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Articles Index >> Marketing
How to Secure Lucrative Joint Ventures
by Michael Cheney
A joint venture is simply where you approach a large representative in your
sector who can promote your product or service for you. The idea is that you
give them a percentage of the profits of all sales that are made as a result
of their promotion.
A joint venture is slightly different from an affiliate marketing program because
it’s on a larger scale. With affiliate marketing you would recruit hundreds,
if not thousands, of affiliates who would promote your product on their websites.
With a joint venture, what you’re looking for is one large player or a
few large players who have a mailing list of tens of thousands of people that
they can send out an email to promoting your product.
A lot people see joint ventures as a short cut to success on the Internet.
The problem with this approach is that it’s just not the case. Before
you try and secure a joint venture you need to have a proven track record. Your
product needs to have been online and been on sale for an amount of time.
I get approached for joint ventures all the time and it really hacks me off
when people do this and their products aren’t even live yet. Don’t
expect people to invest time promoting your product if it hasn’t even
been tested and doesn’t have testimonials.
Your product needs to have proven testimonials from people that are happy with
the product to prove to the potential joint venture party that it’s worth
promoting. You don’t just need testimonials from customers. Ideally, you
need a testimonial from another joint venture party who has promoted your product
and made a lot money as a result.
Obviously when you first start out trying to get a joint venture it’s
impossible to get a testimonial. It’s a “chick in an egg”
situation, so you’ll need to offer a good commission rate in return for
somebody coming on as your joint venture partner. Once they do, get a testimonial
from them on how effective and how successful it’s been.
There’s an industry given which is, you should only think about securing
a joint venture if you have a dollar value of one dollar per visitor. What that
means is you look at how much your website earns in a given period; let’s
say a month. Then you look at how many visitors you’ve had in that month.
You divide the two and the resulting figure is how much revenue every visitor
earns you on average. That value needs to be one dollar or more per visitor
before you start thinking about creating a joint venture, as it will be worthwhile
for other people to promote your product.
The sole question they’ll have in their mind when they’re considering
whether or not to become your joint venture and promote your product is: What’s
in it for them? So give them all the details that you can. Tell them about your
dollar value per visitor. Make sure you have a proven product with testimonials.
Inform them of your conversion rate from visitor into sale and target website
owners who already know this stuff and have large lists.
Don’t try and convince somebody who’s not up on the information
of affiliate marketing and joint venture marketing to become your joint venture.
You don’t want to waste your time educating people. You want to get a
joint venture party that already understands the principles and opportunities
that joint ventures bring. As with recruiting affiliates, you need to make it
as easy as possible for them to promote your product, so have prewritten ads,
banners, images, tracking URLs, etc.
I wish you all the best with your joint venture activities.
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