Nicolas Cole breaks down four lead generation methods: word of mouth, paid ads, content, and cold outreach. Paid advertising loses money 95% of the time and requires over $1 million spend. Cold outreach is fastest to high-paying clients, with one conversation potentially securing thousands per month.
There are really only so many ways to generate business. It's not that hard. There's really only 4. You have word of mouth, which is you sit around and wait. You wait for a client to introduce you to a friend or another potential client. You wait for a friend to introduce you to someone else who might need your help. Word of mouth is amazing, but you don't really have control over word of mouth. You can incentivize it, you can motivate it, but it's not a lever that you can really push and pull that much. Sort of a strategy called sit around and wait. The second way, which is the way that everybody loves to say, 'cause it sounds really easy, is ads. I need new business, I'll just run ads. I'm speaking from experience here. Over the past 2 years, we have ramped up our own paid ads significantly. We've probably spent well over $1 million on ads. And like in the world of spending money on ads, $1 million is nothing. There are people who spend $1 million a week running ads. And I can tell you from experience that ads are incredibly difficult, way harder than organic, and they are incredibly unprofitable for a long time. In fact, 95% of the ads that you run will be unprofitable and you run and you light money on fire hoping to find the 5% that are profitable. It's very, very hard. So word of mouth is a lever you don't have control over. Ads require you to spend a lot of money to figure out how to do them well, which only leaves really two more. You have creating content, which attracts potential leads, and you have cold outreach where you go out and pitch leads. Those are really the only two levers that you have control over. You control if you create content or how much content you create, and you control how much outreach you do. The reason why we emphasize outreach so much is because it is the fastest path. I promise until you experience it, it is quite literally a magical thing that you can sit at home on your laptop and message someone that you've never met before ever. And if you have the right conversation with them, all of a sudden they are paying you thousands of dollars every month. That is an incredible phenomenon and it can happen very quickly.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
