MBA1506 How to Use Content Swaps To Grow Your Audience

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Business strategies that actually work every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to use content swaps to grow your audience. Every entrepreneur knows that without an audience you have no business. You need somebody to talk to, someone to sell to and to continue to sell to. This is why constantly growing your audience is important. But when it comes to growing your audience, there's an easy way to do it and there is a much harder way to do it. I prefer easy and content swaps allow you to leverage somebody else's audience to grow your own. Now, many people misunderstand content swap because they think that they have to go out with their competitors and maybe swap content. No you don't. I'll explain who to go after for content swap, how to make sure it's a win win, and how to set up the agreement between each other to make sure it actually happens that actually isn't just some sort of verbal agreement or a couple emails back and forth and then it gets lost and forgotten. I've been able to use these techniques to grow our audience tremendously over the years, teaming up with other blogs, with other content providers, other podcast to help each other grow our audiences. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Let's begin by explaining exactly what a content swap is. A content swap is a piece of content that you will write for somebody else's audience and they will write for yours. It's usually the same type of content in the swap. So it could be like a blog post swap where you guest post on their blog and they guest post on yours. It could be a webinar swap where you run a webinar for their audience and then they run a webinar for your audience. You it could be a podcast guest spot where they can get on your podcast and guest spot and you do the same. Same thing with the YouTube shows. You get the point. Some people call these collabs. It's very popular in the YouTube world. But the point here is, is that you're helping each other grow. Now, many people think, well, if I'm going to do a content swap, I'm probably going to go after somebody who might be a competitor, somebody who has the audience that I'm looking for. I don't know if I want to do that with a competitor. Well, I'm here to say that this works because you're not doing it with a competitor. Let me explain. One of the most successful content swaps I've done is with Digital Photography School. Digital Photography School is a huge blog for digital photographers. They are not my direct competitor. In fact, they don't sell any business courses. They don't have a podcast that's in business. They don't have any software or webinar software for that matter. But it's a great opportunity for me to leverage that audience because that's an underserved audience. This audience is digital photographers. Some are hobbyists, but some are trying to turn their hobbies into a profession, into a business, into becoming freelance photographers. And they're going to need some help in transitioning into entrepreneurship. And that's where I come in. I'm able to offer the expertise and write a blog post on how to go pro as a digital photographer. Now, digital photography school might approach me and say, hey, I want to write for your blog. So you have a great audience of entrepreneurs. And they may want to know where to buy great stock photos. And we have that feature, we have that option. We have maybe a partnership with iStockphoto, and they want to earn some commission. So this works Even when they're not competitors. In fact, we just have great audiences. We both want to get access to those audiences, so we swap content to make it happen. I get in front of their audience, they get in front of mine. Now, in order for this to be a win win, you gotta be very clear about who's doing what and when. And now we've done these so many times that we have a clear cut format. So to make things simple, we're gonna go with the guest blogging example. But this could work for podcast appearances, it could work for webinars. You get the point. So the first thing you gotta do is that you gotta agree on the content. Is it gonna be 2,500 words? Is it gonna be a thousand word blog post? What exactly is it gonna be? You also may want to have some sort of requirements, like at least three images and one call to action, something like that. You also need to agree on the dates. When will you publish this blog post on your blog? And when will you publish their blog post on your blog? You probably both have some sort of publishing schedule, so you publish regularly and you need to know when that slot's going to be open. So as long as everybody understands when it's going to happen and the date is locked, they know what to expect. But when there's no dates and you don't commit to a date, it's very easy for one of the parties to kind of just not do it. So you agree on the actual length and the content of the blog posts, and then you agree on the dates. Then you need to figure out what you're going to write about, right? What topics are going to be great for your audience and for their audience. So you agree on, hey, this is what I'm going to write about. Here's a quick summary. And usually this is just like a title and a few bullet points. And then they provide the same. These three things, the nature of what's going to happen in the blog post, you know the length, you know how many images, the call to action, the dates and the title and description is really the three things that get the ball rolling once you have that committed. And you can do this via email back and forth. I add them to a spreadsheet that we have, which is a partnership spreadsheet. We share that spreadsheet with them so they understand, hey, this is what we're committing to, this is what you're committing to. And it gets really formalized that way. Now, in this type of swap, a lot of people want to know A bit of information, like how much traffic do you get to your website or to your blog? How many subscribers do you have to your email list? Because you're obviously going to email your subscribers that you have a new blog post. And it's totally okay for you to be transparent about it so they can be transparent about it for you, so you can know what you're expecting. Okay. A lot of partnerships we've done. We are not the bigger party, meaning that we're partnering with people that are maybe 3, 4, 5, 10 times bigger than us. They have bigger email lists, and it's totally fine because you're always looking for fresh content. As long as you can deliver great content for them and they're going to get in front of your audience, they're totally cool with it. In general, we found that this is very helpful. The other thing is that larger lists, larger websites get a lot of traffic. They tend to publish more than one blog post a week. They probably publish three or four or five a week, sometimes every day. If you're HubSpot, you're publishing several blog posts every day. So you get the point. Everybody's looking for new content, new things that they can share with their audience. So don't be intimidated by the fact that, hey, maybe, maybe my list is not as big as other people. As long as the content is solid, that is great. And this is where this comes in. The content has to be solid and you have to show them examples of solid content. If this is your first content swap, that's okay, but you should write the blog post before you reach out to them. So if, say, for example, you're reaching out to a partner, you're saying, hey, I'd love to do a guest post swap. I've checked out your website, read your blog post. I feel like there's some gaps and in this topic, I'd love to address that topic. Here is the blog post attached with all the information. I've already written it. Ready, pre done. So they can easily say yes. They can see the quality of your work. It's a great written article with images and it's just so simple for the editor to say, yeah, we're interested, versus saying, hey, we want to do this back and forth and you're maybe not that popular or maybe not that well known in the space. And it's just easy to ignore that email versus something that they can actually sink their teeth in. Now, after your first content swap, you have material, you have an example you can share. And the more you do, the More content you can share as examples. So this gets easier and easier once you get the ball rolling. Now, I mentioned a call to action on the blog post. This is imperative. You gotta make sure that there's some sort of call to action in your guest post, ideally something that captures a name and email address. So you can grow your email list, you can grow your audience. So this could be a simple opt in so they can get a downloadable version of the post, a PDF, a cheat sheet, a guide, something. Or better yet, maybe they can opt in for an automated webinar that you have set up that they can watch and learn and take it to the next level in regards to whatever you taught on the blog post and of course, your guest post that you're going to publish on your site for the partner, they could do the same. But the point here is that you're trying to grow each other's audiences. It's not just exposure, it's also a chance to grow your email list. So make sure you have a CTA that captures a name and email. Also, if trying to partner with a brand, with a blog, with a podcast, with a YouTube channel, whatever it is that you really feel is a great synergy, you really want to have a long term relationship with them. It's okay to be a little bit flexible, especially if this brand or, you know, content piece is, you know, their audience is much larger. We do this all the time. We partner with podcasts, we partner with other companies that are much larger than us and we are very flexible. We kind of say, hey, since you guys are much bigger and you have more reach than us, you know, the benefit you're going to get from our side of things might be less than what we're going to get from you. We can kind of make sure it's even. Maybe I can give a little bit more exposure on my end. So, for example, if I was doing a podcast swap, maybe I can, you know, also publish a blog post for them along with the podcast swap or mention them in my resources page or maybe blast it out on social to give them a little bit more of a push. The point is that I'm going to offer more because I'm getting more. And people really appreciate it when they recognize that this is something that you're offering and something that you're recognizing that, hey, the reality is that you're bigger than I am, that transparency goes a long way and allows you to build a long term relationship.

Does it feel like it's getting really hard to figure out the best way to save for retirement. Fidelity can help you find clarity so you can save the best way for you. With a free personalized plan, goal tracking, and timely insights, you'll be set to take on retirement your way. Get started@fidelity.com future expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account. Apply Fidelity Brokerage Services Member NYSE SIPC.

Building a portfolio with Fidelity Basket Portfolios is kind of like making a sandwich. It's as simple as picking your stocks and ETFs, sort of like your meats and other topics, and managing it as one big juicy investment.

Mmm.

Now that's pretty good. Learn more@fidelity.com baskets Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC to wrap up today's lesson, Content swaps are fantastic. We just talked about blog posts. But again, you could do this with podcasts. You could do this with webinars. You could do this with YouTube channels. You can even do it with live events. When we can go back to doing live events, right? Where you ask somebody, can you be a speaker at my event and I'll be a speaker at yours? I've done that before and it's great because you encourage your audience to join that live event or to come to that live event. And they do the opposite as well for you when you're doing your event. And these build bonds and relationships that you need. And relationships are huge assets in business. It's like the number one asset, you know, you need to make sure you constantly are looking to grow and build your relationships. And this allows you to do this in a win win situation. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 Ombre Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe, you don't miss a beat. When the next episode is published, you automatically see it on your device. Also, by hitting subscribe, you get access to over 1500 business lessons. All the lessons in our archives. It's the only way to get access. So hit subscribe right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify or Stitcher Radio or Apple Podcasts or Himalaya. We're on them all. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Partnerships do take a little bit of work. In the beginning, I did them all myself. I would go out and reach out to people I wanted to partner with on email. I would follow up. Sometimes I wouldn't get an answer immediately. It's a little bit of work, but it makes a lot of difference. It's an investment and it's an evergreen investment. Once you do it, you, you know that content is in there in the world, right? It's there for people to find forever, basically. Eventually, what you could do, you could start hiring somebody to help you with the admin, whether it's an executive assistant, a virtual assistant, or somebody on your content team. But the point is, is you gotta get started. And not only do you need to get started, but you should document the process. Every time you start something new like this, create a standard operating procedure, just make a Google Doc out of it. So that when you do hire somebody to help you out, they know exactly what to do. You can hand it over to them and they can take over for you. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

Bringing your business dreams to life takes heart and about a thousand decisions a day. That's why Atlantic Union Bank's knowledgeable bankers are here for you with the right guidance and customized solutions to help you reach your business goals. So whether you're planning your next move, upgrading your space or scaling to meet demand, we make sure your business is free, ready for what's ahead. Because we are big enough to support you, yet small enough to know you Atlantic Union bank any way you bank.