I love blogging and one of the things I love the most is collaborating with other bloggers. Most of the time we work on our own and so it can be wonderful to work with others. Collaborations can take many forms, so I thought I would give you my thoughts on collaborations and hopefully mention some that you haven’t considered before.
Why collaborate with other bloggers?
- Working with others can be more fun than going solo.
- It can be useful to have another blogger as a sounding board.
- We can learn from others. See things from another viewpoint.
- It’s a great way to get to know other bloggers or strengthen existing friendships.
- You can inspire and motivate each other.
- Together you can make more of an impact.
- To be able to pitch a bigger brand than you would be able to pitch alone. Your combined stats will be much more desirable.
Together we are stronger.
- You with both increase your readership, gaining exposure to each other’s audience. Collaboration will expand your blog’s community and may even increase opportunities offered to you.
How to find bloggers to collaborate
You might already have a ‘tribe’ or a list of people that you would immediately want to work with. However, it you don’t, here are some tips on how to start a potential collaboration.
- Identify bloggers that you would like to work with. These could be in your niche or maybe in a complimentary one. This decision depends on what you hope to achieve from the collaboration.
- Talk to them. Engage with their posts, chat on social media, just get to know them.
- Pitch them your idea. When you feel the time is right, pitch them your idea. You might be nervous, but chances are they will be flattered that you have asked to work with them.
Ways to collaborate with other bloggers
There are lots of ways that bloggers can work with each other;
- An interview series. This is quite easy to do and doesn’t take either party too much time. Send over a list of questions and some guidelines, that’s it really. Then when the interview is live on your blog, they will help to share on social media too, giving you exposure to their audience too. They in turn get exposure to yours.
- Feature series. Pick a theme i.e. party planning and everyone involved writes a post on one aspect, you can then all link to each other, or post one a day and link on to the next person’s blog post.
- A ‘one-off’ double whammy. Both bloggers create a post based on a theme/topic, post it on the same day or within the same week and you both link to and help to publicise each others posts. One post written, but double the exposure. Why not do a part one and part two?
- Recommend. Why not recommend each other to your readers and brands. If you do a sponsored post, ask if they are looking for more bloggers and if so pass your collaborators name on. I have a few people that I always recommend to brands I work with. The brand will love you for it, trust me. It saves them time searching for good bloggers. I also recommend other bloggers to event organisers.
- Run a linky together. I run four linkies all with other bloggers. You tap into all of your audiences and divide the workload. It is also more fun.
- Collaborative blog. Why not join together are write a blog together?
- Comment on each other’s posts/social media. Subscribe to their newsletter, like their Instagram feed, Facebook status’, retweet, share and +1 all their status’. To keep on track you can use twitter lists and you can even choose to be notified if they post to Instagram to help keep you up to date.
- Chats. Twitter chats or talks in a Google+ community/Facebook group at a set time. We recently did a Twitter chat for Live. Love. Blog and it was so much fun.
- Guest posts. Allow another blogger to post on your blog. They will then help to promote it on social media and expose your blog to their audience.
- Guest appearances. You could also post on someone else’s blog yourself. This is fab for SEO, as the piece will include a link to your blog, you will also reach their audience.
- Giveaways – Combine together to give away a larger prize and have your giveaway reach a large audience.
- Roundups. Share your favourite bloggers in a post, or top blogs in a certain area. If you don’t know your collaborators, then a ‘5 new blogs’ roundup might be a possibility.
- Set up a facebook group. In which you can share ideas and ask questions.
- Actually work together. If you live near enough, why not work with each other. You could alternate houses or even meet in a coffee shop.
- Attend events together. The other person will introduce you to people they know but you don’t, perfect.
- Contests. You could run a post a picture contest on Instagram.
- Pin it party. Invite guest pinners to add content on a particular board at a chosen time
- YouTube video, Google+ Hangout, Podcast, Live webinar. Lots of possibilities using these methods to reach your combined audience.
- Books, eBooks, workbooks – Share your knowledge and create a book/ebook for your readers.
- Hold each other accountable. This is a great way to collaborate and help each other to stay on track of your goals/workload. Share your ideas and keep each other updated.
- Courses. Do you have knowledge or a skill to share? You could teach together, either online or a physical workshop.
- Physical products. There are lots of products that bloggers, especially those with a flair for design could produce to sell.
- Newsletters. You could combine your email lists and produce a joint newsletter.
So these are my ideas for some possible collaborations. Do you currently collaborate with other bloggers? What sort of collaboration do you have? Has this post given you some ideas?
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