Joint ventures are a great way to promote your product without having to spend a lot of money up front on traffic. You can leverage your own resources to multiply your own promotional efforts, and you can benefit others by helping them with their own promotions.
Profitable joint ventures are a win-win situation for both parties. Done correctly, a joint venture can be extremely beneficial for everyone involved.
In this post, you’re going to learn what a joint venture really is, how to use them profitably, and how to find people who would love to be your joint venture partner.
Remember, a joint venture should be beneficial to both parties. Make sure you focus equal time on making your joint venture partners happy, and they will reward you with more traffic than you could ever get on your own!
What is a Joint Venture?
A joint venture is a mutually-beneficial relationship in which one party promotes the product of another party, and in return the party whose product is promoted agrees to similarly reciprocate.
In some ways, being a JV partner is like being an affiliate. You’re promoting someone else’s product in exchange for compensation, but instead of being paid in cash, you are paid by having your own product promoted in return.
Usually, joint ventures involve email lists. This isn’t always true, but in the majority of cases it is. In the next section, we’re going to take a look at some of the different types of joint ventures.
All JVs should be equally beneficial to both parties. If one party benefits far more than the other party, it can’t be mutually beneficial and you probably won’t be able to JV with that person again in the future. Build relationships, not money!
Types of Joint Ventures
There are many different ways to develop mutually-beneficial joint ventures. We’re going to look at a few of the ways you can build the most effective joint ventures.
Email Joint Ventures
The most common type of joint venture is when two parties who have email lists of similar sizes agree to email their own lists for each other. Let’s say you have an email list of about 5,000 people and you meet someone who has a list of around 7,000 people.
Chances are good that a good portion of your list will not be on their list and vice versa. That means each of you could reach many more people by cooperating and sending emails out for each other.
Email joint ventures work well as long as lists are within about 50% of each other. If you have a list of 10,000 people, you could JV with someone with 15,000 people or someone with 12,500 people, but not 20,000 people or 5,000 people.
If one party has more than 50% more subscribers, both parties may not feel satisfied. You can JV with anyone who will agree to JV with you, but it’s a good idea to make sure all of your JVs are as mutually-beneficial as possible to keep the relationship preserved for the future.
Traffic Exchanges
If you don’t have an email list, but you do have a website or blog with significant traffic, you can do a traffic exchange with someone else in your niche with similar traffic.
Generally, the traffic you send to your JV partner won’t be exactly on par with what they send you. Even if both websites have the same amount of traffic, visitors aren’t likely to respond evenly to different offers.
As long as both parties understand going into the business relationship that there is no way to guarantee equal response, traffic exchanges can definitely be beneficial. Just do your best to make sure you reciprocate as evenly as possible and both parties should be relatively satisfied.
Cross Promotions
When you release a product, you can form a partnership with someone who has a product that complements your product well. Let’s say your product is a book about losing weight with a low-calorie diet. You could do a cross promotion with someone who offers a calorie counter software program.
They could promote your program as the best weight loss program to work with their software, and you could promote their software as the best software to use to keep track of calories with people who are using your weight loss system.
Cross promotions are another type of mutually-beneficial relationship that can work really well. Again, both parties need to understand that the response they receive or the money they make may not be perfectly aligned with the other party’s outcome. There is no way to ensure a perfectly even reciprocation, but that doesn’t mean both parties can’t be happy.
Finding JV Partners
Perhaps the hardest part of joint venturing is finding people to form JV partnerships with. It can be very difficult to find JV partners, especially if you don’t already have a big name in your niche.
TIP: Need to build up your Expert Status? – Check out this post
When you contact potential JV partners, you need to make sure to let them know what’s in it for them. Don’t talk extensively about yourself. Don’t talk extensively about your product. Talk about what you can do for them.
You need to make sure you let them know why they should JV with you. While it is important to tell them a bit about yourself and your product, you should focus on why it would be beneficial for them.
Now, let’s take a look at a few ways to find potential JV partners. There are many other ways, but we’re just going to take a look at some of the easiest and most popular ways to find potential JV partners.
Contacting Potential JV Partners
One of the easiest ways to find JV partners is to locate people in your niche that have large email lists or high-traffic websites or blogs and contact them.
Many websites have contact forms or pages you can use. You may be able to find email addresses or telephone numbers. If not, you can check WHOIS.net. You may be able to get contact information that way.
Forums
Webmaster forums and JV forums are great for finding potential JV partners. There are forums dedicated specifically to JVs, and general webmasters forums can also be helpful.
Try these:
http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=5
http://www.v7n.com/forums/joint-ventures/
JV Brokers
Brokers specialize in getting joint venture partners together. They will often charge a fee for the service, but that fee can be well worth it if you are able to find good partners.
Tracking Results
In order to ensure that your joint ventures are as profitable as possible, you need a way to track the results you get from each partner. You want to ensure that your partners are living up to their part of the bargain, and you want to make sure you know how well they performed in case you JV with them at a later date.
Instead of having JV partners send traffic directly to your domain, you should have them send traffic through a special link so you can track results. This could be an affiliate link (depending on your payment platform or shopping cart) or if you have software that can track it, this can work well.
Tip: Try ClickMeter it’s a great service you can use to monitor, compare and optimize all your marketing links in one place.
Or… If you have a WordPress blog and don’t have special software that can track results, you can download and install Pretty Link Pro – It’s an easy to use blog plugin that will let you redirect traffic through a special link and will track the traffic that goes through each link. It’s not as comprehensive as ClickMeter but it will allow you to easily measure the results you get from each partner.
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Is Joint Venture Marketing Worth It?
You bet it is, imagine having the biggest super affiliates in your niche promoting YOUR product. Imagine how much money you’d make if the most well-known marketers teamed up with you. This is the power of partner traffic, and the sky is the limit!
The traffic is highly responsive.
Your marketing partners have spent months or even years developing relationships with their newsletter subscribers, social media followers and blog readers. So when they promote your product, it’s like these prospects are getting a recommendation from a good friend. They totally trust your marketing partner. And that means partner traffic can create some off-the-charts conversion rates for you!
If your partner traffic strategy is focused on your affiliate program, then you only need to share a commission with your partners after they make a sale and put money in your pocket. That means you can use partner traffic even if you have zero dollars in your advertising budget!
Best of all, there are plenty of ways to take advantage of partner traffic which are totally FREE. No commissions, no payments, no fees. Just lots of high-quality traffic flowing into your site for free!
And here’s another really good reason to take advantage of partner traffic…
- If you use paid advertising, you always need to pay more money to get more traffic.
- If you use a strategy like SEO, you need to constantly tweak your strategy to accommodate the ever-changing SEO algorithms. (It’s a lot of work.)
None of this is an issue with partner traffic…
Once you’ve landed a partner and developed a good relationship with that person, he or she will keep sending you traffic and sales for years to come. Just drop an email to your affiliates when you launch a new product, and you’ll enjoy a huge sales surge. It’s crazy how well it works!
Best of all… as you make more sales, affiliates start finding YOU. They’ll clamor to join your affiliate program. They’ll beg to partner up with you. And your traffic grows naturally and exponentially over time as your affiliate program blossoms!
So all of this sounds pretty good, right?
But maybe you’re wondering HOW to do it. Specifically:
- How do you find good partners?
- How do you convince them to join your team, especially if they’re in-demand super affiliates?
- How do you motivate them to keep promoting for you long after a product launch is over?
Here’s the good news…
I’ve got the answers to these questions and many more, and you are now just a click away from discovering them for yourself…
Check out Partner Traffic Blueprint
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