 There are three types of businesses. See which one you are. One type of business has zero audience. You're just getting started. You're trying to clarify your message, clarify your offerings, get everything, all your ducks in a row. Maybe that's you. Let me know if that's true. Zero audience. Second type of business is a business with a small audience. They already have clarified some, at least some of their message and their offerings. Maybe they're starting to do content on a regular basis. Okay, maybe you have a small audience. That's the second type. And the third type is the more mature business with a larger audience already has been selling product and services consistently and would like to expand more. So which of these three are you? No audience, zero audience, just starting? Small audience or a large audience? Which one are you? Well, all three types of businesses can collaborate and grow, okay? Let me tell you how. Even if you have no audience and you're trying to get your ducks in a row, you should be collaborating. This is how I started in the very beginning in 2009 when I had no audience, okay? I had no audience. I was still trying to figure out what my message was. I barely had a website yet. I had not a lot of clarity about my product and services. I started collaborating right away and within 12 months I made my first $10,000 a month, $10,000 a month. I made my first $10,000 a month in the first 12 months because of collaboration. And then by the third, it was the third year of my business, I made $350,000 that year because of collaborations. So I grew from nothing. Nobody knew who I was to my first $10,000 a month and then to my first $350,000 a year all through collaborations. I didn't know how to run Facebook ads yet. Back then it was Facebook ads are still pretty new. It really wasn't until, I think it was 2015 that I started learning how to use Facebook ads and then grew from there. And so really Facebook ads is relatively new for me. It's only in the last four years that I learned how to use it. Now of course I talk a lot about Facebook ads but collaborations is still, whether you use Facebook ads or not, I think collaborations is so important that if you look at your calendar this week or next week, okay, if you look at your calendar next week and you're like, let me ask you this question, look at your calendar next week, do you have a collaboration in your calendar next week? Meaning are you talking with another business to help each other grow in some way? If no, then you should have in your calendar next week time set aside to work on reaching out for collaborations. That's how important it is for me. And when I work with my clients, I have a client coaching group right now where some people are tracking their progress through a spreadsheet. And on the spreadsheet, there are columns for collaboration for reaching out and how many collaborations they've done every single week. So that's how important I think it is. There are also columns for Facebook ads. So these two methods of outreach, Facebook ads and collaboration, I think are the most important in my opinion and I think every business should be considering them. Facebook ads costs more money and collaborations can be done for free. So if you're on a low budget, whether you're on a low budget or high budget, you should be doing collaborations. So let me explain how can you do collaborations with zero audience? You're just starting, you're trying to get your ducks in a row, you don't know what to offer yet, you don't know what your products are gonna be, you don't know what your services are, you don't even know what your message is, how can you do collaborations? So for the rest of this video, I'll describe collaborations for those three audiences, zero audience, small audience and big audience businesses. So without an audience, here's how you do collaboration. You reach out to somebody else in the comments area of this video, go ahead and comment, this is part of why I wanna do this video. Comment below and tell others if you have no audience and trying to figure, what stage are you? If you don't mind doing this publicly, okay? I'm also gonna be creating a course on collaborations, simple collaborations, authentic JVs coming up, well, as I'm recording this, the course is coming up starting in mid-September and the course will be a private community of people who are being educated and inspired about the value of collaborations and how to do it in a way that is really win-win and then in that course, I'm gonna have a directory of students in a spreadsheet where it's gonna be very clear what people's niches are or what it might be for people who are still trying to figure everything out, what niche they might wanna go into and for those who have figured out what niche they are, what they're offering, what their audience size is, including zero is totally welcome. Zero, I have nobody, not a single subscriber, but then some people have thousands already and for those who are signing up, some people have thousands already. So whether you have zero or whether you have 5,000 email subscribers or zero or 5,000 Facebook fans, you can join our course in our private group, a private course and you could form collaborations that way. So I hope you will join the course, but if you wanna do it publicly, you don't mind sharing your audience sizes publicly, go ahead and do that below. And so if you have zero audience, here's how you collaborate. You connect with other people who have zero audience, okay? That's where you start. You just start with people that you feel really comfortable connecting with because they don't have an audience either, you don't have an audience either and you connect, you schedule a time for 30 to 60 minutes and you talk about what you're offering. So let's say you meet for 30 minutes. 15 minutes, you're talking about who your client type of ideal client might be, who, what you might be offering them. If you're not sure, you say, well, I think I might offer this to them. You might offer that to them. And what is your message? Your overall kind of why are you excited about creating that business? And then they do the same thing, but you share for 10 minutes and you get their feedback for five minutes in terms of what's confusing to them, what's clear to them, what's exciting to them that you said and any suggestions that they might have. And then they share for 10 minutes and you give feedback for five minutes. So in the 30 minute call, you get a lot done with somebody who has no audience. But the thing is, because you both have no audience that means you're only gonna be growing. And in the next few months or years, you're both are gonna grow your audiences and then you probably will collaborate again and maybe you'll keep in touch and keep encouraging each other, et cetera. So that's what I mean by collaborations. I don't mean, oh my God, you have big lists and you're gonna do JVs and no, no, I just mean talking to other people who are nice and smart and caring. That's all I mean. Talking to other nice, caring and smart entrepreneurs who are going to, you're gonna help each other grow together, that's it. So whether you do this below for free in this public video or whether you join my course, I hope you join my course, please support me. It's rare, honest, to be honest with you, it's rare that I ask for support, but in this case, I am asking for your support because I did a pre-launch for the course and I have honestly been surprised how few people are signing up compared to all my other courses. So, and yet at the same time, this course I think is gonna be one of the most valuable courses that I teach that people take from me because collaborations are where that can get you from zero to wherever you wanna be in your business. So the more people take this course, the more valuable it'll be for everybody. So I'm asking for your support. If $75 is not too much for you, will you please sign up for the course? I'm begging you. This is very awkward for me and it's very rare for me to be begging like this, but I am begging you to please sign up for the course. If you're not sure at all, sign up. If $75 is not too burden, too much for a burden. If $75 is a burden, please don't sign up and just use this free video to connect with other people for collaborations. But if $75 is not a big deal, will you please sign up for the course? I'm begging you. Even if you can't join live, you can just listen to the recordings and still participate in our course directory where you will connect with others for collaboration. So please, please, please sign up for the course. And if you are not sure about the course, if you have like, oh, maybe it's not a good fit, please comment below or message me so that I can help you decide whether it's a good fit for you, okay? So that's the zero audience method, the small audience method. So maybe you have 200 Facebook fans, then you can collaborate with somebody else who has between 100 and 400 Facebook fans. So the audience size compatibility recommendation I have is 50 to 150% of what yours, sorry, 50 to 200% of, sorry, 50 to 200%, that's right, of what you have. So if you have 200 fans, then look for pages with 100 to 400 fans. If you have 300 email subscribers, look for people who have between 150 to 600 email subscribers. So that's the audience size compatibility. So if you have 300 Facebook fans or subscribers, you wouldn't be compatible with me. I have just about 3,000 email subscribers right now. By the way, you might say, George only 3,000 and you've been in business for 10 years. I built my email list to 13,000 subscribers within my first three years. But then as those of you who know my story know, I have rebooted my business back in 2014. I deleted 90% of my email list. So I deleted until I had about 1,000 left. Since 2014, I've been very slowly growing, very organically without a freebie opt-in. No freebie opt-ins. I don't do any freebie opt-ins, no pop-ups, nothing. Very, very genuine, loyal, organic email list growth to about 2,800 today. So within five years growing, doubling the email list is not that impressive, but at least my email open rates are between 30 to 40%. My click rates are between five to 10%, which is far higher than the industry average. Anyway, long story short, if you have a small audience, you grow with people with a similar audience size. And the very simplest way of doing the collaboration, here's how you do it. You get together with other compatible size audiences and you interview each other. That's it. That's all I want you to do. Every single week you should have an interview going. Whether you're interviewing somebody else or they're interviewing you every single week. If you want to grow your audience, if you're running Facebook ads, great, keep doing that. At the same time, you ought to be interviewing somebody or having someone interview you every week. Every week, not a week should go by unless you're having a vacation. But if you're not on a vacation, not a week should go by that you're not interviewing somebody or they're interviewing you. Very simple, very simple way of collaborating. And I'll talk about more collaborations in the course and we'll kind of set those up among the course students. So, and then finally, if you have a big audience, you already know that collaborations are gold and with a bigger audience, you also know that at some point, your audience will get tired of buying from you, okay? And you always need other people, other people's endorsement for you to grow your sales. So, for the bigger audience, it's really about collaborating with each other to endorse one another and grow the sales together and also maybe have bonuses for each other's products and services. Anyway, this is how the bigger players do it. This is how they do multi-million dollar launches. It's through collaborations with other bigger audiences. That's how they do it. I used to work with the shift network which they have millions of people on their email list. And yeah, with the shift network, they're doing collaborations all day long with other audiences. Hey house, does this, sounds true, does this? Everybody who's anybody does collaborations with each other to kind of grow each other's sales. That's how, so whether you have no audience or a small audience or a medium or big audience, collaborations is something that I've been recommending for a long time. Sometimes I've called it net caring, sometimes I call it JVs, which is joint ventures. Sometimes people call this strategic alliances or referral partnerships. But like I said, even with the zero audience, if you're just clarifying your offers, clarifying your mess of trying to get your ducks in a row, collaborations are where you clarify things and clarify, guess what, your position in the market. Because the more you talk about your, the more you try, the more you practice, talking about your message, talking about your offerings, the more clear you get. And of course, if you're doing this with somebody else who is in a related area, then they could help you to say, oh, you know what, I see what you're trying to do, you're trying to do this, okay, got it. The more you talk with people of a related niche, the more you clarify your position in the market. Because ultimately, you don't want to be offering the exact same thing everyone else is offering. And you don't, but you don't know how you're unique until you start having conversations with other people who are similar to you and that's how you discover, oh, got it. So I'm unique because I'm really talking about in this way and versus that way. So anyway, inside the course of, that I'm gonna be teaching my collaborations, we'll talk about how to find, besides the people who are inside my course, I'm gonna be also showing you methods of how to find online other collaborators, other people who are, you can approach four collaborations, small, medium, or large, and also how to vet them in terms of content and values and how to reach out to them. I'll give you a couple of templates that you can use to reach out to people and we'll actually get some practice doing it. And then hopefully you'll feel comfortable by the end of the course to be doing collaborations on a regular basis and just keep growing your business that way, whether you're growing from zero or whether you're going from $500,000 a year already, keep growing that way. So anyway, thank you for being part of my overall community and I hope you'll really consider joining my collaborations course. Like I said, it's $75, I think it's really affordable for the kind of value you're gonna get from the process of collaboration, the process of finding collaborators and outreach and what you do in the collaboration itself. And then of course, working with other people in my course community to form collaborations. So thanks for considering it. And I'm just gonna take a quick look to see if there are any comments from this live video. Go ahead and comment below. Like I said, if you wanna share your collaboration opportunity, possibility. And thanks for Brian. Thank you for your comments there. Brian has just recently started his coaching business called Grief to Growth. Grief, the number two growth. And Brian is in my client coaching program. So I know more about his business than probably most of you watching this. And Brian, even though you have only 100 Facebook fans you also have your Facebook profile is very active and you have a larger network I think than most people starting from zero. So thanks for chiming in. And Danielle, great to see your comment here as well. Danielle says, I've been asked by my community about how to gauge what a good collaboration opportunity is. I imagine the course would answer the question. Yes. I mean, hopefully in this video I've talked about a few ideas but in the course we'll talk about well how do you know whether to approach people and when someone approaches you how do you know whether to say yes to certain collaborations or not. And Captain, thank you for your comments. As Captain says, can you talk just a bit more about the essence of the interviews? So basically my question is if I have zero audience I'm speaking with someone who also has zero audience then what are we getting from each other or what are we giving to each other? Great question. So when you're at zero you're not really you're working with somebody who is also new. You're not trying to grow each other's audiences because you have nobody except friends and family, right? Friends and family and colleagues. So essentially I really should say nobody really is at zero because everybody has friends and family and colleagues some of whom are your ideal audience members. So for zero audience members I don't recommend interviewing each other because I recommend just having conversation that is a practice of sharing what your message and your offerings are and finding the position in the market. So if you think of it this way the market is like, it's like a bunch of dots a bunch of dots, a bunch of different business owners businesses, right? And a bunch of different niches, right? Different potential buyers and all these things and every business occupies a particular set of dots in the market. For example, I might occupy the set of dots where I am online instruction for authentic marketing, right? And other businesses might occupy the set of dots where they're technical training for medium-sized businesses whereas I'm authentic marketing for small businesses, right? And so it's like these different dots are occupied by different businesses and when you have a conversation with somebody else you get to see where you place yourself within the larger market. And so at the beginning when you have no audience you're essentially having positioning conversations with other newish businesses. And the more conversations you have the more you get clear about, okay, this is the set of dots. This is the set of dots that I'm really occupying in the market. Now I'm getting clear on that, right? So it's really conversations is what clarifies these kinds of things. And I'm just gonna see if there's any other comments or questions. I'm not seeing anything else right now. So thank you again, Danielle, Brian and Captain for your comments. And again, comment below if you'd like to let others know where you're at with collaborations or otherwise I really look forward to you joining the course. The course is in a pre-launch stage right now. I think the URL of the course eventually is gonna be georgecow.com.jv just very, very light, simple URL georgecow.com.jv for joint venture. So go there if you're watching this after September 4th is when I'll have the course URL available. Before September 4th you can message me to get a link for the pre-launch deal of the course. Before September 4th that's available actually technically up to September 2nd but I have a buffer a couple of days because people will go, oh I just missed the pre-launch deal. Okay, I have two buffer days. And then September 4th it definitely goes to 75 which is still a great price I think. So I hope to see you in the course but either way I hope that you are gonna be doing collaborations on a regular basis. So until the next video I wish you well.