Mariah Coz

I’m ready

Megan Minns

I’m ready.

Mariah Coz

Sure.

I’m here with my partner, Megan Minns.

Megan Minns

Hi.

Mariah Coz

We’ve been running Femtrepreneur together for the last couple of years, and we sort of have grown our entire business, Femtrepreneur with joint venture webinars and collaborative strategies. We’ll talk a little bit about what collaborative strategies are and why that the direction I went in, as opposed to using Facebook ads or using paid advertising.

We built our business into the multi-millions without ever spending a dollar on paid advertising because we decided to use collaborative strategies instead,

Mariah Coz

Let me just jump right into what a joint venture webinar and collaborative strategies are.

Just like you said, sometimes people struggle to get people to sign up for their webinars. If you don’t already have an email list, you might be struggling to promote a webinar on social media or just trying to reach a new audience.

And so, for me, I knew when I started my business, Femtrepreneur from scratch, I didn’t have any email list. I didn’t have any audience.

Mariah Coz

I knew the fastest way for me to build my email list and start making the sales was going to be through collaborative strategies and that other people in my industry already had audiences.

They already have email lists and things going on, and I thought “Well, how can I get in front of that person’s audience? How can I have them introduce me to all of their thousands of followers and thousands of subscribers?” The best way for me to do that was to figure out how to do webinars through collaborative strategies.

Then I invented this way of doing joint venture webinars where I would team up with someone and we would co-teach webinar. At that time, I don’t know if anyone else was doing collaborative strategies with webinars.

Megan, I don’t know if you noticed other people doing it quite the way that I was doing it with my co-teaching?

Megan Minns

Yeah. You were the first one who did webinars and collaborative strategies. I was a student of Mariah’s, and that’s how I got to know her. I was on one of the joint webinars she did, and that’s how I was introduced to Mariah a few years ago, and I hadn’t seen a webinar like that.

Megan Minns

I feel like it’s a little bit more common now but if you did it a little differently more in the affiliate way, I think you have a unique perspective on it, and we’ve seen great success from implementing collaborative strategies, so I’m excited to dig into what it looks like logistically.

Mariah Coz

Yeah.

Mariah Coz

So what we ended up doing was creating these webinars using collaborative strategies where the person and I would team up and co-teach the content together.

What you might see often is someone just bringing a webinar and only that one person talks the entire time, and the person who owns the audience doesn’t necessarily say anything.

Using collaborative strategies, what I did is every single week I would create a new webinar collaboratively with my other co-host, and we would combine our knowledge into a new webinar every single week. It created this one of a kind webinar that no one else had seen before that combined both of our zones of genius or expertise into a single presentation.

Then, at the end of the webinar, we would bundle our two products together. I would sell my course, and the other person would have their course. We’d bundle them together and offer them at a special price that was a little bit less than if you were trying to buy both of those courses individually.

Mariah Coz

What we would do is I would partner up with someone who had an audience already. There’s a value exchange that would happen in collaborative strategies. Many people are like “Well, I don’t have a big email list so how am I going to get anyone else to partner up with me?”

I would approach people and say, “Hey, I have valuable information to share with your audience that I think they’d love and it would be super awesome for them.” The other person would have their email list and their audience, and then we would both promote it.

Even if I had a small audience at that time, I would still promote it as much as I could. But the other person would be driving all of their traffic, all of their email lists and social media posts to sign up for the webinar that I was setting up the registration pages for, so I would be growing my email list that way.

Mariah Coz

There are many benefits of collaborative strategies.

It grows your email lists. Obviously, you can make sales, earn revenue. It creates a piece of content so it’s something I could share with my email list later and post up as a blog post. I could use the content and do a recap on the blog or turn it into a podcast episode. There are many ways you can reuse this content.

But to me, the biggest benefit of collaborative strategies is the way it allows you to build relationships like real friendships and relationships with people in your industry.

Mariah Coz

So we’d focus on organic social media marketing, marketing to our existing audiences, blogging, and things collaborative strategies to get people to sign up for this webinars.

Megan Minns

I also think, Mariah, something you did that a lot of people don’t take the time and effort to go especially when you’re starting out, and you do have a smaller list, taking a little extra time to go to extra mile does pay off.

Megan Minns

So Mariah would reach out to people in social media, and when she says organic social media, she doesn’t just mean passively tweeting into the universe and letting it float there. I think you would search hashtags, right, Mariah?

Mariah Coz

Yup, exactly.

Megan Minns

Comment back to them, and invite them personally to your webinar.

You would always ask your audience to share it after they sign up. Lots of extra personal time and attention that you took to get as many people invited to this webinar, and expand your reach beyond just your email list or just the other person’s email list.

Mariah Coz

I’m obsessed with the movie about him.

Megan Minns

I just saw that documentary.

Mariah Coz

I am obsessed with that movie. Oh my gosh. That’s like my dream life. That’s freaking cool.

Mariah Coz

I think the biggest thing is to reframe this in your mind and stop thinking about, “How this is going to benefit me? How is this going to help the other person? What are they going to see in this opportunity? Why would they ever say yes?”

Just start thinking about it strictly from the perspective of “How would this be valuable and a big win for their audience?”

If you’ve come to me and you frame something as “How it’s going to benefit my audience?” I will immediately give you the time of day.

Here’s a good example.

Megan and I have a free Facebook group. There are thousands of people in there and let’s say that you’re paying attention to what people are asking about in my free Facebook group. You send me an email, and you’re like, “Hey Mariah. I’ve noticed that there are these three threads that people keep asking the same questions about setting up your first contract for your first client.”

Mariah Coz

They’re like, “I noticed that you don’t talk about contracts or customers. That’s not your wheelhouse, but so many people are asking about it. I have something super valuable that I could share with your audience and it seems like they need help with this. I could do training that would just be totally valuable for your audience, and it seems like people need this. People are asking for it.”

That shows me that they’re an engaged part of my audience. They’re not just sending me a cold pitch email. It shows me that they’re paying attention. They’re looking and saying “Wow. There are a lot of people in Mariah’s audience that can use this information.”

And then, they’re pitching me not on how many subscribers they have or how much money they’ve made or anything like that. They’re just coming at it from, “Look, I can see that your audience is asking about this and I can provide those answers for them.”

Mariah Coz

The other part of that is knowing that it doesn’t step on my toes. Knowing that they’re not offering to come and teach a webinar to my audience that is something I teach. They’re paying attention. They know it doesn’t overlap with my expertise or what I have courses or products about but offering just real value to my audience.

Reframe it that way and think about, “Wow. How can I provide value to this person’s audience?” Everything changes if you stop worrying about, “Well, I don’t have a lot of subscribers” or “I’m not in their league,” and just stop letting that hold you back.

Megan Minns

I also think another point that we could talk about this from is the relationship building angle.

Megan Minns

This is something Mariah did a lot when she was trying to build new relationships as a new business owner in a new industry. It’s waiting to send that email until you have developed some communication with them. You don’t have to wait for that, but that’s what benefits the long term relationship.

Instead of sending a cold email, maybe you’re engaged on their Facebook group like Mariah said. Maybe you send them an email as a reply to a newsletter they sent out,

Megan Minns

Mariah, I know you have a little process you walk people through, but I think that is also relevant here.

Mariah Coz

Definitely.

It can take a couple of days or weeks to work up to that. Like Megan said, it’s not like you want to go straight to the cold pitch email.

Mariah Coz

We have a three or four-week process that I have like a nice little Kanban board for moving people through the stages where we like to establish contact with this person on social media.

So if you have a list of five or ten people that you would love to do a joint venture webinar with or you’d love to collaborate with them, start connecting with them on social media. Start just commenting on their Facebook posts. Start commenting on their Instagram posts. Start retweeting them.

Mariah Coz

Share their stuff for them.

Even if you only have 100 followers or you don’t even have a big audience, just reposting their content or sharing their content on social media makes a big impact. They’re going to remember you did that.

Then, we work up from there where you might eventually have a little conversation in the comment section of a post, or you might end up having a private message conversation or direct message conversation. And then, you might take it to email and ask them if they want to collaborate on a webinar or it might end up being something else.

To me, I don’t always pitch a joint venture webinar. It usually ends up becoming that, but a lot of times, if I email someone that I’m interested in collaborating with, I just put out the idea. Maybe it ends up being a joint venture webinar, a Facebook live, into each other’s Facebook groups, and maybe it ends up being something entirely different.

But how would you like just to see if we even like the idea of working together in some capacity?

Mariah Coz

That’s a good question.

Megan, what comes to mind for you for something we wished we had known earlier?

Megan Minns

I do all of the systems and technology on Femtrepreneur, so my first reaction is angling more towards setting up systems, caring about security, and a little bit more on the back end perspective. Not as relevant to webinars.

Megan Minns

When you set-up your email lists, and you set up tags, segments, and forms, try to think big picture. Not just this launch but what is the system going to look like when I relaunch this every year? What is my file structure in my folders and who has access to what? Yeah, those are my nerd responses.

Megan Minns

I’m all about systems and organizations. Mariah is the real marketing wizard here at Femtrepreneur. I just try to make things happen behind the scenes.

Mariah Coz

Megan’s the only reason everything happens.

Megan Minns

I love it.

Mariah does a lot of work here too. I just do all the crazy stuff behind the scenes that no one else would enjoy.

Mariah Coz

Especially Megan like you’re saying regarding the logistics, the only “problem” that we had after a year of doing joint venture webinars once or twice a week every single week for a year, wasn’t necessarily with the strategy or what was working or not working. It became the logistics. This is Megan’s wheelhouse.

What ended up happening was having many bundles with other people’s products got confusing. Our audience was like, “Uh oh. You offered a different bonus last month, and now, I want this bonus from this other person as a new bundle.” I was like, “I can’t give you their product.”

So logistically, it became a little bit more difficult. It was an amazing way to build our business and our revenue.

Mariah Coz

In the first year, it was incredibly profitable and just helped us grow super fast.

Ultimately, what ended up making more sense as our business grew and as I have done more webinar multiple times is we started to take our webinars “on tour.”

We do have a webinar program called Webinar Rockstar, so everything is rockstar themed because I have been in a punk band since I was 13.

So to me, doing a webinar is the closest thing to like performing live on stage in my punk band.

Mariah Coz

Oh my gosh, yes.

Once you’ve done enough webinars and you know what works, you are then in a position to take your webinar on tour and book what I call “webinar tour.” It’s where you make a bunch of dates where you’re going to take your webinar and present it to someone else’s audience in a more affiliate capacity where you’re not promoting it to your audience.

In those cases, the affiliate is promoting it to their audience, and they’re taking a commission from everyone who buys from their audience.

Megan Minns

I think one way we still make that convert a little bit better and be less of just at being on tour is that the person who is hosting it a lot of times will still throw in a bonus.

Mariah Coz

Definitely.

Megan Minns

They can throw in something that is their content which fills a gap or a step before or after webinar rock star or whatever we’re promoting on that webinar.

We did the joint venture webinar for a long time.

Megan Minns

But I do agree in hindsight something that we weren’t prepared for was the complications of people in our community buying multiple bundles, and wanting to swap out. If they got one program in one bundle, and it will be included it in the next package, they wanted to swap it out for another program.

We didn’t allow that, but I think it was an unexpected culmination after our audience started loving our webinars. Since there were brand new unique training every time, we had repeat attendees because they wanted to learn this amazing new training.

They get a great pitch from Mariah, and we sold on the offer, and then try to find a way to get a deal, which I understand, but it wasn’t we expected. Then all of a sudden, it started happening, and we had to figure out how we were going to handle it.

Mariah Coz

The first thing you should do is make your list of potential collaborators.

This can take a little bit of research but just make a list of everyone you can think of in your industry who has an audience or a following or is serving an audience similar to yours but not direct competition. We call that a Vertical Market Partner, someone who serves the same audience but with an entirely different unrelated product so you can come together, make a bundle, and just serve their audience with a fantastic offer.

Make that list of people and start connecting with them.

Mariah Coz

Like I said, the first couple of weeks are just you connecting with them on social media, making sure you like and comment on their content, sharing out their content for them, just trying to get on their radar, and then eventually, you will make the pitch.

Megan Minns

I think my piece of advice would be just to have confidence in yourself. When we’re talking about webinars, I know that’s less tangible.

Megan Minns

But when we’re talking about webinars, nine out of ten, someone’s going to say, “Well, I’m afraid to do the webinar,” or “The technology overwhelms me.”

And so, I always try to give people a confidence boost that “You can do this. It’s not that hard. Take one step at a time and just believe in yourself.” The more you do it, the better you get.

If the first one, your camera doesn’t work or your mic messes up, or something goes wrong, don’t let that stop you from trying again. Practice does make it so much easier.