Bina from WebBriefcase is the latest Entrepreneur’s Journey text link sponsor. I asked Bina to share some inside knowledge from her business experience and she offered some great wisdom on Joint Ventures.
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Yaro asked me - “What is the best form of marketing that has worked for you so far?”
I would have to say Joint Ventures. I have tried ezine advertising, article writing, pay-per-click campaigns, search engine optimization, linking strategies and affiliate marketing. I guess, in the long run, they have all added up and helped in some way but nothing has performed as well as joint ventures.
The reason why a joint venture works really well is because you’re offering your product to a set of people who are biased towards your offer. With normal advertising, be it ezine advertising or pay-per-clicks, prospects are more critical of your product. Imagine if you were to read about a product in an ezine ad. How likely are you to purchase it? In fact, how likely are you to even notice it?
Now imagine on the other hand that you hear about the same product from Yaro. He is your favourite mentor, whom has always given you valuable tips and advice, recommending that you check out this product, because it has done wonders for him. How likely would it be then for you to purchase that exact same product?
If you were already looking for a similar product, I wouldn’t be surprised if you clicked over to the web site, skipped the long sales letter and hit the “Buy Now” button straight away.
There’s just one thing about doing joint ventures that you should be aware of. I made a mistake in the past and I’m going to share it with you so that you don’t make the same mistake.
When you do a joint venture make sure you plan it in such a way that you will profit from it for many months, or even years, to come. My mistake was to contact potential joint venture partners with my 50-50 profit proposal. And all I did was supply them with a solo mailing about my product that they could use to send out to their subscribers.
My partners mailed out the letter and within a few days I started getting a substantial amount of sales. Sales reached its peak within a few weeks and then slowed down until six months later, where sales went to zero, zilch, nothing. What did I do then? I started all over with a new set of joint venture partners.
A better way to plan a joint venture is to prepare as many ways as possible for your partner to promote your product passively. A solo mailing would be a good jump start. But you need something in place to keep the sales coming in. Here are some other things that you may want to prepare for your joint venture partners:
- An ezine article that they can send out in their next mailing and add to their web site’s article collection.
- A special report that they can offer their subscribers and customers and/or make available for download from their web site.
- You may even want to prepare a mini-course that they can use in an autoresponder series.
- A banner would be good too.
- With podcast and videocast on the rise, you may even want to create some useful audio or video files.
I’m sure you can think of much more interesting and innovative passive promotion items than this. Feel free to share.
Bina
WebBriefcase
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Thanks for this great post - I love case studies and ‘After Action Reports’!
I’ll be releasing an ebook soon and have been crafting some (hopefully) unique ways to promote it.
Joint Ventures is one method I’d considered, and your post’s coverage on how to make such promotions last longer is something I’ll add to my arsenal. Creating banners and a video testimonial are two definitely useful ideas I’ll be doing.
Thanks a bunch!
I also believe working together with other people on a project or a new site can be beneficial for both parties. Even though setting up a site and using WP is so easy, some people just cannot be bothered, but they would love to run a website.
I have at least 3 people (one is my sister) where we are planning to run sites together. I have set up the sites for them, but they all find it difficult to get the time to work on the project.
They are enthusiastic, but motivating them is another issue.
What I meant to reply (to Mike) is I’ve observed the same lack of motivation from a few people I tried to help set up ecommerce sites…
One thing you could try with your friends/family - since it appears you’ve set them up with WP blogs - is to have them simply do a Google news search for keywords related to the theme of their site.
Then they can quote a chunk of an interesting news article they find, add a few sentences of their own commentary regarding that article (and credit/link to the original article - w. target=”new” so it opens in a new window), and they’re done for the day. Simple and quick.
Creating a ‘news portal’ like that is easy to do to start off, and once in the habit of posting to their blogs they can start posting original entries and/or increase the frequency of blog posts. Both of which may increase visitors and thus potential income.
But be sure to let them know it takes a lot of time and content before even a trickle of income will be realized. They *might* hit it big in a short period of time if they’re lucky, but better to prepare them for the worst case scenario.
Hope that helps and best of luck!
I could go for a blog partner. Loved your articles on how you made yourself a success online. lol Did not know that magic game was so popular.
Bina (and others reading this),
Remember that there are other JV strategies that you can use - even in online marketing - to create a LIFELONG income stream, instead of just a “one-time” sales flash.
Such as:
——–
* Selling a subscription service (either by itself, or as an upsell to a related offer)
* Becoming an UPSELL partner with related product owners, upselling eachother’s products at a discount immediately after someone buys the initial product.
* Integrating products or creating co-projects with a long-term intention
And so on.
Think LONG TERM, and be creative.
You can easily create a lifelong stream of income as WELL as an instant number of sales with an initial “product launch” kickoff.
Sincerely,
Chris Rempel
JV-Web.com
Chris - Why do I recognise your name? Did you recently do a product launch?
Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment. Quite right about J-Vs. A nice build-up of recurring commissions from an affiliate subscription service is something I aim for. It’s passive and you don’t have to do customer service since it’s not your product.
There are many ways to skin a cat, I think that this article covers several with a bias towards joint ventures.
I like JV’s but have found that I like my profits a little more and if I can do the deal myself I like to try and do so..
I love JV’s but the problem is getting the other party interested. I have mailed and mailed some people and they wont say “no” just “I am busy, and I will do it next week”.
Jv’s are a good way to make some decent money, but at the same time it is hard ot give away too however.
[…] Form Joint Ventures for profit. You create (ebook, membership site, service, etc.) and then team up with someone who really knows how to market or someone who has a really large readership. Here’s a really good post by Yaro on why Joint Ventures are the way to go! […]