It's shocking to me that more creators don't collaborate with other people within their market or industry. There are so many reasons why they should. I guess I'll chalk this up to a few not knowing how, so let me break down my process and how I've collaborated with creators over the years to build my brands, grow my platforms, and exactly what I'm doing with In The Making.

Good collaborations help you reach a new audience. If you are a newer creator or if you have a small audience or if you're struggling to grow your audience, collaborations are one of the best things you can do. A good collaboration is going to help you reach new people who've never heard of you.

Now, granted, this does require that you yourself have something valuable to say, something to offer. I've done paid collaborations where I've paid to be on other podcasts or paid to post in different communities, and it sounds crazy on the surface, but think about it. If you can get in front of thousands of your ideal customers, your ideal followers, and it only costs you a couple hundred bucks, then you can easily convert those people into your actual subscribers in your audience.

I also believe that good collaborations are going to give you another level of insight that you didn't have before. Because you get to see someone else's process, you can have a conversation about what they've done, what they're doing, all kinds of things. It's going to help you as a creator get better.

We look at collaborations like competition all the time, and I don't believe that's always the case. I think sometimes collaborations are the best way to expand to a different level that you couldn't get to without that conversation, without that connection.

I think every creator should collaborate with someone else in their industry at least once a month, because this continuously puts you in front of new prospective customers or subscribers, followers, all of that. I think being that kind of active in the community keeps you top of mind for the marketplace as well. Whereas before you collaborate, you aren't really known. People don't really see you.

Another time you should collaborate is when you go on to a new platform. When you go to Instagram and you've only been active on YouTube, think about if you have a different YouTuber who has a channel within your market on your channel once a month. It won't have a massive impact overnight, but over time it definitely will. Their viewers from their channel start to see your content and they engage and they like some posts. They may watch a couple videos. Even if you get 1% of their audience, that's growth. Over time, you'll start to get more and more subscribers that way. It just becomes a flywheel that never stops.

One of the best ways to collaborate is by being a guest on podcasts. That's probably the most popular right now, but the problem is that when you collaborate on a podcast, you have to be really good at repurposing that content so you get the most from that podcast. If you just go on a show and you don't repost it and you don't share the content, then it pretty much goes nowhere. Most people move this way too. I've had a ton of creators come on my show, and they don't even post the clips. They post no social content, and it's just a waste of time. Whereas if I go on their show, I post their clips as if they're my clips. They post their episodes like they're my episodes. And it doesn't seem like it matters, but over time you build more and more, let's call it creator credit because you're active in several different communities and you're all over the place like that.

Another way to collaborate is guest writing. This seems like it died off because blogging is dead, but the answer now is to do it on newsletters. That's one of our plans here with In The Making is to bring in experts from other sectors in the creator space and people with different experiences and write newsletters. We let them take over and write a whole newsletter post for us. And that article then goes out to our audience. What that does is two things:

Another good way to collaborate is live streams. Oh man, this is really good. When you can get on a live stream with somebody else, like on TikTok or YouTube, that's another way to increase engagement and increase your followers. A lot of these platforms want you to be active on their platform. When you go live, they reward you by giving you more attention, putting your content and algorithm a lot more, and you're going to continue to blow up that way.

If you go on live on TikTok once a week with a different creator and you're having conversations over time, TikTok is going to reward you for that, not only for the live stream but because you put out that content and then the live is replayable on your string on your page and people can watch it.

The first step to better collaboration is getting you a list crafted. Get you a list of different experts and people within the community that you want to work with that you would love to have on your platform. You want to be on their platform and start building a relationship. Everything starts with the relationship. This means:

Don't just pop up on people like, "Hey, can you do this thing for me?" No. Activate your relationship with them and build a real connection first. Over time, they're going to respond and want to work with you. Engage with at least 5 pieces of content before you ask for anything.

The next step to better collaborations is having something valuable to say. When I have people reach out to me on my podcast, because I've gotten hundreds of these over the years, maybe thousands at this point, the people who stand out the most are the ones who have something valuable to say.

A lot of people reach out to me and they want to be on a show for their own personal gain, which makes sense. I'm not mad at that, but it also doesn't entice me to bring them on my show. I think they just want to come on here and sell their book, course, or a coaching program, so I'm not really interested in having them on my show.

my answer to this is for everybody to have their own framework. Think about it. If you give people a specific outcome and you have something valuable to say, you should have a three- to five-step process on how people can reach that specific outcome. That is your personal framework. Nobody can take that from you. Nobody can steal it. Even if they try to, they can't take your secret sauce and duplicate that. Building your own framework allows you to consistently stand out from everybody else around you. Me and some other person can help people launch their podcast, but we both will have different systems, a different process, different ways we do content, different types of content. Everything can be completely different even though we're offering something that's very similar. So you have to have a framework that you offer and then deliver that in your collaborations

I think once you start collaborating, it becomes easier and easier to do it. Once I started interviewing people on podcasts and being a guest on podcasts, it's second nature now. It's very easy to do. It's easy to execute, even as setup is something I could do on my sleep.

Every single creator should get to that point with their own content when you can collaborate at the highest level. You only win from that. You're not going to lose something because you collaborated with some new creators. Make it a focus, make it an effort to collaborate with at least one creator a month to start, and then over time get it up to once per week. Again, I know that sounds crazy, but when you see how many people have YouTube channels, podcasts, and newsletters, it's very easy for you to always be in collaboration mode with someone else.

To be honest, this could be a position at a company where you literally have one person that reaches out to different brands, newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels for you to be a guest and you to deliver content information. (This actually might be something you could create with Claude co-work. I'm going to work on that and get back to you.)

If you are a creator struggling to grow your brand right now, collaborations are going to be the best thing for you. If you are a creator reading this and you feel like you could actually help other creators, don't hesitate to reach out to me. I always love to hear from other creators and have conversations and possibly collaborate