I say no to 99% of all sponsor/collaboration requests from companies wanting to reach my audience.

If you’re curious about WHY that is, let me know and I’m happy to share why in an upcoming edition.

Every now and then I do say yes.

A few months ago a British insurance company reached out to me and wanted to collaborate.

They help employers give the right benefits to their people, wherever their staff are located in the world.

We decided to do an ebook together.

It was the perfect fit based on my previous experience of working in the market they target and on a topic I’m highly passionate about.

It’s also a topic that resonates with my audience and will give value to the community.

It turned out to be a great success.

In short this was the process:

We decided on which topics to cover together in the ebook.
We worked with full transparency and everyone hade full access to the entire ebook and writing process. We did regular catchups.
We planned the date for the launch together and made a launch plan including the Future of Work newsletter and a LinkedIn poll.
Why the newsletter? The Future of Work newsletter is published every Tuesday on LinkedIn to more than 55,000+ subscribers. It turns up on the LinkedIn feed and people’s private inbox.
I advised the team to engage on the posts and they also made their own original posts on LinkedIn.
We created a lot of noise, see here.
They saw qualified leads coming in right away.
I also sent the news of the ebook launch directly to several people in my network; their exact target group. Both off and on LinkedIn. They started downloading it as well.
Later in the afternoon, I did a poll on this topic. And dropped the link to the ebook again.
Join the poll here. It’s currently at 69,000+ impressions and growing…
Throughout the day, between meetings, I went into LinkedIn and replied to people’s comments.

This was a great success and we managed to get insane reach and impact. All thanks to a planned launch through organic reach.

We created so much traffic we accidentally crashed their website 😵‍💫

I can really recommend this launch plan 👌

This is what I call a typical strategic approach to do “smart partnerships”.

It’s an effective way to reach a warm audience in an authentic way.

A win-win for all.

Here’s 3 questions I use to decide if I should partner with a company on sponsored content:

If it’s yes to all 3, I do it. If it’s not, I say no.

I’m glad I said yes to this one.

Before we go..

..a LinkedIn post from this week 🙏

That’s it for this week. See you next Friday 👋

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