Most successful creators have a secret — their creations are a team effort.
No matter how talented you may be, your work can benefit from the collective effort and expertise of others.
I’ve increasingly noticed — and found in my own work — that incorporating others into your creative process can pay huge dividends.
Here are four benefits of doing so and examples to inspire you…
1. A Team Gives You Credibility And Exposure
The perspective of one individual will never be as credible as the collective perspective of a team of accomplished people.
Dru Riley knows this.
That’s why — despite his own significant expertise — Dru’s popular Trends newsletter features more than just his own thoughts on any topic he covers.
Prior to publishing each issue, he reaches out to multiple experts and practitioners in that field, gets their take on the topic, their feedback on his own thoughts, and incorporates it all into his newsletter.
For example, I recently had a 90-minute conversation with him as he put together his take on the paid newsletter space…and I was just one member of the team he assembled for that issue!
This approach gives his reports a level of credibility they wouldn’t have if they were solely his personal take.
And as an added bonus, I assume the people Dru consults for each issue then promote it once it’s published unlocking an additional benefit for him.
His “team” not only gives him credibility, but it also gets him more exposure.
Brilliant.
2. A Team Enables Specificity
The most interesting and valuable creations are often the most specific ones.
If you create on your own in a silo, it’s easy to wind up creating vague or generic things.
Connecting with others can counteract this tendency and help make your creation more specific — and therefore interesting.
I know it did for me.
I recently did a Twitter Takeover experiment in which I helped Nate Zeisler grow his Twitter account in three days.
This turned out to be way more interesting and valuable for my audience than a generic Twitter tips blog post would have been.
By teaming up with someone else (Nate), I was able to transform a common concept (Twitter advice) into a story through which more specific suggestions were given and implemented.
My audience loved it because they were able to follow along and see things like the exact question prompts I gave to Nate, every tweet he posted and why I suggested it, and even the results of the takeover.
Connecting with someone else created a platform for me to share my expertise in a more compelling way.
3. A Team Increases Relevance
Your creations will always reflect your viewpoint, but that viewpoint may be limited in its relevance to a broader target audience.
Bilal Zaidi knows this.
His Creator Lab podcast features interviews with creators who share their experiences and wisdom on a variety of subjects.
Bilal asks great questions in these conversations, but he doesn’t solely depend on himself to come up with those questions.
Prior to each episode, he reaches out to others in that space and solicits questions from them which he then asks during a segment of the interview — crediting the person who suggested the question of course.
This ensures he’s able to ask relevant questions to his audience even when interviewing someone whose experience may differ from his own.
Turning his solo creation into a collective effort surely improves the scope and relevance of his interviews.
4. A Team Improves Quality
There comes a point in your creative process where you get a little too close to your work to judge its quality and see how it can be improved.
That’s where a team can help.
I’ve published at least one new blog post every week for the past five years and somewhere along the line realized an easy way to improve the quality of my writing was to get a teammate.
While every word I write is my own, I now have an editor review each post I write before publishing it.
She finds the occasional error, but more importantly functions as a sounding board to give me a sense of whether the concept is clear, which ideas resonate most (or not at all), and helps me choose headlines and formats that best suit the material.
Take this post for example: It exists in its current format in part because she helped me sort out how to combine the examples I mention above with the value those examples unlocked.
My blog posts are my personal creations, but they’re made better by a team effort.
And you’ll find the same is true with anything you create.
The single easiest thing you can do to become a more successful creator is to check this out.