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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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