Ram Moey, if you've heard his story, like Bro was in like so much debt and he was just like, well, I've got a credit card, they haven't closed yet. It's got like a 50 k limit. I'm gonna go in and just start running ads at like a thousand dollars a day on it and try to make back a bunch of money.

Dennis: Especially if you had acredit card and put it on the card, you can pre-finance a month or two of

Brian: that'sThat's risky though.

Dennis: It is risky.

Brian: He was willing to take that risk. He knew what he was selling, he knew the results he had. He was very confident we could do,I think that was around the time that he was just kind of screwed over with his business partner or something. I, I don't know all the,the story with it, but I would not recommend that.

Brian: Okay. For most cases, like have a budget of some sort. It's just kinda like the casino analogy again, it's like, don't gamble what you're not willing to lose. It's the same with ads. Like, I wouldn't call it a gamble. It's a calculated [00:42:00] bet, but at the same time, you can still lose the bet, just like.

Brian: And, you know, investments when they're investing in startups or SaaS companies or whatever, the raising funding, there's just a chance they could still lose it all. a company could go bankrupt, the founder could have done some big scandal or been arrested or something happens where it's a fraud.

Brian: Like Amanda Holmes, is that her name? The girl from, um.The blood company where she was like faking that she could test blood with just a drop of blood. there's a Netflix documentary on it.That kind of stuff can happen and youyour investment can go to zero, but they spread their,risk out enough where they know they're gonna get a return in the long term.

Brian: It's just like that with paid ads. Likeyou, you may lose that a hundred bucks, but if you spend enough groups of a hundred bucks, you will eventually get something that lands and get a return on that ad spend. But don't spend a hundred bucks if you don't have it. That's the big thing.

Dennis: Yeah, and you still get data from the a hundred ads you spend. Even if you don't get the best results yet, you still get data and know what's gonna happen and you can make other assumptions on your business from getting that data. Like maybe you offer sucks and you have to revise it or whatever other stuff there can be wrong.

Dennis: which is what we are therefore to help with.

Brian: Yeah. So if you are in this,position where you're [00:43:00] like, I do have a good portfolio. I don't suck at what I do. I'm not a box of poop. I do have a budget to spend towards ads that I'm willing to lose, even if it's a smaller budget. we're happy to help, like we actually give you 500 ad budget just to get some of the earlier testing stuff outta the way.

Brian: we'll look at your business. Business is one of our six coaches right now. We're probably about to bring a seventh on, but we'll look at your business. We'll assess either what's missing, what needs to be fixed, what needs to be added, what needs to be taken away.

Brian: what order of things need to be done and the,best way to get you a return on,your investment with us to help you. we'll pitch you a, a marketing plan that we think is best suited for you and your needs and what you're trying to accomplish in your business. And it's up to you to either accept that and work with us or you can reject it and we don't work together.

Brian: That's how we,we operate. 'cause we know that if. you can agree to this roadmap, then we're gonna have a good relationship together. If you argue or don't agree with or whatever, we're probably not a good fit. So that's where we start with everyone. And then from there, we just coach you month to month, no contract.

Brian: Um.cancel any time and we coach you until you either are sick of us or you get a great return and you graduate, or if we can't get you at least 10 k of new clients, then we'll just coach you for free after that. So cool things with it. Just go to six [00:44:00] figure creative.com/coaching, fill the show application, see if you're a fit, and you can go from there.

Brian: that's all I got for you today, Dennis. Thanks for coming on the show. my German, New Zealand friend. see you next week on the six Figure Creative Podcast. Peace.