756: Your 15-Minute-a-Day Marketing Plan

24:10And I think on the newsletter side, for example, like, oh, can we do a quick newsletter swap? And it doesn't have to be like a full list swap. It might be like, could you mention my upcoming book in the PS? If you have, hey, my friend's got a new book out, or it could be, you want to plug the newsletter in this little segment that you have. And oftentimes I'll say one of the tactics that maybe I shouldn't say this, but like kind of cuts through the clutter for me is when I notice somebody replies to one of my messages because I recognize that subject line. It's like, oh, this is a subscriber of mine.

24:38I owe it to myself to read this and see what they have to say. And so that is one way to cut through the clutter and maybe one example of a minimum viable thing. Oh, let's do a quick newsletter swap and see if anybody clicks on this thing. Is there any interest there? But what else have you got here for minimum viable partnership angles? The word partnership means so many different things to so many different people. When we're talking to an early stage founder, typically a partnership for them is anything that generates revenue. When we're talking to a brand creator, they think of brand deals.

25:08They think, okay, a brand's going to pay me to make content. Or when we talk to our enterprise clients like iHeart or HubSpot or Vonage, when they think of partnership, they think of affiliate deal. So it depends on how you're framing partnership. One of the easiest ways to give an example of this is in the creator space. When you partner with a creator that may be interested in advertising your business or advertising your side hustle, a big thing to do would be for them to offer a creative brief. Like, okay, well, what is your post going to be about? How is it going to look? And so if they can't give you an idea or a script or an outline or a video as an example of how they're going to promote your business, then how could you possibly feel confident to go into a contract with them, right?

25:51So that's an example of a small thing that they can do to earn the trust of a business. as a creator is, hey, give me a creative brief of what it's going to show me the script of what you're going to record. I'm not asking you to invest in the lights and the camera and the editing, but just give me a script. Tell me what you're going to say about my business. And then if it makes sense, I'll go ahead and partner with you and give you a percentage of the business that you refer. If we treat partnerships like infrastructure, we can build repeatable systems instead of chasing these one-off wins. And that's leading with the other parties upside first and then patient enough to build a small minimum viable partnership, meaning a small trust or a small ask, that's going to lead to the long term before anyone ever asks for a contract.

26:31And I would add that contracts probably only come into play at a much higher level. If I'm talking about a podcast guesting spot, no contract involved, right? It's just like, here, send me the calendar link and we'll get it booked. It's all over email or message and we'll figure it out. Yeah, with podcast guesting, it's a little bit lighter of a commitment, right? The value proposition is usually pretty clear, right? No heavy lift on a contract. You're asking someone for an hour of their time to provide value to your audience. In exchange, you're giving them a platform to promote. But I think for a service-based business, for an e-commerce business, I think it becomes a little bit more complicated.

27:08And that's where I think the trust needs to be built. before you're allowing someone to represent your brand or your business, you've got to make sure that they're going to represent you well. And so how do you build trust quickly without having some small commitments that you each can take to make sure that you'll do what you say in the long term? Here's where a lot of these deals die. In my case, is long, drawn out thing. I need a deadline. And whether I'm on the asking side or the receiving side, It's got to be a somewhat tight timeline. You know, give me the deliverable. This is going to go in next week's newsletter and two weeks out where it just doesn't linger on for weeks or months.

27:49It's like, at least for this very first thing, it's like the launch is on this date. Are you in? Are you out? Oh, okay. I can do that. Here's the swipe copy that you can customize and make your own. And it's like, get these things scheduled to go out and make it easy for the partner that you're seeking out. So it's like not a huge ask on their part and not creating a ton of extra work, but making it not so open-ended. Put a date on it, I guess. Give yourself a deadline. That's been a little productivity hack. Absolutely. The time constraint is the key. It's got to feel urgent. Otherwise, it just goes into that pile of maybe I'll get to it later.

28:25And that goes all the way through the chain, the partnership lifecycle, especially in the beginning when you're trying to communicate your value. Most business owners think that the value is self-evident. So they describe what they do instead of what the other side gets. And that message usually dies on arrival. The person across the table is running this silent calculation in their head about, are you going to make their life easier? Are you going to give them more homework? Are you going to make their numbers bigger or their risk smaller, right? And if your pitch doesn't answer those questions in their language, then you sound like more networking noise.

28:58I've watched brilliant business owners lose deals that they should have owned because they led with their product or their business or what they do instead of what the other party's outcome would be from the partnership. So the fix is to translate everything that you offer into the currency that the other partner can understand, which means doing the work to understand their world before you ever ask them for anything and make sure that you've got that time piece there. If you think that it's going to take hours and back and forth, then you're probably not even going to bother, right? But if you make it easy, make it clear, make it simple and make it time-bound, man, that's much more likely to succeed.

29:31Yeah. You have any other examples on the minimum viable side, either on the e-com side or the content influencer creator side? Well, the content is easy. I can always ask people for samples of content. You can ask them for scripts, right? You can ask them to send you a previous brands or companies that they've worked with, right? So all those things can be able to verify and build trust quickly. On the e-commerce side, I think it's really about understanding what the goal is of the partnership. If it's an affiliate type of deal where you're plugging into someone for their audience, I'd want to see not just follower count, right?

30:03Again, everybody looks great on paper. Everybody's leading with the highlight reel of their life on their Instagram stories or on their LinkedIn bio. So I really want to see the analytics. Like, show me under the hood. Show me someone that you've motivated to make a purchase. Show me your insights. Like, how many people actually engage. When you say, like this, share this, follow this, how many people actually do it? I really don't care about anyone's follower count. I've seen brands waste so much money paying for audiences of millions of followers to get zero. And conversely, I see companies that are partnering with micro-influencers with just a few hundred people.

30:35And they're actually getting real revenue results because they built the trust. And those people have influence over their target market. Right. That makes sense. Is there a stop here where deals die? Where deals die because it's like, on closer examination, this is too much work. Or it's not a fit. Or there's a little bit of risk. if I'm kind of sticking my neck out for this relatively unknown brand and there's a reputational risk. This is kind of where I see a potential roadblock. All types of partnerships, content partnerships, funding, investors, affiliate sales, media, data share, valuation partnerships, marketing partnerships, they're all gonna die a quick death if the key is not going to be follow in terms of systematizing the relationship, building the trust quickly.

31:24There are a few flops, I would say. And if you look at some of the failures in the market today, it all kind of boils down to the same few red flags. You know, number one is lack of clear goals, right? So there's no aligned success metrics, no defined outcomes. Each side is pulling in different directions and you don't really know whether the partnership worked or not because you can't attribute that success. Also, I see that there's a lot of like clout chasing in partnerships. People are choosing partners because they have a name or because they look good on paper, but there's no strategic alignment.

31:56Oftentimes, we hear from especially business owners who are very busy. They've got kids and they're only doing this thing at nights or weekends, is that there's this unequal value exchange. One partner gives but does not receive value. And over time, that creates resentment. There's drop-off. Yeah. What do you recommend? So that's kind of a common thing in like a newsletter swap, for example. Somebody has a list of 100 ,000 people. Somebody has a list of 1 ,000. And it's like engagement metrics aside, it's just like there's this imbalance. And even the audiences are perfectly aligned, but it's still like it would feel unfair to the person like, oh, I'm going to shout you out to my 100 ,000 followers or whatever.

32:35That's right. Yeah. And this is where the system and the structure comes into play. Having a partnership operating system, having clear check-ins, milestones, having an owner of these particular milestones along the way. So, for example, in your newsletter, right, if I say, hey, I've got a newsletter, you've got a newsletter, let's share. Well, we could easily have a point of attribution where we say, okay, after two weeks or after 30 days or whatever, we're going to pause and we're going to measure. And we're actually going to capture the learning of, okay, what happened during this time? And you can easily put this up front to say, hey, if you receive 1 ,000 impressions and I receive 500 impressions, well, then you're going to run it again next month.

33:12And that way, we're going to be able to level out that value exchange so that it's equal. Because if it's not a win-win, then the partnership's going to fall apart. But if it's so mismatched where one person would have to like run it for two years to kind of catch up, or do you just need to chase people who are closer to your level? No, I don't think you need to chase people that are closer to your level. I think you just need to get more creative with how you define the value. I see this in early stage founders a lot where they say, well, I want to partner with Samsung, but what can I possibly have that Samsung wants?

33:44You know, I'm over here making a little application in my basement and vibe coding an app for the Apple store. And Samsung has$3 billion in enterprise value month over month. But the thing is, you have something that they don't have. You have your close friends or family that are customers that Samsung doesn't have. Or you have this idea that no one at Samsung has thought of. Or you have something unique. And that's part of the work that I do is kind of hold this heavy mirror in front of people to say, like, look, you do have value. and not to get too deep into the psychology, but all of the things we're talking about with the red flags, failures of partnerships, it all really boils down to these two unhealed childhood wounds in us as humans.

34:24One is lack of self-worth. A lot of us don't feel like we're worthy of that success. And so we find ways to sabotage our success along the way. And the second is lack of trust, which is harder to diagnose upfront. You don't know if somebody's on their third divorce and maybe it's not a good time to trust another human right now, or somebody always gets the short end of the stick in a partnership because they've never had a system to measure. And so they just feel burnt out and they just don't want to partner with someone. It's difficult to diagnose those things up front unless you ask the right questions.

34:54More with Kyle in just a moment, including reaching decision makers at some of these larger companies and then the amplify stage of Kyle's DVLA framework coming up right after this. Here's a little productivity hack. Give yourself a deadline. I get it. Summer's a busy time. We've got weddings, sports, travel, kids off school. But what I found is it never really slows down. The timing is never going to be perfect, which is why you got to force your own agenda. Thankfully, our partner Shopify makes it easy to get your business up and running in the time you do have. With Shopify's templates and built-in AI tools, if you can point and click, you can set up a storefront.

35:33Plus, every Shopify store is automatically integrated with ShopPay for checkout, which increases your conversions and makes life easy for your customers. And if questions come up, Shopify's built-in AI assistant called Sidekick is ready to help you build, troubleshoot, and keep moving. And if you prefer a human, that's of course an option too with Shopify's award-winning customer support team. All you need is the idea. Shopify handles the rest. If you're serious about hearing your first, start your free trial at shopify.com slash side hustle today. You heard that right. Start your free trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle.

36:10That's shopify.com slash side hustle.

36:18Hear that? That's the sound of your marketing working. And as an entrepreneur, you know that every call is an opportunity. But if you miss it, potential customers don't wait. They'll just call the next business on their list. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the business phone system built so you never miss a call. You can set it up in minutes on any device. You can keep your existing phone number and you can add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Once you do, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast.

36:56Plus, Quo integrates with the tools you're already using. HubSpot, Zapier, Cloud, and tons more so you can save time and stay organized. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash hustle. That's Quo, Q-U-O dot com slash hustle. Do you have any recommendations for somebody, even a solo operator, side hustle, nights and weekends, trying to get on the radar of a Samsung, of an Apple, of a Fortune 500 type of company? And even just getting through to a human, finding a decision maker who might be able to figure out a partnership, let alone, well, who are you again?

37:42Try and puff yourself up and be like, well, I'm not the founder and CEO. I'm the content marketing director. Or give yourself a title that makes it less obvious that you're the sole owner. Overall, 99 % of the success that I've seen in early stage founders and folks just building their side hustle is taking a step back from the clout of like, okay, this is Samsung. What do I have to offer them? And really understand that there's no B2B or B2C. Everything nowadays is H2H, right? It's human to human. It's really finding one person that you can reach, that you can clearly communicate your value to, that you can identify that there's a mutual fit, that you can create a hook, build a minimum viable partnership that can build trust with that person over time, and then launch and measure and grow.

38:30And a partnership that starts off with just a cold DM to the head of product development at Samsung could result in 30 days later after consistently communicating your value and building trust. Now you're meeting with the CMO of North America and now you're meeting with the president of the division in South Korea. And I see this happen every day with our subscribers on our partnership platforms. I can't stress it enough, like you're just talking to another human who has a pain point, and you may be able to solve that pain point for them, but you won't know unless you try. And it may not be the first person or the fifth person or the 10th person that you reach out to, but if you're consistent with your messaging, you're clear about your value proposition, and you lead with generosity, you're going to do the right favor for the right person that will result in your next successful partnership.

39:20Yeah, I think that human to human bit is probably worth pausing on. And where I've had some success is, let's say there's a company that I want to partner with, or there's an app that I like as a potential affiliate to say, and there's no like off the shelf obvious referral program, is finding somebody in marketing on LinkedIn where you know their job is to drive user growth. and it's like, hey, I was testing out your platform. I don't know if you have a referral program, but I would love to explore that if that's an option. And that started more conversations, even going back 10, 15 years, like in the virtual assistant directory that I ran, like all of these companies are looking for growth and lead gen and they're open to the conversation, even if they don't have a built-in thing where you can just apply for it.

40:08They're willing to get creative with you if you come to the table with something. And so through a cold LinkedIn outreach, it wasn't the initial person I found wasn't the right person, but he's like, oh, let me connect you with my colleague, Maria. And so who knows what will come of this down the day, kind of still up in the air, but fingers crossed that it might be something. If you don't put the ask out there, the answer is always no. So I think that human to human is a really important thing. Kyle, let's move on to the Amplify stage here. I've done my Discover. I've done my Verify. and now I've done my launch, my minimum viable partnership, and now it worked.

40:44We collected the data, we got some results, and now we want to go back. It worked. Let's do more of what worked. Let's do it again. Or find another partner to repeat the same system with in a creative way. This is what Amplify is all about. That's it. Amplify is all about killing what's not working, reinvesting in what's working, and building a living, breathing partnership machine that will continue to grow with or without your involvement. You know, you started off small with a trusted test. You proved that test now with real attribution. Now you can escalate it to a paid channel that your partner can count on.

41:20And you've derisaged it already because you've proved what you said. And now you've got real data to base it on. You know, if you think about like going back to our Samsung example, right? It's like if you're the CMO of Samsung, you have a budget that you can spend on partnerships, right? You could advertise on a billboard. You could do a radio ad. You could do a magazine ad. You could partner with a creator. How do you drill all that down to determine what you spend your money on? Well, the inside baseball is they used to use a term called CPM, cost per milli, which means that how many eyeballs do I get for every dollar I spent?

41:53And so they drill all these different things that they can do down into this one number. And that's what they base it on. Well, if you didn't do the minimum viable partnership, if you didn't have a small trusted test, then you have no way to attribute that. If I'm deciding who to partner with as a brand, I can't possibly choose you because I don't have any data. So when you start off small with a trusted test, if Samsung decides to run a placement in your newsletter, even if they only got five people, 10 people, 100 people, whatever that number is, now they have data. Now they have something real that they can go back and say, okay, for the$100 we spent, we got five people to come over.

42:27So now let's spend$500 and let's hopefully get$25 and then let's spend$5 ,000. And that's how you build a partnership over time. Now you're in their annual budgets and they're partnering with you every year because you've proven what you can do. Got it. And you had another point, which is kind of asking for the warm introduction. It's like, well, now that we know this worked, it's kind of like, well, who else do you know? And this could go in either direction. Who else do you know that might be a fit? Do you know any other podcast hosts? Do you know any other newsletter operators that reach a similar audience?

42:59You may be a newcomer to the industry and they're like, oh, yeah, you ought to talk to so-and-so, especially if you have some positive results to share. Yes, absolutely right. All right, anything else on Amplify? That's it. Turning one win into a repeatable system. That's right. Have you ever reached the end of your list and you're like, well, crap, I tapped out on partnerships? Not anymore. Now that we've got AI, I mean, it's impossible to be tapped out, right? AI finally makes it possible to systematize any relationship intelligence that used to live only in the heads of a few elite dealmakers.

43:32Now it's available to anyone. So if one partnership worked, then you can make a list of 100 more. Yeah, I'm going back to an episode we did a year or two ago. Mike Ettenberg was selling polarized sunglasses for first responders was kind of his niche. And maybe they were like durable or scratch resistant because they were sick of losing sunglasses on the job as a firefighter. And he was like, well, we did some influencer marketing and we sent out a bunch of pairs to these different micro influencers that spoke to first responders on social media. and I was like, well, Mike, how many did you send out?

44:03You know, I was thinking like 10, 20. He's like, oh, we've sent over a thousand pairs of sunglasses out. It was a partnership strategy or an influencer strategy at scale. And he knew there's an 80-20 to all of it. Sometimes people would be like, hey, thanks for the sunglasses. But sometimes they would make a video and it would get, you know, tens of thousands of views. So you just never know. But it was kind of planting those seeds kind of as far and wide as you could think. And there was probably always new first responder influencers kind of up and coming to continue that strategy. There's always someone up and coming.

44:31There's always a new VP that's looking to make a name for themselves. There's always a new business development person that's open to receive, right? It's just about getting out there, sending the message, being clear on the value, and that consistency to find the right person that really recognizes your value. That's what it's all about. And it doesn't always take a thousand pairs of sunglasses, especially when we're being more intentional about the people we're sending them to, right? I would dare to say that if he did a little bit more research on the D, the Discover, he would find the right influencers and maybe he only needed to send out a hundred instead of a thousand and he would have got even better results.

45:06Yeah. Going back to your 15 minutes a day homework, kind of the framework that we've been talking through is discover. This is kind of your identify your ideal target customer and kind of ask the question, well, who are they already paying attention to? Who are they already doing business with? How do I skip the line? How do I borrow from some of that authority, building your list of your dream 10, 20, 100 potential partners there. And then sending that initial outreach message, being giving first, trying to get creative. What can I possibly give to this person or this business? But offering something of value to them, understanding how do I help them get what they want?

45:42Using that in my outreach, holding up the verify portion, sharing some social proof, trying to figure it out and be concrete. What are the next steps? What are you going to do? What am I going to do? When's our deadline for that minimum viable launch? And then lather, rinse, repeat, trying to amplify this thing after you found something that worked. Is that the playbook as I understand it, Kyle? That's it. That's it. It comes down to leveraging other people's audiences to build trust quickly. There's people out there that already have the trust of the customers you're trying to reach. So let's partner with them.

46:14Let's find a mutual value proposition, borrow their trust, and cut through the digital jungle. Yeah. I'm thinking back. Chandler Bolt was on the show recently from selfpublishing.com. In the early days of this business, it was self-publishing school. And I don't even know if he had a website starting out, but he would do all of these joint venture webinars with people that spoke to an entrepreneurial audience, that people spoke to kind of an influencer audience or an online business audience. And like, what do you mean you don't have a book published with self-publishing? It's never been easier.

46:44You got to have a book. You could write it in a weekend. Here's my rapid outlining tactics and stuff. And grew to millions of dollars in the first year just on the back of these partnerships. I didn't have to have an audience myself. I'm just going to borrow from these people who already had the audience. So the playbook absolutely works. Onspark.com, onspark.com slash hustle, you'll be able to download the playbook, really the detailed outline of everything that we've been talking about here. And Kyle, appreciate you putting that together for Side Hustle Show listeners. What's next for you? What's got you excited these days?

47:17We've been laser focused on subscriber value. So we've loaded over 8 million partners onto our database. And the cool thing about it is without having a system, most folks are left to their own devices to figure out how to do this, where with the click of a button, you're able to access up to 8 million partners on our platform. So that's the one thing that's got me the most excited for sure. Yeah. Shortcut your research process a little bit there. Yeah. Not only the research, but it'll craft your outreach. It'll automatically send to the partner, what your unique value proposition is, and it will score and align every single partner to make sure that it's a good fit.

47:54So we're only introducing people that are vetted, that are high intent. It's definitely a shortcut through the entire partnership pipeline. Very cool. We'll link that up on spark.com and again on spark.com slash hustle to download the playbook that we've been talking through in this episode. Kyle, let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation? Every side hustler thinks they need followers before they can make money. And that's not true. You need one partner who already has them. Your first hundred customers already exists inside someone else's email list or their community or their client base.

48:30And that person is not your competitor. They serve the same buyer with a different product. You know, a fitness coach and a meal prep company sell to the same person and they never compete for the same dollar. So you find five of those, offer them something that their audience wants that costs you nothing to give, and let them make the introduction. Borrowed trust converts at rates cold traffic could never touch because the recommendation carries the credibility you cannot buy. So if I had a tactical close, I would say this, that listeners can act tonight. Write down five businesses that already serve your ideal customer without selling what you sell.

49:05Send each one a message offering to create something valuable for their audience. For free, no strings. One yes replaces six months of content creation. Yes, there it is. There's your homework. I love that. Kyle, this has been awesome. A couple of takeaways from me before we wrap. This really is a game. If you can commit to this 15 minutes a day, doing it consistently, it's this game of relevance and consistency and persistence. And you just mentioned there's a certain comfort in writing the next newsletter or the next social post or the next blog article. The kind of direct outreach that Kyle is describing, you might feel outside your comfort zone.

49:43But guess what? That's where the growth happens. So build your gravity map, figure out a genuinely helpful offer to kind of break through the clutter and go get it done. Remember, it's human to human. Be a good human. Be a good steward of the business. and I think you'll be able to go out and build some of those partnerships by making it a win-win. Now, another partnership-themed episode that might be worth a listen if you like this strategy. I really liked Dustin Lean's partner workshops tactic in episode 465. I reference it quite a bit because I think it's replicable across a bunch of different niches.

50:17Episode 465 in your archives if you want to check that one out. But Kyle, big thanks to you for sharing your insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. sidehustlenation.com slash deals is where to go for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend, fire off that text message, let them know, hey, I got your new growth strategy. All you need to do is listen to this.

50:48Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.