Before Spending $1 On Paid Ads, Ask Yourself These 6 Questions

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Most freelancers make one of two big mistakes when it comes to paid ads:
  1. They dive in before they’re ready and burn cash they didn’t need to spend.
  2. They avoid ads like the plague—even when it’s their best option to make more money.
If either one of those sounds familiar, this episode is for you. I break down 6 simple ways to know if ads are right for you right now.
 
No more guessing. No more wasted money. No more leaving cash on the table.
 
Listen now to see if ads are the secret weapon your business needs, or if there are better options for getting clients.

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347. How to know if paid ads are right for you

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Brian: [00:00:00] If you've ever thought about doing paid ads and you just weren't sure if they were right for you or if you're ready for them or not, I wanted to talk through in this episode some things to think through, particularly six different things to think through, to figure out whether or not you're ready for ads or not.

Brian: Because the two big mistakes people make are first they either they dive headfirst into ads when they really didn't need them in the first place and they had better options So they end up wasting money on ads that they shouldn't waste it because they didn't either weren't ready for they didn't need it Or two they endlessly avoid ads for God a million reasons which we're not gonna get into today But they endlessly avoid ads even though that's their only or best Option and and thus they leave a lot of money on the table They have an empty calendar. They have these Feast or Famine periods because they're not constantly refilling the cup in which they drink from.

Brian: now whichever those camps you might fall into, we obviously don't want to spend money we shouldn't spend on ads if you don't actually need it. but if you actually need it, if you could put a dollar into a box and get 10 out of that box, why wouldn't you do that over and over and over and over again, at least until you have better options.

Brian: So this episode, I'm going to talk through an easy way to know if paid ads are right for you.

Brian: if it's not a fit for you, you can avoid wasting money on ads. if it [00:01:00] is a fit for you, then you'll have a way to get consistent leads, consistent clients. And if done right, as many clients as you can handle.

Brian: Before I get into that, if this is your first time ever listening to the show, Hello, I'm Brian Hood. I run the Six Figure Creative. I've I have over a decade freelancing experience. And when it comes to paid ads, I just looked it up. I've spent over a half a million dollars on paid ads, profitably.

Brian: Thank you. we've really ramped that up recently. We're spending between 30, 000 to 40, 000 a month on ads right now profitably. Over the last year, I've had a 10 to 1 return on ad spend, meaning for every dollar I spend on ads, I get 10 back. And then the clients we've worked with have had a 15 to 1 or 18 to 1 return on ad spend.

Brian: even have one client who has over a 200 to 1 return on ad spend. that's 1 in, 200 out. He's only spending 3 a day. if you heard last week, you heard the strategy involved with that. if it makes sense for them, I don't know many people who would say no to that.

Brian: so that's a little bit about me. This podcast is for you. If you're a freelancer, you offer creative services and you want to make more money without selling your soul.

Brian: If any of this sounds interesting, you're in the right spot.

Brian: So I'm gonna talk to six different things to think through. If you are debating or not whether paid ads make sense for your business

Brian: and to put [00:02:00] a gist on this We're just trying to figure out do you have better options or not many people they want to avoid paid ads But they literally do not have a better option So i'm going to talk through According to alex ramosi the six ways to get clients I'm, actually throwing a seventh in there because I think he left one out when it pertains to freelancers But these are seven ways to get clients and if you don't have the other six You Then the only other option you have is the seventh, which is paid ads.

Brian: And so you have to take an honest look at yourself and your business and your life to determine whether or not you have these, other six. And if you don't, paid ads is literally all you got. And this is the thing we see time and time and time and time again with people.

Brian: They make the mistake of having no other option, but not wanting to do paid ads. And if that's the case, you're going to keep getting what you've been getting, which is generally what most freelancers get. And that's the first on this list today is referrals. Referrals is a viable way of getting clients.

Brian: When friends, or when family, or when past clients come across someone who needs your services, they send those people to you, right?

Brian: wonderful source of clients. The problem with most people is it's inconsistent. is it's not enough to keep you booked solid. And the most [00:03:00] insidious part about this is most freelancers only rely on this to get clients. and year after year after year, there's these up and down, up and down months of feast or famine.

Brian: I've talked about this so many times. I get sick of it, but many people still fall into this trap and you might be falling into this trap right now. So the first way on this list to get clients is referrals. And the only question you have to ask yourself is, are referrals filling my calendar or not?

Brian: Am I book solid with IDO clients from referrals? If not, I need to look at something else. One of these other six areas. If so, you're good. You don't have to listen to this episode. You're booked solid. You've got all the clients you need just from referrals. Wonderful place to be. I can't help you here when it comes to client acquisition.

Brian: Because you don't need my help.

Brian: That brings us to the second method for acquiring clients. Alex Hermosi calls this outbound, I don't like that term, freelancers, we call it cold outreach. where you send DMs or send emails to your ideal clients who don't know like and trust you yet. Basically sending spam emails. If you do it right, you're doing it highly personalized, but even then you're going to have a relatively low response, right?

Brian: You might get between a 10, 15 percent response rate on a hyper personalized email. Depending on your niche, your offer, your [00:04:00] messaging, there's a billion factors that could be involved here,

Brian: but this is something I've seen. So many people try and fail at for multiple reasons. First is they're not prepared to be on a treadmill. If you're doing cold outreach as your main client acquisition strategy, you've got to have this system so dialed in with clear inputs, clear outputs, You have to be willing to do this an hour a day, every day, or batch it into like five hour days once a week, which is very tough, but does this feel like something you want to do every day, sourcing potential leads to reach out to crafting customized messages that will resonate with them and get them to respond to you, nurturing any leads that are interested until they actually book a call with you and take the next step.

Brian: And potentially become a client

Brian: tracking the metrics involved with this, with how many emails you send and what your response rate is split testing, different approaches. This is really involved process to do correctly. And yes, it works, but it's something that most people fall off the wagon because the second you stop doing this, you lose this source of clients.

Brian: so even though this is a consistent way of getting clients, the same feast or famine thing can happen because you'll do this when you're in famine periods, you'll reach out to a bunch of people, [00:05:00] you'll get clients from it, then you'll have to fulfill that work.

Brian: You'll be busy doing the work. You'll stop doing the hour a day of cold outreach because you're so busy with the projects you're getting paid for that one, two, three months later, the projects thin out you're back to where you were months ago, another famine period. So if this isn't something you want to do or have the capabilities of doing, Or this is something you don't have a proclivity to do. Then this is probably not a viable strategy for you. And my least favorite part of this is that fact that when you stop this, when you get off the treadmill, your flow of new leads and clients instantly stops.

Brian: So if referrals aren't keeping your calendar full, outreach either isn't working for you or it's not something you're interested in doing every day.

Brian: That leads us to method number three of getting clients. And this is something you don't see in the freelance world very often, but can still work. It's affiliates and partners.

Brian: That is where you say, Hello, person who has control or attention of my ideal clients. It could be an influencer on Tik TOK. It could be a YouTuber. It could be your local accountant. It could be anyone who has a lot of your ideal clients in their sphere of influence that can send people to you, leads clients to you, essentially on a pay for performance method where they get 10 [00:06:00] percent finder's fee.

Brian: It can be as high as 20, 30%, in the like online course world, you see this all the time, 50, 50 splits. If you have the customers and I have the product, I'm going to You get 50%, I get 50 percent service based businesses. You're going to see a much lower percentage here,

Brian: but this is another viable strategy that can work. However, it's very difficult to find the right partners. even more difficult to motivate them and train them on how to properly send leads to you.

Brian: And even if you set it all up right, it can still be wildly inconsistent because you're still relying on someone else to send you leads. It's just like referrals where someone else sends you clients, except you have to pay out an affiliate commission to that.

Brian: I actually like this approach more than cold outreach because it's more scalable because you're still likely going to have to use some form of cold outreach in order to reach out to these people, but at least it's more scalable, where if you reach out to the right partners and you're still doing 10 outreaches a day, getting one or two responses a day again with hyper personalized, really thoughtful those people might have Control of hundreds or thousands of tens of thousands of your ideal clients underneath them.

Brian: So it is more scalable but again, It comes down to are these people incentivize enough to actually send clients to you, especially on a [00:07:00] regular basis? And in many cases the answer is no

Brian: so we've talked about referrals not keeping a counter full We talked about cold outreach. You likely don't want to do it You don't want to get on that treadmill talk about affiliates and partners may not be something you're interested in pursuing either You

Brian: and it's definitely not something you're doing right now. I don't know any freelancers that I've met that are currently actively doing this, process. that leads us to number four here. And that is content. Alex Amosie calls this earned media.

Brian: This is where you've earned the right to the eyeballs, or in the case of this podcast, your ear holes.

Brian: And this is a wonderful way to get clients. Creating consistent content is a lot of work. It is another treadmill that whenever you stop, it can tend to fall off. The exception being YouTube, where YouTube can have a pretty long tail of traffic. TikTok and Instagram being the other extreme where, The next day it's gone, you know, you can have one viral day and it's gone.

Brian: So you have to be, you know, on there constantly on the treadmill on short form social,

Brian: but earned media, AKA content is a wonderful strategy. However, very slow start. Some people just don't have the X factor needed in order to do this. Like, be honest with yourself. Some people, you just know. You don't have the personality for [00:08:00] content,

Brian: or some people you do have the personality and maybe you are doing this and you are putting in the work, but it's a very slow ramp. So the question you have to ask yourself is, is this a viable way for you to get clients right now? Because I have seen people where content is a big focus for them, but it's not enough to keep them booked solid.

Brian: So they have to do paid ads or some other method to supplement that until the content starts to grow and grow and grow to the point where they reach critical mass and that's now their main source of clients. And I do have clients where YouTube or social media is their number one source of clients and that's all they need.

Brian: is the case, there's no point in paying for ads. Because all we're doing is saying, what do we need to do in order to stay book solid? We have to either pay with time or we have to either pay with money. Many people are taking neither approach. They're not taking time, they're not taking money.

Brian: But for those who spend time growing something, like YouTube following or an Instagram followingthey've taken the time and invested the time to do that so that they don't have to pay money in order to get clients.

Brian: And then there's other people where they say my time is either too valuable or I don't have the skillset to invest the time into content marketing to grow the earned audience. So I would take my money [00:09:00] and spend it.

Brian: And get, you know, 10 back for every dollar I spend so that I can stay busy. I can say book solid so I can have clients constantly. and then I'll take a small amount of that money and reinvest it back into bringing new clients in for the next month and the next month and the next month.

Brian: and over time, no matter what your approach is, you start to get more and more clients underneath the belt that can then refer you more clients. So you can start every year when clients come back to you for repeat clients or clients refer more clients to you every year, your need for content or paid media or any other source of new clients, your reliance on that falls because you have referrals and repeat clients that increase every year.

Brian: If you're constantly again, refilling your cup.

Brian: So if content or earned media either isn't working for you right now, because you're not skilled for it or you're doing it, but it's not bringing in any clients or enough clients, then we have to look to number five on the list. And that is owned media. Or I like to call this your email list. That's probably the best place to look here.

Brian: And the email list is a wonderfully powerful thing, and I think anyone who's been on TikTok, I'm recording this before the ban goes into place. I don't know if it's happened or not. Who knows with [00:10:00] politics. If TikTok's gone. Then anyone who is on TikTok understands when you don't own the media, what can happen to it and just disappear overnight.

Brian: So owned media, like an email list is something can't just disappear overnight. would take a very wild thing to happen for email to just disappear overnight. So when you own the media, that is your email list, you have full control over When and where you take that email list, you're not stuck on a specific email service provider.

Brian: You can take that email list to someone else. You can literally just have a spreadsheet of all your contacts and move that to any other email marketing platform.

Brian: So owned media, email lists amazing. We have over 50, 000 people on our email list. It's amazing asset to our company.

Brian: if you don't have a list or you have a list and it's not bringing enough clients, then this is literally not a viable strategy for you. many people, they want the email list, you've heard us talking about this, we had an episode recently that aired, called the secret weapon for six figure freelancers, email marking, that was episode 343,

Brian: But the big problem with an email list is it's hard to grow. It's hard to build unless you have some other source of new leads and clients and traffic to your website. So if you have a large following on social media or on YouTube or somewhere else, that's a [00:11:00] great way to build an email list. If you have affiliates or partners promoting some lead magnet or some other live event or something you're doing or some anything, if you have affiliates promoting that, you can build an email list.

Brian: If you're doing paid ads, you can build an email list, but if you don't have some way to build that email list, then you don't have owned media. So just ask yourself, is owned media bringing me in clients or not? Yes or no. If no, not an option for you right now.

Brian: Number six. And this is the one that Hermosi didn't talk about, but it's, viable for freelancers. And that is just good old fashioned networking, whatever that means. it's a term I don't love because it's very nebulous, vague, fuzzy I think a better way of saying this is a, it's a random act of marketing. The idea is I will just network, get around my ideal clients and I will get clients that way. obviously it can work. I'm sure you've gotten clients through networking before, but the problem with this is it's very consistent.

Brian: It's hard to turn into clear inputs and clear outputs. Like right now, think about, do you have a bunch of your ideal clients that you can get around on a consistent basis to refill your cup every single month? Most freelancers, the answer is no, especially in B2B space.

Brian: Do you have a way to [00:12:00] quantify it, to track metrics behind it, to turn it into clear inputs and outputs? cannot think of a single freelancer I've ever met who both consistently does networking and tracks the metrics behind it and turns it into clear inputs and outputs.

Brian: And if you can't turn it into clear inputs, clear outputs, how are you supposed to keep your calendar full? You don't know that, Hey, for every five of these events I go to, I get three clients, there's no clear. Thing like that. And if there is, you're not tracking it. And if you're not tracking it, it might as well not exist.

Brian: so if networking isn't a viable way to get consistent clients in a way that you can influence on a regular basis, okay, you can't refill your cup through networking every month. You can't do it through own media cause you don't have an email list or maybe that you don't have the skills to know how to even utilize your email list.

Brian: You can't do it through content because either you're slow to start right now or you don't have a following on social media or anywhere or the skillset to do so. You don't have affiliates or partners, you don't want to do cold outreach and referrals from your clients and friends and family and everyone else is not enough to keep a book solid. If that's the case, if all those things are true, The only other option you have to get more [00:13:00] clients is referrals. It's paid media, paid ads,

Brian: getting strangers to hire you. Very difficult skill set. We've had many episodes. We've talked about this on the podcast before.

Brian: But time and time and time and time again, we talked to freelancers of all shapes and sizes from all over the U S and Canada, because that's the only real place we really target with our ads. At least right now, we do get people from other countries from our email list and from this podcast, but we talk to people all over the world actually.

Brian: And they're in the exact same situation that kind of outlined here through this kind of really one sided argument where they don't have any of these other ways to get clients. They have no other ways to get clients. Pay media is the only option for them. Especially for people who live in more rural or remote areas,

Brian: and yet they're still hesitant to do so.

Brian: It can be scary. I know. It's one of those things that if you can learn the skill, it's incredibly valuable. I learned the skill back in 2017, 2018, when I first started doing paid ads.

Brian: I spent heavily on ads in 2019, 2020. I cut back 2021, cut back even more 2022. Started ramping up again, 2024 really double down on [00:14:00] those on 2024 and then 2025 I'm spending more per day than I've ever spent my entire life on ads. And it's not because I'm desperate for clients. It's because I have found the strategy that works.

Brian: at this point. We spent 1, 800 yesterday on ads. The time that I record this,

Brian: I've had entire months in my journey as an entrepreneur, where I've made less than that, I remember February, 2014, 1, 200. That's what I made that month spending more than that per day on ads. and if you look at this over my lifetime, my income is directly tied to how much I spend on ads gears where I didn't spend any money on ads.

Brian: My email list grew very, very little. My income shrank or sidelined.

Brian: it has been one of the, if not the single most valuable skillset in my arsenal. I have a bunch of skills. I am very much. A jack of all trades, master of none. I'm definitely not a master at ads. Don't let me fool you here.

Brian: Many other things go into paid ads besides just the strategy behind paid ads. There are things you need to have in your pricing, your business model, your niche, your offer, but when you get it all right,

Brian: it's a very freeing experience to have full confidence that you can just [00:15:00] open a screen, put a dollar in, get 10 out.

Brian: It is much better than the helpless feeling of having a. horribly low month, like back in February 2014 when I had a 1200 a month and just accepting that that's how freelancing is. Feast and Famine, Feast and Famine, 20, 000 in January, 1, 200 February.

Brian: The feeling of powerlessness, to me, is one of the worst feelings because if you know Enneagrams, I'm Enneagram 8, I crave control, and so I always seek out things that give me control and freedom over my life. Like, my greatest fear in life is to get a job. It's been

Brian: 5, 858 days since I last had a day job. I had to stop and Google that for a second. I

Brian: worked at GameStop. Through the holiday season 2008 end of the year and then left that job January 2009 Started my studio my first freelance gig and have been slowly just chipping away at the problem of how do I get? Out of a job and never have to work again

Brian: I can honestly say without learning the skill of paid ads. I would not have made it this long So if you want to help with this You want to speed up the learning process, avoid the pitfalls that I've fallen into and maybe may have fallen into before if you've wasted a bunch of [00:16:00] money on ads with any real strategy or without fixing the underlying issues that need to be fixed before you even run ads.

Brian: We're happy to help. It's all month to month. You can work with us, get your foundation fixed, get the strategy going, start getting some clients. And peace out, there's no long term contracts. That being said, our average client stays with us over a year because they like working with us. So

Brian: If you're interested, just go to six figure creative. com slash apply. That'll take you to an application short application. You can fill that out. We'll see if it makes sense.

Brian: If so have a conversation. If not, we will send you on your way. there's a few niches we just can't help out in because the model is different. we just seen the paid ads don't really work in those niches. So if, that's you, we'll, tell you we can't help you if you're bad at what you do, because no matter what you do, if you market a bad business, you're just promoting how bad you are.

Brian: So we can't help that. So you've got to be good at what you do and you have to be open to coaching. Like we don't want to coach an uncoachable person. So if you have tried a billion things and you keep blaming everyone else, except looking to yourself to say, Hey, maybe I'm the, actually the common denominator between all these things I've tried and nothing's worked instead of saying everything else sucks, why are you any [00:17:00] different?

Brian: I will tell you right now. No client we've worked with like that has been successful. Every client we've worked with that has been successful are people who are coachable, who are humble, who are willing to do the things that we say to do and are willing to admit that they are wrong. So if that sounds like you go to six year creative.

Brian: com slash apply. Love to talk to you. Otherwise, let this episode have been helpful on kind of giving you the. Brain space to understand whether or not paid ads make sense for you or not. For many people, it's the only good option.

Brian: And the goal with anybody, when you're doing paid ads is how fast can we get that referral snowball going to where we're no longer dependent on ads

Brian: or in many niches, depending on your niche, keep it going until you can grow into a full on agency. Cause I came from the music producer world, the music producer world. You're very much a specialist. You're capped at how much you can make because you can't hire out a team underneath you and build like a full scale agency.

Brian: But in many freelance businesses. Makes a ton of sense to move to an agency. We work with a bunch of web designers, branding designers. Those can be great agencies. So at that point, when you hit your, cap on how many clients you can work with, instead of the referral snowball taking off, cutting down on ads, you keep going on ads and let that referral snowball keep you so busy that you have to hire help.

Brian: You grow a [00:18:00] real agency. That's how you actually get the seven figures. So if you're interested in that, let us know. Otherwise we'll see you next week on the six figure creative podcast. Bye.

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