Channel partners

“Any relationship other than win-win won’t survive across time. If it won’t survive it can’t compound. If it can’t compound not only are you leaving huge gains for both parties on the table, but you’ll have to spend a lot of time and energy finding a new counter-party.”

• Farnam Street, The four types of relationships and reputational cue ball

Channels come in all sizes.

Media is huge. The creator economy is also. Influencers can amass massive audiences too.

The good news?

All of them are within reach of your business when you’re aligned to the niche they serve.

Niches are your friend. They provide a way to be relevant to an audience pool by being specific.

Entire media businesses get created from scratch because they provide value.

My friend Tony has been doing this for years.

He set up media companies around sneaker culture, Australian basketball, long-distance running and run them profitably.

The good thing about niches is that the appetite for fresh, high-quality, and educational content never goes away.

Like any good subject there is always more to know.

As a business owner, you know your niche and can offer teaching content to channel partners repeatedly, across various channels, attract interest, and ultimately sell your product.

The trick to this is:

Be helpful, collaborative, and easy-to-work-with.

It’s not hard.

Yet there are stories at every level of a talented artist who wanted things their way, an influencer who stormed off a shoot, or the actor who wouldn’t do the media roadshow after getting tired of promotional work.

It burns bridges.

You want to be open-minded, curious about what’s important to them, and go out of your way to make sure you’re over-delivering on that.

How important is it when you’re starting out?

It’s a MILLION DOLLARS IMPORTANT.

(I just made-up that term but it sounds good doesn’t it?)

Every channel with an audience has curators, gatekeepers, hosts, research teams, outreach specialists, and assistants filtering through requests to be involved with them.

The next section is going to teach you ways to pitch content, create a win-win, re-purpose and put processes in, notice what’s working, and much, much more in the rest of this book yet it all counts for diddly squat if you can’t be easy to work with.

You’ve now got a sense of where the buyers are and how channels are managed so let’s move to the next section on Collaborating for Customers.