For a freelancer, it may seem counterproductive to collaborate online with other professionals and organizations. If you started taking on freelance gigs to have more control over the type of work you do, the clients you interact with and the schedule you keep, the notion of working with other businesses may have you downright skeptical.
That’s fair.
But most seasoned freelancers will tell you that collaborating online won’t jeopardize your workflow nor will it distract you from your daily work. Instead, it may actually help you gain a bigger audience, more clients and a tribe of like-minded entrepreneurs that you can connect with.
Let’s explore how to effectively collaborate online to enhance your freelance business and find new opportunities.
1. Realize the Benefits of Collaborating Online – Then Think About Who you Want to Collaborate With
In contrast to a ‘normal’ 9-5 job, freelancing allows you to pick and choose the types of services you provide clients.
Only want to offer blogging services? You got it!
Prefer social media management instead? Done!
Ready to help show off your digital marketing chops? Get moving!
So, by seeking out other freelancers who offer complementary (rather than competing) services, you can team up to provide more value and reach a larger audience together.
Success requires a mix of talent and skills. For example, if you offer blogging services, it may be beneficial to seek out a graphic designer who can provide eye-catching original graphics for your clients’ blog posts.
Or, let’s say your social media skills are second to none. It might help you to find a talented videographer to work with and create compelling content and stories for a social campaign.
Teaming up like this allows you to present your combined services to prospective clients as a packaged deal. But, if you’re not comfortable doing that, you can simply refer each other to your existing clients who may need the others’ services.
Plus, collaborating online enables you to split the cost of advertising with other solopreneurs, partake in email list swaps, host informative and comprehensive webinars, share best practices, do some creative brainstorming and swap solutions to your tricky business challenges and more.
You can start by writing down the services you offer and what other offers might complement those. This could be someone in the same industry with a different service or skill set, someone who has a product your customers might benefit from, or someone who has a completely different audience but similar mindset and approach to business as you.
Knowing who you want to reach out to will help you hit the ground running with creative collaboration ideas. And keep in mind, people are always looking for collaborators to add value to the way they work and what they can offer clients.
2. Host a Contest on Social Media
A popular way to collaborate with other freelancers, independent professionals and self-employed contractors is to host a joint social media contest.
First, come up with a contest that allows you both to obtain the end goal you’re trying to reach. For example, the goal may be for you to both expand your audience by exposing each other’s social media following to the other’s brand.
Next, create contest rules that work for both of you (keep it simple for your first collaboration to avoid feeling overwhelmed). You can easily research effective social media contests and pick and choose the ones you like.
Incentivize followers to engage with the contest by providing a great prize or two. Perhaps this is a custom brand logo (from the graphic designer) and one, on-brand 1,000-word blog post (from the blogger) or a copy of your latest e-cookbook and a handmade card from the calligrapher.
Finally, consider widening the reach of your audience by engaging in a little paid advertising.
Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter allow you to spend as little as $5 per ad campaign and can provide hyper-targeted audiences to serve up your contest to.
Contest tip: consider creating an easy-to-remember and catchy hashtag for your contest. By requiring users to incorporate the hashtag into their contest entry, you’ll be able to easily search entries and leverage Instagram’s hashtag following feature to widen your social footprint.
3. Co-Create a Limited Time Only Value Exchange
Offering a value exchange to your customers is a fantastic way to showcase your services and products, while gathering someone’s contact information.
Consider collaborating with another service provider to create a value exchange – or a lead magnet – that will appeal to both of your audience bases. Using the previous example of a blogger and a graphic designer teaming up, here are some potential effective value exchanges to offer via both of your websites:
- “5 Key Ways to Nail Your Branding Through Visuals and Blogging” (offer this as a comprehensive, downloadable PDF).
- “The Elements of An Effective Blog” (offer this as a video tutorial where each service provider offers a few tips).
- “How to Engage Your Audience in 2018 with Graphics and Blogging” (offer an engaging infographic on the topic).
Value exchange tip: Be sure to heavily promote your value exchange as a limited time offer, such as a free download of your cookbook before the hard copy goes on sale or a logo creation when someone signs up for your webinar (but only during the pre-sale period). This creates urgency and helps people understand the importance of acting now before they miss out on free stuff.
4. Launch an Online Event
In addition to offering a value exchange and limited time offer, another way to collaborate online is to host an educational or informative event, such as a live Zoom Q&A, free webinar or solution-based tutorial.
In order to really engage your audience, it’s important that you’re offering them something of value so they feel as though their time is being well spent and they’ve received something of value for free.
As strategic marketing consultant and Facebook ads specialist Nicholas Kusmich said, “every step of the digital advertising process (advertisements and promotions) must be valuable in and of itself.”
Collaborating with another professional means you’re able to present each other’s audiences with helpful information about a topic you normally wouldn’t discuss. Chances are if you’ve properly vetted your fellow collaborators, they have information your customers would love to hear about and vice versa.
For example, businesses of all sizes could benefit from learning more about the basics of SEO and blogging, key elements to a brand’s logo and color palette, and how graphics can elevate your website’s rank.
Online event tip: Be sure to properly prepare for the potential number of viewers who may join your event. If you’re using a tool such as Facebook live, the audience number won’t matter. However, if you’re using a free video conferencing service – like Zoom or GoToMeeting, for example – you’ll be limited to the total number of viewers allowed.
You don’t want to lose out on potential customers because you didn’t know about your viewer limits!
As you can see, collaborating online can consist of hosting social media contests, offering value exchanges and online events or tutorials. All of these marketing activities provide your current and prospective customers with new, valuable information for their business while simultaneously exposing your business to a new audience – ideally leading to a new freelance gig or two!
By researching other freelancers who offer products or services that complement your business, you have the opportunity to reach a greater audience and collaborate online in a meaningful way. And you get the bonus of meeting new people.
Since opportunities are attached to people, it’s a win-win.
Just remember that working with another person can require a little extra organization and time management – especially if you are both digital nomads in different cities. Having a project management platform like Spera can help you track your time, assign tasks and chart your progress as you build out your project, setting the stage for many successful collaborations in the future.
