8.2.2 Exit Pop-ups

Exit pop-ups have become an increasingly popular way for Internet-based companies to work together. The fact is only a tiny percentage of the people who visit your site will actually give you money. The rest will just click straight through. The problem is that you’re paying for all of those users. Whether you’re buying them on a search engine, an advertisement or some other deal, you’re paying. The more ways you can find to turn those users into money, the better.

Exit pop-ups present another website to a user as soon as s/he leaves your site. The advantage is that your users aren’t bothered until they actually leave (in which case they’re no longer your users), and you can choose which pages generate the pop-up. So if a user comes to your home page and then clicks away, they get offered your joint venture; if they purchase, they don’t.

On the downside, most exit pop-ups are with competitors which means you’re getting good users but giving them extra business. Users also find them annoying.

You can approach another site directly to arrange an exit pop-up joint venture, or you can use any one of a number of different companies to join a wide ring of sites offering the same service. webTrafficSwap.com for example, gives you two users for every three that leave your site. They also make sure the users you receive are well-targeted and unique. They’re a pretty useful site if this is the way you want to go.

8.2.3 Plug Your Partners

There’s no need to be too subtle with joint ventures. There’s nothing wrong with using your email list to simply send a marketing letter to your subscribers to plug your partner’s products. You'll have to negotiate a good deal for this in return-one that includes a mailout of at least a similar scale.

Ultimately, a successful joint venture depends on providing services that are truly complementary. Offline for example, a computer technician could make a deal with a computer store offering customers free installations and advice in the first three months after their purchase. He’d get access to a pool of potential customers; the store gets an extra service to offer its users. Online you can use similar special offers to truly boost the power of your partnerships.

 

The best way to make your joint ventures truly successful is to use exclusivity. Offer your users something they can’t get anywhere else, even if it’s someone else’s services, and you make your users feel that they’re getting a real value by knowing about your site. Of course, if you want your partner to give something truly valuable to your users, you’ll have to do the same for them. That’s not really a problem though. You don’t have to give them all gold watches, but you can offer them a discount or a special offer.

For example, I get a newsletter every week from a marketing guru. Just about every edition he sends me contains at least one offer of a book or some other product at a bargain rate. Those products come from his joint venture partners, and I assume that he’s doing the exact same thing with his products on their newsletters. I get a lot of newsletters, but his is one I always read. I never know what sort of offer I’m going to be made next, and I know that I’m getting a real value in return for my free subscription. If you’ve got a good relationship with a joint venture partner, these are easy to arrange.

Whenever you enter a deal, whether it’s listing a keyword on a search engine, buying a banner ad, or entering into a joint venture, it’s crucial to track your progress.

The only kind of joint venture you should enter into is an equal one. There’s no point in sending thousands of users to a site that only sends them back in the hundreds. You’re going to wonder what you’re getting out of the deal and if you can’t get more somewhere else. You probably can.

How you track the responses will depend on the particular joint venture. If you’re swapping users, any traffic monitoring script should keep you in touch. Otherwise, you’ll have to monitor sales-ultimately, the best way to monitor your progress.

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