Thank You Sponsors And Network Recap For March 2006
It’s the end of another month so it’s time to thank the sponsors and recap the content from my network of blogs.
Thank You Sponsors
A big thank you to all the people and organizations who offered sponsorship and donations.
Blog4999.com - Want to rank on higher on the search engines, flood your website with sales, and improve your relationship with your customers in one step? - I’ll show you how, and most importantly, I’ll do ALL the work for you! Read More at www.Blog4999.com…
Blish.com - The easiest place to buy and sell digital content, including eBooks and Legal Forms.
WebBriefCase.com.au - If you run a home-based business, you MUST HAVE a good website. It’s that simple. Yet building your site can be very confusing… It doesn’t have to be that way! - Let me show you how to Make Your Own Web Site in 7 Easy Steps, with a Free Video Enhanced Course. Read more about WebBriefCase…
Content Recap
Here is what has been happening at Small Business Branding.
- Don’t Make My Mistake - Test Your Systems Regularly - A made a boo-boo with one of my email lists that cost me three weeks worth of subscribers. Read what happened and how to prevent it happening to you.
- How To Market Your Small Business With Blogs - I’ve been reading Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations book and it inspired me to write this article about blogging for small business.
- How Much Do You Love Your Business? - Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO goes a little bit crazy in this speech. Watch this video to see the man in action.
- Sell Benefits, Not Features - A gentle reminder about selling benefits to your customers and not focus on how good you are or your product is.
- The Small Business Success Secret - A special secret I use that is the key to a lot of my success online.
- 7 Tasty Tips To Market Your Small Business Offline - A short report listing 7 techniques you can use to market your business offline.
- Are You Forgetting To Backup? The Backup Checklist - A surprising thing happened to this blog one morning when I woke up - it had been replaced with another website (hacked!), which prompted me to write this piece on backing up vital things in your business. Includes a checklist.
Joint Ventures Are The Way To Go
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.
******
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
