Paid Ads vs Organic Content: What Actually Works in 2026?

392. with Richie, Dennis, and Rob

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[00:00:00] Should freelancers use paid advertising to get clients, or should they use organic content to get clients? Which is better? How do the two things maybe affect each other? In this episode, we're gonna break down how paid and organic really worked together in 2026 and beyond. When to use each one, where people are getting the best results right now and what freelancers need to know before spending time or money on either one of those two things.

Brian: And so because of this, I actually wanted to bring on three amazing guests who have spent, uh, combined tens of millions on paid ads, or at least. 10 to 20 million on paid ads, generated hundreds of millions in revenue for their clients through organic and paid. they're all three actually coaches for six figure creative.

Brian: So by the end you'll know the answer to this [00:01:00] question, which is kind of the age old question. Do I do organic or do I do paid? So real quick, lemme intro these coaches, Richie is the first, hello Richie. Um, He runs a marketing agency where it's, I think you're somewhere in the half a million dollar a year range.

Brian: You've also coached, I think, hundreds of clients at this point, because even before you worked for us, you worked for another coaching company. 'cause this is kind of a passion of yours. He's from New Jersey. We try not to hold it against him. And despite that you're somehow the chillest guy in the room most of the time.

Brian: Rob, uh, is our second guest here. he's got a long marketing and copying background going back to the nineties. You generated a half a million, half a, I'm sorry, million.Half a billion plus for your clients over your career. You've built multiple, multi six-figure businesses, which is hard to say. You even built and sold I think a six figure SaaS company as well as your background. and you are the complete opposite me, of me in every single way where like Rob is professional buttoned up. If you've listened to this podcast, you know how I am.

Brian: So is that mostly accurate, Rob?

Rob: Yeah, it's mostly accurate. I don't know how buttoned up I am. Sometimes I'll wear the button up shirt, but behind the scenes,

Rob: things are a little rough.

Brian: [00:02:00] If you're ever on our team meetings, Rob will sometimes have like these nice buttoned up, like crisp, ironed or pressed shirts on and I always like compliment him on them. And then sometimes he just comes with the hoodie and I'm like, oh, hell yeah. He's coming to the dark side. Our last of the guests here today is, uh, Dennis.

Brian: he is built and sold a multi seven figure agency. He has doubled two businesses from three to $6 million a year as Head of Marketing. He spent over $15 million. On meta ads, probably way more at this point. 'cause he'd run all of our ads now Dennis. And, uh, he lives in a van down by the river in New Zealand.

Brian: Uh, Dennis, where's your van parked at today?

Dennis: Uh, my van is currently parked at Oh, Hopi Beach, which is, one of the most beautiful beaches in New Zealand.

Brian: Yeah. it's afternoon for us here in America. It's like early in the am there for you. You'll probably hear birds chirping and things happening. 'cause he is, he literally is like doing that hashtag van life, down by the river.

Brian: are our three guests. Today I'm gonna run this kinda as like a panel. This is something new I wanted to try. I was like, I've got all these amazing coaches. We've got all these amazing topics we can talk about. I'm personally burnt out as hell on this podcast trying to come up with topics for the last 400 episodes by [00:03:00] myself.

Brian: I figured why not try a panel type episode? So before I get to the panel questions, I want to first explain. the definitions of organic and paid, because some people might not know what organic is.

Brian: When I say organic, I just mean content that you're creating organically that is made for, platforms like short form video on Instagram, TikTok, shorts on YouTube, or reels on Instagram. It could be things like YouTube videos. It could be things like a blog, anything like that is considered generally organic.

Brian: Versus paid is where you're spending money to get eyeballs, like meta ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, et cetera. So that being said, let's get into the questions. So first thing I wanna talk about with you guys is. In your experience, how do you decide personally between investing time in organic marketing or money on paid marketing? I'm speaking specifically to, your own entrepreneurial pursuits and I think a good person to start with here would be, Richie.

Brian: 'cause you do have an agency you're currently running right now, and I'd love to get your take on how you think through organic versus paid in your own business.

Richie: Yeah, so the way I kind of view it is like, this is a really basic analogy I [00:04:00] use when I'm talking to potential clients, like you could think about it like a water coming out of a faucet. So if the ad, is, the faucet turning it on? Is the leads coming through, just throwing money at it, right?

Richie: you're paying to be in front of those people where, over time doing enough organic content, that kind of faucet is always on like a steady drip. But it takes a lot of time to build up. So in reality. It's kind of both at the same time in my opinion you need organic content to back up your page strategy.

Richie: people are going to look for you for validation. They're gonna see if this person real, do they know what they're talking about. I would say that the next best thing after social proof is detailed organic content of you walking through your processes, talking about how you get clients' results.

Richie: It really boosts your page strategy a lot. And also side note can be used in nurture content as well if you're doing a retargeting strategy for people who have visited your landing page or booked a call.

Brian: What about you, Dennis? You've run your own agency. You built that up over time. And you also have, been head of marketing for two different companies. do you think through that kind of, [00:05:00] I wouldn't say dichotomy, but like the thought process of should I invest time, effort, energy, and organic, or should I invest money in paid?

Dennis: Yeah, so I've always been, for my whole career, I've kind of been a paid ads first guy where I've usually, when I started promoting anything, I've started going with paid ads and then later on I added organic stuff into it. Obviously as Richie said, both of them are a great tool and both of them work really, really well together, right? my, whole spiel was always, if we can get ads to run profitably. And then add organic content on top of it is just gonna amplify all the other stuff. So obviously ads work better, as Richie said, when you have organic. the other thing is that if you have organic content and you produce a lot of content, you'll also learn and get data from that.

Dennis: And you can use that for paid ads as well. And you, 'cause you at one point know what your clients wanna hear right from organic content.

Richie: it's possible to run a profitable funnel or paid ad without organic content, which is why what I was trying to say was [00:06:00] go for ads first, and then you can build up your content over time. It's only gonna help, but you could have, you know, not a lot of content and put a lot of money into an ad and be very profitable with it.

Dennis: hundred percent agree. so I've seen the thing for like probably 50, 60 clients that I've worked with in my agency time, where we mostly build everything off paid ads, and then once these work profitably, then we kinda edit it to it and use some of that money we made from the paid ads and put that into organic strategies.

Brian: this is kind of the approach that I've taken, like six figure creative as a whole has been built off of paid ads, but it has just, poured fuel on the fire with organic. Content marketing like this podcast for all the people that have found us through the paid ads to nurture them long term.

Brian: But I'd love to know your input, Rob, because you, I think your last business you built about a half a million a year with a different approach. I don't know if you did much of any paid ads. I'd love to get your take on it 'cause you seem to be more of an organic first guy.

Rob: we did way more organic. We would run paid ads anytime we had a program to promote. were bringing in new students into, you know, our accelerator or ifwe [00:07:00] were, you know, selling something, we would run paid ads for that event, but we weren't running for. Funnels to constantly bring new leads into the business.

Rob: Everything else was very organic. My thinking around that though has changed over, especially in the last yearbecause of the way organic works. If I were starting today. I would still do organic content, but I would focus on channels that are permanent rather than channels that, are fleeting.

Rob: specifically, and this worked for us because we had a podcast, podcasting is permanent. know, it stays out there. It can last for years. If you put up content today, it could still be there in three years. YouTube videos permanent. in fact, YouTube videos, because YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

Rob: It's an amazing organic resource, and your content stays there. then if you're posting on Instagram, your reel is up for, what,24 hours. your posts are available for 15 to 20 minutes. Of course, you can go find that stuff on somebody's page and through their grid.

Rob: But it doesn't get surfaced by the algorithms the same way. And so, [00:08:00] like I said, my thinking has changed. If I were starting today, the primary thing that I would focus on is permanent places like podcasting, video, your own blog, your own website and then maybe, you know, scatter in a little bit of, Instagram or TikTok, just depending on who, you know.

Rob: If your audience is there, you probably wanna be doing a little bit there too.

Brian: with you guys being coaches for me now for Six Figure Creative, You all have your own rosters of freelancers that you work with. I'd love to know what you look at with your own clients. when you help them decide whether they should be doing organic or paid. And again, I'll start with you first, Richie, just because I think you've been with us, of the three coaches here, you've been with us the longest,

Richie: Yeah. I feel like ads could work for most people. And any sort of service-based business where you're providing like any sort of like transformational outcome through the skill or expertise that you have? There's an offer to be made, which means that we can run, some sort of ad to that offer.

Richie: So most of the time I'm finding a way to run paid ads to this offer rarely ever. And I'm like,okay, we have to go to some sort of organic or likecold [00:09:00] outreach strategy. Likeit has to be a very, very specific niche offer where it's like, people are gonna be an audience large enough on meta where we can target them.

Richie: so most of the time I'm just trying to find a way to create an offer for paid ads no matter what.

Brian: What about you, Rob?

Rob: think about the clients who come into Six Figure Creative, most of them come. ' cause they wanna find clients and you've got a program that works here. So obviously ads are going to be the very easiest you know, faucet to turn on with an immediate response. But I will say when a client comes in.

Rob: That has a large social following already. whether they've built that audience on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or wherever, I get excited about that because that's a really good platform for doing some of these extra things where yeah, you can post something, to that audience that you've built and.

Rob: Assuming that you can get some response from your audience. The algorithm may even pick it up and start showing it to new audiences. It's a good place to test ideas that you can then bring to your ads, [00:10:00] portfolio and the things that you're doing. So, I mean, ads first is definitely, you know, like if you need clients, that's the fastest way to get them ads first.

Rob: But having the social platforms to build on top of that, just, it's like rocket fuel, right? It's just additional opportunity.

Brian: Part of the things we ask for in our clients onboarding forums is links to socials, if they have a mailing list, any other things that we call marketing assets that we can utilize early on so that if that is already there, we can maximize the use of those. Audiences or those, assets before we start spending money on paid ads.

Brian: And generally what we've seen though, is when you start running paid ads for somebody who has already built a name for themselves, it is just so much more effective because meta is really good at showing your ads to people who already know, I can trust you first, even if you don't want it to, which is,it could go either way.

Brian: If you're like, I wanna write ads, but I don't want people to know about it, honestly, show it to everybody and you'll start to see like Early dollar spent on ads can be some of the most profitable.

Rob: that being said, though, you don't necessarily need that platform to come into a program like Six Figure and have it work. [00:11:00] Like you can start with ads, you can grow that afterwards. know, it's not a prerequisite, it's bonus. Right.

Dennis: ads is usually the quickest way to get people where they want to be. Especially considering that most people who get into the program, they usually have a lead issue and a quantity of inquiries issue. Not a sales conversion issue. 'cause most freelancers get their clients from referrals and similar sources.

Dennis: So mostly it's just a quantity issue and that's the easiest solved by using paid ads. That being said, obviously picking the low hanging fruits and utilizing a social following, can have really good results. And I've had a few clients where they came in some with like two to 3000, some with like 40 to 50,000 followers.

Dennis: And we just did some social content first to kind of. Pick these low hanging fruits and make a bunch of money from it.

Brian: the social media blitz? Was it that, the playbook you did Raymond? What do you feel like crushes it with organic and where do you feel like it falls flat on its face? Because there's pros and cons to all platforms in all approaches on both sides.

Brian: We'll talk about the pros and cons on the other side, but what do you think an organic crushes it right now and where's it fall in its face? I'll start with you, Rob.

Rob: I am not sure that I have the perfect answer for this. But what [00:12:00] I would say is that you need to be thinking about what is actually the goal? What's the end point? Too many people create organic content just to create something, to post something because they feel like, I need to put up a reel.

Rob: Content like that, if the goal is to bring clients into your business is generally not a great use of your time. Like, you need to be thinking what is the message that's actually going to attract clients? What is the thing that they need to hear?

Rob: What's the problem they're trying to solve? this is true by the way of ads and organic, but too many people treat organic content differently than they would treat the messaging on their ads. And I think that's honestly the biggest mistake with organic content. You'reas a business owner, you're not here to entertain.

Rob: If you're here to solve problems for your clients, and if you wanna have a personal account where you're doing funny stuff and entertaining, that's fine. if you're trying to run a business, everything you do on your social media should be helping you reach that goal.

Brian: think, uh, the trap people fall into is they do it for the likes. the vanity metrics, and so they'd rather have like a hundred likes on a post, and they'd rather have [00:13:00] 10,000 followers of people who are there to be entertained versus the person who just understands In my niche, I only need like 300 of the right followers.

Brian: I only need four people to like my post. I only need 50 people to see this reel because it's the right people they fall into the trap of thinking, oh, we only got 50 views. It only got a hundred views. But they don't realize the people watching that stuff is the people that want to be there and they're the ones who wanna see your stuff.

Brian: A thousand followers can be as valuable as a million if it's the right people

Rob: More

Brian: I.

Richie: and you have the right offer.

Brian: Alexey had that person on his podcast or at least mentioned her, she had like a thousand followers on Instagram and had a seven figure business because it was just like the right following, and it was all from organic.

Dennis: I've seen that same thing with my clients where some come in with like a thousand followers and some with like 40,000. But the social media stuff kind of gets the same results. Like the person with a thousand followers gets five clients from it and the person with 40,000 also gets five clients from it.

Dennis: Just 'cause it's the specific audience. And I also think a lot of people. Don't really see that. They look at the likes and then they post a few times over the span of like two weeks and then [00:14:00] they give up. 'cause they're like, oh, it's not working. But in reality it is working. They're stopping too early.

Dennis: It's like this classic meme of like stopping before you dig into the diamonds. Where a lot of people are like that. They put out content and then they stop right before they hit that point where it's actually working.

Brian: The inflection point. we'll likely start going all in with YouTube next year for Six Figure Creative and been watching a lot of content around that. And what you'll see a lot of people talk about is. If you'll see them posting for like a year, two years straight with very little growth, and then they just hit this weird inflection point out of nowhere and their accounts just skyrocket.

Brian: And so it's interesting to see people are,willing to do all the work to get started and then maintain it, but they pitter out before they really see success with it.

Richie: normally it's 90 to a hundred videos or something. Some number like that where you finally start to hit some sort of like ramp into like the next stratosphere. But it's possible to have success and gain a lot of following before that too,

Brian: I think that's one of the areas that Organic falls flat on its face is that it is very much like learning a brand new instrument. People understand that when they pick up a guitar, they're [00:15:00] not gonna be amazing at it. The very first time they do it, they're gonna suck at it. They're not even gonna know what to do.

Brian: And so how do you go from that to performing on a stage in front of a hundred thousand people? It's a long journey. It's not overnight. It's not in a month, it's not in a week. It's not your first song. It's not your 10th song. It's probably not at your hundred song you wrote. It's somewhere way down the line.

Brian: That's why when you see awards for best new artists. They generally have had careers for five or 10 years. So I think when you take that same mindset and approach towards organic content, You're playing a different game at that point. It's a game of improvement, micro adjustment, celebrating little wins, and not just looking at, oh, I didn't get as many likes as Debra down the street, you know, with her a hundred thousand followers.

Brian: Oh, I'm just a failure.

Rob: The fact that, you don't usually get too many, views on those first couple of videos is actually a gift from the social media gods. Because if everybody saw how bad you are, you would never sell anything, you know, down the road. So to have that time to actually get good at this thing, I mean, you mentioned my podcast, Brian.

Rob: I actually don't think I was decent at podcasting until well after my 50th [00:16:00] episode. Like that's a lot of time

Brian: listen to episode one of this podcast and you'll understand what he's talking

Rob: E. Exactly. And takes time to get good. And so, you know what, like Richie said, somewhere around that 90th or a hundredthvideo that you post on YouTube or whatever it is, then you've kind of figured it out and you actually deserve the audience.

Dennis: The algorithm starts to send your way. if you have a lot of videos out, you have some kind of called binge ability so people can just go in there and binge your content and that builds so much trust. Compared to just receiving a few emails or seeing two ads, right. I know that there's people listening right now to the podcast probably that have listened to 150 episodes over the last year or two or whatever.

Dennis: And that's just something you can't get with ads. I mean, you can kind of emulate it by shooting a bunch of content and showing it to people. It's retargeting, but you can build that kind of binge ability with paid outs that you can build with organic.

Brian: Well, let's, let's shift to paid ads. What situations make paid ads the better move in y'all's opinion? I'll start with you, Dennis, 'cause I don't think I've led with you

Dennis: I always think paid adss are [00:17:00] the,best move, which alwaysprobably comes with my background of my whole career mainly doing paid ads. so I think there's almost always in like 99% of cases paid ads are the best, or the fastest way to get where we want to go.

Dennis: That being said, paid ads as the first. Priority is basically for people who, they don't haveany audience, they don't have an email list, they don't have anything. They maybe don't even have their offer figured out yet. A hundred percent. they don't know what pricing is, the market is gonna pay and all that stuff.

Dennis: It just helps to get so much data, no matter if it's like a newer business or if you've been in business for years. But if you don't have any kind of audience, like email list podcasts or socials or whatever paid ads should always be the go-to, to kind of dive into that as quickly as possible.

Dennis: And we have some strategies where you don't even have to build out a whole funnel to run paid ads or anything like that. You can just bake some ads and run them to direct messages or something like that to just get in there as quickly as possible and just get real world data. ' cause that's what a lot of people are missing, just the [00:18:00] quantity of data.

Richie: Yeah, I mean, you could give me literally any situation I we could find a solution for paid ads for it. Like you're like, oh no. Social proof. Run a decoy offer to a service-based lead magnet, a low ticket offer. Get some quick wins. put it on a landing page.

Richie: There you go. Like, there's so many different ways and situations where people might try and find a way out of paid ads, where it could easily be combated. most people think that They're not in a position to run them, whether it's financially or they're not good enough, they're not skilled enough, they don't have enough of these things.

Richie: It's all gatekeeping themselves from actually doing it. especially financially, honestly, until I started coaching here, I've never got so many wins with such little ad spend. You know, most of these people are spending $500. And getting, insane return on investment if you do it the right way and you get the right coaching.

Richie: So, barrier to entry for ads is,obviously very low. But the return on investment is, it's there 100%.

Brian: our record is probably from Jay Moss who was able to spend like three bucks a day and brought in like $140,000 of clients. we've seen some [00:19:00] other really cool returns as well. Generally speaking, there's a few things that we've seen that make paid ads work better, and there are also things that typically means that the person's better at their jobs as well.

Brian: Things like social proof, success with their own client work that they've done. What have you guys seen in your own rosters as far as what makes paid ads work versus ones who struggle with paid ads?

Rob: I'm your newest coach, in the program, and so we're starting to see some success with, getting attention. the clients that I've. Worked with there's two things really that they do in their ads that I think are really effective.

Rob: Number one is they're able to demonstrate their skillset, so they're able to show that they get a result for their client. And number two is they're able to demonstrate that they've worked with a name client or someone that the people that they're targeting is gonna recognize. So, you know, it's not necessarily Bruno Mars.

Rob: But it's somebody in the local market. know, is, familiar in the niche. previous experience definitely helps with that because then you've had some success. But just being able to demonstrate that you can actually solve a problem for your client, being able to do that in eight to 10 seconds in an ad, [00:20:00] it's an amazing trust builder an amazing way to show off your skillset.

Richie: Yeah, I honestly, I think, I know that there are a lot of things that, be nice to have when it comes to running ads, like social proof and all these things. But I have clients that don't have the best social proof, that have never worked with huge artists or done anything before. For instance, James, he. He'd never worked with like any enormous artist, but he's,had a transformational experience with us He put so much time and effort into making a quality ad and writing a good script, and making a really good offer. And he did his own editing, spent a lot of time.

Richie: Me and him went back and forth on hooks forever, and then he finally launched and that, literally that first ad set changed everything for him. Like, literally. And I think it comes down to the people who have the most success with ads. They're,willing to try new things. they get creative and they know their audience and they're not scared to like,put themselves out there on camera and be themselves.

Richie: Most of the people that kind of shy away from the experience of filming ads and trying new hooks and, constantly trying to make a better ad. [00:21:00] They're the ones who fall behind. I feel like. again, obviously people can make a great ad and just be like, yeah, I have a billion streams on Spotify and a Grammy, you wanna work with me.

Richie: And they get,they're gonna get both calls, you know? So, I feel like the people who don't have that it's an effort thing. it's like, let me just make a kick ass ad.

Brian: what was the results of,James that stood out as far as you said it was transformed? Everything.

Richie: he's probably made close to, uh, over 40 K in like two months just from a couple ad sets and he was having like 11 K weeks and he just kind of just started closing enormous amounts of business.

Brian: Nice.

Richie: I think there's a really important point of clarification here though, Brian, like sometimes people are, you know, new to this and they'll see the opportunity to promote a post, and they think that promoting a post is running an ad. Really different situation. I mean, ads give you a level of control that organic stuff doesn't give you.

Rob: And that's one of the main reasons that you wanna run 'em. But you can choose the audience that you're targeting, you know, you can choose the exact message that the exact person needs to hear. Promoting a post in almost all cases, promoting a post [00:22:00] is a waste of money,but Facebook loves to tell you to do it because, you know, they make a lot of money

Brian: the quote boost post button on social media. I call that the donate to Zuck button. We do not press it unless you just like giving money to a billionaire who doesn't need more

Richie: That's good.

Brian: where have you seen organic and paid actually help each other out? Like, Ernie, anything that freelancers should be aware of when it comes to how one feeds the other, or vice versa?

Dennis: Yeah, obviously it works really well together, which is one of the reasons where we always combine it. Usually what I like to tell my clients is basically when have you ever bought something the first time you saw a face somewhere? So like you see one ad and you buy immediately. That's very rare.

Dennis: I mean, it does happen, obviously, but you know, I've seen it in ads. But also if you look, for example, at our ads, which I run, if you look at where people came from and we track all that, obviously we have some like advanced software for that, but we can always see that they've seen more than one ad and then maybe they've listened to the podcast and stuff like this.

Dennis: So the goal is. For the ads to bring the people in, to get the attention, to get the leads in there. [00:23:00] But then you need to build the trust. 'cause even if you have the best offer, people are gonna see it and they're gonna be skeptical. 'cause obviously there's a bunch of, bunch of scammy stuff out there on the internet.

Dennis: if. by the way, freelancers don't have to worry about as much as we do. 'cause like in our market, if you're a coaching company, it's just assumed you're a scam until otherwise proven innocent. Whereas for. Freelancers generally, like you're creating stuff and your portfolio is the proof. A lot of times there's other sorts of proof, but it's not quite the same in that world.

Brian: There's not an instant wall up when running paid ads like there is in the coaching world. So we have a little more to overcome, but continue on Dennis.

Dennis: Yeah, I agree with that. But still it's like you need to build trust, right? People are gonna see you at and they'll be like, oh, that's a great offer. I'm interested. And they were like, can I trust this person to actually fulfill what he's promising? And youthey look at some pulse and the more organic content you have, they can kind of binge through it.

Dennis: you can prove your expertise. You can show some more client results so people know that you. Didn't just work for one client and that's the testimony you used in your ad, right? So it's just about building more trust in building that connection with them. And also obviously people are [00:24:00] looking at, they're not just looking at can you get results, they're looking at like your personality.

Dennis: Is that a fit your overall offer in all the general stuff that. people in general look at when they meet other people, they're like, someone's not gonna hire you if you don't fit their personality of they hate you on the first site. So there's just a lot of trust in, everything to be billed out through organic.

Brian: Which by the way, if you do run ads, I do encourage you to let someone else moderate your comments for you. Just, just putting that out there for your own mental health.

Rob: but don't be afraid of negative comments because I mean, though you don't like seeing them, every time somebody comments on your post, whether it's positive or negative, that means more people see your post more people see your ad. occasionally you might wanna hide 'em if they're really brutal, but don't be too afraid of that stuff because more eyeballs on your ad is not a bad thing.

Brian: Yeah, I was talking to a client about an ad hook recently and we were just talking about mentioning a specific artist's name. 'Cause he had like an example similar to that artist and he had mispronounced that artist's name to me. I was like, it's actually pronounced this way, but I would love for you to mispronounce it in the [00:25:00] ad so people will correct you in the comments and boost it in the algorithm.

Brian: But that's a strategy we should test is specifically like making an error in the hook of the ad so that people comment to see if it brings the ad cost down. That'd be fun to test.

Rob: one other thing, Brian, just to go back to your last question, organic and paid. Organic is a great place to start testing ideas. You know, if you post you know, a new idea every couple of days and you start to see one. Really resonates with your audience. That's an indication that that could be an idea that you can build an ad or even an ad set off of.

Rob: So you know, don't shy away from, just throwing ideas out there. it's organic, most of it's gonna disappear and that's okay. But if something pops, that's something that's resonating and might be worth turning into an.

Brian: that's something.

Dennis: just turning it into an ad, but you can also basically test offers in organic, which I've done a bunch of times with different clients of like, Hey.This is an offer that we think could crush it. So let's just post it to your audience of 2000 people and see who reacts to it. And if people react and you get good feedback on it and people are [00:26:00] interested, that's something worth putting dollars behind, and spinning at spend on.

Dennis: If you don't get any resonance at all, that might be a sign that it's not a good offer for the target group.

Richie: we kind of talked about it already, but Paid ads. I said the barrier, to entry is very low, but at the same time, like having a strong organic strategy, especially on YouTube, I'm like, so happy Rob brought that up. that is, I think nowadays probably the most powerful platform that you can make organic content on, because the way that Google's doing AI and their search results. With YouTube now, like you're getting a two for one bang for your buck you're not appearing in just YouTube results. You're on Google search now too. You get SEO juice from that. it's just so powerful and people are asking questions on YouTube and you can give them a 30 minute answer

Richie: can literally,

Brian: that. I use Google a lot still to like,find answers to things and I didn't even think about like how.Google is now throwing YouTube videos at the top, and it'll be skipped to the specific point in the video that answers the

Richie: Yep. It literally reads your transcript. It knows everything about your video.

Rob: The other thing you get [00:27:00] with a YouTube video is that every video has its own page where you can include not just a video description, but links to programs, links to offers, links back to your website. That's really hard to do in a place like Instagram where you know, it's like Link Bio and then you've gotta have, you know, some other app that gives you all of the links, right?

Rob: you know, I'm not necessarily all in on YouTube, but man, YouTube is a powerful platform for organic content, and it just has so many things that help you out as a business owner.

Dennis: that's another pro of like organic or something that I wouldn't say it's new to organic, but has come up more recently in likethe marketing world overall. People always talked about building a funnel for paid ads, but you can build a funnel for organic in the same way of just like having top of the funnel content, having more.

Dennis: Bottom of the funnel content that's more specific, that's not gonna get as many views. You can have an entry level offer for just organic people or lead maintenance. So there's a lot to be optimized for and a lot to be done with like organic funnels that can work

Richie: I know, I I literally know a guy whose entire agency [00:28:00] is YouTube funnels and he does like a hundred KA month. Like it's insane.

Rob: Yeah. You, I mean, linking three or four funnels to take somebody through an entire sales message and then you end with an offer. Yeah. It's, it's a powerful tool.

Richie: Mm-hmm.

Dennis: one of the things that I did with one of the companies I worked for before at the head of Marketing where we did a lot of organic, we basically built a funnel on YouTube and each video we posted brought in like four to five sales that were worth like 4K. so there's a lot of power in organic strategy.

Brian: What about some myths behind this? So whether it's organic or ads, are there any myths that you hear that you have to dispel with, your client list or with people that you talk to outside of this program?

Dennis: I have one big one, which I don't know why it always comes up. Usually mostly with music producers. And I have a lot of, objections to overcome with this, but people seem to think that they look desperate when they start running ads, um, which is not the case. And I even, I even had a success interview with one of my clients recently who's been crushing it.

Brian: And he said in the beginning, when I started thinking about that, I was like. [00:29:00] I'm gonna look desperate. I want people to see me running ads. They're gonna think, oh, this guy doesn't have enough work. He has to run ads, which is just bullshit. Like businesses promote, right? If you promote in person or via an ad, like people who are gonna see your ad, if they think you're desperate for running their ad, they're probably not a good client Not only fun.

Dennis: We work with them.

Brian: not only that, any client that I've worked with who had that objection and we overcame it with them and actually had to run ads, they'll tell me later, like after being like, oh, thank God I now have this skillset that I can use for the rest of my life and actually can start generating leads or.

Brian: As for Moses calls it like being a rainmaker. Like you can just make it rain whenever you want. He now has, people reaching out to him all the time trying to help them with that. So it's like these people that you think, think you're desperate, they're actually being like, I've seen his ads every like week for the past six months.

Brian: He's obviously crushing it. He wouldn't still be running these ads. How, well, how is he doing this? They wanna know how to do it at that point.

Brian: yeah. How do you handle that Objection, Richie? Like, how do you do that with your clients?

Richie: I just basically tell him that it's bullshit. and then I ask him like, why is the entertainment [00:30:00] industry the only industry that shuns people for trying to be better? Like, It's crazy. Like I've had so many clients be like, I lost followers when I posted this. I'm like, I don't know why, but if you want to get more clients, this is what we have to do.

Richie: But some of the other big ones, there's so many myths. for instance, we kind of talked about it. You need a lot of money to run ads. You don't,

Brian: Yeah. What's your average budget per day for your clients?

Richie: One kid right now, he's gotten five books, calls. He's on a $5 a day.

Richie: Like we always start that little, And who knows, like maybe it's, it's, he's just starting, like two of those might be good, you know, but it's a start. And then once we figure out why those good people are booking, we up it, it's all calculated. You know, if you,if you're very smart about it, youcan get a lot out of $500 of ad spend.

Richie: Now for my agency, I don't wanna work with someone if they can't spend a hundred dollars a day, right? But it's bigger audience,

Brian: So when I first worked with an agency, I hired an agency for my company years and years ago. Didn't work out, but they asked me what my budget was for ads. Typically, I would imagine with you, Richie, people are like, how much do I have to spend a day?

Brian: Like This is big chore of like, they don't, they wanna spend [00:31:00] as little as they can on marketing. I'm always a numbers guy and so I've always understood this. So I told the agency, you spend as much as you fucking can. Like as much as you possibly

Richie: you're the type of guy I wanna work with,

Brian: As long as you're hitting these numbers.

Brian: That's all I care about. And I, I tell my clients the same thing. You'll start at $5, $10 a day, but you wanna spend as much as you possibly can. Profitably because. At a certain point, you just won't be able to spend more because you'll be booked solid and you can't take on more work. So any added dollars you spend are gonna be wasted.

Brian: And truthfully, the closer you get to book solid, the worse your ad spends gonna be because you're gonna have less efficiency in your overall calendar and people aren't gonna be able to work with you because they wanna work now and you can't do it for six months. Like There's all sorts of complications around that.

Brian: So general, let's just say we're trying to get you to 75% booked up and the rest of your clients come from repeat clients, word of mouth, referrals, that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, you wanna know what your maximum spend you can possibly spend is because it's gonna be profitable. And so when you have clients uh, I just did an interview with Josh by, it's somewhere on our website if you wanna find [00:32:00] it.

Brian: maybe Google Josh Byrd six figure creative. Maybe you'll find his page. But he had spent. Something like $900 and brought in like 30 or $40,000 worth of clients from $900 in ad spend. And when you have like a 38 or whatever to one return on ad spend, you say, how much can I crank this up? You don't wanna just spend $5, $10 a day.

Brian: You wanna spend as much as you can.

Richie: I think that's the big misunderstanding myth I guess is like no one looks at the ROI or like the ROAS on your ad spend. They only ever see like, I'm spending $500, I'm spending a thousand dollars. It's like, well. What if you spent the thousand dollars and every time you did that, you made 10, would you do it again?

Richie: You know, that's how you have to look at running ads. It's not you spending money it's calculated. And as a coaching program, it's like, well, we instruct, our clients is you're not spending that much until we know for a fact. We have a thing that is a winning ad that's gonna be profitable, so it'll never get to that point unless we're spending irresponsibly, which we talked

Brian: And I,

Richie: the call yesterday.

Brian: Dennis runs our ads for six Figure [00:33:00] creative, it's the same thing with him. Like, I want you to spend as much as you possibly can, as long as you're hitting these numbers. And like, I think as of yesterday, we were spending like.$2,400 on ads yesterday, soI just updated our sheet.

Brian: So we've come a long way since. You know what? I could barely spend a hundred dollars a day profitably.

Rob: My favorite myth is the opposite of the, it's too expensive to run ads, and that is that social media,organic social media is free. the reason that we have so much bad social media out there is because people treat it like it's free. They don't put time into thinking about the strategy, the creative development editing out so that you're really sharing a good message.

Rob: Like the time involved in creating good organic content is oftentimes gonna cost you. Far more than the 10 or $15 you're gonna spend a day to run ads. So it's interesting that these are both myths because it's the opposite sides of the exact same coin.

Brian: Yeah, I, I think that's a big area is like people don't wanna spend money on paid ads and I don't blame them 'cause like The prevailing wisdom is you should stay booked solid from word of [00:34:00] mouth and referrals as a creative, or else you have failed, which I think that in itself is a myth.

Brian: And I've talked about this at great length on the podcast. I've talked about survivorship bias and how only those who have made it off word of mouth are the ones who survive long enough. Because all the people who tried to make that work and failed had to give up and go back to a day job. Right?

Brian: Just think about it, the perspective of who's telling you this. there's more examples now of, there's companies like me who help. Creatives on the paid ad side, but even with organic, generally speaking, to do a great organic strategy, that that is your main source of clients is cost prohibitive, not from a money perspective, but a time perspective.

Brian: And when you start getting booked solid as a freelancer, the last thing you have is time. So generally speaking, the more booked up you are, the more you want to lean more heavily on paid methods when you can so that you can just throw money at the problem to make more money back. I'm at the point now where I do wanna explore YouTube next year.

Brian: I do want tobuild that organic audience because I have grander visions for six figure creative than where we're at now. And paid advertising alone is not gonna get us there. But that said. Mostly paid ads hasbrought [00:35:00] us to the multimillion dollar a year range through just paid ads with some organic content like this.

Brian: But this podcast is a,not a huge time suck. It's more of just like a,endless wave of ideas I have to keep coming up with over and over again to keep the ideas fresh. 400 episodes into this thing. But it, this is not a huge time suck for me. Maybe it takes me two to three hours a week to keep this podcast alive, probably closer to two hours a week.

Brian: So time is a big consideration when it comes to making organic work. And that's, I think, going back to an earlier discussion, I think that's where it tends to fall flat for most freelancers. On top of the fact that when I talked about, it's like an instrument you have to learn and get better at, organic is even more so than paid ads.

Brian: Organic is something you have to be truly great at to excel at, whereas paid ads, go watch the interview I did with Josh Bird. He messed up every damn thing he possibly could. He's not great at it. He still spent $900 and got like $40,000 back. So there's a lot more grace and,leeway in the paid world than there is for the organic world because you are just spending money to show your content to people.

Brian: You're, it's a pay to play [00:36:00] game versus having to earn your way there and to earn your way to the top of the feed is so much harder because if you just scroll on Instagram or scroll on TikTok. The shit that's out there in the organic feeds is so much better than anything you'll ever create because it is completely tailored to the person who is swiping.

Brian: the content on the internet now is why I don't use socials, is because it's so damn addictive and so fun that if I let myself, I would, I would just be on there all day long

Dennis: even if you're great at organic, paid ads is still mostly something that is just going to save you so much time and get you better results if.People watching this can watch the interview I did with Leighton, it's also somewhere on the website, but he's been doing a bunch of organic, he's got like 40 or 50,000 followers.

Dennis: He's really good at organic content, but he said in interviews, he's like, I usually spend like three hours on a piece of organic content, but I just spent two hours or three hours oncreating an ad, and that ad got me like 50 calls the lifetime of that ad, right.

Brian: I've had like one three minute ad run for like six months straight, and bring in like hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I know what it's [00:37:00] like.

Richie: and if you can make really good like organic content, like you have the equipment and likethe knowledge to make like really attractive, high quality organic content, you make amazing ads. So you might as well just put the energy and money into that.

Brian: I forgot about that part. If you do get good enough to play the organic game and win it, you'll absolutely crush it. It paid,

Richie: Yeah.

Brian: If you want to get those videos. I mentioned the one with Josh Bird, the one with Layton.

Brian: Well, I actually have it on the show notes page 'cause my team is better than me. go to six figure creative.com/ 3 9 2 and both of those videos should be, linked from that page. last question here. Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, how do you see this, whole game evolving, organic, paid a blend of the two, one over the other, like what do you feel like is going to, it's gonna look like over the next year?

Richie: It's a podcast in itself, right there.

Brian: Yes, I know. Give us a soundbite. I just want a soundbite, dude. Just make it

Rob: YY

Brian: you kind of mentioned how addictive social media is. Brian, it's only gonna get worse AI is more and more integrated into understanding our proclivities. What we wanna see, really good [00:38:00] social content is going to, fill the stream. And if you can't create really good social content, then the only way in is gonna be paid ads.

Rob: And then the other thing that I would say about that is if you're gonna play the organic game, you gotta play where it's gonna be permanent. started out saying it, and this is what I finished saying, you gotta be in places like YouTube. You gotta have a podcast. You've gotta be posting on your own website.

Rob: Places where what you say and think and do will be there forever and on your own website where it's gonna get picked up by AI and, you know, be available in the search engines of the future.

Richie: Yeah.

Dennis: Yeah. I think on top of that, what is going to be a lot more important than it already is, is adding personality in your content and also in your ads. 'cause with all the AI content and people are putting out more content than ever. Most of the content that's put out is just generic. And the more personality you can put into that, and I've seen that with all my clients.

Dennis: If they put personality in their ads and their content, it just works better, right? It's just [00:39:00] lean into your personality and be who you are and,and crush it.

Richie: Yeah. I think to that point, there's so much fluff and AI stuff out there. the more you can be yourself and put the effort in, a human, you're gonna stand out and you're gonna do well and all the stuff with AI as well. And you could see how and drama's affecting how we run ads and how everything's changing there.

Richie: Everything is going to be more customized to the user. So your ads need to be more creative. They need to be more direct. Everything is gonna be custom tailored to the person that's looking at it. So everything's gonna be easier on the user, but it's gonna become more, custom and detailed for people who are advertising and things like that.

Richie: I think.

Brian: Yeah, we've seen some big changes come in on the ads platform and I think, uh,While they do bring their challenges, There's a lot of things that are good for, I think the average userfrom when I started running ads, probably back in 20 16, 20 17, on Meta or Facebook back then. I think it was even before they even had Instagram ads.

Brian: Back then, it was very complicated, hard to make work. You had to do a lot to make it work. Now it's [00:40:00] so much more simplified and I think they're gonna continue to do that. And they have a lot of powerful tools they've built out with the use of AI and making things more personalized for the people that are seeing the ads.

Brian: And I think they'll continue to develop that through 2026. And I think that should be better for the average person who's just trying to advertise their small business because meta wants every single dollar it can possibly squeeze out of everybody on Earth. Like that's their goal. And. As long as they're making more money back from me, I'll continue to dump money into meta platforms.

Brian: And I think most people areunderstand fundamentally, except for freelancers, that you have a certain amount of money in your advertising budget, your marketing budget every year that's gonna return more than you spend on it. And that's just part of doing business and. That's how most businesses should operate.

Brian: That's how most freelancers should operate, and that is making that easier and easier every year. Love it or hate it. I think you should have amount of money set aside to learn and deploy paid ads for your business. If you want help doing this, we are happy to help. Three of these coaches here, Richie, Rob, Dennis, all taking on clients Dennis, maybe you're not, I know you got a lot of stuff going on, but we'll see. Maybe we'll still put some clients on your roster. You're, you're getting pretty [00:41:00] full, but you can go to six figure creative.com/. Apply and you can fill out the short application there if you wanna be a part of the coaching program. if you have a specific coach you want to be a part of just put some of the application or find a place to put it in or talk to the, whenever you talk to one of us, just mention it and we'll try to put you on the roster. No guarantees. But, uh, any, parting words here as uh, we wrap this up, guys?

Dennis: Go run some ads.

Richie: Amen.

Brian: Well said, that's pretty good advice. Yeah. If you don't have clients, it's a good way to find.

Brian: I would rather be somebody who takes marketing in my own hands and controls my own destiny compared to somebody who is a people pleaser and cares about the opinions of others and is also beholden to other people sending me clients or other people referring clients to me. That's just my opinion.

Brian: Everyone has their own business, they can run it their own way. But that's, my encouragement to you. Soagain, if you want to apply, just go to six figure creative.com/apply. I encourage you to get in ASAP because January is our busiest month of all time. So if you can get in earlier, the better. That's better for you. So that's all I got. See you [00:42:00] next week. Thanks for coming out to the six Figure Creative Podcast. Peace.

Rob: