When I looked back recently at what’s worked best for us at DoWhatWorks, partnerships were near the top. Partnerships get a bad rap, partly because the word covers so much. There are integration partnerships and there are content partnerships. Content partnerships have driven a significant amount of business for us, but what’s more unique is that they are not paid spots.
We earned our partnerships by finding outlets that have strong relevance to our audience, like Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged and Emily Kramer’s MKT1, and writing a well-researched, in-depth piece for them. For Kyle it was what we learned from 20,000 experiments. For Emily it was how websites are changing in the age of AI.
To do this well there are a three key steps:
First, you have to really understand the outlet and what they care about. A lot of these outlets are very interested in MCP, CLI, and SDK right now. I’m talking with a lot of the biggest companies, like Stripe and Glean, about MCP as a vector. So I reached out and asked: if I compiled all that data together, would that be an interesting article for your audience? The answer was “hell yeah.”
I run a newsletter too, so I know the other side of it. If someone brings me something well researched, full of their own stats and data, that’s great. I get content for free and they get the exposure. But I only say yes if it’s really good, hyper-relevant to my audience, and not overly promotional.
Second, is being a good partner on the CTA. I never push for one off the jump. You need to earn that through being a great partner and adding value. I open with something like, I was looking at doing this piece, I thought of you and your audience, do you think this would be an interesting article? Once the relationship is built, outlets like Kyle’s will usually put a little CTA at the bottom on their own.
It’s the same approach I used when I pitched podcasts. I’d always come with three very specific topics based on watching the show. You make it really easy for the host to say yes.
Third, you need to show up and promote. Something that happens so much with partnerships is that one side does the collab, then peaces out, and the other side does all the work. We promote everything and work to make each piece successful. That’s a big part of why we’ve now done many collaborations with those same top outlets.
My test is simple. If you wouldn’t share the collab in your own newsletter and channels, why are you doing it? That’s a reason to rethink who you’re partnering with.
From these collabs we’ve driven a ton of business, and we still see long tail across those channels. Many top logos from Apollo to Priceline to Xero, came from our newsletter path.
The part I didn’t expect was the consistent traffic from recommendation engines. If you work with newsletters on Substack that can recommend you, those recommendations keep coming. 60-70% of our new newsletter signups come from three recommendation engines, sending us people every day, from collabs we did three months ago.
Key metrics
- 60-70% of new newsletter signups come from Substack recommendations
- 3 recommendation engines sending subscribers daily, months after the collab
- $0 spent on placements
DoWhatWorks
