The Word-of-mouth Death Trap And How To Avoid It

[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of the six figure creative podcast. I'm your host Brian Hood.

And I am not here with my big bald beautiful co-host Chris Graham today because I just got back from my interview. And, uh, I was digging into my numbers, which is something I recommend any person do when they're, uh, at least once a year, at least, and dig into your numbers to kind of see what's going on under the hood, because so few of us actually take the time to dig into our numbers and see what sort of insights we can gain from.

I did that at the end of the year, and I did a whole lot of other stuff, and I'm going to talk about it on a future episode or a YouTube video or something. But I started digging into my analytics for both the podcast, for the YouTube channel, for our website. And I came across a couple of things that were interesting, the main thing being that, um, we have way more downloads on the podcast than I do on YouTube videos.

And let me tell you why that's important. It's important because. I put out separate videos on our YouTube channel, every single week of content that is not discussed on this podcast, it is completely separate from this podcast. And what that means is if you haven't [00:01:00] found your way to our YouTube channel, you've missed out on that content.

And so I wanted to take one episode for our podcasts and just dedicate it to a couple of YouTube videos I've put out recently. And so sorry if you've already found these videos, but this is for the rest of our listeners who haven't gone over to the YouTube channel yet because the content over there is just as valuable as the content here.

And a lot of it's still kind of longer form 15, 20 minute videos that go deep into.

And so there are two videos that I want to pull into this podcast and you don't have to see them. So if you're doing the normal thing you do for podcasts, where you're on a walk or you're you're driving, or you're running errands or doing something around the house, like you don't have to stop. Watch the YouTube version of this, actually, I don't even know what the YouTube version this is going to look like because people who watch the sun, I guess on YouTube, I've probably already seen these videos, but this is for our listeners.

You can still listen to these videos. So the first video I want to highlight today is from a YouTube channel. I posted it back on November 18th of last year. And the whole premise of the video is something I call the word of mouth death. And this is a really controversial one, but one that I [00:02:00] still wholeheartedly stand behind because there is a perpetuated lie.

That word of mouth should be enough to sustain you as a freelancer. And the reason I think this is a lie and actually, I don't even think I hardly believe it. And I would actually really argue against anyone who doesn't believe this. There is nothing that is a lie is because the people who say this and the people who argue this are the ones who have made.

As a freelancer who their, all their work is coming from word of mouth. And the problem with that as you're going to find out from this video is just merely that those people got to that point because they survived long enough for their word of mouth snowball to grow large enough to sustain them.

Long-term that's not the case for those who failed and never made it because it didn't understand anything about marketing, about client acquisition, about any of this stuff. So So this was going to be the shorter of the two videos today. It's about 12 minute clip, it's just pointing out a very fundamental thing that you have to understand.

and so without further ado, here's the YouTube video called the word of mouth. Death trap is word of mouth marketing.[00:03:00]

If you were to go to any freelancer that you look up to, who's successful, who's making a lot of money doing what you want to do. If they're in the position you want to be in nine times out of 10, they're going to tell you that their number one source of clients is referrals. Word of mouth. As a matter of fact, if you were to go ask a large group of freelancers, what their number one source of clients is, it's word of mouth.

I went and I pulled four different Facebook groups and four different industries in the photography industry, the, uh, music production industry, the videography, and then the graphic design industries and all four Facebook group polls listed the number one source of. Is word of mouth. So when you see all of the successful freelancers around you saying that word of mouth is their number one source of clients, and you see all these Facebook group polls that are saying our number one source of clients as a group is word of mouth.

Then your natural inclination is to say, I will focus on word of mouth. I will rely on word of mouth advertising is my soul. Or at least my main source of clients for my business. And if [00:04:00] that is you friend, I am going to put my flag in the ground right now and say, unfortunately, that is a recipe for disaster.

If you are sitting there right now and watching this video and your calendar is not already booked up 100% full with your perfect ideal client, and you don't have a plan in place to fix that other than. Waiting on word of mouth clients to find you, then this video is for you. And in this video, I'm going to dispel the lie that is this toxic mindset of waiting for clients to find you and why that's a terrible idea for 99.9% of freelancers.

So let me address the elephant in the room for those of you wondering yes. You can get clients from word of mouth. Yes. You can book your calendar 100% full with word of mouth clients and yes, you can make six figures a year, 100% from. Referrals. So what is my problem with word of mouth? Why do I think it's toxic for free the [00:05:00] freelance community as a whole?

Well, there are actually four major issues that I have with word of mouth advertising and the lies that are around that. And in this video, I want to break those down. So let's dive into that issue. Number one, problem. Number one would word of mouth advertising is that you have absolutely no control over.

When a client comes to you because they were referred to you by someone else, word of mouth, that's generally how it works. This is not a strategy. It's not a plan. It is merely a result. The only thing you did was make that client happy. And that is literally the Mo the bare minimum you can expect to do as a freelancer.

You have to make your clients happy. The result of making them happy is that they will sometimes refer clients to you. The problem is you have no control over that. You don't dictate when they refer other people to you. If they ever refer people to you, you simply wait around for it to happen. It is not something that you can control and it is not something that you can just merely go out and get a, another word of mouth client, because that's not how it works.

Unfortunately, the second issue that I have with word of mouth advertising for freelancers is that it [00:06:00] is a slow. It's something that takes years. It is a snowball that slowly grows. Every time you work with a new client and you make that client happy, it's something that slowly, slowly grows. As you build a new relationship with a friend or a family member or someone in your circle.

It takes time. Effort, it takes energy, but the one thing you can't just do is just go out and get a new client via word of mouth. Again, if you're new, tell me where to go out and just get a word of mouth client. I'll sit here and wait for you to tell me where that is.

It doesn't exist. And if you think through the whole process of how word of mouth advertising works, it makes sense you work with. You make that client happy. Eventually that client comes across someone else who needs your services. And then they'll let that person know about you. That's really the referral loop in a nutshell.

And the problem with this is one person is not really that effective at word of mouth. Two people is a little bit more effective twice as effective actually, but it's still not that effective of bringing new clients to what is it, the average person going to bring to your business? It's this varies depending on [00:07:00] what niche you're a part of, but realistically one person might bring.

Another person a year, one person a year. Maybe, sometimes they'll maybe bring nobody, some mega people might bring in two or three people back to you as a referral in a year. So you can start to do the math yourself and see that it's going to take a lot of really happy clients before I'm ever going to actually get referrals.

Or it's going to take a lot of friends who really believe in me before I'm going to get the referrals that I need to stay booked up full time. So that's the second problem is it is a slow grind. It is a slow build for that word of mouth snowball. The thing about the word of mouth snowball is it is actually a net.

If you're good at what you do and you do this long enough, eventually your main source of clients will be word of mouth. And this actually leads me to the third issue I have with word of mouth advertising. Is that something called survivorship bias? This is actually the main culprit behind why so many freelancers fall into this word of mouth trap.

So to illustrate this point, there's a popular image from a world war II fighter plane that shows all of the [00:08:00] areas that they found were being shown. During battles. That's all the places where the bullet holes were concentrated. And so the natural response in the military was, oh, we should actually put more armor over these areas because these are the areas that planes are being shot at.

What they didn't realize is they were falling into something called. Bias. These were merely the planes that survived battles. These are the ones that made it home. So what they soon realized was the planes that made it home. We're actually showing you all of the spots that could be shot and still be capable of flying.

So what they instead did was look at all the areas of the plane that didn't have any bullets. And those were likely the spots that they should add the extra armor to reinforce them. And so that's exactly what they did. So let's bring this back to the freelance world. If you're a freelancer and you look at all of the businesses that are saying word of mouth advertising is the best kind of advertising.

These are merely the freelancers and the businesses that survived long enough for that inevitable word of mouth snowball to grow large enough [00:09:00] to be their number one source of clients. Again, the word of mouth snowball, it is an inevitability you will eventually get there over a long period of time. And as they say, Slog through a lot of time, effort and energy, but you'll eventually get there.

And what you don't realize is that all the people you look up to are the ones who survived to that level. And so they, of course, they're saying our number one source of clients are word of mouth, but what's, you're ignoring is the large pile of dead bodies that never made it to that point. The people who quit and gave up and went back to their day jobs because they bought into the lie.

That word of mouth is the number one way to get clients they bought into that. Unfortunately, And that's the lie that so many people fall into. If I build it, they will come. If I'm good enough, I will get noticed. And unfortunately that's called hope marketing or another way of putting it as hopium. But unfortunately that's not how it works.

The best person does not always get hired and hope marketing is not a plan. It is merely the lazy way out, which actually leads me to point number four, problem. Number four that I have [00:10:00] with word of mouth advertising. And that is. It appeals to the lazy. If that sounds mean I'm not trying to be just bear with me.

The natural human tendency is to avoid friction, avoid pain, avoid suffering. So when it comes to doing things that make us uncomfortable, we will avoid those if we can. So if we buy into the hope marketing lie and instead buy into this lie, that. If I'm the best, then I'll always get hired. Then we're falling into this trap that allows you to be selectively lazy.

I will just do the things that I love. I will spend hours and hours and hours honing my craft and watching YouTube videos and collaborating with others and making incredible art and doing all these fun things that fill my soul. But. Selectively be lazy. If I'm being honest and avoid the parts of the business that I don't really want to do, I don't want to do marketing because it feels icky.

I don't want to have to do this because it makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't want to do that because it's just not part of who I am. Unfortunately, as a business owner, we all have to do things that don't make us comfortable. Sometimes things that make us stretch outside of our comfort zones. And if you buy into the word of [00:11:00] mouth lie, you're allowing yourself to be selectively lazy, because if you just let all your clients do your marketing for you.

You don't have to do anything uncomfortable. Anything that challenges you is this starting to come together as to why word of mouth lie is something that's toxic for freelancers. Now, at this point, I hope you starting to see all of the big picture of why this is toxic for freelancers. Why we can't just fall into this lie.

And if you're nodding your head, you're starting to kind of come around and, and agree with that. You're also probably wondering what is the. Thing. What is the better solution to this? Because we all want to get there. We all want to have all of our calendar slots full. All of our calendar filled up. As far as the eye can see with the perfect client and we don't have to do anything for that.

They just come to us. We all want that. Who wouldn't want that. But the problem is when we just rely on that and it's not happening, we're sitting around, we're waiting on hope marketing to kick in and it's not working. What is the better method? Unfortunately, the answer is simple and somebody is going to push you out of your comfort zone, but it's something you have to hear, unfortunately.

And that is you need a. Plan an actual plan, something that you can take action on something that you [00:12:00] control, something that involves steps that you can actually take, but really let me back up even further than that. What, what the heck is marketing anyways? Because that's a complex subject. It means so many different things to so many different people.

People see like Facebook ads have a gurus and people holding big wads of cash and they think, oh my God, I don't want to be that person. You don't have to be here's marketing in a nutshell. Marketing is. Giving the right message to the right person at the right time. That's it? This video? Believe it or not, this video is marketing.

I am putting the right message, the message of hope marketing and word of mouth advertising is toxic to freelancers, to the right person. You you're still watching this. You're the right person at the right time. You probably need to hear this right now. This is marketing. This is part of my overall plan.

It's not scammy, it's not scummy. It's not something that makes you feel cringy. If anything, it's adding value to you and hoping help, hopefully helping you open up your eyes to what's possible out there and what you need to do as a freelancer. If you want to make it in the. Part of my overall marketing strategy is to [00:13:00] sit down every single week and produce a video like this.

I also do a podcast episode for the six figure creative podcast as well. I create content like this that helps solve problems for people which also builds trust with you, the V the viewer. And then I offer some sort of valuable thing in exchange for your email. And once I get your email address, I will email you every week.

When I have a new YouTube video, where we have a new podcast episode, further building trust, showing credibility, helping you solve problems. And then eventually you might purchase something from me, whether it's software, whether it's education, whether it's a live event or coaching or something else altogether.

And if you never purchased something from me, chances are, if I'm genuinely adding value to your life, you will eventually refer other people to what I'm doing. My videos, my podcast, and any products that I have and the services that I offer. You're probably going to refer someone to what I'm doing, the difference between this.

And word of mouth advertising is that I have steps that I take every single week that will generate new business for me in the future. So my question for you is this, what steps are you going to be taking every single week? What actions can you [00:14:00] actually take to drive your business forward instead of waiting for people to do.

Find you do you have to do videos like this. Do you have to create content? Do you have to build an email list? Absolutely not. Most freelancers don't and you can still be successful doing it that way. You can still do what I'm doing here, but on a one-to-one basis, I'm just doing it at a larger scale where I can tell.

Hundreds or thousands of people at the same time. Now, if you're starting to see how this all comes together, how a marketing plan is more than just hoping them more than just waiting for people to come to you. And you're not sure what steps you need to take next. Then I want to give you my guide on marketing plan for freelancers.

I call it my five by one marketing method. And in this resource I give you the. Areas the five parts of any good marketing plan. And then the one thing you should be implementing in each of those five places. If that sounds good, if you need a little bit of extra guidance on what to do from here and what sort of actions you can take, you're excited.

You understand how this is starting to look and you need to actually. Find something to put into place. Cause you're not sure how this even [00:15:00] looks then go to six, figure creative.com/marketing, and you can get that resource for free. Again. That's six-figure creative.com/marketing, and I'll send you that resource.

All right. So welcome back to the podcast. That was a good taste of what you'll find on YouTube. Uh, but the funny thing about that is once that video was published, we had a, a fun debate in our community, which if you're not a part of our community, you need to, you need to absolutely join our community.

The link is six-figure creative.com/community. That's the way to get to our free community. We had a really good debate. Where people were, were debating back and forth at this topic that I talked about in this video, how the word of mouth liar, the word word of mouth death trap. Isn't a thing that's, it's not a thing.

And the funny thing that I noticed in that community, the people that were arguing hardest, that the word of mouth death trap, isn't a thing. We're all people that were decades into their career, or at least 10 plus years into their careers and were fully sustaining themselves on word of mouth. So hopefully you kind of understand my argument and I'm more than happy to hash this out, further [00:16:00] in, uh, And actually, you know what, I, I did a separate Facebook live on this exact topic.

So if you're not in our community, you miss that. So make sure you join the community for potential sporadic Facebook lives. When I want to argue with people in our community about something, but that leads us to the next video that I'm going to pull in the next clip, or actually the full video. This one's a longer one.

And I posted this back in November 25th. So shortly after that was a good followup to this topic of the word of mouth live. And this one is. Called earning a hundred thousand dollars as a music producer marketing 1 0 1.

So the whole premise of this is discussing what marketing actually is because people overcomplicate it. And when you hear the word marketing and then, the word creative in the same sentence, do you have a Rollie pollies in your areas? This is just a thing I had in Alabama.

People are going to think and be like, man, what are you talking about? You're crazy. Uh, when I was a kid, is these little, these little cynical. Tiny creatures have walk around and then if you've got close to them and they felt scared or frightened, they would roll up into a little ball. And that's why we call them as kids, roly polies. Anyways, that's what creatives [00:17:00] feel like. They, they grow, they grow up under the little roly-poly ball and they don't want to talk about, or think about marketing because it feels icky and skeezy and like all sorts of like negative emotions that go along with that.

And, and not only that, a lot of this field by imposter. But not only that, like, they just don't understand really what marketing is. So this video that I did on YouTube shortly after the last video you just listened to, I talked about marketing 1 0 1. What marketing actually is in a nutshell, and I break it down so simple that I think anyone, any creative should unders not only understand it, but it shouldn't be more appealing to you because of how pure it really is in its essence.

So without further ado here is the video marketing 1 0 1, earning a hundred K as a music.

In this video, I'm gonna break down marketing 1 0 1 for freelancers and more specifically creative freelancers. If you've Googled this before, you've seen the other results, maybe you've watched a couple of other videos. It's always like buttoned up. People in colored shirts spent a bunch of jargon at you.

This is not that video. This video is for creatives who want to avoid [00:18:00] marketing, but have to learn marketing or else they're not going to get. So I'm going to do my best to keep the simple, as a matter of fact, it's going to be so simple that I'm going to break down all of marketing into one single sentence.

If that sounds good. Stick around

marketing 1 0 1. How can we break this all down into one simple, easy to understand, easy to remember sentence, write this down. Marketing is simply this putting the right message in front of the right person at the right. That is it nothing more, nothing less people always want to over-complicate it. And it's because the people that teach.

I had forgotten what it's like to be the person who's trying to learn marketing for the first time. And so they use all these fancy words and these weird acronyms and three letter phrases that you don't really understand is the person just trying to get started. So I'm avoiding all of that. So we're going to break this down the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

We're gonna break down all three of these things. So you can actually take this away and use it in your [00:19:00] business. So, number one, what does it mean to have the right message? Well, it's freelancers, we're typically offering a service in exchange for a. That's it really in a nutshell now the problem comes when we message our services in the wrong way, we say, I will offer you this service for this amount of money.

I will offer you copywriting services for $500. I will offer you mixing and mastering services for $1,000. I will offer you wedding photography for $5,000. That is the wrong messaging. The right messaging is focusing more on the end result. The end thing that you're giving somebody the outcome you're giving somebody more than the service that you're using to get that outcome.

Let me actually say that again and try to clarify a little bit more bad. Messaging says I offer a service. Good messaging says, I offer an outcome or I offer a result. Think about this way. If your client is a business that end result is typically tied to money in some way, shape or form. If your client is like a musician or somebody in the arts, a lot of times their outcome is tied to something internally.

It's something that's in their [00:20:00] self-actualization, they're realizing a dream or they're doing something to stroke, their own ego. You're selling an ego in a box. You're selling a, uh, you're basically selling them an inflated ego, which sounds weird, but that's the reality of the situation. Selling music production services, you're selling the ego hit that that band or artists gets once they get famous in their little local area and can play in front of their few hundred people at a, at a concert.

That is the, that is really the end result that you're selling them. And the fast you start to realize that the faster you're going to get your messaging dialed in and able to actually get people to pay you money. So my challenge to you is think through your services more as an. Then a service and you'll start to have a lot better idea of how to communicate that to the people that you talk to.

So if you're struggling with this, I want you to kind of think through this exercise mentally you're a client is at point a and they want to be at point. And your service is bridging that gap between point a and point B. So my question to you is where's point a where's point B. And how does your service bridge that gap that is [00:21:00] messaging in a nutshell.

So if you can really start to understand that you're going to have a much easier time in your marketing. So that's, that's the first part of marketing. Let's go back to that sentence again. Marketing is. The right message to the right person at the right time. So now we're on the second part, getting the right message in front of the right person.

What do we mean by the right person? This is essentially your niche or your niche, if you're American, and this is the one type of person that you should be servicing. And this is the part that people mess up so much because they want to work with everybody because if they work with everybody, they have a better chance of getting clients because they don't want to exclude people.

The reality of marketing is the more you exclude, the more you attract. Let me say that again. The more people you exclude from your marketing, the more people you'll attract to you, which is counterintuitive. And this is the reason people mess this up. And niche is a powerful thing. And the reason this is so powerful is that when you focus on one person, One singular person.

You're able to shape that message, that first part of marketing. And one-on-one the right message. You're able to shape that to laser focus to [00:22:00] that one type of person. So if you go back to my music production example, if I'm a music. And I'm helping people, some busy selling an ego in a box for lack of a better phrase.

Here. I could go. After all genres, I could go after rock bands and metal bands and rap artists. I could go after Christian CCM, a good go after country artists. I could go after all of these different with jazz, I could go after everyone. But the problem with that is if I'm speaking to. All of those people that I'm essentially speaking to.

No one, I'll say that one more time. When you try to speak to everyone, you speak to absolutely. No one. And that's because we're so bombarded with messaging from so many different sources in the world, we tend to just, it's like water going off the back of a duck. It just glides right office because we're so bombarded.

So much we're oversaturated. So the only way to break through all of that messaging and all of that mayhem is to have a laser focus on one specific type of person. So if you're struggling to kind of narrow down who you want to focus on, you're, you're drawn to too many different types of areas because of ADHD.

Maybe that's, that's how I am. I'm not sure how you are. There's a framework I've [00:23:00] created. That's helped me and accept a lot of other people. I've I've rented this exercise with is called PCP framework and all it stands for is passion. Connections and profit. And so the exercise I walked through is if you're just saying there's two people that I'm trying to narrow down and decide on who I really want to go after, should I go after rap artists or country artists.

So go through each of those letters and score on a one to five. So for passion, how passionate am I about this type of group of people? Do I love being around them? Do I love interacting with them? Are they fun to be around? Is it someone that just have a really close, emotional connection with, for some way, shape or form?

Because of my. So just rate it on a one to five scale. Now, the second one is connection. How connected are you with people in that group? So if I'm going after country artists, do I have a big background in the country music scene? Do I have a lot of friends and connections in that world? That's another one to five scale five being, I have a ton of connections.

One, meaning I have virtually no connections in that world. And then the final letter to, to write on is P for profit, how profitable. This group of people [00:24:00] be on a one to five. Actually I do a one to three scale on this, and this is, this is why it's so important to do one to three scale on profit, just because you don't have to have a really profitable juicy group.

You don't have to go after fortune 500 companies in my world. I made hundreds of thousands of dollars recording, mixing, and mastering heavy metal artists, which is a very small group of people. And I wouldn't say highly profitable because a lot of people I worked with had like day jobs at, at taco bell.

Uh, but the, the. It was a small enough group of people that I could comfortably make a great living doing it. And so when I rate the profit number, it's only a one to three scale because I don't really want it to add up to too much of this whole pie. So think through again, how passionate am I about this group of people?

How well connected am I in that group of people and what is the potential profit in that group of people? And that'll help you help you really narrow this down. So now we've got the right message in front of the right person. Now we have the final piece of the puzzle for marketing one-on-one and that is getting the right message in front of the right person at the right.

Time let's break this down first. Let me give you examples of [00:25:00] bad timing. Going back to my music production example. If I am going after music producers, I'm selling them an ego in a box, going back to my messaging. Uh, I've got to find people who are looking for production services right now. That's ideally the world I'm going after the wrong time.

Right after they released a brand new album. And the reason is once they released an album, it's going to be another six to eight months before they even start considering going back into the studio. So that's the right message to the right person at the wrong time and be the same as like, if you're a wedding photographer, the right message, the right person.

But you get them at the wrong time because they're newlyweds after their marriage. You can't go photograph their wedding anymore. So it's getting again at the exact right time. And for some of you that where that little window of opportunity is super, super narrow, that actually leads to another little concept.

I want to teach here for the right time. And that's something called the 3% rule of marketing. So the 3% rule basically states this of a given group of people that, that represents your ideal. Only about 3% of that group is [00:26:00] ready to hire you right now. But that doesn't mean they're going to all hire you.

That that doesn't mean that they're even going to consider you, but just means only 3% of a given group of people is even in the market are or considered at the right time. Now, the interesting thing is 15 to 20% of that full group of people that represents your ideal clients, 15 to 20% of them will be ready to purchase soon.

So if you look at the. And you look at the 3% versus the 15 to 20%. That's a five times larger group, the 15 to 20%, the group of people that are ready to buy soon versus the 3% that are ready to buy now. And that actually brings an opportunity to have that most people don't capitalize on when we talk about putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time, most freelancers and creatives, and really any people marketing and anything in the world, tend to focus on the 3% and ignore the 15 to 20%.

And that is a massive mistake because that 15 to 20% represents a. Times larger group of people, meaning it's five times more people to get in front of as long as we're doing the right things. So that now leads to the payoff to this whole 3% rule thing. [00:27:00] And that is for you, the freelancer, what you can do about this.

If you are only going after people in that 3% group, you are severely limiting yourself as someone who is only going to catch the lowest hanging fruit of all. And you're not even to get all of the. It's very difficult to live the 3% world, because then you're essentially relying on inquiries and you're lying on hard selling, saying, who is looking for the service.

Do you need this service I'm available? And the 3% people of people that see that are going to probably think you look desperate and don't want you to know. So now we are going to, we're going to move over to the 15 to 20% of that group. The people that are looking to buy soon that will be ready to purchase from you sooner or hire you soon.

And this opens up a whole lot of opportunities because no matter what service you offer, there's a whole slew of things that that client has to do before. They're ready to actually hire you. And for me in the music production world, if you think through the whole life cycle of it, They have to write songs.

Usually there's like some sort of pre-production involved. There's a lot of nerdy things that aren't relevant to you right now, but that opens up a whole lot of opportunity for me [00:28:00] because where there's confusion and overwhelm there's opportunity. And if there's opportunities for me to add value to my ideal client before they're ever even ready for my service than I, when at the end of the day and the faster you start thinking through it, and that regard the faster you're going to start getting clients lined up at the door.

To hire you instead of desperately waving your hand, posting Facebook posts or Instagram posts, uh, calling out for clients who are looking for your services. That's not the way to do it or spamming Facebook groups for the worst. Oh, don't even get me into that. So my challenge for you is this, think about it from the perspective of your ideal.

Perfect. Where are they when they're in that 15 to 20%, the groups that will be ready soon, maybe they're studying into whatever it is you offer. Maybe they're trying to learn about the things that they need to know about before they can hire you. There's a whole list of things that they need to know about before they're prepared to hire you, the things that they need to either avoid or the things they have to have prepared or have done or whatever it is for your service.

You already know these things, list all of those things out, and then start thinking through the perspective of how can I help my [00:29:00] client get these. Done or answer these questions for them and the best way to do this. And this is something that people don't want to hear and it's. It's really effective because you're watching this video still.

If you can create content that helps solve your ideal client's problems, you will win. At the end of the day, you can have hundreds of people or thousands of people watch a YouTube video that you make, or listen to a podcast that you created or read a blog article that you wrote and help them solve a problem.

And that puts you on their radar at the perfect time, because they're about to hire for whatever service you offer. They're just not ready quite yet. And they will be ready soon. And this is the difference between hunting. And farming hunting is going out and finding the ready of readily available people that just happened to be out at the time and throwing a spear at them and dragging them back to your cave.

Farming is saying, I will take the time, effort and energy to sow the seeds today so that I can reap the rewards later. But at greater quantity so that I never have to go hunting again. That is the power of this. And it's something called [00:30:00] content marketing. Now that's my chosen way of marketing. There's actually a lot of different ways you can do it.

You don't have to do content marketing. You don't ever have to be on video or do a podcast. There's other things you can do, but that's all I have on this video. That's marketing. One-on-one I don't want to get any more complicated in this. If you want a deeper dive into this sort of stuff, and you want to get a little bit more nerdy about this, I actually have a video.

I called the five by one marketing method. It goes over all my five different points of the marketing plan that people should be implementing in their business. If that sounds like something you're ready to dive into, just go to six, figure creative.com/marketing, and you can get that. But if you're not ready for that, I just encourage you to go back through this video and actually.

Action on the things that I talked about. Cause I guarantee if you can answer that question, if you can really go through getting, how do I get the right message to the right person at the right time, you're going to be so much further ahead than any of your competitors or any of your friends, because you actually took this and took action on it.

All right. So that's, that's marketing in a nutshell. it shouldn't be anything that's scary or over complicated.

It's literally just putting the right message in front of the right [00:31:00] person at the right time. And if you keep it that pure, and if you think about it that way, it shouldn't be something that feels icky or skeezy. You can make it super gross. If you want to, like, you can, put the right message in front of the right person at the right time and make it super gross and icky and skeezy. But, you don't have to, and as creatives we don't want to because we, we want to make sure we protect our personal brand, our business brand and any. Goodwill that we've created over the years as freelancers as creatives.

So the last video that I want to, to end this with, and I I wasn't going to do this one originally, but I just felt like this would fit really well as just a third to this trio of videos from YouTube. And I posted this one back in December 9th. So this was only about a month or so a little over a month ago. And this was called the six methods for getting traffic to your website as a freelancer.

So before you turn this offer or. This is an important part of understanding, the part of the message that I just talked about,

which is getting the right message to the right person at the right time, the word that people don't understand is getting or putting the right message or getting the right message in [00:32:00] front of someone. That's an action that requires getting in front of somebody. Without having one of these six methods implemented into your business, then you can have a great message and you can have no way of amplifying that into the world.

And if that's the case, then you're going to continue to struggle because just say this. I had a call with someone recently. they were incredible. Business people they had put so much work into their website and, what they do as a service provider. I'm not gonna go into the details cause I don't wanna give this person away or make them feel bad, but they'd built this incredible business.

One of the best businesses I'd ever seen behind the scenes. And they were great at what they did. That's honestly the most important part, but they were just technically great at everything. Around their business, but they didn't have the most crucial element. And they, it was, they didn't have website traffic.

They had no way of getting this wonderful message. They created this wonderful service. They created this offer. They created out into the world. And because of that, they had only had four clients in the past year. And this is someone that had put hundreds of hours into building this [00:33:00] business. I have to add this video to this, this lineup from, from, uh, our YouTube repertoire that I've been building over the past six.

this is an important part. This is something you cannot, absolutely cannot ignore. So this is a little bit more, this is a much longer video. This one's 28 minutes long. So this is gonna be the bulk of this, this. But this has to be something you start learning more of, and I'm not going to go into it too much, but just, just like you, you put time, effort and energy investing into, and maybe money investing into your creative skills.

You have to learn these other skills. If you want to make it as a freelancer. That's why I, try to sign off every podcast episode. And I definitely signed up every sign off every YouTube video with saying it takes more than passionate to become a six figure creative that's because it takes.

Above and beyond what you're passionate about, just because you're passionate about the thing that you do doesn't mean you are going to be successful. It doesn't mean you're going to have people flooding to your website. and so this video at least gives you some of the technical things you need to know.

About six different paths to getting traffic to your [00:34:00] website and traffic means eyeballs on what you're doing. That means people filling out your foe, your form on your website, or booking calls with you. That means leads, which means customers or clients, which means money and you're in your pocket. And if you're trying to be a six-figure creative or even, or even a mid five figure creative, or you just want to have like some side income from this as a creative, you still have to have these elements in place.

So this video, uh, I'm just gonna stop talking and rambling. This video is, um, the six methods for getting website traffic as a freelancer.

In this video, I'm going to give you the six ways to get traffic to your website. And if you're a freelancer, this is especially important because if you don't have traffic coming to your website, that means no one is filling out your quote request form or your inquiry form, which means no one ends up being coming in client, which means you don't have a business.

You have a hobby. And with a six-figure creative, our goal is to help you monetize something who actually truly love doing something you're passionate about, but monetizing your passions. Start. With getting traffic to your website. And in this video, I'm gonna give you these six ways. These are, as far as I know, these are the only six ways to get traffic to your website.

And if you don't know all six of these, then you're [00:35:00] not making an informed decision on which one you're going to focus on in your business.

So, if you're still watching this, I'm going to assume that you're a freelancer, you're struggling to get traffic to your website and you have no idea really what to do if that's you you're in the right place. And it's okay that you don't know this stuff yet. No one was born a marketer. No one was born on all of this knowledge.

And I've been talking about marketing on this YouTube channel a lot lately because so much of our community struggles with this. So let's dive into these six ways to get traffic to your website. This is relevant, whether you're a freelancer, whether you're a fortune 500. Whether you're an e-commerce company.

These are just the six fundamental ways to get website traffic method. Number one is paid media. This is the first place people's brains go to when they think about marketing or getting traffic to their website. And this can be anything from Facebook ads to Instagram ads, to tick-tock ads, YouTube, uh, video ads, or it can be a Google display ads.

There's all sorts of ads that are out there. Basically. Dishing out money and exchange for people's eyeballs or ears. In some cases [00:36:00] like with podcast ads, then you are participating in this strategy called paid media. No surprise there. The issue is when you are a creative minded person with no marketing experience, trying to get into paid media.

In most cases, I would say, stay away from this. This is for the type of person who is very analytical. Who's very left brain who is really nerdy and marketing is like, AB test and split tests and, uh, changing out images and creatives and, uh, writing with copywriting and getting different headlines and split testing, different calls to action.

Like that's all skills you have to have if you're going to make it in paid media. Otherwise, if you don't have all of the skills involved, you are going to crash and burn, but there are still pros and cons with this. This is not all bad. Paid media is not all bad. And I have personally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars profitably with paid media, but this is not for the faint of heart.

So the pros, first of all, are it's clear. Meaning you can put dollars in and you could literally get a client the same day and you could scale it up to a lot of money spent and a lot of clients. And in a really quick amount of time, there's very [00:37:00] few methods that are out there that you could quickly go get 50, a hundred customers or clients in a really short amount of time.

Meaning you can quickly scale if you're good at it. That's the big thing. The second pro is that you get a really fast feedback loop, that feedback loop between putting something out into the world and then getting a massive amount of feedback on whether that resonated with the world or it didn't with paid media.

That's the only way that I know of where you can put a new message out into the world or a new video or a new creative or a new. Anything, you can put anything out in the world and put a bunch of money behind it and instantly get feedback from thousands of people on whether or not that is something that resonates with your ideal client or not.

Those are two really, really important things because sometimes it is worth spending money just to get feedback quickly and not. Getting an ROI or profit because long-term, you can take those lessons and make a lot of other things work. And some of these other five areas we're going to talk about today.

So it's not all bad. Paid media is not all bad. Uh, but that leads to the cons the bad parts of paid media, which is, it can be a huge suck of money. Meaning if you're not experienced with [00:38:00] this. Analytical and really meticulous on testing. You will lose a lot of money before you'll ever make money. And most cases, I would say, people need to spend five to $10,000 and be willing to lose that in order to gain this education.

If you compare it to a college degree, it totally makes sense. Like it is a really, really great degree to have the skill and degree. Paid advertising. If you can make that work, it's worth the five to 10 grand. It takes to learn the skill, but most people are not willing and able to, to front that sort of money before they start actually making profitable ads.

The second con or negative with paid media is that it changes quickly when iOS 15 rolled out this past year. It changed a lot when it came to specifically Facebook and Instagram ads, but a lot of, a lot of other platforms struggle with this as well. Out of nowhere, what was working is no longer working.

So that means if you are not someone who's willing to put in the time, effort and energy to relearn, what's going to work from that point on you're basically out of luck. You're no longer going to be able to profitably spend money on ads on a lot of platforms. Um, the third time and the [00:39:00] last one I'm going to talk about here, so we can move on to these other five areas is that it is low trust.

Meaning when someone sees an ad, there's instantly a wall, they put up a shield, they put up. There's no trust there, there, they know you're paying for that spot on the newsfeed or that spot on YouTube ad platform or that spot on Google. So there's an immediate mistrust there. And so you have to be able to overcome that.

And it takes a lot of skill. It takes a lot of testing and then it takes a lot of time to figure out the best way to build trust with someone quickly. So it's a really low trust. It's one of the lowest trust of all the ones that I have here today. Method number two for getting traffic to your website is something called earned media.

What is earned media? It is essentially. What I'm doing right now, this is actually earned media. It's time, effort, and energy that I've put in in order to earn someone's eyeballs. So this is an example of it. A podcast is example of it and a blog articles is an example of it. Pretty much anything even social media is an example of earned media.

Blood, sweat and tears, time and energy into building the trust on a platform for the [00:40:00] right to be shown to somebody now, in some areas, this works better than others. Like Tik TOK is a really viral platform. So if you can, if you can crack the code on Tik TOK, you can get in front of a lot of people in a relatively short amount of time, because there's a lot of algorithm.

I would say algorithm, Goodwill, that you can get sometimes, um, like for six figure creative, we had a video that's hit like a hundred thousand views on there and that shot up like triple or double tripled our follower count on Tik TOK. Now I'm not personally saying tech talks right place to be. I still don't really think tick-tock is the right place for six figure creative, but it's something that I'm willing to test out on just to see long-term.

If it's something that's going to pay off, let's talk about the good and the bad when it comes to earned media. Firstly. It is relative. It's pretty much free. Like for me, it's not free with Tik TOK, especially because I pay someone to take clips from our YouTube videos and from our, uh, our podcast interviews and put them on tick-tock.

So I'm not creating content for tech talks specifically. So I'm actually exchanging money on that platform for content to show up. But in most cases, Earned media is free or really, really low cost. Like for this YouTube video, [00:41:00] I'll pay our editor to edit this video. But other than that, it's the only expense that I really have for this specific earned media channel.

The second pro for earned media is that it is much higher trust. The fact that you're watching this video with me right. You're a few minutes into this video, if you've never experienced anything I've ever done before, I have hopefully given you some amount of value so far, and we'll continue to give you value, especially if you stick around for my last two on this list, because those are my personal favorites.

This is a much higher amount of trust because I earned the right to be here by talking about a subject that you're interested in. And I'm hopefully educating you on the subject and doing a really good job of it. But this also leads to the cons or the negatives of earned media. It's time consuming. I'm spending time this week out of my busy week to make this video.

I do this every single week. Sometimes I do multiple videos a week just to get ahead of schedule and because of this, uh, it's, it's it's time consuming, but not only that, it takes a lot of videos to get any sort of traction. So if you have a blog, it's going to be a lot of articles before you start getting consistent eyeballs to your blog.

If you are doing a YouTube video, Fifth, give [00:42:00] it at least 50 videos before you can really start to get traction. If you have a podcast, give it a hundred episodes before anyone will be listening to it. It's a, it's a long game. That's pretty much what I'm trying to say here. Not only does it take time up every week for you to do it, it takes a long time horizon for you to actually see a returns on all the work that you put in.

So unlike paid media where you can just put some money in and instantly get thousands of people to your website. This takes much more time, but it can still be done. And it's really, really, really effective. If you can get. So the second con of earned media or the second negative of earned media is that the rules can change at any time, just like paid media on YouTube.

For example, I might rank for certain keywords and all of a sudden I'm no longer number one, because YouTube changed the way something showed up. Same in SEO. Same on social media, even. Um, just an example. Back when Facebook first came out, Facebook was really, really great for businesses to get on because you could get tons of eyeballs and website traffic to your, uh, to your blocks.

A six figure home studio, the F the, the, the sister to this business, or the cousin to this business. Six figure creative was my first blog. The very first article I ever put out on the [00:43:00] internet for the six figure home studio. I got like 50 to 60,000 people to my website from that one article because it went viral and it built my email list to like 2000 people the first week.

That article up that was old school. Facebook. Now you're, you're lucky to get your, your put your stuff put in front of five to 10% of your total followers. So that's the way things can change. Now. Facebook, Instagram is a play to play a pay to play world for most people, unless you have a very visually appealing industry like photography or videography in my world.

And audio it's really. Organic social media work. And it's the same on a lot of other platforms as well. So all that time, effort and energy you take to build up on someone else's platform that can essentially wipe it out from under you at any point, which is why number six on this list is my absolute favorite of all of these methods.

So really quick, let's talk about who earned media is for earned media is for you. If you are patient, first of all, that's the most important part in this for you? If you have a lot to say, if you're someone who's really outgoing, likes to speak a lot, but doesn't want to be. Podcast is great for you. If you'd like to speak a lot.

And you'd [00:44:00] like to be looked at a lot, YouTube might be a good platform for you if you'd like to write, but you don't want to be seen or heard. Then a blog can be really good for you. There's a lot of different platforms up there and it really just depends on what you, what, what skill set you have and what you like to do.

But this is really good. If you just have a lot to say, and you ha you can find some platforms somewhere to say it on. All right. Number three, on this list of ways to get traffic to your website as a freelancer. And this is something called outbound. This. Probably my least favorite. And so when I had the least amount of experience with, but it is something that is still effective.

I've seen some of the week we spoke to in our podcast is earning almost seven figures a year, doing nothing but outbound, but essentially outbound is this. It is cold outreach. Through DNS or email or Facebook messenger or any, any platform that allows a one-to-one interaction. So sending out to someone who doesn't know who you are, that's the first kind or a cold calling.

So if you work with kinds of clients that have their phone numbers listed on the internet somewhere, let's just say you are. Videographer who works with small businesses for [00:45:00] commercials, cold calling would be you literally just opening up the phone book and just calling businesses in your area to see if you can work for them.

That's essentially outbound. It's you sending stuff out into the world instead of waiting for stuff to come to you. And there are definite pros and cons, especially cons in my opinion, to this approach first, let's talk about the. Number one, it's very process-driven. If you're someone who likes to just follow a set process and do it over and over and over and over again, it can be really, really good for you.

And because it's so process-driven meaning you can just follow a step-by-step process, open up a phone book, call a number. Say this specific thing, talk to them further and get a next step or next call or something set up. Like it's a very easy process. If you can find one that works in your world. And because of that, it can be easy to outsource, which means you don't have to be the one to do this all the time.

Eventually I might start trying to experiment in outbound media, meaning I'm going to start reaching out to people in my, in my niche or start reaching out to people in my world, especially for my podcast company. Good fortunate media. I might start doing cold outreach with that specific company because it meant it matches that model, but I don't want to be the one doing all that.[00:46:00]

Uh, outbound work. So I would just create a system, pass it off to my virtual assistant and have them do the first parts of that so that I'm not doing it all. And the third pro for this is that it is dependable. If you can get a system that works, then you know that for every person, for every a hundred people or 200 people, or a thousand people, you email or DM, you know that you're going to get this response rate, which leads to this result.

And this many clients I've seen the people who actually make this they're mainstream. I've seen this work time and time and time again for them. And it's a really repeatable outcome for them. And so by taking a system and process, they put into place giving that process to a team to just replicate and do over and over again, every day with certain deliverables, they have to do like how many emails or DMS I have to send out per day that they know at the end of the month, they're going to get X amount of clients relatively speaking.

They know they're going to get a certain amount of clients. And this can be really, really comforting to know that if you can put this input into the machine, meaning human power and. Outgoing emails or DMS. If you put this into the machine, this is the result that comes on the other side of the machine, the dollars that come out that can be really comforting for someone who [00:47:00] needs that sort of a baseline revenue in their business, that leads to the two obvious kinds when it comes to this or, or negative when it comes to this approach is that first of all, it's time-consuming which you could obviously gather by how many emails it likely takes.

Hundred plus per day. Uh, and it is low trust, similar to ads. If you show up at my inbox and my DM request box on social media immediately, I have no trust with you in my guard is up. So you'd have the same issue with paid media, where you have to, you have to lower their guard and figure out how to speak to someone who doesn't know you like you or trust you.

And that can be very hard for most people to overcome. So that leads to the third point. Who is this method for? This is for those of you have really thick skin. And for those of you who like really clear goals with clear outcomes, all right. So now we're on the method for, for getting traffic to your website.

And that is word of mouth slash referrals. I'm just going to lump those into one place and we all know what this is. Your past clients or your friends or your family out there, biscuit being a little soldiers for you on the battlefield, sending you clients, uh, with word of mouth referrals. This is a wonderful thing.

It's a beautiful thing. We all know it. [00:48:00] We all love it. We all want it, but let's talk about the pros and the cons of this because there are definite pros and there are different kinds. And I don't think many enough people know the cons of that. Unless you watch my video. Uh, a few weeks ago where I talked about the word of mouth lie, that video will be in the description of this video.

If you want to see more about that. But the pros of word of mouth is that it is free advertising. Anytime someone recommends you to someone else, and that person comes to you to your inbox and they send you an inquiry or a quote request to wonderful thing, or they book a call or whatever, whatever your sales process is.

It's a wonderful, beautiful thing because it didn't cost you a dime. And the second pro is it is incredibly high trust. This is probably the highest method of trust that you can get of all six methods here. But the cons of this are that it takes a, it takes a really, really long time to snowball, which is one of the reasons that I am so against word of mouth as your only means of client acquisition.

And you have little to no control. Think about that. You don't control when people are out there sending you clients, you don't really have any control over when Johnny recommend Sally to come hire you. So [00:49:00] with that, A feast or famine cycle. You might have a really, really good monster. Everyone's referring people to you and you'll have to do any sort of marketing.

And you may have a really, really bad months where you get no clients because no one's out there referring work to you, especially if you're in a really highly seasonal business. I remember back in 2015, January, 2015, I brought in $20,000 into. Metal mixing and mastering and recording a production business.

Like I did audio production for metal metal, and hardcore bands, which is very weird needs to be in may 20 grand that month. And it was a really good month because part of it was clients paying for work had already done. And part of it was just a lot of referrals that month and clients coming to me in that month.

But the following month, February the same year, I made $2,200. Actually, I might have been less than that. I think about it in 1,250. I have to look at that either way. It was a huge drop in my income because I was only relying on word of mouth clients. So when it comes down to the final piece of this section, which is who is this for?

It's for anyone who can get a word of mouth snowball, that's big enough to keep their, uh, keep their calendar 100%. [00:50:00] With their ideal clients. If your counter is not 100% full with your ideal clients all the time, then you still have to have a piece of one of these other five methods in your business.

Otherwise, you're going to have the same result that I had. You're going to have a really good month followed by the worst month you've ever had. And you're going to have to be able to deal with that as a freelancer, or now we're down to the last two methods for getting traffic to your website. And these are two of my favorites because these are the two that no one really talks about.

So number five is affiliate. Affiliates are anyone out there who is sending you clients for some sort of commission? So this could be other freelancers who offer complimentary services to you. This could even be your direct competitors, or this can be influencers. Let me talk about all of those, whatever world you're in.

There's likely other freelance. Who are catering to the same type of client. I'll give you an example in my world, as a music producer, the band needs other services. They need a music video, so they need a videographer. They need a mastering engineer, which is another one in the audio world. They need merge printed.

So there's merge companies out there. They need a lawyer, [00:51:00] an entertainment lawyer. A lot of times they need a booking agent. And so a lot of these are just like freelance. Other similar services that cater to my exact client. And so the way that you do this, as you build, first of all, you need the relationship first.

I'll just go to somebody and try to do this. But you have a relationship with somebody who, who caters to the same client and you offer a referral, basically a kickback for any clients that they send your way and you can do the same to them. So you have a two way street. Now, the commissions I've seen are anywhere from 10 to 20%, usually in the 10 to 15% range, as a means to say, thank you for sending me the lead of the.

And this works really well in professional environments where it's not like a friendship. It is like your professional that I respect. I'm a professional that you respect. And so we will, uh, send money each other's way for, for sending clients each other's way. The same goes for influencers. If there's like some big influencer in your world that has control of your ideal client, you can offer them commissions for sending clients your way.

This is a very underutilized world for the freelancers, because think about how many Instagram or Tik TOK influencers have your perfect client that [00:52:00] they're not. Anyone to, for your service that you can offer a commission to. So they win the influencer wins because they're able to monetize their following in a way that's better than the typical ads they're getting.

Their advertised posts are getting you get clients for just 10% of 10 to 15% of what you're doing. And if you are someone who does higher ticket, higher premium priced things, that can be a lot of money for the influencer and a lot of money for you at the same time. And the same goes for competitors in your area, you might have someone who is a direct competitor of you.

Hey, you're booked ups sometimes where you can on take, you can't take on clients anymore, and sometimes they're booked up and they can't take on clients anymore. Or sometimes you just don't want to work with a specific client for some reason or another, and you can start referring work to each other back and forth for a commission.

So that's what I mean by setting up a referral network and there are pros and cons to this. The pros are first of all, it's high trust because. Someone just paid me and I'm referring them to my referral partner, my affiliate. In other words, then they trust that I'm going to send them to someone that I respect and know will take good care of them.

And that is true. As long as you are a, a good person with good morals and ethics. And you're not just [00:53:00] getting someone who's going to pay you just because they're gonna pay you. I would like to refer people to someone that I trust who will also give me a kickback, but there's a lot higher amount of trust there that something like a Facebook ads, Instagram.

Or something like a cold outreach email. The second pro is that this is incredibly affordable. So even though you're giving up 10, 15 to up to 20% of your income to your affiliate, or you can call them a referral partner or whatever you want, even though you're doing that, you're getting paid first. So you don't have to pay anything out of pocket, like with Facebook ads or Instagram ads or tick-tock ads, you're fronting the money, hoping that you make it on the backend.

This is the exact opposite. You're getting the money first and then you're paying out on the commission. So this is a guaranteed profit for you. But now let's talk about the cons or the negatives of this. The first negative is that you have a little to no control. So you don't really control similar to word of mouth.

You don't control when someone refers work to you. So it can be similar to the feast or famine cycle. If you don't have a lot of affiliates that are feeding you constant stream of clients, which leads me to the second negative of this is that it is time consuming to get all those clients and people set up because our relationship takes time to build and develop and to [00:54:00] make sure that it's the right person for you.

And they're gonna take care of your clients. So you don't get people that are angry, that you send them to a bad service. So this takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to set up on the front. But it pays off on the backend because once it's set up and you have those relationships out there, it's a relatively easy thing to keep moving along.

And in my experience, I've had affiliates that I've probably made, I've made at least six figures, maybe multiple six figures in my life from affiliates through different products, services, and things that I've done in my past. I've always loved this. I just haven't really put the time and effort and energy into this that it deserves because it is such a good high ROI activity.

And if you think about how much work one affiliate could send to you, if you put your put a dollar amount and how much one person can send you, I have one affiliate who in their lifetime has sent me $50,000 worth of clients, one affiliate. So if that one relationship you think it's worth $50,000 for me to spend the time effort, energy, building that relationship.

Sending them, my ideas on whether or not this is going to work, talking it out, hashing out the details. Like it's, it's worth the effort as long as you're working with the right types of people. So, final thoughts on [00:55:00] affiliates, who is this for? Who is this strategy for? It is for the person who already has a lot of relationships in your, in your world.

So if you're someone who's like a good networker, good social, social, light, whatever you want to call it. And you have a lot of friends and people in the industry and people that are especially aren't direct competitors. We have a lot of influencer friends, biscuit, people that have control over your ideal clients.

Then that is the perfect person for this sort of strategy. Last on my list. And honestly, my favorite method on this entire list is something called owned media. This is the most underutilized method for all of freelancing. Let me tell you what this is. This is your email. This is a list of phone numbers you have, or this is just something that you control that no one can take from you.

Unlike social media, unlike ads, where things change, unlike social algorithms that can change and, and all of a sudden decide that they're not going to send you traffic, unlike affiliates, that you have no control over unlike outbound, where you have to send all this work. This is in my opinion, the best thing, because in most cases it can not just disappear overnight.

You will always have an email list that [00:56:00] you've taken time, effort, and energy to build out because you can export the CSV. So even if the platform you build it on goes down, you will always have that list for whatever platform is still around, which is the first pro am I've pro cons list. No one can take it from you as the first pro.

The second pro is that this pairs perfectly with all the other methods on this list. So if you are doing paid media, you should be doing it to build your email. Not to just get clients. You first build an email list that you can nurture and then sell to that list. This works in every industry, whether it's e-commerce, whether it's coaching, whether it's actual freelance services, it doesn't really matter.

This method works because they're all humans. If you're selling to a human, you get their email address, you build trust with them. It's a lot easier to sell them on the back end than just trying to go straight from a paid. To a cell. It doesn't work anymore. Um, earned media where you're doing YouTube videos like this, I'm using this.

I will pitch you on something. That's going to be, uh, getting you on my email list. And it's going to be a valuable enough thing where you'll want to sign up for it because I am adding value to the world. And that's how I build my email list. To hear I'm using earned media [00:57:00] YouTube video. And I'm using that to build my own media, which is my email list.

Um, outbound, if you're emailing people constantly, you're adding them to an email list. So you're just by, by default building that email list up, won't be the highest quality, but it is using earned media and outbound media. Um, for referrals, if you are doing word of mouth advertising or whatever it is, people are sending.

They're friends to your website through word of mouth and you should have on that website, something that's worth signing up to an email list on, so you're building through word of mouth, your earned media list. So again, that pairs perfectly with that. And then finally, through affiliates, if you have affiliates out there doing the same thing where they're sending leads to your website or eyeballs to your website, you should be having something on your website again, to build your email list.

This is called earned media. This is the thing that, again, I cannot overstate how valuable having earned media is because you can email them anytime, as long as you're building trust, as long as you're adding value, you're always top of mind with your earned media, because you're always showing up and showing up in their inbox.

Even if they don't open your email, they're still seeing your name [00:58:00] in the subject line or in the email itself. So. Are thinking of you. So when it comes time to hire you for the service that you're offering, they're gonna think of you because you've been in their inbox for the last six to eight to 12 weeks, send them very valuable emails that they may or may not be opening, but you're still top of mind.

And the best part about earned media. And this is the final pro on my list. Here is this that the nurture portion, the portion where you're taking your earned media and building trust can be automated. Meaning if someone joins my email list or someone joins your email list, you can have a predetermined set of emails that goes out that does a lot of really good things for you from crushing objective.

To building value to, uh, overcoming obstacles that may be getting in the way before they can ever actually hire you for your service. And you can have all of those emails sent out in a very specific way that naturally leads to a sell in three to five to 10 emails. You cannot do this in other mediums because you have to do that stuff.

Manually. Email is the only one that I've seen that you can automatically do that, but it's not without as cons. Um, earned media has a few cons. The first one is it can be really expensive if you have a big email list. I will go ahead and shamelessly [00:59:00] plug easy funnels.io. That's my website builder, which has got full email marketing built in, um, split test funnels, landing pages, all that nerdy marketing crap.

But I think for 10,000 email leads, we charged something like $79 a month, which sounds like a lot. But when you compare it to active campaign or MailChimp, which are two of the leaders out there, their cheapest plan for 10,000 email lists. $104 a month. But if your email is substantially smaller than that, um, it still can be relatively expensive.

Um, but it's, it's worth it. As long as you have a good high quality list that you're constantly cleaning, meaning you're unsubscribing people that are just a bad fit or not opening emails, you can keep a relatively short amount, a small amount of emails, and the studies I've heard and I've experienced this myself and depends on how healthy your business is.

Right. You should be earning at least a dollar a month per email address that you have. So if you have a few thousand emails, email leads, you should be bringing in around $3,000 a month from that email list. So when you look at an email list of 10,000 people, even if you're paying MailChimp or active campaign, a hundred, $4 a month to [01:00:00] host that or easy funnels paying a $79 a month to host that list, you're still.

An immense amount of value from that list. So don't worry about the price on it. Worry about building the list of that. I would like, I want to pay as much as I can from my list because I want it to be as big as possible within reason as long as people are opening the emails. So my world I've probably brought in 80, over 80, maybe closer to a hundred thousand.

Throughout my life and my different businesses at this point. And again, this is the sole driver of all my businesses is having owned media at the core of everything. So when I talk about who is owned media for who should employ the strategy, it's pretty much everyone you should be using. Owned media in tandem with whatever other method that you want to use.

I just recommend using one at one major thing at a time. And one minor thing at a time. Meaning if you're going through, uh, earned media, you have your social media and you're spending a lot of time, effort, energy building that have some S some amount of time you've put in. Owned media, meaning you're building an email list passively on the background through like some sort of lead magnet on your website or anything.

I actually have a full [01:01:00] video on this YouTube channel about how to actually build your email list as a freelancer. If you want that, that'll be in the description here, but my final thoughts on this, um, just to kind of go over this whole list again, you've got paid. Earned media, outbound media referral slash word of mouth affiliates and owned media.

Those are the six ways to get traffic to your website. My thoughts again are don't overcomplicate this focus on one to maybe like one and a half at a time and find one that you're going to actually invest time, effort, and energy in and go deep with it. Don't just dabble in all of these, because if you start dabbling in everything, you're going to fail at every.

One of them. So that is it. Those are three videos from our YouTube backlog. If you haven't gone over to our YouTube channel yet and subscribed, and why some of the content on there there's many other videos that I didn't get a chance share in this podcast episode, but that's all I have for you this week until next time. Right in early 6:00 AM next Tuesday morning. Remember it takes more than passion to become a six figure creative.