Chapter 8 - Joint Ventures:  Success through Partnering

Joint ventures have already been mentioned briefly previously in this ebook, but in this chapter we’re going to look at these kinds of partnerships in much more detail.  The importance of the role joint ventures in creating a profitable online business cannot be stressed enough.  It doesn't matter what products or services you’re selling, there are always people that you can partner up with in a way that will bring benefits to both of you without costing you a penny.  It’s those savings that boost your profits and reduce your costs.

In this chapter, you will find out how to find joint venture partners, be exposed to a number of different ideas and techniques you can put into practice, and find out how to keep track of your deals.

8.1 Choosing Your Partners

Selecting the right partners is crucial for the success of a joint venture. As always, the best bets are businesses whose services complement your own. If you’re selling CD’s for example, you could do a deal with company that sells audio equipment, or a music magazine; if you’re offering home-made furniture, you could partner up with other home furnishing companies.

Essentially, you want to be sure that you’re both appealing to the same kind of market but not directly competing.

One way to find partners is to figure out where they advertise. As you surf around sites related to your business, you’ll probably notice that you keep seeing promotions from the same sites. Those are the kind of people you want to team up with.

In fact, you don’t even have to look further than your inbox. You probably already get a whole bunch of newsletters from companies in related industries, and are already pretty familiar with their business. Your first choices for joint ventures then will probably be easy to think of-and they’ll probably be the best ones, too.

If you want to expand the scope of your partners beyond the immediately familiar though, it’s worth downloading Alexa. This is a neat little software tool that plugs in to your browser and ranks websites based on the amount of traffic they receive. That makes it pretty useful when you want to be sure a potential partner has a decent amount of users to send you. It’s also free.

You can then do a keyword search, pick the top ten sites, and use Alexa to get an idea of how big those sites really are. Alexa will even tell you the name of the webmaster and give you a contact number.

Of course, it’s one thing to get in touch with a potential partner, it’s quite another to get them to agree. In my experience though, this isn’t really a problem. About 80 percent of the people I contact already know me and understand exactly what I have in mind. Once your business is up and running, you’ll probably find that’s true, too. The whole negotiation takes nothing more than a couple of emails and maybe a five minute phone call.

Even a cold call gets pretty decent results. In general, I start with an email introducing my site and suggesting a partnership. It’s pretty rare not to get a reply at all, and about half of my proposals result in a deal.

So what sort of partnership do I suggest? In practice, that depends on who I’m writing to. Clearly, you want to make sure that you create a joint venture that uses your partner’s strengths to strengthen your own services as well as your profits.

8.2 Joint Venture Techniques

The next three sub-sections (8.2.1, 8.2.2, and 8.2.3) we'll cover three different joint venture techniques that can be used regularly for profit:  joint subscriptions, exit pop-ups, and plugging your partners.

This is a newsletter joint venture.  One of your website visitors comes to your site and signs up for your newsletter. They then get a thank you message inviting them to sign up for other newsletters that they might find interesting. Those other newsletters are the newsletters of your joint venture partners. In return for an advertisement on your site, you get the same on theirs. You want to be careful not to pester the user so the invitation needs to be kept simple and well targeted.