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Steve Dotto here. Next in our journey to 100,000 YouTube subscribers, I want to talk to you about the importance of finding some complementary websites that you can work with to cross promote your product.
Now I’ve done this in a couple of different ways but probably my most successful relationship to this point comes with a fairly popular site called LifeHack.org. What happened is early on in my process of starting to publish regular videos, I reached out to LifeHack and I say are you interested in my videos? They’re all about productivity. You don’t have a lot of video on your site. Is this something you might be interested in? The dialogue that ensued was really important for you to understand what we went through.
The first thing that they were looking for is obviously quality content. That I provided so we can check off that checkbox. The next thing that they needed to recognize was that I was going t consistently deliver. They didn’t really want to post some content from me for three weeks in a row and then have me disappear for three weeks. I needed to build some credibility with them that if I’d told them that I was going to deliver one post per week, that I would indeed deliver one post per week. That really helped me also from a point of discipline of having to produce one post a week because I didn’t want to disappoint my partner and I didn’t want to put that partnership at risk because I was seeing benefit from it. That was very important to them.
Now as far as the rest of the relationship goes, you’re going to have a negotiation with each individual partner in a different way. In some cases, you might decide that you’re going to be producing videos and you’re going to want to be paid for them, in which case you’re going to have that negotiation of what they’re worth and who has the rights, for how long, etc. For me, because of the way that I’ve structured my YouTube business, being paid by a portal site for my video is not important to me because I make some money regardless of who displays it because of my embedded advertising from AdSense in it. So I don’t really care who is broadcasting as long as it’s a reputable source and I’m not out there on some less than desirable website.
LifeHack is a great site. Here’s their site. They’re a little busy for me. They certainly publish a lot of different content all in the Lifehacking area. Here is my post from yesterday actually. Look at this, how many posts they’ve posted since then. I post every Sunday on them and there’s my post. This post is actually done well. It’s closing in on 600 shares on LifeHack so I’m actually seeing some nice traction from this particular post. You should know that all of my posts don’t do quite this well on LifeHack. Sometimes, I only have 60 or 70 shares and sometimes I’ve had over 1,000. But this one is performing quite well – 5 Fantastic Writing Tools.
Now the relationship for me, as I said I’m not so concerned about them paying me; I’m concerned about reaching their audience and exposing my product to a new audience that might be interested, so finding a complementary website is very important, somebody who has a similar audience to yours but isn’t competing with you directly. If you do that and you can work out a deal, then this is a great way for you to expand your reach.
What sort of success am I realizing as a result? Well, let’s take a look at the Analytics. This is not for the video that I just showed you because the Analytics haven’t come through for that one but this is one that I posted a couple of weeks ago, My 5 Favorite Dropbox Features and I posted it a couple before on my site. Then it went up on the LifeHack site. I rewrite it, I write an introduction for them and do a little bit of a customized introduction for them, a couple of hundred words intro for the video.
We can see here that on the day that I post it, it received an extra of nearly 300 views, not a huge number but out of these 300 views there’ll be a few new subscriptions to the channel. There’ll be some people who have never seen my product before that will be exposed for the first time and I actually even embed within my post a link so that people can sign up for one of my free online courses. In this particular case, I put in a link to my Inbox Zero course and I get additional newsletter subscribers every week from the LifeHack post, anywhere between 15 and 50 depending on how popular it is, new newsletter subscriptions.
Think about the benefit for me now. I’m getting views which will earn me a little bit of money. I’m getting new subscribers and being exposed to new people who start to follow me. So I’m getting new followers based on sharing with the people at LifeHack. Plus I might even be getting some additional firmer customers, people signing up for my list which is just a terrific level of contact.
What do they get out of it? They get good, consistent content that they don’t have to pay for which increases traffic to their site. So it’s a win-win situation. These are the sort of partnerships that you have to look for and the more of these that you can put in place without overexposing yourself, the more that you’re going to create additional traction for the growth of your YouTube channel.
I hope you found this video to be useful. If you have, please subscribe to our site here. If you have any questions or comments on these videos, please post in the Comments field below. I check out these comments each and every day and I respond to every single one of them, even with just a thumbs up if you’re saying that you like it but for the most part, I enter a dialogue with you. So I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say about these ideas. Onwards to 100,000 subscribers, I say! Thanks for spending time with me today. I’m Steve Dotto. We’ll see you soon. 
