Collaborate To Elevate: One Of The Most Effective Strategies For Amplifying Your Business - with JJ Virgin - I Love Marketing Episode #335

So that meant that I had to come in and totally change their thinking and teach them how to collaborate and not compete and that it actually would amplify their business, not crush it. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish. And this is the I Love Marketing podcast.

JJ Virgin connected the top health experts in the world and turned her competition into valuable partners. This is how she did it. Remember to subscribe to I Love Marketing so that you don't miss a Future episode. Visit ilovemarketing.com subscribe for more.

Our next presenter is three times New York Times best selling author. Amazing. Transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people. She's been on pbs, she's been on everywhere. She is phenomenal. She walks the walk and talks the talk. Give it up for the fabulous and fantastic JJ Verge.

All right, this is a talk I did for an event I do now once a year. Joe Polish has spoken at it, as has Dan, and called the Mindshare Summit. And it all came about because I was in a room and it's always about asking the right questions. I was in a room and I wanted to figure out how to 10x my business. And I was fortunate that I kind of wormed my way into this little mastermind day with Jeff and John Walker. And Jeff Walker said, 90% of your business should come from your JV partners. And at the time, maybe 10% of my business did. So there it was. I was like, this is perfect. This is how I will do it. But there was a big challenge with that. My JV partners are health experts, mainly doctors. And doctors, by their very nature are taught to compete because most of us wouldn't have two cardiologists, two gynecologists. You have one, and if you do go to another one, you go to the other one to prove the first one wrong. Right? So that meant that I had to come in and totally change their thinking and teach them how to collaborate and not compete and that it actually would amplify their business, not crush it. And I started with one phrase that I got from Brendan Burchard and he talks about it in the way of business books, but I'm going to do it with diet books. Does anyone here have a diet book? Anyone? Two, three, ten? Yeah. So all. All. And did you open any of them? It doesn't. We don't care. Just buy them. But, you know, that's the point is when you get into a topic, you collect that topic. And my closest partners, collaborative partners, are Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Sarah Godfrey. They're the people who are the most similar to me. But this took a while to get into this culture. And I will tell you, the last event we did, it was amazing, because all of a sudden, I started to see this whole collaboration, and I'm going to share the results of what's happened over the couple years. I did this when I first started, there were 12 of us in a room, and I didn't ever start at wanting to have an event in a mastermind. I didn't actually want to do any of that. I just knew that I needed to have these collaborative partners, but I really didn't know I'd go to events, and there was, like, one or two health experts in the room, and I thought I got to get them together. And what I found was that a lot of them really didn't know how to do this. So then I got him into a room, started teaching them, mentoring them up. And then it was 12, then it was 20, then it was 40, then it was 60, then it was 80, now it's 120. And we have a black tiger, so. Yes, I know. Well, the whole reason we have a Black Tai gala is that I got this really great dress on ebay, and I needed a place to wear it. So we had an impact award ceremony. We built it all around my dress. See how that works? Always about me, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then we discovered everyone really likes to get dressed up. Now we have to have these galas every single time. But this is a picture of our group. It's amazing. And what's been most amazing are all the different ways that we collaborate. So I'm actually going to go through and show you some of these, because they work in my industry. But as Dan Kennedy says, if it works in one industry, it'll work in other industries. So I'm going to show you the different ways we've done it, because I really wanted to. When I first started talking about collaborating, all of a sudden, everyone's mailing for each other, and that got old real fast. So what I wanted to show people were more organic ways that we could naturally collaborate that would help all of us build the list and increase our credibility. And, you know, one of the coolest things about collaborating is you have instantly increased your credibility. If all of a sudden, you know, your collaborative partners are Dr. Daniel Amen and Dr. Markheim and Dr. Sarah Gottfried. I, like, rise up with them. And so that's been fantastic. But the other thing, and I'll show you, is people really want to See what we're doing on the inside. So Chalene. That is such a bad picture of me. But Chalene and I did this podcast for her. And then I do. I'm a columnist on HuffPo because of Joe. And so I always try to pull someone in. So here's Sarah Gottfried that I pulled in when I did HuffPo. And then Johnny Bowden writes a magazine column, so he pulled me in on that. And then a group of us from the event put together a magazine. And so this is our magazine with 12 of US experts in it. And then the summit model, which I'm completely sick of, but I guess I'm the only one because it seems to be working. We have in our organization now we've got summits going every single month. We've had a guy, literally a guy who started with no list and never making money online, who did his first summit, hundred thousand list and a million dollar summit just by pulling all of us together. Amazing. We've also now had people create their own institutes with a group of people. So we've got like the Institute for Hashimoto's in my ezine. I always include. There's my guys too, by the way, my kids. I need to put them in my bio, but they're Cynthia Pascuala in my ezine. And then we do something else that we learned from Brendan called platform farming. And actually, you're the one that made me do it, Mastin. And so what we do is we have a group of us. And what I've really found is that my best promotional partners are the people who are closest to me. We share the same market, the same demographic. Like the personal development or business don't really do well. If you send a diet book to the business world, they're like, why are you sending this to me? Right? And if I send business stuff out into my health, they don't. It's a complete disconnect. So I don't do that. But in the consumer space, we have 10 of us now, and we take our top posts each week and we send them out to those 10 people. And those 10 people post them, tag us. So we each do this back and forth and it is absolutely bumping me up without any of the boosts or anything else. We're adding another 500 to 1,000 on our Facebook each week. So that's been very significant. Next thing that I do, and I tend to crowdsource most of what I put together in programs. I always do my primary framework for a program. And then beyond that I do a couple different things. Like for pbs, I put together both of the shows. I put together a collaborative cookbook, and what I did was take all my expert friends, and I had them all send in recipes based on my guidelines. The first time I did public television, I had no credibility on public television, but I knew that Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman did. So what I did was I made sure that they were front and center in the cookbook. And every time I went on to pitch the thing, I brought up their names so that I could ride their credibility. And then this next time, I brought in Stephen Massley, who'd gotten big on pbs. So it's, again, a great way to ride credibility, but it's also a great way to create a product without having to really do anything but have an editor put it together. So for any time I do a program, I try to also look at who are experts in things that work well with the program. For the Sugar Solution online program, obviously, blood sugar's a big one. So I have Mark Hyman. Cravings is a big one. I have Alex Jamison. Hormones are a big one. So I brought in Sarah Gottfried, and Gluten's huge. So I brought in Tom o'. Brien. And then, by the way, that's Mama B, Brendan's mom, over there. And I have her dancing on a table at Tao in Vegas. And I'm texting Brendan going, look at Mama. I always try to send as much of this stuff as possible because people love to see us out doing our thing. They feel like they're, you know, they're girlfriends with us. So anytime we're out. And the funniest part, Jen jumped into our arms, and I. The first we had to do a retake because I wasn't expecting. I almost dropped her. He's like, so again, anytime I'm doing things that are bonuses, trying to promote somebody, what I do first is I do something that's a really cool freebie that I can send out. And Rocco just published his Cook youk Butt off book. So I use. And I'll repurpose these things like crazy. So I use this for my launch, and then I use this again just to promote his Cook youk Butt off launch. And then this was so fun. What was the most fun? Never got shown, though, right? The most fun was. I don't even think you know about this, Jo. So, like, three or four days after we all go to the gym and Joe and I go work out together, he's one of the few people that can Sort of keep up with me. But Mark's like, I want to go. And I'm like, okay, great, Mark. Three days later he goes, I cannot lift my arms. I cannot. I'm like, you know, four more days, I still can't lift my arms. But we did an impromptu video here at the gym that was just fantastic. It was a great video, right? And Joe is so good at this. But this is the stuff that really builds engagement, builds your audience. It's so easy to do. You just have to think about doing it. So I'm working much more on doing more of these just on the fly videos. Great photos because people want to feel like they're getting to know you and what you're doing as you're going through your life. And a lot of the times I do have a PR team, but like I was on Dr. Manny because of my girlfriend, Dr. Jen Landa. And whenever I go anywhere or do any pr, I always ask, I always let them know I have some really amazing experts and then I give them, send them a list of who else they can interview. So we do that back and forth because that's really the best connection. The deal is on TV or in any of the articles. They're not going to use you every single week. They're going to use you every three months. So why not have your friends in there too and rotate it around, share the love that was Sarah and I. And then for some of the people, I'm a big mentor. And so for some of those people who aren't there yet, what I do, if I can't promote them directly, I will mentor them. So let me just go through a couple of the results that have happened in the last year from this collaboration. 14 million in book deals by Celeste Fine for people in our group. Six New York Times best sellers, A bunch of summers Summit New Livestream model, Six figure list. For people that started with nothing. The best part is amazing friends and fun times like all of us at the Grammys a couple weeks ago.

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Sam.