Mastering The Art Of Self-Promotion | The Lead Generation Series

[00:00:00] Brian: Hello and welcome to the Six Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time joining me on the show today, first of all, welcome. So glad to have you today. You are in the right place right now. If you are a creative freelancer. You offer freelance services and you want to earn more money from your creative skills without selling your soul.

[00:00:16] Brian: If that is you, you're in the right place because on this podcast, we talk about all the things we need to know and do in order to earn more money from our creative skills. but before we get into the episode, I have awesome news for my recurring listeners who have been following this journey of my compromised, aka hacked um, ads or meta ads account, after 19 days and a lot of back and forth and a lot of BS, I finally got my account back this morning.

[00:00:38] Brian: I talked about this at the end of last episode, but the advertiser was advertising, elderly women's bras on my ads account. And they had the ad budget up to like That's 9, 000 a day, something like that. So they spent thousands of dollars on my ad account promoting an elderly women's bra.

[00:00:52] Brian: all those charges have been wiped from my account. And as of right now, my ads are back live again. So two thumbs up to that finally. And I'm going to do a [00:01:00] full episode. I, I plan at least right now to do a full episode on like cybersecurity basics for freelancers, because this is something that.

[00:01:06] Brian: My account was because of stupid password, not because I didn't have two factor authentication on it, I had all those things, but because of something completely unrelated. And I want to talk about some of these things that we need to do as freelancers to secure some of our most important accounts.

[00:01:19] Brian: Because what I learned through this entire process is that you can lose business crucial accounts that... Your entire livelihood depend on or a huge part of your livelihood depend on through something that doesn't seem completely apparent, right? So that'll be a completely other episode in the future.

[00:01:32] Brian: I've got another series planned after this one So I might just squeeze that in as the next episode between this series and the next series I found that I really like series for some reason Hopefully the listeners like it.

[00:01:41] Brian: Uh, you can, tell me if you like these series and not just email podcast at thesixfigurecreative. com all that to say the count's back. It's a glorious day I even have my i'm showing it my video right now my positive optimist sweater on today Because it's sweater weather finally here in nashville And I like the sweater.

[00:01:55] Brian: I also had, I heard a really good quote that I want to say that just caught my ear this morning on my podcast [00:02:00] walk. That's where I do a long walk, like 45 minute walk and listen to podcasts on my walk. The quote was, some of the effect of. Pessimists get to be right. Optimists get to be rich. For some reason that stuck with me and I like the sentiment of like, pessimists can like poo poo everything and they're right more often than not.

[00:02:16] Brian: But there's nothing to be gained from being right when you're a pessimist. But when you're an optimist, there's a lot to be gained from when you're right business and investing and things like that. I'm kind of like a contrarian optimist. I do poo poo a lot of things but I've also missed out on some opportunities in my life because I was more of a pessimist than an optimist. So wearing the sweater today, positive optimist as a reminder after I heard that quote, I put this on and maybe I'll have a whole episode.

[00:02:38] Brian: I'm just like when to be pessimistic about something and say it will never work versus when you should be optimist. Cause there, there can be a lot of difference in how successful you are based on how optimistic you are about things. Like I could have just given up on this ad account for like just being frustrated by Complete and lack of ability to talk to a human being, by their horrible automated systems that allowed a hacker to after I flagged the [00:03:00] account as being fraudulent.

[00:03:01] Brian: They still bypassed and got the ad account reactivated without having to verify credit card details or anything and spend, thousands of dollars on my credit card. I could have just been like, Facebook's a joke, meta advertising is a joke. I'm never using them again. And I could have been right.

[00:03:14] Brian: And I could have just moved on in my life, but I think I'm going to be better off by staying on the platform. And this is actually ties in to the topic for this episode today, which is the conclusion of the lead generation series. The first two episodes we talked about creating a lead magnet.

[00:03:26] Brian: And the reason we create a lead magnet is because pound for pound, it's cheaper and easier. to get a client by using a lead magnet than it is just by promoting our services. We can also promote a lead magnet and stand behind that a lot easier for most people than we can to stand by promoting our services.

[00:03:40] Brian: It feels less desperate when we're promoting a lead magnet versus promoting ourselves or our services or the fact that we need clients. Even if you are desperate, you don't want to show up as desperate. And so the lead magnet helps alleviate a lot of these things. And we've loosely based a lot of this series on Alex Hermosi's 100 million leads book that came out, last month or a month, and a half ago, where he talks [00:04:00] through a lot of these frameworks that I'm talking about, But I'm trying to reshape this based on what makes sense for freelancers and creative freelancers. And I also just from my own experience, I shape things differently, including what we're going to talk about today when it comes to promoting a lead magnet. So episode one of this series, which was two weeks ago, episode 277 was What is the one narrow and meaningful problem that we can fully solve? Episode two of this series, which was last week, episode 278 was determining how we can solve that problem.

[00:04:23] Brian: And we talked to the four different types of lead magnets that actually work for freelancers.

[00:04:27] Brian: and here's the surprising thing about last week's episode, if you haven't already listened to it, lead magnet can include a paid service. A paid service can be a lead magnet. It's not your core service, but it is a paid service that solves a narrow and meaningful problem.

[00:04:39] Brian: Again, go back to listen to last week's episode if you want more on that. But that's a surprising thing that people don't think about. And this week we're going to talk about We found the narrow, meaningful problem. We've created the lead magnet, or at least the outline of the lead magnet, or the test service we want to try out, or the actual PDF, or whatever it is, video, course, There's a million ways you can solve these problems, but we created the thing. Now, how do we get it out into the world to [00:05:00] start generating leads? A. K. A. How will people find this? And this is where we run into the same roadblock that you probably have as a freelancer if you don't have a calendar chock full of clients that you want to work with.

[00:05:09] Brian: Like your ideal clients are filling your calendar. You run into the same problem trying to promote a lead magnet as you do when you're trying to promote your core service. And that is you have no idea how to promote things. You don't know how to self promote your service. You don't know how to self promote your lead magnets.

[00:05:21] Brian: Therefore you're stuck. You've created this wonderful thing, just like you've created this wonderful skill set and the service that you sell as a freelancer, but now you don't know how to promote it. So this episode will be relevant whether you're trying to promote a core service and you're saying, screw you Brian, I don't want to create a lead magnet.

[00:05:35] Brian: It doesn't work in my industry, AKA you're a. snowflake freelancer who believes that these other core concepts that work in pretty virtually every other business model in the world Can't work for freelancers. That's a lie. That's a myth You got to get that past your head get past your thick skull because lead magnets can and do work for freelancers Whether or not you're promoting your core service or a lead magnet this episode is for you Because this is basically just all about distribution methods or promotion methods.

[00:05:58] Brian: Now there's something from Alex Ramosi's book [00:06:00] called the Core Four. That's when he's talking about promoting lead magnets in his book. I have my own Core Four. And it's based on the exact same principles that he, talks about himself. They're all based on something called like the six traffic types.

[00:06:11] Brian: As far as Alex Ramosi has ever said, and as far as I can find, there are only about six types of traffic when it comes to promoting something. Traffic just means if you're promoting a lead medic, you generally have a landing page or a funnel. And maybe that's worth discussing separately.

[00:06:24] Brian: Maybe I'll talk about that really quick because that wasn't part of my outline today. But you generally have a landing page or a funnel that you're sending people to put in their name and email address or Name and phone number or some sort of contact information because we have to be able to contact them in order for them to be considered a lead because a lead is merely somebody who's contact information that we have that we are able to reach out to and contact in some way, shape or form that could be email phone.

[00:06:44] Brian: It can be social media dms. It can be whatsapp.

[00:06:47] Brian: But when it comes to traffic, we're talking about how do we send traffic to that landing page for them people to sign up? And that's where we get into the six traffic types. It's the same thing that works if you're just trying to send traffic to your main website. These same six things apply, and I'm going to [00:07:00] quickly run through these.

[00:07:00] Brian: I have a video that I'm going to link to in the show notes page. It's a video on YouTube. It's called The Six Methods for Getting Website Traffic as a Freelancer. which you can always get to the show notes page for our episodes for this one specifically, just six figure creative. com slash two seven nine, because that's the episode number for this podcast. And that'll take you directly to the show notes page where this link and anything else I mentioned for this episode will be shared.

[00:07:19] Brian: These are basically the six traffic types and I'm going to breeze over these and we'll go deep dive into these throughout the episode. method number one to generate traffic to website is paid media. Number two is earned media. That just means things like. You've earned an audience like this podcast is earned media.

[00:07:33] Brian: A YouTube channel is earned media. A social media following is an earned media. It's something where you've earned the right to be in front of somebody. Traffic type number three is owned media. That's where you like own the asset, like a list of phone numbers, an email list, things like that, where you actually, own the asset.

[00:07:47] Brian: Whereas like a YouTube channel or. an Instagram or TikTok, those platforms own, your, leads. Basically, they own your, eyeballs, whereas an email list, you own those. Number four is affiliate. So that can be someone else promoting your stuff. Number [00:08:00] five is outbound. That's where you're manually reaching out one-to-one.

[00:08:03] Brian: And number six is referral slash word of mouth. And that's where people are sharing your stuff. and again, I'm going to go deeper into these in this episode.

[00:08:08] Brian: But if you want another deep dive from a YouTube video that I did just go to our show notes page for that. But here's my core four, and this is actually from my client acquisition toolkit, which you can get by going to sixfigurecreative. com slash toolkit. And I have my own core four on there. This is when you think through, how do I actually get somebody to hire me or get my lead magnet or consider my lead magnet and sign up for it. If it's free or pay for it, if it's a paid lead magnet, what are the ways that I can essentially self promote this thing? So this can be for, again, your core services or your lead magnet. The core four are this. number one is one to one. And this is including things like warm outreach and cold outreach. So think about one to one as I am promoting this thing, myself, manually to one other human being. And there's two kind of camps in this. There's warm, and that's people that already know like, and trust you. And then there's cold. That's people who don't know like, and trust you. They probably don't even know you exist. And if they do know you exist, they don't like or trust you yet. Right? So that's, that's cold. the less they know you, the less they like you, the less they trust you, the colder they are [00:09:00] to where they're complete strangers.

[00:09:01] Brian: That's the absolute coldest you can go.

[00:09:02] Brian: So obviously when it comes to one to one advertising something, you want to make sure you start with the warmest and only gradually go out from there. And when it comes to promoting a lead magnet, I don't know if one to one method really makes sense for this. One to one can really work. In cold outbound, like cold outreach or cold emails or cold DMS can really work if you have a really high priced service, meaning it's like a client's worth 000 for you, the amount of time, effort, energy it takes to reach out to hundreds, if not thousands of, cold people, In order to get one client makes sense, whereas when you're trying to promote a lead magnet where it's not necessarily your core offering, it's a paid service, it's usually going to be a lot lower dollar.

[00:09:39] Brian: And if it's a free thing, then obviously we can't just reach out to cold people all day long trying to get them to consume our free thing. I'm sure someone's done it, but I wouldn't promote it that way. one to one generally makes sense for lead magnets when you have no other options and you're reaching out to your warm audience, people that already know like, and trust you. And the larger that network is, and the more valuable your lead magnet is for those [00:10:00] specific people, the more effective this will be.

[00:10:01] Brian: So that's one to one. It's again, Good place to get started. It's not a great place to live when it comes to promoting a lead maggot. The second way to promote a lead maggot and the way that's way more viable and way more popular and what everyone can and should do when it comes to promoting lead maggots and that's one to many.

[00:10:15] Brian: One person promoting to many at a time. I am literally doing it right now. You just heard me pitch my client acquisition toolkit to you. I gave you a link to it on this episode, six figure creative. com slash toolkit.

[00:10:25] Brian: That was me. One person on the microphone or the screen right now, if you're watching on YouTube, promoting to thousands of people listening and watching this show around the world right now,

[00:10:33] Brian: we're having our best year of all time on the podcast as far as downloads and listens and stuff, which is great. Awesome. Thanks for listening.

[00:10:38] Brian: And that is the spoiler for what the first type of one to many outreach is. And that is content creation, AKA earned media. That's one of the list of the six traffic types I mentioned earlier. Earned media is wonderful. It is a slow, painful slog depending on which method you choose, but it is wonderful.

[00:10:54] Brian: So there's a few different ways you can do earned media or content creation that are worth noting. And those [00:11:00] are long form content and short form content. And I like to think about it. More like deep relationship versus wide relationship. Long form content like this, where you're listening to me every single week for 30 minutes to an hour a week.

[00:11:12] Brian: That's a very deep relationship. So the relationship I have with my regular listeners who've been listening to this podcast for years. Shout out to you, by the way, if that's you. The relationship is real. You hear my voice. You get to know like, and trust me. through my ups and downs from...

[00:11:23] Brian: When we used to be called the Six Figure Home Studio, to the full rebrand, to the parting of a co host, to me getting married, me going on my honeymoon, me going on trips around the world, where we were in Bali in Southeast Asia for over two months last year, and we're going to Peru in a couple weeks here.

[00:11:36] Brian: You just get to know, like, and trust me through this long form media. the downside of this is long form media, especially podcasts. are notoriously difficult to grow. So I generally wouldn't start with a podcast. I would start somewhere like short form media or even just midterm media, like a YouTube, channel, like 10, 20 minute videos.

[00:11:55] Brian: I would go to YouTube or somewhere that has an algorithm driven growth engine. [00:12:00] Meaning if I create a viral piece of content, I can grow very quickly. We've had videos on TikTok go up to a half a million views and that got us thousands of followers in just one quick video, right? This podcast has worked for years to get a relatively small amount of subscribers.

[00:12:14] Brian: I would say somewhere in the tens of thousands, maybe low 10, 000 up to 20, 25, 000 subscribers. I don't really know. There's no way of really knowing because no one really reports on this. I'm just basing this on the amount of monthly downloads and weekly listens that we get. That's a really low number when compared to something like TikTok.

[00:12:28] Brian: Where 20, 000 followers on Tik Tok is nothing and that's because 10, 000 podcast subscribers are worth way more than 10, 000 Tik Tok followers because the relationship is deeper. But the upper limit and the speed of which I can grow on podcast is really limited. So generally podcasts like mine some other type of media to grow.

[00:12:46] Brian: let's talk about how this matters to you as the person trying to promote a lead magnet. I see this all the time. A lot of freelancers and really successful ones use short form media to grow wide. Okay, that's why I say the reach is wide. It's not deep. You don't have a super deep relationship with these [00:13:00] people, but it's a large following.

[00:13:02] Brian: And in that large following, that gives you more chances to promote the lead magnet that you have to the potentially ideal client. There's something called the 3 percent rule that I've probably explained a million times in this podcast, but it's worth reiterating here. In any given time. Out of the entirety of your ideal client base, only about 3 percent interested in the thing that you have to offer right now, their life circumstances or whatever problem you're solving is not relevant to 97 percent of the people right now.

[00:13:27] Brian: It's relevant to 3 percent of the people right now. That means the more often you get to touch somebody, meaning they see your stuff many times over a long period of time through content creation, eventually if they are your ideal client. At one point or another, they will become the 3%. Does I'm not shopping jeans right now, or I'm not shopping for a car right now. However, at some point, I will shop for a car. and I would bet that somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3 percent of Americans are actively car shopping right now. The other 97 percent would not respond to direct ad promoting...

[00:13:58] Brian: A car sale or[00:14:00] buy my used car or whatever. Again, I'm not, I'm not in the market for cars, so I don't know. I'm using it as an example. So whatever problem you're solving as a freelancer, we need width and we need depth. When it comes to content creation, we need to touch a lot of eyeballs and we need to touch them a lot of times over a long period of time.

[00:14:14] Brian: So if you're just starting out, we need to focus on how do we get in front of a lot of eyeballs. And that's where short form media and algorithmic driven growth can be the great place to start, especially if you have more time than money.

[00:14:24] Brian: However, if you're like me and you have more money than time, then you're the opposite and you don't have a ton of time to do short form media to do the algorithm game. The song and dance is involved with that and frankly, the treadmill. I love doing this podcast But I don't love the idea of short form media, at least not yet, and I will eventually move that direction and I understand the pros and cons of both sides, but that's where we get to something called paid media. That's what I'm heavily invested in, and that's why it was such a big deal that we lost access to our ad account for 19 days the beginning of this month, because that is generally how I generate the most of my leads.

[00:14:54] Brian: lot of the people listening to the show right now, especially new listeners, found us through paid ads.

[00:14:58] Brian: And those paid ads were promoting [00:15:00] a lead magnet that I have one of my several lead mags that I have

[00:15:02] Brian: and so paid media gets me in front of a lot of eyeballs very quickly I can go from showing my ad to a thousand people a day to showing it to a million people a day like that just by upping my budget. Now, generally you want to scale a little slower than that.

[00:15:15] Brian: You can pace things out, but you could theoretically do that. And I saw this whenever the scammers were actively promoting bras on my account, that they ran up that 8, 000 a day bill just to see how quickly they got traction. They sold 80 bras, something like that, 80 or a hundred bras on my account in less than four hours.

[00:15:33] Brian: just to show you, that's how quickly they can scale something up that had never been promoted on my account before, promote it, get sales, and then obviously the account got shut down because finally something got flagged. So whether you're promoting elderly women's bras on a hacked Facebook account under the six figure creative brand or you're promoting a lead magnet, the same principle applies.

[00:15:51] Brian: You can spend as much as you want, the numbers have to make sense for your brand. Now the hackers, they target ad accounts like mine because they can't generate a sale [00:16:00] profitably on there. They spent... I don't know how many thousands of dollars to generate 2, 000 worth of bra sales. Obviously, if they were spending the money on those ads, they would have lost money.

[00:16:08] Brian: They didn't spend any money on those ads because it was under my credit card and then Meta wiped those charges away after I got my ad account back. So they can't generate clients at a profit. Or they can't generate sales at a profit. And if you can't generate clients at a profit, then you can't do paid ads.

[00:16:22] Brian: So that's why the numbers have to make sense. And generally speaking, if you want to know some rough benchmarks, I can tell you off the top of my head, spending about 3 for a typical, what I call marketing lead. Somebody who's downloading a lead magnet, it's just like a free thing.

[00:16:34] Brian: Like our client acquisition toolkit will be about three bucks,

[00:16:36] Brian: about 5 percent of those will take the next step. And become what we call a sales lead. That's somebody who's actively interested in your service. Another 5 percent long term over the next year will also become a sales lead. So generally we say about 10 percent of your leads, of your marketing leads, will become a sales lead and have an inquiry about your core service.

[00:16:53] Brian: So generally speaking, on how effective your funnel is, to get a sales lead, it can be anywhere from 50 to [00:17:00] 100 and depending on your close rate, closing cold paid media traffic is much more difficult than... what we call lay down sales that involve closing referral traffic. It is a night and day difference in the difficulty and If you want to find out if you're good at sales, talk to cold leads, You have to really up your game. But if you close generally speaking, one out of three, one out of four of those, then you can expect to pay about 500 up to a thousand, sometimes more. For a client. And if your clients aren't worth three, four, five, 10, 000 or more, that can be a difficult, exchange to make.

[00:17:32] Brian: and when it comes to paid media, there's something called demand creation and demand harvesting, and it's important to understand where you live in that sort of spectrum. And it is a spectrum. And that is where you have to determine there's my lead magnet. Is that something that people are actively searching for?

[00:17:46] Brian: Or is this something that people have to be notified that exists before they're interested? For example. No freelancer is looking up the term client acquisition toolkit. I have to promote the fact that that thing exists and I have to create demand for it. Now, once people find out that it [00:18:00] exists and it solves a real problem, they're actively signing up.

[00:18:03] Brian: I've gotten tens of thousands of leads through paid ads. For that specific toolkit, that's just creating demand when it comes to harvesting demand that's already there That's where things like Google ads or AdWords can be really valuable to freelancers if that's something that people are already searching for So for example,

[00:18:17] Brian: if you're a family photographer and people are looking up a family photographer on Google That's active demand. And if your front end offer is just something around a small package that family photography Clients can buy like a nice Neat package that kind of solves the narrow meaningful problem that we said earlier and that's something that people are actively searching for.

[00:18:34] Brian: It could be new baby photos. I don't know. I'm just making this up on the fly here. then you can bid on certain keywords in Google AdWords. For example, baby photography, Nashville, and then whenever you fulfill the services, you can sell them on the next logical service.

[00:18:47] Brian: And that can be your core service. It can be similar to anime Tonkin, who we, replayed her episode recently, and I actually was on her podcast. We'll be coming out in a few weeks here. She has something called the yearbook club, and that's where families sign up under a recurring revenue service where they [00:19:00] pay her a flat rate per month, and they just pay continuously.

[00:19:03] Brian: And then she schedules. I think quarterly or twice a year family photo session so they can track the progress of their children's growth as they get older. So they don't miss out on any of those core memories. So she could theoretically put together an offer just targeting newborn photography.

[00:19:18] Brian: And then on the back end of that cell, the recurring revenue service, that is her core offer that brings in six figures or more per year. Again, that episode, if you go back to episode.

[00:19:25] Brian: 276. It was just a few weeks ago called shifting your clients from one time projects to monthly recurring subscriptions. That's an interesting one for any of you who kind of fit this kind of mold here.

[00:19:34] Brian: so that's demand creation. That's what I do when it comes to promoting my lead magnet. And then another version is demand harvesting. That's where you're just picking up the traffic that people are already searching for. And that's a completely different type of advertising.

[00:19:46] Brian: All right. So going back to the core four, when it comes to promoting our lead magnets, we have one to one warm outreach and cold outreach, really just warm outreach, because we can't do cold outreach. There's one to many. So we got content creation and we've got paid media. And now we have something that's a complete shift [00:20:00] here.

[00:20:00] Brian: It's others to one, and this is less relevant for lead magnets and more relevant for when it comes to our offering our core service, but that's referrals and word of mouth for the thing that you're offering here. So with lead magnets, you can, and you will see this sharing lead magnets.

[00:20:13] Brian: and that's where someone downloads the lead magnet, they consume the lead magnet, or they, buy your. front end service, the low dollar front end service like the newborn photography. And then they refer others to you because they enjoy service so much. But that is where other people are referring one person at a time.

[00:20:27] Brian: Their friends, their family, their colleagues.

[00:20:29] Brian: and there's two types of referrals here. There's active referrals and there's passive referrals. Most people when they think of referrals, they're thinking of just passive referrals. That's where I wait around for someone to refer my thing to someone else. that's the smoking hopium thing that I talk about all the time.

[00:20:41] Brian: It is just hope marketing. And so whether you're promoting your core service or your lead magnet, waiting around for referrals is a loser's game. If that's not keeping your calendar full, it's a winner's game. If it's keeping your calendar full, that's where we get to something called active referrals.

[00:20:54] Brian: That is where you are facilitating in the referral itself. For example,

[00:20:58] Brian: you can have automated [00:21:00] emails that go out when someone has clicked the link to your lead magnet. If you're delivering something like my client acquisition toolkit, and you can ask them if there's anyone else that they know of who would get value from that. You can actively reach out to people or have a followup whenever somebody buys your front end offer, your paid front end service as a lead magnet, you can ask for a referral right then and there when they've paid or when you fulfill the service.

[00:21:18] Brian: Those are more active referrals and that's where you're, Spurring the referral because people will not refer others to you if they haven't thought of two things thing number one They thought of you and your service or your lead magnet and thing number two, they thought of the person who might need it, They need both of those things to be in their head because most people aren't actively thinking about you or your lead magnet and most people are not actively thinking about the people who need that thing or the people who need that solution. So active referrals is the act of you putting something in place that spurs those two things from happening.

[00:21:48] Brian: Email. Automations are wonderful for this. Automated texts can be wonderful for this. Manual emails, manual texts, depending on the flow of leads that you have coming in. But these can spur those two thoughts. Oh, Brian's client [00:22:00] acquisition toolkit is actually really awesome. I know person A, B, and C who suck at client acquisition, and they would be delighted if I sent this their way.

[00:22:08] Brian: But if those two things don't come into their heads, you're not getting a referral.

[00:22:11] Brian: So that is, again, others to one. And then the final of the core four here is others to many. This is where other people promote your lead magnet or your service to many people at a time. And this is a wonderful thing that freelancers are almost always neglect. The

[00:22:24] Brian: first and the most logical is something called a lead magnet swap. That's where you go to your peers in your industry, people in your, what I call your referral circle. Those are people who offer different services to the same client.

[00:22:36] Brian: Just using from my own background as a music producer. When a client comes to me for recording and mixing, my referral circle might be something like this. A master engineer. They work with the same type of client. They're just offering a different service. videographer who does music videos for the artists that I work with.

[00:22:50] Brian: That's someone who offers a different service, but offers it to the same exact client as me.

[00:22:53] Brian: An attorney who specializes in music business,

[00:22:56] Brian: professional songwriters who collaborate with my ideal clients. These are all [00:23:00] people who do different services, so we're not competing on service, but we're all working with the same type of client. That's what's called a referral circle. And when you have a referral circle, especially people who listen to this podcast and they understand marketing and they have an email list because they promote the lead magnet through paid media or content marketing and they have social media followings.

[00:23:16] Brian: They have all these wonderful assets at their disposal. They basically have eyeballs at their command. You can do the same thing. You have somebody who has an email list of 5, 000 people. You have an email list of three or 5, 000 people and you swap lead magnets and that way they're sending leads to your lead magnet.

[00:23:28] Brian: You're sending leads to lead magnet and they're not competing with each other. This is again, other people promoting your thing to many others.

[00:23:36] Brian: The downside with this approach is. It is contingent on the fact that you have some amount of following or some amount of eyeballs at your disposal. It can just be a social media following, it can be an email list, but it's gotta be something of value for the person that's, you're exchanging a lead magnet swap with that is relatively of equal value.

[00:23:50] Brian: And you also have to trust each other. You trust that they're going to send you great leads. And they trust that you're going to take care of those leads and vice versa. You don't want them spamming people and [00:24:00] you getting complaints that that person spammed the hell out of them and were super annoying and abrasive.

[00:24:04] Brian: Right?

[00:24:04] Brian: So that's one to many that's through peers and your referral circle. The other type of one to many is something called affiliates. This is another untapped opportunity in most freelance markets that they don't think about affiliate traffic. So affiliates are paid commissions. So that's instead of like the referral circles, swapping lead magnets or someone promoting it out of the good graces and Just an IOU, essentially.

[00:24:22] Brian: Now there's a financial incentive, and this only works in markets where

[00:24:26] Brian: the numbers make sense and the types of people who are willing to promote your affiliate offer align with you. There's a lot of people that will promote pretty much anything, and they'll send you whatever garbage traffic they can. And That's not the type of person you want to work with. There's also people who aren't motivated by money, therefore trying to give them commissions on something isn't going to align with them and they feel almost bad doing it.

[00:24:46] Brian: So that's not it either. But there can be markets where they will send you traffic from whatever source they have. It can be influencers. It can be. Blogs or podcasts like mine that have your ideal clients, but you're not competing with them directly and you're offering up a [00:25:00] paid commission whenever they send leads your way.

[00:25:01] Brian: And things can work a number of different ways. If you're offering a front end paid service as a lead magnet, some small service that's a complete solution to a narrow, meaningful problem. Going back to two weeks ago, this episode, if it's a paid service, you can offer as much as a hundred percent of that front end service as a commission to affiliate.

[00:25:20] Brian: And you would think, why would I offer 100 percent commission to my affiliate And this, because of this, two things have to happen for an affiliate relationship to work. Thing number one is your affiliate has to make a certain amount of money for all the traffic they send you, for all the clicks they send to your website or to your funnel or whatever.

[00:25:35] Brian: They have to make a certain amount of money for it to be worth their time. someone who understands the affiliate world, they can promote a lot of products in my world. I command the. Eyeballs and ears of thousands of freelancers. So I can promote software.

[00:25:48] Brian: I have my own software I promote, but I can also promote other people's software, other CRMs, other landing page builders, website builders, softwares. I can promote courses. banking places try to get me to [00:26:00] promote them on our podcast.

[00:26:01] Brian: straight up banks have contacted me, which is crazy to think about. And I have to look at all of my opportunities And decide what is best for my listeners long term and for my business long term. And if my earnings per eyeball or earnings per click of people that I send to an affiliate offer is too low, then I can't do that because it's bad for the business.

[00:26:18] Brian: I also have to stay on brand or else people lose trust in me. the exact same thing with other affiliates that you have promoting your services is they have to make enough money. And so if you're not able to offer commissions that are high enough to make it worth their time, this will not work.

[00:26:30] Brian: On the flip side, it has to work for you as a business. Obviously, if the only thing you ever sell them is that front end offer, then you can't give away 100 percent of your commissions. However, if you're converting 50, 60, 80 percent of those front end offers to a back end recurring subscription like Anime Tonkin's business, the yearbook club, or you're doing it where You're upselling them to a five, 10, 000 package.

[00:26:49] Brian: Then all day long, you will send a couple hundred hours of commissions to your affiliate. If that means it turns into a five, 10, 000 project. So again, the math has to make sense for both sides. So if they're [00:27:00] promoting a freely magnet for you, then you'll obviously have to give them a commission on the backend offer that big ticket item on the backend.

[00:27:06] Brian: And that can be anywhere from 10 to 20 up. I've seen as high as 30 percent commissions for the affiliates on that back end service

[00:27:12] Brian: Generally speaking when you're a service based business. I don't like seeing More than 20 percent of the money go towards client acquisition costs. That's why I'm saying if you are doing paid ads, for example, you need to have a five to one return on ad spend. So for every dollar you spend, you need to get 5 back.

[00:27:27] Brian: For every thousand dollars you spend, you need to get 5, 000 back at least.

[00:27:30] Brian: And that's just in the first three to six months. A lot of times those clients will go on to spend many thousands more throughout their lifetime, that's just on the, near term to make sure your business and cashflow position is healthy. The same with commissions for affiliates. You don't want to give too much commission up front because then you don't have enough money for your business to survive at the end of the day.

[00:27:46] Brian: That's why these things are important for you to have all considerations. But if you kind of sum all of this up for this episode, there are many ways to promote anything that you have. Whether it's a core service that you're charging thousands of dollars for or a lead magnet that is 100 [00:28:00] percent free.

[00:28:00] Brian: All of these concepts that I talked about today are still relevant to you, but those are the core forts. you can promote things one to one. one to one interactions, one to many like this podcast, you can even be guests on other people's podcasts.

[00:28:11] Brian: I forgot to mention that. That was, I was on, on my talking show. If it hasn't been out yet, it'll be out in a few weeks here. And that's me being exposed to new audiences and a one to many format. There's others to one. So that's referrals. You can. Either facilitate actively facilitating referrals to where you're getting people to refer your things for you, or you can just wait around for those.

[00:28:28] Brian: And then there's others to me that's getting other people to promote your stuff to many, many people. All four of these can be viable and sometimes only one of these will be viable for any business. That's why These podcasts are difficult for people because it's advice buffet, as we say.

[00:28:40] Brian: So if you want more specific, tailored advice specific to you, this is what we do in our coaching program all day, every day is we work with you. We create an entire plan for client acquisition for you, including for doing lead magnets for doing paid promotion. How are we going to promote these lead magnets?

[00:28:55] Brian: How's that going to turn into? Sales leads and clients for you. We pitch that roadmap to you. And if [00:29:00] you don't like the roadmap, we part ways as friends, and there's no obligation continue coaching. If you approve the roadmap, it's a month to month coaching program that you can cancel or pause at any time.

[00:29:09] Brian: If you want personalized, one to one attention, one to one help, one to one coaching, And a full plan to follow. And you just want to learn more about that, just go to sixfigurecreative. com slash coaching. where you can kind of learn more about our coaching program. So that concludes the series on lead generation.

[00:29:22] Brian: Again, love to hear from you in the YouTube comments. If you're watching on YouTube or just email podcast at the six figure home studio,

[00:29:27] Brian: I will see you all next week on the show. Until next time. Thank you so much for listening to the six figure creative podcast.