Formation of profitable joint ventures

You won’t be involved in internet marketing long before you see the term “Joint Venture”. You may be familiar with the term from its application in the business world, but don’t see how it would apply to Internet marketing.

It’s actually one of the most exciting ways to drive targeted web traffic you’ll find.

For the purposes of the definition, a joint venture could be said to be an operation involving two or more Internet marketers, each contributing unique resources for their mutual benefit. That may sound a bit stretched, so look at it this way. Let’s say you and your neighbor need to plant trees in your respective backyards. He only has a wheelbarrow and you only have a shovel. Neither of you can do the job effectively by yourself, but together you can get the job done for both of you. That’s a joint venture (backyard variety!).

Similarly, in Internet marketing, each of you brings something that the other lacks, so you both benefit by getting more sales, site visitors, and subscribers. In most cases, this is a product and a list. You may have created an explosive eBook (like this one!), but since you’re new to marketing, you don’t have a huge list of people who might be interested in your eBook. But you have a friend who also does online marketing and has a list of 5000 subscribers who have already expressed interest in your ebook topic. In a simple joint venture, you send emails to your list about your ebook and keep a commission on any sales. You get a percentage of each sale and you get a lot of targeted traffic to your site. Traffic can prove to be more valuable in the long run than your immediate eBook sales. That’s because if you have a cool site set up to entice visitors to leave their email address, a good chunk of their friends’ list becomes your list!

Joint ventures are often more complex than the simple one described above. You will see a lot of joint ventures involving multiple marketers, maybe a dozen or more. Sometimes a product doesn’t even sell: the main goal is to drive traffic to sellers’ websites and build their subscription lists. In this type of joint venture, each marketer contributes some product that he sells or owns. So the JV can proceed in any number of ways. The marketer(s) with the listing(s) may set up a contest, where the winner(s) get all the products. Another way is to offer participants a choice of one or more of the products if they visit all of the websites involved and sign up for all of the marketers’ subscription lists.

You can also do ad or article trades (assuming you and your JV partner have an ezine or newsletter). You can offer an eBook you’ve written to another seller to give away on your site. It has your name and affiliate links in it, and you can give the ebook more value and a viral quality by allowing the recipient to change some of the links to theirs so they want to pass it on. Your JV partner, in turn, has something of value to offer your site visitors or subscribers. These are just a few possibilities; the options are limited only by your imagination. To summarize, here are some general types of joint ventures to think about.

Cross Promotion: Promote each other’s products or services, such as ezine ads in each other’s ezines.

Co-development: Work together with another marketer to create a product, such as a book, that both of you can sell.

Product Endorsement – ​​Pay a percentage of profits to your partner who endorses your product on their listing.

Cooperative List Building: Similar to cross-promotion, but focuses on building each other’s subscription lists.

Regardless of the details, all entrants get a huge number of visitors to their sites and the opportunity for their acceptance lists to grow dramatically.

Are you ready to start a joint venture?

There are several things to consider before launching into your first JV. You must first select the correct JV partner. A wrong choice can spell disaster for your project. It’s best to start with people and companies you already know and trust. If you have already decided on all the parameters of your joint venture, it will be easier to choose the partner – it is someone who can complement what you already have.

Using a simple example, if you have the hot eBook, you need a partner who has a list, not another hot eBook. But if you have bigger plans for your first JV, you may want to partner with another eBook owner and together find additional JV partners with complementary resources. To help you brainstorm and select additional JV partners, talk to your marketing friends about your JV idea and see what suggestions they might have.

If you can’t find the JV partner you need among your friends or business acquaintances, you may need to look for them in other ways. If you subscribe to multiple ezines (and you should!), your publishers may be good candidates since presumably you’re subscribing to ezines that focus on your area of ​​interest. If you don’t know of any good ezines that target your market, check out http://www.directoryofezines.com/.

What about your JV details? That will vary greatly depending on the type of business you have in mind, but here are some general guidelines. If you are going to offer a commission on sales, keep in mind that the average is around 50%. This may seem high, but to reaffirm the old adage, would you rather have 50% of the profits from 100 sales or 100% from none? You are unlikely to attract serious JV partners if you only offer 15 or 20% commission. Also, you are unlikely to attract many quality JV partners if your commission is less than $25-30. So a $10 eBook just isn’t a good attraction for JVs. And when you’re talking to someone about a JV, if you’re going to propose to provide a product, offer it for free so they can properly evaluate it, don’t expect them to pay for it.

When you’re ready to get in touch with site or ezine owners you don’t know, you need to create a good JV proposal letter. Remember that they are busy like you and will not read a long letter, so keep it short. Since the recipient probably regularly receives JV offers, you need to make yours stand out.

Below is a sample JV proposal that you can learn from. Of course, it will need to be modified to fit the details of your proposed JV. In addition to an email (or instead of one), try faxing a copy to your potential partner; it’s more likely to catch your eye.

Dear ________,

My name is ______ and I visited your website at [http://www.________.com] today and was very impressed with the quality and content of your internet marketing articles. The article on _________________ was especially helpful to me. I run the site _______________ in [http://www._____________.com] and I would like to offer you a free copy of my package. I would also like to discuss the possibility of a joint venture between our companies that could significantly increase your website revenue. Please call me at ____________ or email me at __________________ as soon as possible.

Thank you, ____________ ________@____________.com [http://www.___________.com]