00:47 -

So what’s the myth? The myth is that leads are free. I think people think that unless they’re paying for advertising that leads are free. They’re not free. They either take your time or your money. And sometimes both. This is something you’ve got to acknowledge. If you’re running a business, you have got to understand that generating leads is the lifeblood of your business. In fact it’s more than that. It is the oxygen. Can you imagine trying to have any kind of blood flow or any part of your body working effectively if you didn’t have oxygen? Just hold your breath for five minutes and see how long you’ll last. It’s not going to work is it? The thing is that you to have a steady stream ideally of your ideal leads coming into your business. Now, I’ve talked about ideal leads and other specific strategies in other videos and blog posts and I will pop some links in here afterwards for that. I also have a free resource that will be really helpful in relation to this too.

01:56 -

Before I do that I just really want to make sure that you get in the mindset part of this trait. Because it’s like - you may know that I’m an actor. In fact just for those who don’t know me, my name is Una Doyle. I’m the founder of CreativeFlow.tv and business coach for creatives. And I specialize in helping them to grow profitable businesses that allow them to be happy, healthy, and wealthy. And to be able to achieve the creative flow and to have work that they’re really proud of. Because I know as creatives, that is what we all want. I’m also an actor. It reminds me of being - like so many actors, in the haste of the audition process. In fact, I was just in acting class the other night and our teacher was telling us about a friend of his who was going to pack it all in. And he started talking to him about, “well, what have you been doing to promote career?” When is the last time you reached out to a casting director, or a director, or a producer, or anybody in January? This is July. So he’s gone like 5-6 months doing nothing to make his acting career work. Well it’s exactly the same for you. I don’t want to hear, “oh I’m not a business person.” I’m sorry but if you are going out there, if you don’t have a job, if you were expecting people to buy stuff from you, you have a business and that makes you an entrepreneur. It makes you a business owner. Whether you’re a freelancer - and strictly speaking, a freelancer is somebody who is selling to agencies who work on other people’s clients. Okay then you still have clients but they’re usually a smaller number and they’re the ones who go out and do the selling to the direct customer. Many people describe themselves as a freelancer when they just mean they haven’t got any employees but they are selling to the end-user. So, the thing is that you’ve got to understand that in a  way for us marketing ourselves is like doing auditions. The really fun part comes when we get to do an acting job. It’s exactly the same for you. I quite often look up what are some quotes around the topic that I’m talking about. And I couldn’t really find any good one for lead generation. So I made one up and here it is. Lead generation is not a goal, it’s a process. Lead generation is not a goal, it’s a process. It’s something that you have got to be doing day in, day out, week in, week out for as long as you want to be doing business. And in the way that for some people who love acting, but actually realize they don’t love the business of acting - maybe they decide to do it as a hobby or maybe they decide to have some sort of job that allows them to just do it in their freetime, it’s exactly the same for you. You’ve got to understand that lead generation is a core part of you running your business. Now obviously, I want you to be in flow even when you’re doing that.

05:10 -

Generally speaking, choosing the lead generation activities that suit your natural strengths is the way to go. But sometimes you don’t have time to get into that. Sometimes you need to get something now. And we’re going to talk about that in a moment. But first, I just want to look at some other well-known lead generation strategies out there. So we got word of mouth and referrals. This is by far the most common way clients first come to me. So social media, public speaking, doing advertising that could be online ads like Facebook, or LinkedIn, Google PPC, and it could be offline. Maybe there’s specific trades, publications that you might be in. Maybe you do local marketing if you have a local service. Blogging, guest posting, video marketing and obviously live video has become more and more popular. Networking, okay. Again that is very common for people to do. Now I’ve got cold calling and cold emailing. Generally speaking, the people who come to me don’t tend to be doing this. It can be a good strategy when it’s done in the right way. But it usually needs to be part of a bigger plan. And then there’s exhibitions and events. So you got 10 different types of ways of getting in front of your ideal customer there.

06:44 -

But there’s a problem with these in that they are very medium and even long term. If you start blogging in whatever kind of content marketing that you’re doing, it can take a good 6-12 months. I haven’t even mentioned this to you but obviously that’s tied into the content marketing I was talking about in terms of blogging and video marketing. But it takes a while for those leads to start coming in on a regular basis. So I’m not saying don’t do these things. But what I am saying is do not have the expectation you’re going to start doing them and get clients next week because it might not happen that way. Particularly when you look at social media. Generally speaking any post you do on social media are not seen by very many people unless you have built up a massive following. And even then, a lot of the time, there will come a point when you have to pay to play and you’re going to have to advertise to those people. And that’s a whole different strategy, a whole other way of doing that.

07:41 -

So what do you do? Because the thing is when you are looking at your website in blogging, and your social media, and videos, and all of these things, there’s a real possibility that you might get stuck in this kind of perfectionist zone which is actually just another way of procrastinating. And quite often procrastination is because you want to step away from rejection. So what I’m calling for you to do is to be resilient. Be a resilient creative because it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you’re going to have ups and downs. And you have to be able to deal with those. I’m doing it because I’m passionate. I do not want you to be giving up. I do not want you to be struggling. I want you to understand that rejection is part of the process. And there may well be times when people almost become a client or even become a client and back-out. Look, it happens to me too. It’s not always fairies, and stardust, and everything is absolutely wonderful. That’s the way most people position themselves on social media but don’t be fooled by that. Behind the scenes, every business is facing challenges and is working to overcome them. And yours will be no different.

09:02 -

So what do you do instead? Well, what I would suggest is that you - this works for me and it works with my clients when they start doing this as well - is that you directly reach out to your ideal clients. My suggestion will be to do it through your best or your favorite social platform; the one that your ideal clients are most likely to be on and where you are able to identify them. LinkedIn is a favorite particularly for business to business types of creative services. But it might be Instagram, or Facebook, or Twitter, whatever it is that suits you. You need to be able to actually reach out to them.

09:54 -

5 C's you should do:

11:05 -

​If you do not have enough leads in your business right now, you need to be doing this everyday probably for a few hours. Because the thing is, if you don’t have enough client work in, you have got the time. Rather than trying to perfect your blog post, and create loads of content, and do all these things that will actually only get you results in a longer term. You need clients now. So you’ve got to get those leads in now. And I know that this may not be the best strategy in terms of your preferred strengths. And it could even have some of you going, “Oh my God. I don’t want to be doing that because I’m going to have to face rejection. Or I don’t like talking to people.” But you’re only doing it over social media. You’re going to have conversations with people at some point. And at least this way, you’re only going to be speaking to people who’ve expressed some kind of interest. And this is what you need. This is very powerful for you. Remember what I was saying about lead generation, that is not a goal, it’s a process. You’re never going to get to, “Oh, that’s it! Don’t need to do anymore lead generation. Okay, that’s all right then.” You won’t get to that. You have to build this into the way that you are running your day and your week. And when you have enough clients in, you can then look to more medium and longer term methods that might suit your strengths more. And we’ve got to be balancing it and just making sure that you always have enough coming in.

12:43 -

There's so many different ways that you can grow your business. And I’d love to help you to do that in the way that actually works best for you. Now of course, you also need to make sure that you are actually charging enough. So, I want to tell you about a new guide that I just brought out which is called The Number One Sure Fire Strategy to Raise Your Prices without Getting Client Pushback. Because look at it this way, there are many ways to earn ten thousand pounds, or dollars, or whatever your currency is. You can have 20 clients. You can have 10 clients. You can have 5 clients. You can have 1 client at £10,000. So, when you are charging higher prices, you attract better clients and you’re able to do better work as well.​ When this is over and it’s actually uploaded, I’m going to pop a link so that you can go and get that for yourself. If you have any questions pop them into the comments. I will come back and I will answer those. And I would like to ask you, “Have you found today’s show of value?” If you have, please share this out to your peers. I’m on a mission to help as many creatives as I can to be happy, healthy, and wealthy. So if you found value in it, please share it out and let them do that too. And I want to hear your comments. So what have been your successes, what are your challenges, what are your questions, pop them down below and let me know and I would love to come and help you with that. I can also answer things in future shows as well. I’m here same time every week. That's 4:30 GMT every Wednesday, 11:30 AM EST. And yeah, have a fantastically wonderful lead generation week ahead of you and I’ll see you same time next week. Bye.