The Top 5 Ways Freelancers Land Clients (And What Actually Works)

382. The top 5 ways freelancers get clients

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Brian: [00:00:00] If you have ever thought to yourself, God, I need more clients, please God, rain them dead out of the sky. I'm probably gonna piss you off today. and hopefully in a good way because in this episode I'm gonna break down the five most common client acquisition methods that freelancers use according to the internet.

Brian: I'll talk about the sources in a second and I'll show you exactly why most of them probably are not working well for you. Just for the record right now, I have over 250 active clients on retainer right now, not to mention the thousands and thousands and thousands of other customers that I've acquired from my other businesses. so at least I know something about marketing and client acquisition.

Brian: So I'm gonna talk from my experience, what I've seen from other people's experiences, and I'll also talk about how to make at least some of these five methods work well for you. And I'll share an extra strategy that flips the script on all of this and works no matter where you live.

Brian: If you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative podcast. It's a podcast for creator freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their soul. Part of earning more money without selling your soul is getting clients. You can sell your soul to get clients. I'm not gonna talk about those methods.

Brian: These are just gonna be the five methods that freelancers use to get clients. And when I talk about sources, I've tried my best [00:01:00] to find the top five sources of clients As reported by surveys from a lot of liketop, job platforms a bit of research I could find through Cornell listicles.

Brian: I try to take a conglomerate of whatever I could find online because theproblem with freelancing is it's,a massive market, but there's not a lot of studies about it.

Brian: There's not a lot of research and data about it, and mostly because freelancers are not that sophisticated with how they run their finances, they don't report to anybody. There's no good way to figure out how many freelancers are doing different things and what's working for them and what's not working for them.

Brian: So. What we've really got is what we can find on the internet and what I can find from my own client base and what I can find from our email list and what I can find from the resources online. So these are the top five ways that freelancers get clients as far as I can find.

Brian: And these are all self-reported.

Brian: And I'm just gonna give you the list really quick just to kind of spoil it for you. I wanna talk about each one of these in detail. Number one, the number one method that that freelancers get clients from is word of mouth and referrals. No surprise there.

Brian: Number two is partnerships and networking. Basically, they're like collaborating with other agencies, other freelancers, or going to networking events, et [00:02:00] cetera. Number three is through direct outreach. That's emails, dms, calls that could be cold or warm. So you're sending out, messages or dms to ideal clients that already know you or people who have no idea who you are.

Brian: Number four is social media kind of online networking through social media. And number five is freelance marketplaces. And I wanna talk about each of these because I found some interesting studies. there's a study from a, one of the bigger freelance marketplaces, and I'm not gonna name, but it's a study that they did, that they surveyed through their own, audience.

Brian: And they have hundreds of thousands of freelancers. A part of that. many millions that 68% of freelancers rely on passive methods to get clients. They rely on passive methods. And if you look at like that list of five that I just gave you,

Brian: three of the five are usually passive. Two of the five. Are active but usually are passive. So lemme just explain what that means. So word of mouth and referrals, that's entirely passive, meaning you're waiting around for referrals and word of mouth you can make it more active. We'll talk about that later today.

Brian: But it's a usually a passive form of getting clients. So when people think of like a passive form of getting clients. Like passive income. I get referrals. there's like mailbox money just comes to me. I get [00:03:00] people sent my way, from, you know, a friend or a friend of a friend or an old client sends a client to me, that's all passive, right?

Brian: Number two, partnerships and networking. This should be active and can be active, but this is usually passive as well. You get your clients through your network. when you're a freelancer saying, Hey, Iget my clients to my network,You're thinking through the friends and relatives and friends and friends and oldclients and new clients.

Brian: You're thinking about your network and the clients. You get through that network and it's kind of really just an extension of the referrals. You're getting referrals and clients directly from your network, and it's usually not an active thing. It's more of a passive thing, although that one can be either way.

Brian: The third way is direct outreach. That is entirely active to do direct outreach or cold outreach or warm outreach. That's all you have to be active with that. The fourth method is social media and online networking. So Posting on socials, reaching out to people, connecting with them, following up with them, talking to them through socials, that's all active.

Brian: And then the fifth one is marketplaces. Like you have a profile on Fiverr, for example, and you get gigs that's all passive. They just come to you once you have it set up and running and it's actually working. We'll talk about that in a second, but why am I [00:04:00] bringing this up?

Brian: It's because 68% of freelancers as reported in this survey, 68% of freelancers rely on passive methods of, getting clients. And then in that same exact survey, 58% of freelancers listed client acquisition as their number one challenge.

Brian: And actually 58% said client acquisition. And then another 30% said marketing was their number one challenge. So if you put those together, marketing and client acquisition are kind of the same thing. Their one of the same. So I'd say closer to like 80% of freelancers have client acquisition issues.

Brian: So my challenge you today is when we're talking through these things, almost all of these are gonna be ways of, I'm going to be helping you convert to an active method. Meaning, yes, you can sit around and wait for clients to come to you. Yes, you can buy real estate and get your,mailbox money, or you can invest in stocks and get your mailbox money or whatever.

Brian: But when it comes to passive income versus active income, meaning active income is where you're actually using your time and effort and energy and labor to get money, you'll always make more money doing that.

Brian: Almost always make more money doing that than you will on passive income. And even passive income has a lot of, most of it has a lot of active [00:05:00] work to get done. Like if you're in real estate, you have to find the properties, you have to buy the properties, you have to close on the properties you have to probably renovate Get it rented out, then you have to manage the properties and fix things when it's broken or have to find a property manager so that even that's not fully passive. But I digress. We're gonna talk about converting passive methods of,client acquisition into active methods to have better results.

Brian: Because if you don't have clients as a freelancer, you have time. And if you have time, you can use that time to invest into client acquisition activities.

Brian: So let's start with the top one here. Word of mouth and referrals. This is like every freelancer's dream. you want to be so amazing that every single client that you work with refers other clients to you. And once you have five or 10 clients that you've worked with and they're all referring you to two or three other clients, that just exponentially increases.

Brian: That's the dream. The reality is something very different. The reality is maybe you do crush it for somebody, but they don't know someone else who would need your services, or when they come across someone who needs your services, they're not thinking about you.

Brian: And so what tends to happen is you get referrals in peaks and valleys, ups and downs, feast and famine. You have little to no control over this, [00:06:00] and this is the biggest issue with word of mouth, is that it is a byproduct of doing great work and having a lot of clients and having a large network.

Brian: It is not necessarily an actively done thing. Now you can make this active, or at least what I consider semi-active through a couple of things. The first is just staying top of mind with your clients. if you were top of mind when they need your service again, you'll likely get the gig if they liked actually working with you,

Brian: When a potential referral opportunity arises, when they're talking to their friend or their colleague or their, relative, and that person needs your services. If you're top of mind, if they've recently interacted with you or seen something from you, they're likely gonna refer you to them.

Brian: But if you're not top of mind, if you don't come to mind when that opportunity arises, you don't ever get the gig. Common sense. But the problem with common sense is you know it, you understand it, but you don't do anything about it. And that's the difference between passive and active.

Brian: Passive. You're just waiting around active, you're doing something about it.

Brian: and I've talked about this a million times in a million different episodes, all kind of sporadically. dispersed. But if you go back to just a few episodes ago, episode 379, the six star client experience, that doubles referrals and repeat [00:07:00] work, one of those talks about staying top of mind once the project is over,

Brian: and it boils down to just investing in a relationship with your clients.

Brian: I made the mistake many, many times in my life that I get paid. I do the project. The project is done, I give the final deliverables, and I wipe my hands of it. And I'm just like very goal oriented. Cool. What's the next thing and what's the next thing? And not really investing in the relationship with the client, not really following up, not really staying a part of their lives.

Brian: And sometimes the people come back to me, sometimes they don't. But it will come back to you a lot more often if you actually invest into your clients.

Brian: The second part about making this more of a active versus a passive method where you're not just waiting around for clients from word of mouth is actually making the ask at the right times. There's multiple times in the client journey that you can make the ask for a referral or to see if they're ready to come back to you,

Brian: but the best time is when the final files are delivered. You ask for feedback, they give you a glowing review. They're happy.

Brian: and it's basically like I'm calling it the flattering ask, and it is basically something like this. You were one of my favorite clients I've ever worked with. If I could clone you and work with you for the rest of my life, I would do [00:08:00] that.

Brian: do you know of any other clones like you that I can work with? And this flattery type ask is a very effective way of getting a referral to someone else. ' cause you've asked at the right time, they're happy with the experience they had with you.

Brian: You've haveflattered them and you've made the ask.

Brian: But that's word of mouth and referrals still. Even with that amount of control, you have little to no control over whether someone refers someone else to you or not. So you cannot fully rely on this. Even. I've seen people that have made long lasting careers from word of mouth and referrals, I've been shitting on word of mouth as the number one client acquisition.

Brian: For freelancers for like the past decade, I've just been shitting on it and no matter what piece of content I've done, YouTube video, Facebook ad Instagram ad, whatever, there's always somebody in the comment that's like, I've been doing this for 25 years and all I ever rely on is referrals. I'm not gonna talk about survivorship bias here, but even when that's the case, that same person will come back a year later or two years later or five years later, and

Brian: They can't pay their bills because they have no client, because the word of mouth has dried up for them. Something has massively changed in their industry. They didn't pivot, and [00:09:00] they're still relying on a thing they have no control over Even if that never happens to them, it still happens to so many people that you cannot rely on that one person who just loves to just perk up and say, I'm so amazing.

Brian: Then I get clients that fall outta thin air. and the implied message there is that if you don't have that yourself, you are less than, and I wholeheartedly disagree with that. For every freelancer that's out there, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of clients that need your services that never hire anyone or hire the wrong person simply because they didn't know you exist.

Brian: And by waiting around for clients to find you magically, not only are you hurting yourself in your bank account, you're hurting those potential clients you could help if they just knew you existed.

Brian: Let's talk about the second method partnerships and networking.

Brian: first of all, I have no major issues with this. if you get clients through your network or through partnerships, this is a wonderful way of getting clients.

Brian: You tend to have a little more control over it, although there still can be some like kismet or random things to happen to actually get clients to this. It's not so much like a numbers and numbers out type thing. Clear inputs and clear outputs like I prefer for client acquisition. But the issue I have is how most [00:10:00] freelancers actually do this.

Brian: they make this passive. This should be an active thing, but they made networking and partnerships. They make this this passive thing where you're just waiting for your network to just synergize clients outta thin air. you want to connect with clients, you want to connect with referral partners, and you occasionally do, but it's all kind of accidental.

Brian: It just kind of happens. A random connection here, a random referral there, a random, in with this person, a random meeting of someone at some. Random thing, you went to that one time.

Brian: But to make this actually active, it's similar to just about every other client acquisition strategy, especially the ones I'll talk about today. The first is have a clear goal of some sort. Do you want referral partners here? Are you trying to find other freelancers to collaborate with or to trade work from?

Brian: Or are you actually just trying to find clients through these events, through networking?

Brian: Where do you need to go or hang out to actually meet those people? What's your approach when you get there? What's a lead to you? Is it a business card? it a traded phone number?

Brian: Is it adding each other on socials to follow up later? How do you actually follow up? Are you gonna connect on socials? Are you gonna add them to your CRM? Are you gonna text them? Are you gonna email them? Are [00:11:00] you gonna call them? Are you gonna meet up for lunch again? and then with all of that, what are you actually measuring?

Brian: What is success here? Is it your response rate? Is it referral rate? Is it your close rate? What are you actually testing here? Are you testing which events you go to, the number of conversations you generate? Are you testing different follow up approaches?

Brian: You see how complicated this can get? This is the difference between actively working on something and passively waiting around for something to happen to you. And I have seen enough people to know that some people just want the passive approach. They can't afford the passive approach, they don't want to do the active approach, but they need the active approach.

Brian: And then you just have to ask yourself, do you actually want this or not? not every person is cut out for freelancing, not to be doom or gloom, but some people are just better off with jobs.

Brian: But you're like me and you are truly unemployable, you just cannot imagine working for some other human being, and you actually have the fire lit under you to actually go and do stuff, to build something that matters, then you know that you're the person who can do this sort of stuff.

Brian: So it's just a matter of actually mapping out a strategy that works for you that you can actually do over and over again consistently, but above everything else. When it comes to [00:12:00] networking and referrals, you have to actually determine is it even worth your time? That actually goes for all of these. Is it even worth your time?

Brian: If you live in a small town, networking probably, isn't it? You're probably not gonna have a big referral network either. You're not gonna have a lot of partnerships to collaborate with. At least not in person. Maybe something online.

Brian: But if you don't have a clear strategy with this, it's not worth doing. Number three is direct outreach on this list. And this is something that I've not been a fan of for a long time. I'm maybe slowly coming around to it 'cause there are some use cases where direct outreach really makes sense for some freelancers.

Brian: I'll, maybe, I'll talk about that in a second. But the things I don't like about direct outreach. And this can be cold or warm. I'm mostly talking about cold because warm outreach, you only have so many people you can reach out to in your network. The people that actually know I can trust you, you do that like once a year, maybe twice a year tops.

Brian: It's not a consistent thing you do over time. But with direct outreach, which I'll just call cold outreach from now, because that's generally what I'm talking about here.

Brian: Consistency is always the issue. I have not met a single freelancer who's ever actually had a real strategy here. There's no method for getting fresh leads to reach out to, which is a big problem. It can be a bottleneck for you. And depending on the approach you're actually taking, whether you're going [00:13:00] high volume, low customization, or high customization, low volume, Either way, you're gonna run outta fresh leads to reach out to, you have to have a fresh batch. Every single time you're reaching out to people. There's usually no method for split testing hooks or you're messaging to make sure, hey, what's actually working? What's getting a higher response rate?

Brian: There's no method for tracking results. There's no clear metrics that actually turn the inputs into the outputs 'cause the whole. Good thing about this method is that you can put a hundred cold outreaches in, you'll get x number of responses that'll lead to X number of calls, and then maybe you get one or two clients outta that.

Brian: Usually freelancers just dabble with this. And so I dig into what the process was, if they've ever done this in the past, they couldn't tell me how many people they reached out to. They couldn't tell me the response rates. What their booking rate is for like a discovery call.

Brian: They couldn't tell me what their close rates even are. that's just dabbling.

Brian: mean, this is fully active. There is no passive version of this, but just like networking, you have to have a strategy for this to even be aconsidered a viable method for you to do. But above all of that, let's just pretend you have the perfect strategy. It's actually working for you.

Brian: You know how many cold outreach messages you have to send, you know how long it takes you to [00:14:00] gather your list Every week or every month. Whenever you are starting from a,fresh batch, you know how many out,outreach messages you're gonna do, how long it's gonna take to write those up. If you're doing a loom video with it or not, you know your response rates.

Brian: You know how many of those are gonna turn into discovery call. You know how many of you're gonna close from that? All these things are wonderful, right? But two issues with that. One is it's linear, it's not scalable. Meaning if you want more clients, you have to put in more time. Number two is if you stop doing it, you stop getting clients.

Brian: so what happens over and over and over again is that maybe it actually worked for you. You never really even did a strategy behind you're just like, I'm just gonna attack this with brute force. throw numbers at it. I'm gonna do tons and tons of,cold dms, or cold emails, or God cold calls.

Brian: Does he wanna do cold calls anymore and I'm gonna get some clients from it. Oh my God, it actually worked. And then you start fulfilling on those gigs. And while you're doing that, you're busy. You're not doing more cold outreach, and so you're fulfilling, you're making money, you're happy. Then what happens?

Brian: The project's done. You got paid, you have nothing else in the pipeline, or the pipeline dries out and now you're back to the drawing board. You've gotta get back on the wagon. You gotta start doing cold outreach again.

Brian: So that's the biggest issue, is it's basically a treadmill. And if you ever get off the treadmill, it stops working [00:15:00] for you. So the key to making this work is having a sustainable amount that you need. It's kind of like working out. It's like if you just stop working out, you just shrivel up.

Brian: and it takes so long to build up muscle or build endurance or whatever you wanna do, but it doesn't take that much to maintain it. You can run five days a week and get your cardio, your VO two max way up. If you stop running for a month, you're gonna lose a ton of that. But if you just at least run for twice a week, it's not that much time.

Brian: It's not that much effort. It's not five times a week, but it maintains you. Same with working out, you can build your muscles up and you can probably just maintain with two full body workouts a week.

Brian: So same with cold outreach. It's my gym time in the morning. I'm gonna spend an hour each day if you're in family mode, you're gonna spend all your free time doing it. But then in feast mode, when I actually, things are going well, I'm still gonna have this amount of time carved out each day or each week to actually continue to do this, to make sure my pipeline is full once this project's over.

Brian: But that's direct outreach.

Brian: has its place, especially with higher income freelancers, meaning freelancers that. Have higher project values. maybe it's 20, 30, $40,000 for a gig Cold outreach can work for that, but if you're, a [00:16:00] typical one to five to even maybe up to $10,000 for your projects, it may not be worth it.

Brian: And even if it's worth it, feel like there's other better ways of doing it, at least to number four, the number four method. The freelancers get clients, and that's through social media slash online networking. These kind of go one and the same. I have no major critiques on this one. Like social media is wonderful.

Brian: it's an awesome way to get clients. The problem with it is how many freelancers use, or in many cases don't use social media it's typically just the dabbling effect.

Brian: Just like every other one of these things, it's the damn dabbler. If I could kill one habit in every freelancer, it's dabbling in things get when you're just trying some things out to see what works, there's a time and a place for it. When you're new and you're just trying to bunch of stuff out, but a certain point you have to get outta the dabbling phase.

Brian: But for social media, the dabbler is just like, I am following social media people now and I'm trying certain things out and I'm testing certain things and I'm getting likes and followers and it seems to be working well. And then it just kind of trails off. You dabbled and you never really even fully committed to a strategy you gave up.

Brian: He stopped posting we see it with clients we work with where we'll look at their social media account and their last post was like six months ago, [00:17:00] but that six months ago they were posting like every day they did that for like two months and before that was like two years of a gap.

Brian: So it's like the dabbler, you know it if you are it.

Brian: The next type of person I see on social media that doesn't really work well for freelancing is what I call the, like quarter. It's the person who's making content for vanity metrics, where you're posting things to get likes. You're like, oh, that's good engagement. I'll do more of that sort of content.

Brian: the problem with this is it's not actually turning into dollars at all. And I kind of get it, like you have to play to the algorithm to some extent, but what this usually turns into is that freelancers are trying to post things that get the most engagement.

Brian: And the things that get the most engagement are things that other freelancers like. So if you're a music producer, you're posting stuff about music production, about EQs, about your gear. If you're in web design, you're talking about website platforms and little tricks you learned on Webflow and how Webflow is dead and how.Figma website builder thing is the future. I don't know. You're talking about stupid stuff that none of your clients care about. And so you end up getting this following in this subscriber base of people just like you, and none of [00:18:00] those people are gonna hire you. So you have this marketing asset that you, could make money from.

Brian: You could do a lot with that, but it's not freelancing, it's not your services you're selling. It is gonna be something else.

Brian: And that is the big danger with social media when you are just like hoarding,

Brian: is that you never attract your ideal clients to you. the third kind of avatar I see in social media is the one way street. This is the type of person who just posts everything and you engage with no one.

Brian: This is me, by the way. I've made many of these mistakes. Remember half the battle is like networking, the networking piece. So we've seen our clients succeed when they're DMing people who like their stuff or follow them. They're proactively reaching out to the right fit type of connections, whether it's clients or referral partners or whatever it's, you're actually looking for.

Brian: But social media admittedly is not my forte. It's not my skillset. We have social media accounts We only just post like basically token content there to make sure it's at least updated and doesn't look like we've abandoned our business, it's not something I've invested in.

Brian: And that's another key here is like these are the top five ways that freelancers are saying they're getting clients. That doesn't mean do all five of these. It really [00:19:00] means pick one to two active ones, and just go all in with that. And if social media isn't it for you, if you're the type of person you're just like, I don't wanna post, like go to my Instagram, my wedding photo from 2019 is like in the top six photos on there.

Brian: But I post stories all the time, but I just don't really care. I don't consume, so I don't put out, I just don't deal with social media. It's like just not part of my day. I spend maybe 20, 25 minutes a week on all social media apps,

Brian: and truthfully, it's just for my own mental health. Like I just don't wanna see what's on there. I don't wanna doom scroll. I don't want the algorithm to learn what I like and just start feeding me more of it.

Brian: there are gonna be some great stuff on there. I'm not gonna lie, some really funny stuff, but a lot of it's really negative and I just don't want that in my brain, at least the number five here. Freelance marketplaces, this is the interesting one.

Brian: Because I actually found a study from Cornell that's fascinating here. I'm not gonna talk about it yet. I have some other things I wanna talk about first, but freelance marketplaces, you've seen them out there. And this is again, a, passive one. So it's appealing. In your brain, you just make a profile.

Brian: Clients will come to me and I will get gigs, and maybe they won't be the highest paying gigs, but at least some, it's some money, right?of the many problems with this is first and foremost, the five tax is what I call it. [00:20:00] I've been calling it the five tax for Forever, but obviously there's other platforms out there other than fiber.But the fiber tax is, they take every platform's different. Let's just say 15 to 20%. I think it's about 20% right now.

Brian: Fiverr takes a 20% commission from the seller's earnings on each order. This means if you complete a hundred dollars project, Fiverr, take 20 bucks and you'll receive 80 bucks.

Brian: Also included on any tips. If somebody tips you, they take 20% of that as well. So basically the five tax is 20% off the top before you ever see a dollar. And then on top of that, whatever's left over after the fiber tax, now your government takes their tax out as well.

Brian: they're going to send you 10 90 nines for what you have earned through them, or your 10 99 BEN or whatever you're from Canada, or whatever's equivalent for your country. And so you're gonna pay taxes on that. And depending on what your tax bracket is, it could be anywhere from 25 to 35%, probably on the lower end if you're on marketplaces like this.

Brian: So 25% on top of the 20% tax. So that means.

Brian: For every thousand dollars you make, you get to keepget the privilege of keeping $600 of that. So that means when you make a hundred thousand dollars,

Brian: you take [00:21:00] home 60,000 of that. on top of whatever other business expenses you have. So that's one of my biggest problems here. The other big problem is it is a bloody red ocean. This is a massive, massive market. If you go to fiverr.com, you look up whatever your service is, go find it on there.

Brian: It's probably sold. And if you look at there,it's just a grid of people it's all basically the same. They have slightly different headlines, slightly different photos, The first differentiators are how many reviews do you have and what's the price? So differentiation is more reviews, lower price.

Brian: There's third differentiator, which is likethe quality of your work, but a lot of it you're selling button seat services. So the quality is kind of a moving target.

Brian: And this study from Cornell that I found that basically shits on marketplaces, this is the numbers that they found. They found out that there are about 163 million freelancing profiles on online platforms globally. of that 163 million profiles, only about 19 million profiles have ever gotten work.

Brian: That's like just over 10%, call it 12, 15% have actually gotten work on a platform and just 5 million profiles. Completed, at least [00:22:00] 10 projects earned over a thousand dollars, meaning out of 163 million profiles, only 5 million of those profiles actually earned over a thousand dollars, and it actually gets worse than that.

Brian: When you factor in duplicate accounts, they found out like the average person has 1.8 profiles or something. So when you factor all that in the number of like individual unique human beings that have made over a thousand dollars on freelance marketplaces drops to 2.7 million people out of 163 million freelancing profiles, which is probably about a hundred million unique people, so like 2.7% of people on those platforms made over a thousand dollars.

Brian: And this was, by the way,this was in 2021. So it's a little outdated, four-ish years, outdated. But do you think things are more or less saturated on those platforms now compared to 2021? I think we know the answer to that.

Brian: So if you can make it work, if you're getting clients from it, and it's paying the bills right now. Continue it. I'm never gonna tell someone to turn off a source of revenue, keep it up. But getting off of that to where you can actually get clients on your own should be a huge priority for you.

Brian: There's a reason that like a lot of hotels, they don't want to use booking.com. [00:23:00] They don't want to use expedia.com to keep their hotels booked up. They want direct bookings on their website.

Brian: It is the same for freelancers. Let's talk about the other client acquisition methods that weren't really covered here. 'there's a few of them. But there's really one I wanna focus on. One is like content marketing. You could argue that social media is content marketing, and I would agree, but I'm talking about like long form content marketing.

Brian: There's YouTube, which is the world's second biggest search engine. It's a massive recommendation engine. So even if you don't have searchable terms, you can get your videos recommended.

Brian: And we have clients who have tens of thousands of subscribers on there bringing in clients to them. It's a free source of traffic.

Brian: There's also a podcast like this. This is more of a podcast than a YouTube. We have our stuff on YouTube. If you watch on YouTube, shout out to you, YouTube is not where we get the bulk of our downloads. We get, uh, order of magnitude more on actual podcast apps than we get on YouTube.

Brian: Also, shout out to our Spotify. Listeners, because that's our,our largest growing segment.

Brian: But the cool thing about podcasting as a freelancer is that you can actually create a podcast where you're interviewing your ideal clients and the content you create with that conversation is appealing to other ideal clients. you get to double dip. [00:24:00] You get to dip first by just connecting directly with your ideal client and potentially closing some of those into clients.

Brian: It's basically giving you an excuse to reach out and connect with your ideal clients and talk to them for like 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, and the conversations you have can be appealing to more clients. Thus bring in scalable client acquisition.

Brian: Meaning that hey, maybe your first 10 episodes you get zero clients. From your followers you get two clients from people you interviewed. You're like, cool, this is worth doing. I'll continue this on. But maybe, 10 through 20, you actually start getting, you still get your two clients from the people you're interviewing, but maybe you get one extra one from the listenership that's grown maybe by, episode a hundred.

Brian: You're just booked solid from the listeners. You don't even worry about the people that you're interviewing. That can be powerful.

Brian: And finally for long form content marketing is blogs. my wife has a, one of her best friends is a designer and she does blogs for her design business and brings in clients that way. So it's not antiquated, it's not dead. It's probably less effective now, and it's definitely less effective now than it was a decade ago, it's still can be done and it's worth doing for certain people.

Brian: If you're a good writer, you can create written content that people wanna consume, and generally you [00:25:00] have a way of,distributing it. She has a social following, so she kind of puts the social and the blog together. And also, she has SEO with some of the things she does, although that's probably changing with chat.

Brian: GBT, it's still worth considering not the first choice for me, but that's content marketing. The one I wanna talk about that is honestly slept on in the freelancing world, is paid media. I've talked about this many, many times in this podcast. But the thing about paid media is that it brings strangers into your world.

Brian: ' cause you can show them your amazing social proof. You can show them the case studies, your portfolio. You can let them know you exist so they know that you're out there at the very least. So you can bring strangers into your world, and also you can stay top of mind for literally everyone else through retargeting.

Brian: So past clients, past leads, warm leads. Lukewarm leads, people who just found you, you can say top of mind for like ever. I know some of you people I get this all the time. They see my ads like every day. even my brother-in-law is like, do I see your ads every day? He listens to the podcast so it makes sense.

Brian: If he's been to a show notes page of ours, then he's probably being retargeted to death. and so if you wanna be retargeted to death, you can go to the show notes [00:26:00] page for this episode by going to six figure creative.com/ 3 8 2.

Brian: And maybe you can get an idea of how we retarget

Brian: But the reason this is so powerful is that it works no matter where you live. It's semi passive, meaning you create ads, you launch them, you let them run. Review the test results. It's a little bit of work in the front end to find winning ads, but once you find winning ads, if the ad spends that most freelancers are spending it on, they can let those ads run for weeks or even months without touching them.

Brian: Only thing you're doing is adjusting the budget up and down, and it's generating leads. It's keeping you top of mind. You're getting more referrals. You're getting more eyeballs on your website and on your offers.

Brian: It exponentially scales, meaning I can create one ad one time. I can set it up in Meta Ads Manager and I can put dollars behind it, and then that can bring me tons and tons and tons of leads.

Brian: And when I'm working on projects or working with clients, I can keep those ads running. So that I have future leads and future pipeline and I'm not letting it all dry up why I perform the actual service that I've been selling, right? So it helps even out those dips, it helps get more referrals. It basically makes everything else more powerful.

Brian: [00:27:00] It even helps in networking. So if you go to networking events and these people have seen your ads already, then it just helps elevate you in the market as somebody who's like, oh, I see your ads all the time, dude. Talk to me about those, right? Just like people wanna talk about it,

Brian: but there's some limitations with paid ads that need to be considered carefully. The first thing is proof is king. Don't try to run ads if you have no social proof to speak of. If you have no past clients who are notable or you have no case studies or no results, if you can't show that you can do what you say you can do and do it at a high level, Then it's likely not worth doing because it's not gonna work for you. The second thing is, and this is unfortunate, but it's reality, accents matter, so it's really hard to close. English speaking USA Canada, UK clients, if you have a very thick accent, and we've seen a couple exceptions with this, generally speaking, the thicker your accent, the harder it's to target us or English speaking countries.

Brian: It'd be like me trying to speak. Horrible Spanish to a Spanish market, it just wouldn't convert. They can't understand what I'm saying and if they can't understand what I'm saying in an ad, they're just gonna keep swiping. And also they [00:28:00] probably are thinking if they're thinking through it, they're like I don't wanna try to communicate with this person who can barely speak Spanish if I don't speak English.

Brian: Right. So just think about the roles reversed. You would be the same exact way if you were considering somebody that you had to communicate with on a very important project. the third limitation for paid ads is that very high ticket freelancers might struggle here. So again, if you're like 25, 30,000 or more for your services, this can be very, very difficult for you to do.

Brian: Not because it doesn't work, but because acquisition costs tend to scale with the price of your service. So if you sell, call it a $5,000 service, when you're early and running your ads, you might get a client for. Half that amount or a quarter of that amount, or the goal we shoot for is one fifth of that amount early on and over time you can get that number down.

Brian: say you actually get it down, it's one fifth, you're doing great. It's a thousand dollars to acquire a $5,000 client. And then the goal is to get that even further down. So you wanna get five hundreds for a $5,000 client or even less if you can. That's the goal when you scale that to a $30,000 client.

Brian: Now we're looking not at 500, not at a thousand. We're looking at $6,000 to get one client, [00:29:00] $6,000,

Brian: and most freelancers are not willing or able to spend six grand. With little to show for it. Even like just getting leads or getting book calls and qualified leads and getting people to show up and have a conversation. Even that can be expensive. You can spend up to like $1,500 on a qualified lead in that market and still have a highly profitable funnel.

Brian: That's the problem with it, and that's if you're getting like a five to one return ad spend early on. Again, the goal is much better than that long term, but five to one, something to shoot for early on, and if you're doing poorly and you have like a two to one, meaning it's a $15,000 cost to get a $30,000 client.

Brian: Early on. Again, this is like month one, not the rest of your life. That's again, unsustainable for most people. So if you have a really expensive service, that's where something like cold outreach might be a better bet if you need to get strangers to hire you.

Brian: But no matter what method you choose, whether it's paid ads or you're going to try to make referrals more active, or you're gonna do in-person networking, or you're gonna do social media, or you're gonna do cold outreach. No matter what you do, active or passive free, your paid the strategy is the most important part of this.

Brian: Don't just wait around. Don't just half dabble in [00:30:00] it. Don't just throw shit at the wall. See what sticks.

Brian: Sit down and think through what is going to be your strategy. Ask yourself some of the same questions they asked earlier in this episode. What is the goal? What is the method? Whatcha you gonna test? Whatcha gonna track

Brian: if you're listening to this the morning this episode comes out, which should be, if everything goes correctly, should be September 30th. If you listening to this in the AM later today, I'm talking over the direct offer strategy. This is a live, workshop that I'm doing later today at 1:00 PM Central Standard Time.

Brian: That's 2:00 PM Eastern, So if you want to be a part of that, just go to six figure creative.com/live LIVE to sign up for that. this will be a really good companion to what we just talked about here.

Brian: these methods can work. Any of these methods are viable. I've seen the every single one of these work for people. The problem is, again, the dabbler, the person who has no strategy. So whatever you do,

Brian: work smart, not hard. That's the That's the goal, or work smart and hard. But that's all I got for you today. Again, if you wanna be part of that live, just go to six figure credit.com/live to sign up. If you missed it, there'll be it next time anyways. See you next week. Peace.