The $3/Day Paid Ads Strategy That Could Change Your Business

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$3 a day.
 
That’s all it took for one of my clients to add $140,000 to their income last year.
 
Sound crazy? It's not.
 
This strategy is simple, low-risk, and requires no complicated funnels or tech setup. And the best part? You can set it and forget it.
 
In this week’s episode, I’m breaking down step-by-step how to turn tiny ad spends into new clients using a straightforward strategy.
 
Stop overthinking. Stop making excuses. Start seeing results.
 
Let’s make this the year your calendar is finally booked solid.

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346. The $3/day paid ads strategy

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Brian: [00:00:00] recently we had one of our clients turn 3 a day in ad spend into an extra 140, 000 a year of income. And I wanted to take this episode to actually break down what we did with our client to make that happen. So that you can steal that, do it in your own business and maybe have similar results.

Brian: Usually when I say something about paid ads, that's where most freelancers guard comes up. They're hackles raised. They don't want to do this because it's this fear of complexity. It's this fear of maybe wasting money.

Brian: typically they shut down, they avoid it, they don't want to do that. And that leads to this kind of perpetual cycle of doing the same stuff you did yesterday that didn't work today and won't work tomorrow.

Brian: And so you're in this groundhogs day of hell where everything is the same.

Brian: There's this dissonance where you know you're good at what you do, but you see other people around you who are not quite the skill level that you're at who are doing better than you for some unknown reason.

Brian: and no matter how good you get at your craft, your famine periods never seem to end and your calendar never gets filled up. I Think between you listening and me talking here, we can both agree on something similar where if you're not booked solid with your ideal clients. And you're not doing anything new to fix that. The problem is not going to magically go away.

Brian: if [00:01:00] what you've been doing isn't working, something has to change.

Brian: That's why I want to bring up this 3 per day strategy, because it is something that's low impact, low cost, low downside, high potential upside. It's not that hard to implement. mean, the worst you can lose is three bucks a day. The most you could gain is 140, 000 a year or more. And it's just one of those set and forget it things. Our client set this up back last summer and hasn't touched it since it's still running today.

Brian: Before I get into that, if this is your first time listening to the podcast, Hi, I'm Brian. run the Six Figure Creative Podcast.

Brian: I've had over a decade of freelancing experience, earning over a million dollars as a freelancer. also built six or seven or maybe eight other six figure income streams over my lifetime. I spent over 200, 000 on courses and coaching, and my goal is to cross pollinate all the information I've learned from other industries with other freelancers. Because the last thing I want is for any industry to be what we call inbred business, which is where you only look to your immediate vicinity for what to do and how to run your business and you don't get any outside DNA, let's say.

Brian: And so you end up stagnating, doing what [00:02:00] everyone else is doing and not learning from others. So the point of this podcast is to help you earn more without selling your soul. And we do that by looking outside of our industry for other influences from people who have already solved the problems that we have as freelancers instead of, doing the same thing we've been doing, which has not been working or worse looking to other people who have been successful despite their best efforts of fucking that up. Which I've seen dozens and dozens of time, people who are amazing at their craft and despite not doing anything they should be doing, they're still successful. You are not going to be that person. You're likely not the top 0. 1 percent of your craft. And so if you're a, what we call a blue collar freelancer, we have to do other things that maybe those people don't have to do.

Brian: And that's okay. We have to run a real business here.

Brian: And that's why paid ads is topic that I'm going to talk about a lot this month.

Brian: starting with this 3 a day strategy here. So going to break down a few different things here. I'm going to talk about the platform. I'm going to talk about the overall strategy. I'm going to talk about the actual ads themselves, what we're doing with those ads, how we create them, what we say in them.

Brian: And the goal is for you to be able to walk away with at least an understanding of how you can do this. If not enough information to go do it yourself.

Brian: But the first thing I want to talk about here is what platform should you use [00:03:00] here? Because there are tick tock ads, although this is filmed early January, who knows what happens after the deadline that has been given. So this comes out after that. Maybe it's gone. If it's not, I think it's probably still around by the time this episode airs, but there's tick tock ads.

Brian: If it's still around, there's YouTube ads, there's meta Facebook, Instagram ads. There is. Probably Twitter ads or X ads. Google ads there's all sorts of different ads that you can do. So when I'm talking about 3 a day, what platform am I suggesting here? Or can you actually use this on? the only answer really here is meta ads platform.

Brian: That is Instagram, Facebook WhatsApp. They own a few other properties. And the reason for this is as of the end of 2024, the end of last year, there are 3. 29 billion daily active users. That is

Brian: roughly 40 percent of the world's population, maybe just under that. 4 billion monthly active users. So that means they're active at least once per month, 3. 29 billion of those are an active every day, which is. utterly insane. It's crazy to me. I hate social media. I spend less than a half an hour per week on all social media combined myself, most of that's just. Doing general business stuff on there, DMing with [00:04:00] people. I don't want to be the victim of it, but I do want to use it as a tool for my business. And you can too.

Brian: The product of Meta, if you're looking at it from a platform, it's a free platform. You are the product. If you're using Meta every day, if you're using Instagram every day, if you're using TikTok every day, you are the product that is being sold. The people who is the customer are people like me who run ads.

Brian: People like you who could run ads. So I am encouraging you to, instead of being the product, be the buyer, be the person who can use the product, use the tool here's why I'm talking about this. Three to 4 billion people are active on meta platforms. That means that your clients are on there. Yes, they're on there. 100 percent It isn't B2C. It isn't B2B. It isn't even an enterprise. Your clients are on there. It just looks different in every level of business and every level of business to consumer. where like, if you're a music producer we have a lot of music producers who listen to this podcast. and you're working direct with bands and musicians, that's more like a B2C. Business to consumer, your clients are 100 percent on Instagram, maybe even Facebook. If you are B2B, where you're working with small, medium businesses 10, 15 million a year or less, 100%, they are on meta. If you're looking at larger, 50 million, [00:05:00] 100 million plus, even billion dollar businesses, the people who headed the departments, who hired the freelancers sometimes if that's the way you're trying to go, those people, Are on meta as well.

Brian: Although our bread and butter, the people that we work with are doing 15 million a year or less the clients. We're helping our clients get, if you're a B2B, all that to say, your clients are on meta platforms. They're using it off work. They're using it at work. They're using it on the toilet.

Brian: They're using it at dinner when they're ignoring their family, staring at their phones. It's being used all the time.

Brian: Another benefit is that it is a visual or creative platform. Meaning if you're creating ads on there, you can make them very visual, very creative, and that is wonderful. If you're a creative, which is all the people listening to this podcast, you are a creative, so you have an advantage, a distinct advantage over a lot of people who are not creative, who are trying to run ads on there.

Brian: so the platform is meta. That's the overarching like hierarchy here. It's meta. And then I'm going to talk about the campaign objective we're going to use. I'll talk about the ad set object.

Brian: I'll talk about the ad. I'll talk about what we say in the ad. So it's going to basically filter down all the way from the top to the bottom of what you do here. So the platform's meta. That's what we're doing here. when you're advertising on meta ads platforms, you can put your ads in any platform that meta owns that they currently have [00:06:00] inventory for. Usually Instagram. Or Facebook. I think WhatsApp might have ads at this point, I don't know, but they will eventually if they don't already. So you're creating a campaign in here and the campaign's objective should be leads.

Brian: If you're familiar with with meta ads, you know about the campaign objectives. If you're unfamiliar, there are six objectives you can choose from when launching a campaign on meta ads platform.

Brian: There's the awareness campaign. That is where you are trying to get your ad to be shown to as many people as possible. So they're going to maximize the number of impressions an ad gets. There is the traffic objective, and that is where you're trying to get your ad to be Get as much clicks as possible or as much traffic to your website or app as possible.

Brian: There's the engagement objective where Meta will try to optimize to get as many engagements on the ad as possible. So the most likes, the most shares, the most comments. There is the leads objective, which is the one we're going to run with here because we're trying to generate leads for you. There is the app promotion objective, which you can ignore unless you're trying to market your ai Uh, we're trying to optimize on, you know, dozens of sales per day which is [00:07:00] not generally what you're going to do as a freelancer.

Brian: So the objective is leads. We're trying to generate leads for you.

Brian: So far we have the meta ads platform. That's the top of the hierarchy here. Then there is the campaign we're running, it's going to be the lead's objective.

Brian: Underneath that is what we call an ad set, and that is where we choose our targeting and what we're trying to do where are we trying to send people? Are we trying to send people to our website or we're trying to send people to an app, or we're trying to send people to a dm? What are we trying to do here?

Brian: And A Big change in the strategy. From what you may have heard me talk about before or something that I might do for with more advanced people or who have a better infrastructure set up. And that is where we're actually going to not send people to our website here. what we're trying to do here is we're optimizing for DMs, not traffic to our website, not leads or opt ins or inquiries or any of those things. We're trying to get. DMs from people. you can optimize for DMs on Facebook, DMs on Instagram, can generate chats on WhatsApp if WhatsApp's big where you're trying to advertise.

Brian: But this step allows us to skip the whole funnel, skip the whole tech setup, skip the whole technology thing, which slows a lot of people down and really makes us a really fast strategy. That's what my client did. He just set it up for DMs and the whole goal of the ad is to get them [00:08:00] to send him a DM and he can have a chat conversation through DM and then turn that into a sales conversation and then close them.

Brian: And he did that about 30 something times in a relatively short amount of time, just in a few months period.

Brian: and again, we're at the ad set level. This is where we choose this in meta ads. Also in the ad set level, we choose our targeting. Who are we trying to reach with this? And in many cases, when you hear me talk about paid ads, talking about cold advertising.

Brian: We're going after a cold audience who's never heard of us. They don't know us. They don't like us. They don't trust us. that's where you really open up the floodgates. If you're trying to really scale your business and get a lot of clients, however, the other way of doing it is what we call retargeting. And that's where we're trying to get people who already know of us already probably like us probably already trust us and those are much easier to close, especially for people who are inexperienced with sales, because selling to somebody who likes you is a warm referral.

Brian: infinitely easier than selling to someone who doesn't already know like, and trust you. There's other things you have to do. You have to be better at sales, more confident. You have to be able to ask hard questions. It is a completely different process. And in this way, we're able to just target people who already know like, and trust us.

Brian: So the way we're targeting this ad set is we're just targeting people who have engaged with us on social media. So [00:09:00] if you have an Instagram that has an amount of following people who've liked, who have commented, maybe clicked read more on your Instagram or posts, things like that. Anything that they've engaged with, you can find people who have engaged with your stuff the last day, the last seven days, the last 15 days, up to the last year, 365 days. You can have anyone who's engaged with your social media account in the last days. You can show them an ad. also, if you've had a Metapixel on your website. Which if you've been listening to this podcast as long some people here, you likely already have that. Meta has been keeping track of everyone who's visited your website in the last, I think six months, 180 days is the maximum there. And you can create retargeting audiences of anyone who has visited your website.

Brian: Those are the two. That's really the only two you need. people who have engaged with your socials and people who have visited your website. There may be other situations where some people have audiences worth targeting, but 99 percent of people, that's the only two you need.

Brian: And if you don't have a pixel on your website or what MetaNow calls a data set, if you don't have a pixel or data set on your website. able to create those audiences of people who've been to your website, then just go with social engagers.

Brian: So we have the campaign objective. [00:10:00] We have what's called the conversion location. We're not trying to send them to your website. We're trying to send them to a DM. So the conversion location is a DM on Facebook or a DM on Instagram or a DM on. WhatsApp.

Brian: Now we need to figure out what are we going to say in the ads. Because that's honestly the most important part of this. The technology, all the stuff I've talked about so far, very basic stuff. With one or two YouTube videos, you could likely settle the stuff up yourself up to this point. But the ads are the stuff that actually matters.

Brian: with this client we have two types of ads running. We have image ads, we have video ads. Both serve their purposes. Images are great for people who are scrolling, doomscrolling on the internet, and maybe they're in a place where they're just like doing stuff that's visual, they have other things going auditorily, they're in a loud place, they're at work, they can't do things with volume on.

Brian: So images are a great place to convert those people. And then the videos are a great place where people are like, at home in a comfortable place where they could be loud, they have their volume up and they can hear what you're saying.

Brian: But the image ad generally is just a photo of you doing your thing or you with a good professional photo or you in an informal setting. Again, whatever matches your brand is appealing to your ideal client as an image of you. That's it. And [00:11:00] then underneath it or above it or somewhere around it on the actual image itself, it says something like this, walk you through this kind of like, film the blanks here.

Brian: It's, I'm looking for a few blank. So a few avatars, whatever you're trying to target here. It could be for you web designers. I'm looking for a few businesses. I'm looking for a few SAS companies whatever's in your audience. I'm looking for a few blank who want to blank who want to launch your new website, who want to update your site whatever the thing is that they want. What is the goal that they want to achieve? What is the thing that you've been putting off that they need to do? Finally, It's January now, if you're a fitness, person listening, if you are a business owner and you're ready to finally take fitness seriously in 2025, again, that's a good thing to put there.

Brian: And you're tired of blank, whatever the thing is they're tired of.

Brian: It could be again, if you're. A web designer you're tired of putting off your website, you're tired of trying to do it yourself, or you're tired of working with designers who never do what they say they're going to do or missing deadlines, whatever the thing is, you know, they're tired of, and you're tired of blank, and you want me to personally blank, whatever the thing is, you can personally do from you want me to personally walk you through Transcribed a plan for fixing your site, or you want me to personally, again, put your fitness plan together for you for 2025 [00:12:00] personally help you reach your goals.

Brian: Again, whatever the thing is, I'm using fitness because it's a universal example. And then your call to action. Shoot me a DM and let's chat. Very casual, very easy to do. And that's it. That's the ad. That's the image ad. Anyone here can do some version of that for you and your specific situation.

Brian: Now the other ad. This one tends to do a bit better because it's more personal, especially for people who maybe the image doesn't stop the scroll, but the seeing you talk, seeing your face, seeing your mannerisms, by the way, actually, this actually works better if you have the right personality. In some cases, some of our clients aren't a natural on video and that's okay.

Brian: That's where the image can work better. But this client is a natural on video. The video is you in just a professional environment, whatever makes sense for your niche. might be your home office. It it can be outside, it can be a selfie, it can be inside. I've seen this all work. I don't really think that the setting matters that much.

Brian: Just make sure you have good lighting, be in front of a window, try not to have any glare on your glasses if you're doing glasses.

Brian: I've experimented with professionally shot edited videos and just selfie videos and semi professional like I'm doing here with the podcast in the studio where have crazy edits or unsophisticated edits with just subtitles. Surprisingly, the worse it looks, the better it [00:13:00] performs. That's the weird, crazy thing here, obviously to a limit, but all I have to say is your iPhone holding it up in front of you is more than enough to do this.

Brian: But if you are like me, where you just can't make yourself. Look that bad. Then you can set up a nice camera like this and do it setting like this, where you have professional lighting. But in the video, you can say something similar to what the image said as well but here's what he's doing in his video ad. it's similar to what I've talked through this podcast before in other frameworks and other videos. So this is nothing new for my listeners who've been around forever, but it's basically just some variation of this combination. It's idle client plus clear result, plus some sort of timeframe, plus risk reversal, plus social proof, plus call to action.

Brian: And here's how it could look for you.

Brian: I'll give you a few examples here, but here's, my own basicallyIf you're a SAS company, which is software as a service, I will create a brand new website for you in the next 30 days. That increases your trial conversion rates by 25%, guaranteed, or I'll work with you for free until we hit that number.

Brian: Again, that is, I know a client, it's SaaS companies, clear result is a website that increases free trial conversion rates by 25%, time frame is the next 30 days, risk reversal is if we don't hit that number, I'll [00:14:00] work with you for free until we do. The social proof can be something like, this is the same process we took company A through, to increase their new trials by 75%, sounds like something you're interested in, shoot me a DM and we can chat about it.

Brian: Another way of doing this, if you don't have like results based social proof, just associated or you've worked with bigger companies, you can do something like, This is the same process we've implemented with companies like Google, Tesla Apple, Facebook, whatever, just big names that are associated with it. you want to work with me, or you want to chat with me, shoot me a DM and let's chat. Something like that. So again, one more time.

Brian: It's I do a client plus clear result, plus timeframe, plus risk reversal, plus social proof, plus call to action. A lot of little things in there. It can be arranged any way that makes sense.

Brian: And one small note there is if you don't want to do a, I'll work with you for free until you do like a risk reversal thing. You can skip that. if there's like a ton of work to be done and you don't want to Keep working for free or you don't want to do like a refund guarantee or anything like that. Don't do it. You can also put the guarantee behind some sort of plan or roadmap you create for them. That's what we do with our clients. We want to make sure that they're happy with what we do before we do all this work to [00:15:00] implement it with them. And if they're not happy with we're going to do with them, then they're out zero dollars.

Brian: That's the way we do it ryan coral was one of the guests we found the podcast before he does this in the video world where he has a low ticket thing low ticket being like a thousand two thousand dollars which he sells on the front end Which is like a workshop one two day workshop something like that And if they come up with a plan that they're not happy with they'll just refund them. And if they're happy with it, they can hire them for 100, 000 to actually do the project in the video world. Again, it's a completely different offer, but he puts the guarantee on the lower price thing and makes it a easy foot in the door so that the 100, 000 thing is a much easier yes. So that's another option for those of you who are doing B2B a higher scale, still perfectly valuable to do it like this.

Brian: think of things like, how can I versus like, oh, that won't work for me. Because I promise you, any client that we've had, that had the mindset of, that won't work because of X, Y, and Z, they do so much worse than the clients that we have that are like, That's weird. I don't know if that will work for me.

Brian: Let me think about how that could work for me. Again, a thing where like you see an obstacle and you're thinking of all the reasons you can't [00:16:00] get past it versus seeing the obstacles and your brain immediately goes to here's all the ways I could get past obstacle. So be the person who thinks of solutions, not reasons and excuses why that won't work for you.

Brian: If you can do that, you have a much, much better business. that's the strategy in a nutshell. It is essentially showing Image and video ads to your people who are already engaged with you on social media or have already visited your website Setting it to just a few bucks a day letting it run continually because that's 90 a month tops And if you are struggling so much that you can't spend 90 bucks a month just ongoing Then there's likely a lot of issues you need to fix before this will ever even work for you Anyways, so I wouldn't do this strategy if I were you if you're that strapped for cash, right? This should be for those of you who are 90 bucks a month. You're like, I'll just throw that in there. See how many DMS I can get back from that. And then eventually just see how many of these DMS turn into paid work. cool thing about it is Instagram specifically, cause this is my client was doing this all on Instagram.

Brian: It shows you which of the DMS that come into your inbox are from paid ads. So it shows you that. So you can easily keep track of how many of those you're closing and see if there's actually an ROI there. when you're spending three bucks a day and you get 140, 000 in new clients, you're You never [00:17:00] turn that off.

Brian: You just keep going forever on that until you just stop getting any DMs whatsoever. So if you want our personal help setting this up, you feel like this is something that could be helpful for you, but you're like, I still have a bunch of questions or I have a bunch of unknowns, or I would rather just have someone help me through this.

Brian: Who've done this a bunch of times versus trying to figure it all myself.

Brian: Or if you. Want to do paid ads and you don't think that your retargeting audiences would make sense. For example, if the followers you have on social media aren't your ideal clients, if you don't have a pixel on your website yet to be able to retarget those people, then we have to do cold ads. And that's a whole different strategy.

Brian: It's a whole different ballgame. Either way, it's something we can help you with. So here's how it works. If you're interested. First thing is we will craft a full customized roadmap for you and we will pitch it to you. This is what I talked about earlier with our risk reversal. We make it as easy to say yes as possible.

Brian: So we craft this roadmap. And if you hate it, we just part ways. You're out zero bucks. If you love it, we will actually help you implement it on a month to month coaching schedule where you're not locked into any long term contracts.

Brian: And you can stay as long or as little as you want. But while you're with us, we will help you one to one despite every one of our clients, except for a small handful retested a one year contract. We [00:18:00] tested that for a while with like 10 of our clients, except for those 10 clients. Every one of our clients are with us on month to month contracts. our average client has been with us over a year. We have higher client retention than any other coaching company I have ever seen.

Brian: Alex Hermosi himself told me he cannot believe our, client retention is as high as it is, because we take the coaching part seriously. We take their relationships seriously and our coaches ratings on average are a 9. 72 out of 10. Over the last year

Brian: and we rate our client coach relationship multiple times throughout the year to make sure it's not just falling

Brian: if you want to be part of this Just go to sixfigurecreative. com slash coaching.

Brian: If you join us this month, we'll actually give you a 500 ad credit to spend meta ads We've had clients turn that 500 into Nine, 10, 000 worth of clients.

Brian: I'm going to give that to you. So if you want that, go to six figure creative. com slash coaching, apply. If it makes sense, we'll chat

Brian: and then we can get started. So that's all I got for you this week. I'll see you next week on the six figure creative podcast.

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