There are 3 types of businesses that need to do more collaborations:
Which of the above are you? I will soon be teaching a course on simple & authentic collaborations. In the rest of this blog post, I’ll talk about these three types of collaborations.... No Audience Yet?
Without an audience yet, you are probably still working on clarifying your message and your offerings (your services and products). For you, here is how I would recommend collaborating:
This simple collaboration gives you practice in sharing your marketing message and talking about your offerings, and may give you some great suggestions to improve it. It gives you someone to bounce your ideas off of, to see whether it sounds on track or needs a lot more work. This also gets you connected to other supportive entrepreneurs who will in the future have an audience. You will both grow in the next few months and years, and may then collaborate again! Even without an audience, you can also collaborate with those who already have an audience, and I'll talk more about this in the Authentic JV / collaborations course. In fact, collaborations is how I grew my business from zero to $10,000/month within the first year. As everyone does, I started with no audience at all. Got a Small Audience? How will you grow it? Creating consistent content is a great idea, but you still need to distribute that content so enough of the right people see it. What’s your plan? As you might know, I recommend and teach a course on Facebook Ads. It's probably the easiest way to distribute content. The other way I often recommend is to do collaborations with other small-audience entrepreneurs to grow together. (In the Authentic JV / collaborations course I’ll also discuss how you can reach out to those with a larger audience than you.) There are various kinds of partnerships for small audiences, but let me describe a simple way of doing it: trade interviews with each other.
That’s the simplest way to collaborate to grow audiences together. Doing these collaborations also helps you, over time, to see where you are positioned in the market, in relation to other businesses. Collaborations are so helpful that I recommend looking at your schedule each week: “Do I have a collaboration scheduled this week? If not, I need to spend some time to seek one!” Big Audience? With a big audience, you already know that collaborations are gold. At this stage, you also know that your own audience will only buy your stuff for awhile before they need a break. And you also know that they enjoy hearing about other businesses too. Collaborate with other businesses with larger audience like you, to cross promote each other’s services and products. ** In the Simple JV / collaborations course we will have a course directory of students, with indicators of audience size, so that you can easily find potential partnerships with compatible allies. Whether you have no audience, small or big audience, I hope you’ll join us. Let’s create a culture where supportive collaboration is the norm! |
George Kao is a Marketing Coach for small business owners, especially solopreneurs such as Coaches and Mentors. He focuses on ethical & effective ways to grow one's platform and build true livelihood.
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