Speaker 1: Hey, my friend, it's Melanie Ferguson, your host of Creatives on Fire, the podcast where I hope to inspire you to create a profitable six-figure following online. So turn it up and listen in to amazing stories of success, along with behind-the-scenes secrets and valuable tips from, you guessed it, Creatives on Fire. Hey, my friend, I want to ask you a quick question. Do you struggle with overwhelm in your business? How about confidence or maybe even just knowing what the very next step is that you need to take for you to see the success you desire? I want to invite you to join me over on the inside. This is where your business will benefit from access to powerful, relevant collaborations with other creatives just like you each and every week. You'll have an opportunity to receive motivated messages every single morning, as well as access to multiple live events. These are all tools that are designed to help you grow your business, get you out of overwhelm, boost your confidence, and show you the path to success that you're looking for. I want to encourage you to go check it out today at creativesonfireinsiders.com. I'll see you over there, my friend, on the inside. Welcome back to the podcast. This week, we are going to chat about my favorite topic, collaborations. Have you done a collaboration? Do you know what a collaboration looks like? Collaborations are defined as two or more people working together to achieve a single goal. I want you to always be collaborating. Let's make that our ABC, always be collaborating. Don't wait for other people to reach out to you. And I don't think you're going to have to once we go over these over 20 ideas of ways that you can put into place right now to collaborate with others. Can we just all agree real quick that all of us are completely different? We have different personalities, different backgrounds that all stem from different experiences we've had in life. It is these pieces of uniqueness that are our superpower. You have heard that your product is not your brand, you are your brand. Well, this is totally true. And when we combine that with other people's unique DNA or experiences, that is where the power starts. We can supercharge our goals by getting with others who are working towards the same exact purpose. I've actually heard it say recently that if you want to go somewhere fast, go alone. But if you want to go somewhere far, go together. So that is kind of be our premise for collaborations. Let's jump into it. I am so excited to share with you all of these awesome ideas. So as I go through these ideas, I want you to keep an open mind and start thinking about what that would look like for you and your business and maybe even someone you have in mind that would be just right for putting one of these ideas into place. All right. If you are a blogger, you can do a blog post series with someone in your niche that shares the exact same audience. You could do this on a weekly basis or for a short amount of time. It's completely up to you. You can go on social media and do a live video with another creator. This doesn't have to be a huge drawn out event. It can simply be a, hey, you want to go live tonight at six? Let's talk to our audiences. And then you can take turns going live. You can get with other creatives and do a giveaway. Anytime you can get multiple things donated to a giveaway, the chances of the public cooperating and actually wanting to be the winner increases. And so you will have a much better turnout on your giveaway if you have a greater prize or more prizes. So be thinking of simple things that you could do maybe even on a regular basis with other creatives on a giveaway. And it doesn't always have to be a prize. It could be a month for free and your memberships. It could be a gift certificate. It does not always have to equate to a physical product or money. If you have someone who is in a complimentary business from you, it is a good idea to cross promote their brand with yours. So this could look like just shouting out a brand. It could be all the way as in-depth as having a sponsored post or as simple as sharing an affiliate link of someone's product that you know is amazing. Now another good way to collaborate is to go and just interject yourself into, is that a word? Y'all interject anyway. Go to networking events. Put yourself out there. Just be present. Let people know what it is you do. See if maybe they were looking for you at the same time as you were looking for them. You can network and not only live events like a conference or a happy hour, but you can network inside of groups. I would encourage you to find all the groups that you can online that you could be a part of and be a big contributor to. So I wouldn't join several hundred groups where you don't even remember what group you're in. Be very on purpose. Pick groups that are really, really in touch with what it is that you are trying to accomplish and is open to people who want to contribute to the group. You may even reach out to the group's owner and ask if you can help moderate the group. And this is just a good way to get to know the members. All right. If you're a blogger, you could always do a roundup post. Roundup posts can be super powerful. It is where you collaborate with other bloggers and share their content to create a cohesive post that can get a lot of SEO for you, as well as give backlinks and credit to your co-collaborators. You could go on someone's podcast or create your own podcast or just be a co-host of an interview video. Just get creative. I know I'm going to say that a million times. And don't forget to ABC. Always be collaborating. You might have a product or a digital product. Either way, you could bundle that with someone else's product or digital product. You could discount them and put them together at a special price and present them to each other's audiences as something new. And that would be an amazing collaboration. You could join a mastermind group. This is one of my favorite ways to collaborate. You could meet monthly or weekly or biweekly and share ideas, share wins and share trials so that you can all learn and rise together. You could go and actually review one of your co-creatives' businesses. So basically, this would be like a testimonial. It can be super powerful if you do this through maybe even a video format. Just share why you think they are an amazing business owner and why you love what it is they do and share it on each other's social medias. You could grab a fellow creative and co-host a challenge where you bring each other's audiences in for a short amount of time. Maybe it's a three-day challenge. Maybe it's a seven-day challenge. And you do it together. This can be super powerful because you both bring your own unique skills and talents to the table. You could even dumb it down to just a simple meetup or chat. I know that a lot of the social media platforms are starting to really encourage co-creations. So on Instagram, you can go live together as well as on Facebook. You can go live together and just have a coffee chat. Talk about your plans for your businesses. People love to hear behind the scenes and what you're thinking. I know also that Instagram is coming out with a new collab feature. It's not here yet, but it is on the horizon. It is going to be where you can grab a fellow creative and co-author your Instagram posts and reels together and tag the other author on the actual post. It will show up in the top little header of your post, just like a sponsored post with a brand would be, but it'll have your co-creator or your co-author on there. It is a great way that's coming soon for you to collaborate with other creatives that are working towards the same goals as you. You could even hold office hours. So this would be a time that you grabbed another business owner and you told your audiences that you were going to go live and hold office hours where they could do a Q&A with you or they could see behind the scenes what you're working on throughout your day. It is just a fun way to put yourself out there and grow the know, like, and trust factor. If you are pretty close with another co-creator, you could start a community, a community that you don't already have for your niche, where you both are managers of the community and you both pour into the community. Maybe one of you takes one of the weeks and shares something each week and someone takes the other. Maybe you collaborate with multiple creatives to start a community where you are all in charge of either moderating it or contributing to it. This could be a great place for you to share additional links with all of the members or additional products that you come up with as a group or even individually. I think that the community aspect is a really, really good untapped collaboration. You could also co-author an e-book. An e-book is a great way to get content out there. It's one and done. And if you co-author it with somebody, it can maybe make it feel a little less intimidating. It could be something where someone has a complementary expertise and one of you writes half of the book and one of you writes the other half. You could do the same idea with a course or a workshop. You could co-create a course or a workshop and both be on to deliver that. You could deliver it in a video format in one of the platforms like a Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific. Or you could deliver it in the form of a webinar and share the proceeds if it's a paid webinar. If you are so inclined, you could create or co-create printables and sell them in each other's shops. So maybe you have a fellow collaborative person that you think is super talented in the way of printables and you have similar audiences. Maybe you could be in charge of creating one printable a week and they could be in charge of the second printable of the week. When you are each just coming up with two a month and you share them on each other's shops and both benefit from doing half the work, I'm loving this idea of working smarter and not harder. You could also get with somebody and co-create a tool or an app that you see fulfills a need in your niche. So maybe you are looking to help solve a problem for your people and you know that this other person could be the perfect answer to these people's problem. You could pitch your idea to them and you could work together to create this tool or app that would be something that would be beneficial to both people's audiences. Those are my ideas. I hope that you found some of them to be new to you or creative. Just put your thinking cap on. I know that once you start brainstorming of ways that you can get together with other creatives to achieve a goal, your mind is going to be racing. I recommend that you do a complete brain dump of all of your ideas. Maybe jot down some of the ideas I shared in this podcast episode or listen to it over and over until you resonate with one of these ideas. And then you might message some people that you've met over the years, or you could even pose it to your audience and see if there's somebody who volunteers, who wants to do this with you. You might be surprised, you might find your next best friend collaborator from your very own audience. Now, if you are unsure of where to meet people in order to do these collaborations, I've already mentioned Facebook groups are a great place to meet with people and try to get to learn and know about some new people that enjoy the same things you do. But also, don't forget about the chat boxes in your Zoom meetings. So when you are on a call in a class or on a webinar, don't forget that chat box. Pay attention to who's chatting. Make sure that you're putting yourself out there and that you are being active. You will always get more out of a group or a event if you are interacting and being an active participant. Also, I know that we just had the podcast with Ms. Kristen about Haven Conference. If you ever have an opportunity to attend a conference, this is a really good place to meet people that are doing the same thing that you're doing. Gather their information, get all their business cards, reach out to them as quickly as possible so they don't forget who you are. This is another idea of how to meet people. You could also go to a local trade show or a local event in your nearby area. I know for me, I have the privilege of living close to a market. So I go to Dallas Market and you can meet people in showrooms. You can meet other shoppers. You can meet people that are attending little talks and little programs that these markets put on. You can meet people, what I'm saying is just about anywhere and everywhere. You just need to always be collaborating. Put that on your mind and you will see opportunities open up everywhere. So I just want to encourage you this week to take these words with you and to keep an open mind when you are interacting with someone on your social media or on a phone call or during a webinar. Think to yourself, would this person make a good fit for my goals? And then of course, my friends, always be collaborating. If you are interested, I do have a group that I would love to invite you to check out. It is called Creatives on Fire Insiders. So it is a sister to this podcast and basically it is all about collaborating. In fact, my goal is for it to be the largest collaborative resource dedicated to the success of creatives online. It is where I empower you with amazing tools to use in your business, including graphics, videos, there are private podcast episodes with courses and classes in there. And every week we have what I like to call coffee and collaboration. This is when we have powerful, relevant collaboration discussions with other creatives every single week in order to grow our business. We share ideas of what we have going on. If we have something we would like everyone to come check out, we share if we're going to be live that week with people, please come and comment and love on that video. It is just a very fun way to meet other people in our space and collaborate. So I would really invite you to check that out. It is located at creativesonfireinsiders.com. All right, my friends, I hope you've enjoyed this week's podcast and I look forward to hearing all about the collaborations that you do in the coming days. Thank you so much, my friend, for listening to the podcast. I'm blessed every single time you come back and listen to an episode. It's especially amazing when you share it with others on social media. So be sure to follow Creatives on Fire online. Listen, if you have not already done so, I want you to go ahead and download the five ideas I personally used to explode my online audience growth to a six figure following. You can find that at creativesonfirepodcast.com. I appreciate you and until next time, stay inspired. Take care. Bye-bye.