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This depends entirely on what stage of your business you’re in. For example: a more mature company/professional, that has steady cashflow and is expanding, the formula is a little ‘simpler.’ So we’ll start there.

Because you’ve asked for advertising, I’m going to avoid talking about overall marketing techniques (like SEO, social media, content delivery, more round-abouts brand building / lead gen activities).

Basic Formula For Established Pro

Take a percentage of your earnings, say 15–20% and put them into direct ads from sources like Google Adwords, LinkedIn, increasingly sources like Alignable - pick a few to start with, until one really hits.

When the one that really hits, hits - dump the rest (temporarily) and pour your efforts into that particular ad source. Refine the funnel, optimize the conversion and max out the budget until you reach a healthy daily spend amount.

Once you’ve ‘maximized’ that ad source, repeat the steps minus the one that worked the best.

Keep doing this until you’ve pretty much gotten a nice, healthy mix of paid ads going.

The general formula is to stick to business-oriented sites first (hence Google search, LinkedIn, other professional / business oriented communities) because that will already take care of placing you in positions where the targeting is easier for your learning curve.

Eventually, you’ll of course go into Facebook and other more ‘long-taily’ advertising avenues for professional services.

The overall formula is “cast a wide net” til something works well, then focus and maximize that avenue, then cast a wide net again, rinse and repeat over and over again.

Nothing special, just consistency and focus. The reason you focus on the one that you’re seeing traction with first is that allows you to get into the nitty gritty of optimization while building on something that caught fire - whether that be your own style of advertising or the community or “luck.”

Basic Formula “From Scratch Start, Little / No Budget.”

This one is going to be a bit different because likely you’re not very established yet, maybe don’t even have a customer or consistent customers and you likely don’t have much to throw at advertising.

So what do you do with no money and no or little existing customers?

Sweat equity and hustle.

That means going to places where the competition might not be willing to go (either because it’s time consuming or quality of lead isn’t very high or whatever reason) and just going all out.

You could go to Freelancer . com, Upwork, Craigslist, any site where there is active people who are looking for the work you’re doing and you can bid on projects.

If you have the stomach for it - go cold call and go door to door. It might sound grizzly, and unappealing and you may be terrified of it, but it’s the only way I know of to guarantee contracts without paying $$$ for them. But that’s an art all on it’s own.

Then bid, bid, bid, bid like your life depended on it (seriously, spend 12 hours a day doing this if you must). At the start just go for volume, like, burn through the amount of ‘free’ credits you get until they’re gone (all the while making sure you tailor your pitch / presentation to each bid, don’t just use boilerplate “I’m awesome’ text).

The objective here isn’t to land the biggest or best job. It’s to get A JOB. Just take anything you can, no matter how seemingly small and then slowly start getting more and more picky.

Once you get your first awarded contract….go right back to bidding! Spend at least another few hours bidding / responding to contracts, then start the work you were hired to do in the next 24 hours or so, but every day spend at least 6 hours bidding, bidding, bidding.

This will be challenging because you have to complete the work you were hired to do, while maintaining a high quality of work and delivering it on time. But fortunately it usually takes a day or so for people to look over edits, revisions or to supply you with the “seed materials.” So don’t spend this time idle, spend the time starting your sales cycle.

You’re looking to flesh out your experience, your portfolio and the most important thing - you’re reliable customer base.

These clients you’re going to want to wayyy overdeliver on the quality of work, even if it means that you’re basically doing something for free when you calculate the time cost. But again, it’s about setting up a precedent and getting a good basis going.

Out of these ‘seed clients’ 10–20% will end up being reliable and providing you with a base of repeat work / monthly contracts. Some will even be with you for life.

That’s what you want. You want the base clients that you don’t have to market / advertise to every month to get more work. Get them to pay your basic bills / overhead and become an excellent source of building your testimonials and referrals for clients.