SPI 732: Don’t Go It Alone

SPI 732: Don’t Go It Alone

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, his daughter would be really upset if he shaved his beard. Pat Flynn!

Pat Flynn: I want to share something with you that I recently shared in my Unstuck newsletter.

This is a newsletter that comes out weekly, a five minute story, some lesson to help you with your business growth. And a couple of weeks ago, I shared this story. But before I get to that, I wanted to talk about Bruno Mars. Yes, Bruno Mars. So I’m going to share the same lessons, but in a different kind of way today, talking about Bruno Mars.

Now, you might know who Bruno Mars is. Chances are you do. He’s an artist. His voice is super buttery smooth. I mean, it’s amazing. His lyrics are incredible, and he sort of brought back that old school funk sound. Kind of Earth, Wind and Fire with the trumpets and like that sort of era, old school funk era, but in a modern way.

And every time I hear songs, they’re just earworms, right? The lyrics just get stuck in my head. 24k magic in the air, strawberry champagne on ice. I could go on and on. Anyway, the first time that most people, including myself, heard Bruno Mars was during the song Billionaire. Now, if you don’t know this song, it goes, I wanna be a billionaire so freakin bad.

Buy all of the things I never had. You know, that song. Be on the cover of Forbes magazine, sitting next to Oprah and the Queen, that kind of thing. Anyway, the funny thing is, that’s not even his song. Billionaire is by an artist named Travie McCoy, and Mars was featured during the intro and the chorus of that song, it’s great.

His debut album, however… Doo Waps and Hooligans, this is Bruno, came out later that year. So musicians are always collaborating. And this was cool, it was a great way to get introduced to Bruno through Travie’s song, Bruno helped produce it, but this was the first time most of the world heard his voice and then fell in love with it, and then Doo Wops came out, and it’s just, you know, he’s been exploding ever since.

Musicians are always collaborating with each other, right? And even artists that you wouldn’t think would go together are coming together to create Something new, right? They’re igniting a new sound, like Selena Gomez and Reyma for their song, Calm Down. Calm down, calm down. Such a catchy song as well. We could all take a page out of Musician’s Marketing Playbook right here.

A musician’s marketing playbook. Now, you might go, well, Pat, like, these guys have record labels, it’s easy to cross promote. They just, you know, it just happens. I have another example. Connor Price. Connor Price is a Canadian American rapper. And I got into his stuff actually through TikTok. He’s gotten… I mean, hundreds of millions of views on TikTok, different skits around some of his raps, but he has over 650 million plays on his songs, and he’s making about $200,000 a month.

$200,000 a month, and he’s independent. He’s actually had people come to want to sign him, and he said, No, I have more creative freedom this way. And he’s able to do a lot of things faster as a result. And most of his songs are in collaboration with other rappers from around the world. He actually did this really cool thing where each song that he created and produced was with a rapper from another country and then at the end he had a song that featured all of them.

So it was kind of like he was bringing the world together and it really made for really good TikToks. He spun the globe and pointed to a particular place and then showed the collaboration happened and then the song came out and the songs blew up. They were amazing. So I recently had a podcast with Eric Partaker.

This was a couple of weeks ago. He was on the SPI podcast, but little did you know, I was on his podcast and we came out with those podcasts on the exact same day. Not only that, in a newsletter that I wrote a week later, I included a link to his coaching business bundle or his business coaching bundle.

And I included that in the podcast as well a week prior and guess what? I was able to include a bonus link to something that I had to offer for his audience. And he included me in a newsletter as well. This collaboration, the style of collaboration, which is planned, like a planned, coordinated attack is so amazing that I want to encourage you.

This is why I brought it back and I told the Bruno Mars story because I just I want to, like, have you understand how important this is. Gone are the days of just writing something on your blog and then Google picks it up and yay, you got sales. Or you can, you know, put display ads on your website and you’ll start to generate revenue.

Still possible. Still possible, but gone are the days where that is automatic. It is not automatic anymore. Far from it, in fact. Gone are the days of just doing it alone. I did it alone for so long. And it’s funny, because once I started to get out of my comfort zone, once I started to see the power of collaboration and partnering with other people, not, not even… for JV purposes, joint venture purposes, which typically come with an affiliate link and a partnership with a deal structure of sorts. This is just much simpler. Hey, I’ll help you grow your email list. If you help me grow mine, I’ll be a guest on your podcast. If you’ll be a guest on mine and hey, let’s just do all of this stuff at the exact same time.

Now I should have known though, I should have known that this was powerful. Back in the day, it took me years to get over the fear. I remember when I first started speaking, I spoke at FinCon. Actually, shout out to the folks at FinCon who I met. I was in New Orleans for a team retreat recently, and it just so happened that FinCon, the Financial Blogger Conference, was in New Orleans as well at the exact same time.

And I went out one evening after the retreat was over to say hello to some friends, and so shout out to… To Monica, and Robert, and Tom, and Deacon, and all the people who I got to meet again and just kind of reconnect with. It was, it was awesome. And, again, that speaks to where you can go and find these collaborations.

At events. That’s the beauty of events like that. Now, you don’t have to go to an event in person. You need to be a part of a community, though. And this is why… SPI Pro and the SPI All Access Pass are so great because not only are people getting the content that they need, but they’re seeing other people, like minded people, who are just like them, who they can collaborate with in this kind of way.

And those things have already happened. In fact, some people have already created business partnerships and wholly new businesses together, having just met inside SPI Pro. SoSPIPro.com if you want to check that out. SPI Pro does come with the All Access Pass with it. Definitely recommend you get involved with that.

Anyway, it is a little bit harder to coordinate, but it’s not as hard as the stuff that involves the products and the affiliates that like, I’ll help you grow your email list if you help me grow mine, this is the power and, of course, I hope that you are growing your email lists and I hope you can see how powerful this can be.

And the cool thing is you don’t need a large list to do this. You might want to target people who are in and around the same sort of scope that you’re in, perhaps roughly around the same email subscriber size or, you know, it’s obviously important to get them in front of your audience and provide value as well.

So don’t just invite them on because they have a big email list and you’re like, okay, I’ll sacrifice quality to my audience. in order to get in front of their audience. No, you want this to be a nice win, win, win, a win for them, win for you, of course, and most importantly, a win for your audience and the audiences that are being a part of this.

Now, you can do this with more than one person. In fact, in 2013, when I was still in the internet business mastery community, there was a moment when I think it was before 2013. Anyway, there was a moment where we did this across five people, where all five people were all on each other’s shows at the exact same time.

And, man, it was a wild, kind of, administrative thing to figure out. But it did work, and it introduced a lot of us to each other’s audiences. You know, for example, on my podcast, I would talk about one topic and I’d say with everybody on the same show, just, Hey, by the way, like, if you want to hear this topic, I’m going to be discussing it over here.

And they’re going to be discussing this topic over here, yet I’m showing up in all those different places. So. If you have a group of people, a network of people, you might want to coordinate something a little bit bigger. They used to call those like carnivals in the blogosphere days, where you would guest post on each other’s stuff kind of all at the same time and then people would kind of amplify where all those things existed all at the same time, which was really neat.

And we tried to do this with podcasting, and it worked, it just was a much more logistical nightmare. So I would say, start with one other person, and maybe introduce… them to them, this podcast episode so they can hear it and get inspired by it as well. But it works. It works. You can be the next Bruno Mars in your space. Because here’s what’s happening.

You’re showing up in front of another audience. You’re showing up in front of an audience who does not yet know that you even exist, or even if you did. exist in their minds, now you’re showing up in front of that audience with the endorsement from the host that has spent all this time earning that trust with that audience, right.

So that’s really important. Some other tips, and I’ll just go through the step by step that I talked about in that email, so step number one obviously is to go and find that person to collaborate with, and I already shared some tips with that, make sure it’s a win for all parties involved, right, you’re, you’re serving their audience, they’re serving yours.

Number two, This is the next step. Plan when you both are able to hit publish. A date and a time, if possible. It’s not always going to work out perfectly, but as close to the same time as possible. You’re going to work backwards from there. Then you’re going to figure out a time to actually record or you know, it doesn’t even have to be a podcast guesting situation where you’re both guests on each other’s podcast It could be a YouTube channel.

Maybe it is still guest blogging with the written word. But whatever the case may be figure out that publish date Then you’re gonna have to find a time and a date to record together. I would recommend having one longer session like a two hour time block. You might not need all two hours.

Maybe it’s one hour and you both have shorter shows. But whatever it is, I prefer one larger time to fit both recordings in. Right? Where you’re on their show and they’re on yours. Maybe you flip a coin to see who goes first. I don’t know. But doing it all at once makes it so much easier. But you might have to schedule a second time for the other person or for yourself.

Now you want to also have a discussion about what it is that you’re going to promote on the other person’s podcast. And what are they going to promote on yours? So. What are you going to promote on theirs, and how you’re going to do that, right? Same thing with the email list, when you’re going to share that in the newsletter for each other, you can reference that podcast episode, you can reference the bonus, it’s still a win for everybody when you do it that way, but you just want to make sure you talk about that.

Personally, I set up a landing page, I just used ConvertKit to set up a page and put the bonus there, put an image, write some copy. And I sent him that link and it was as easy as that. And he was able to create a nice link on his end to promote to my email list and the bonus that I offered and vice versa.

He did the same. I think his landing page was on his website, not using a tool like I did, like ConvertKit or Kajabi or ClickFunnels or whatever the case may be. But either way, talk about it, figure it out. Again, like I said, this is the administrative stuff that takes a little bit longer.

Then, I would recommend that especially after you record, you just at least check in with each other leading up to the date of publish. You don’t want to assume that everything’s going well on his end or her end, and then you hit publish and you’re like, Hey, where were you? You were supposed to go live. Oh yeah, things got away from me.

I was going to delay it another week. Sorry, I forgot to tell you. And of course, Same thing if something happens on your end, because life gets in the way sometimes of these kinds of things, and you have to take care of certain things that are more important. But if that’s the case, make sure you are clear and upfront about that ASAP, because you don’t want to have sort of that impression to the other person if you were to fall short of doing that.

Then of course, hit publish on the same day, enjoy the rewards, that kind of thing. And bonus! If they happen to have a community or an active group or community or of sorts, this used to be easier when there were blog comments everywhere. Now blog comments are mostly turned off because they were filled with spam in most places.

That’s why SPI turned it off. It’s just a better experience. Be active there if possible. If you have the ability to insert yourself into that group or wherever those conversations are happening with your partner, collaborator, collaborative partner, get involved. This is a great time to do it. You know the date.

Set some time aside for it. Get active. And if you don’t know if they have that, ask. They might welcome you into their private community to come and chat about it. It happens. Well, I hope this was helpful for you. And my call to action to you is to go find somebody to collaborate with and make it happen.

And again, the power of it all happening at once, same day. Cross promoting. This is just like you’re a musician, right? You’re an artist here. You’re a creative. You got to team up with other creatives because you cannot do it alone. And the African proverb that I put in that email, the unstuck newsletter, I think it was 61 was, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Thank you for being here together with me. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode of the podcast.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!