How to Grow New Business Through the Power of Partnerships

Hello my Freelance Fam. I'm back this week with another thread about how to make the most of the freelance life.

This week, I'm talking about one of my favorite and most successful lead generation/business growth strategies: Partnerships.

If you think you're too small/unknown to launch partnerships, think again.

Let’s dive in 👇

First a quick definition. What do I mean when I talk about partnerships?

Partnerships are when you, a freelancer, team up with another freelancer, business, or organization in a way that's mutually beneficial.

That's a pretty vague definition, so let's dig a bit deeper. What are some types of partnerships that might happen? They can range from super simple to very complex:

✍️ Guest blogging for another site

📢 Collaborating on social media

🎙 Guesting on a podcast

✉️ Leveraging another person's email list

🍎 Launching a course together

That's just the tip of the iceberg, but I have done all of these with solid success. Speaking of which - what are the benefits?

The main one is exposure. Collaborating with a business/organization that is slightly bigger than you builds name recognition and helps you reach new audiences.

AKA LEADS LEADS LEADS 🤑

Beyond that, being active with partnerships gives you more street cred. It gives you impressive projects and work examples to show leads you find through your non-partnership marketing channels.

So the big question: How do you go about getting partnerships? 🤔

Not to sound like a broken record, but the first step (as I've said in other threads) is to build up a name for yourself on your own. You can do this by:

1. Posting helpful content, asking for nothing in return on LinkedIn (my fave place for leads for freelancers, but other social channels work as well)
2. Creating a website/digital portfolio
3. Writing in depth blogs or creating video/graphic content talking about your area of expertise
4. Creating useful assets that you can distribute for free
5. Building a mailing list off all that effort

It sounds like A LOT when I spell it out. But don't let that intimidate you from starting. Just get into one of those things, and soon you'll start seeing partnership opportunities pop up.If you don't do these things, when you approach people for partnerships you won't have any cred or things to offer in return.

Let's assume you're doing that. Now what?The first goal is to find business/people/organizations you want to partner with. Look for on LinkedIn, in Facebook groups, or through a Google search for:

1. Opportunities that have an audience that overlaps yours, but aren't a direct competitor
2. Folks/businesses that are within your niche/industry
3. Opportunities that are active on social media/and or publishing frequently

You don't want to rush up to these businesses/people and ask for a partnership. You need to be more slow and mindful about it.

💬 Engage with their posts

💸 Purchase/download/use their product/services

😍 Send some fan mail

👆 Do all these things without asking for anything in return or suggesting anything just yet.

The key here is to help these businesses see who you are and what you do, and build a personal relationship with someone in the business in some way.

Once you have these connections, forming partnerships is a lot easier. But you still need to come correct. Your targets probably get requests for partnerships all the time. You need to make your pitch unique.

Here's how to come up with a good pitch:

What channels are these people already using?

Do they have a podcast? Evidence of guest blogs? A big mailing list? An active social media community? Figure out where your opportunity lies, and frame your pitch to fit within whatever they already have going on.

What do they want?

Even if you are approaching someone with much better name recognition than you, you still need to make your pitch valuable to them. Don't just ask, "Can I be a guest on your podcast?" Listen to several episodes, scan through old topics, and show that you've done your homework. "I loved your podcast conversation with _______ about _____. This quote stuck out to me ______. I noticed you haven't talked about ________. I have experience with this topic, and would love to cover questions like...."

What do you want in return?

Though you may not want to mention this in your opening pitch, you should have a good idea of what you want to get out of this partnership. Do you want them to link to your email list signup form? Do you want them to retweet an article you've written x # of times? What do you want to promote/share with this opportunity? Know that in advance, and once you've got them on the hook with your pitch, suggest it.

I'm going to wrap this with some examples of partnerships that have worked for me.

First off, to be a bit meta, what I'm doing right now is a partnership. I'm not getting paid to write this content for TOFU - it's part of a partnership between me and the guys who run this show. They get quality content from me, and I get to meet lovely freelancers like you. Everyone wins.

I ended up here through a series of fortunate meetings.

1. I responded to a tweet from the famed Jacob McMillen
2. He and I worked together, then he put me in as a Mastermind in his Slack channel
3. I met @David Broderick in that Slack Channel and formed a relationship with him
4. David asked me to start posting here

And voila! A partnership was made. This is why you need to be promoting yourself and networking 1:1. The 1:1 freelance connections in your network will introduce you to more partnerships.

My biggest partnership to date was with the group StoryChief. I made a free SEO training for them. They have an enormous audience of over 40,000 users, many of whom are freelancers and businesses looking for SEO. It was perfect. I ended up making this course: https://academy.storychief.io/

This then led to them becoming a regular client of mine, and I've got LOTS of people coming to my site/signing up to my mailing list from this course. All thanks to my partnership with a brand who has a much bigger audience.

Once again, this opportunity came to me from someone I met via LinkedIn. We made friends as freelancers, and when her client (Storychief) was looking for an SEO expert to make a video, she knew to contact me.

If podcasting is something you like (I've had big success here too), you can look for podcasts in your industry by searching on your favorite podcast app (I use Spotify). Look for high-quality, frequently posted podcasts, trace them back to whoever is behind it, build a relationship and make your pitch.

You can also use this service: PodMatch.com

It's like Tinder for podcast guests and hosts. I've gotten a number of speaking slots out of it. It now costs $23 a month.

I'm going to wrap it there.

🤔 Have you had any partnerships?

🤔 How did you land them?

🤔 Any other questions about how to go about this?