Leveraging OPA

One of the biggest opportunities you have as a professional is to leverage other people’s audience.  Other businesses have worked hard to build up a customer, client, or patient base, and with a strategic approach you can benefit from that relationship.

A Perfect Example

Outside of our industry, my good friend Nick Nanton has done this about as well as anyone could ever hope to do so.  Nick and his partner Jack’s business model is actually pretty simple: They develop unique, high-value offerings that would benefit – but aren’t already being offered to – the audiences of the colleagues they have (like me as an example).

They’ve created offerings like group-authored books that they guarantee to turn into an Amazon Bestseller, TV shows that allow people to gain valuable media credits, and even promotions that showcase participants in places like USA Today and other major newspapers.  They’ve even recently developed an offering in which they film a documentary for clients and get it aired on the Biography Channel.

Then, Nick comes to someone like me and tells me about the offering to see if it would be a good fit for the people I work with.  If it is, he and I work together to introduce it.

Nick reaches a new audience that he didn’t have to take years to build, and we get to share something of value we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

How You Can Form Valuable Partnerships

Your approach won’t likely be exactly the same as Nick’s, but you can certainly borrow from the general premise.  Here are 2 simple strategies that will allow you to leverage other people’s networks that can dramatically build your business:

1. Easy Strategic Alliances – I’ve always been a fan of strategic alliance relationships between businesses, but usually these get bogged down when they rely on partners having to do too much work promoting each other’s businesses. When this happens, the partners don’t see enough immediate return to keep putting time and effort into the relationship.

The Easy Strategic Alliance Method eliminates that problem completely.  With this approach you need to simply have 4 things:

• A Willing Strategic Alliance Partner You should be able to find these in your network: business owners who are clients, clients who are spouses of business owners, fellow Chamber of Commerce members, or simply people in your network that own or manage a business.
• A Downloadable Gift You Can Offer A healthy-recipe guide, a collection of fitness tips, a series of exercise videos, or something else of real value that you can give away digitally to the SA Partner’s audience.  If you don’t have anything like this, you can create your own, purchase private label rights to one, or get someone to create one for you (like the book of recipes). In fact, if you own Instant Fitness Copy or are invested in ClickFunnels through me, you can just use one of the ones I’ve provide to you.
• A Simple Squeeze Page You need a squeeze page where the SA Partner can send their audience to access the gift while opting into your email list.  If you have any technical knowledge, this is a 20-minute task.  If not, you can go to Fiverr.com, UpWork.com, or Guru.com to get it done for you inexpensively.   

When someone opts in at this page, they should be subscribed to your email list.

If you don’t currently have an email provider, ActiveCampaign.com would be my recommendation.

• An Email That the SA Partner Can Send You want to make this as easy as possible for the SA Partner, so you provide a pre-written email that is written as if it’s coming from them.  They can edit it as they see fit, but this approach will make it 10 times more likely that they’ll actually send it out and that it will get a good response.

Once you have all 4 of those components you simply tell the SA Partner that you’d like to send a free gift to their audience as your part of the relationship.  The SA Partner doesn’t have to do anything but paste the email into the service they use to send broadcasts and press send.  They also get the benefit of being able to give something of high perceived value to their audience to further enhance their relationship while having to put out no work or money of their own.

Once the SA Partner sends out the email, their work is done (unless you send another offer at a different time).  You’ve eliminated the middle man and can now communicate with their audience without them having to do any additional work – the area where SA relationships usually fall apart.

Obviously you still need to reciprocate with the SA Partner to make it a win-win, so if they want to take the same approach with your list, great.  If not, they can do one of the more traditional tactics like giving discounts, providing gift cards, or sharing marketing materials.

2. Advertising 2.0 Media outlets like radio stations and newspapers have fallen on hard times when it comes to selling advertising, yet most have still never embraced the value of the email list they have.

With this in mind you can approach them and tell them that instead of purchasing an ad on the air or in the paper, you’d rather send an email to their email list.  Tell them you’ll provide the email (that they can approve) and all they have to do is send it out.

Negotiate the price, as you can likely get an email sent (that will have far more value) for less than it would cost to purchase an ad.

Once you’ve found a media outlet that’s willing, follow the same steps you took in the previous strategy.  You’ll pay for an email once, but you’ll be able to market to their subscribers and listeners who opt in again and again.

Either of these three strategies has the potential to provide you with a number of high quality leads and an influx of new clients – all by leveraging the relationships that businesses already have with the people they serve.