Joint Ventures – The Business Model of the Future

Making a living on the internet is hard. I started online in the mid 90’s and it was like the California gold rush. If you got there, stuck your pick in the ground, you found gold. But, just like the gold rush, when more and more people jumped in it made the potential riches so much harder to attain.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining (well, maybe just a little), the point is you must work much smarter now in order to become successful. I don’t think I have met one internet marketer that did not complain that his or her site was not getting enough traffic. The common thread is “I know my product is great, I sell X percent of the people that visit, I just don’t get enough traffic”.

Is that you???

Back to those early days, traffic was the easy part. Throw up a site and send some pay per click traffic to it for about 5¢ a click. Five cents! Or just place a few links on other sites and directories and your site would end up on the first page of Google.

There are no more 5¢ clicks and getting on the first page of Google can be a daunting task. So what do you do? Joint ventures are the answer.

The “get rich guru” crowd on the internet has been using joint ventures for some time now. These mega gurus with lists of 200,000 or 300,000 or more get together and email their lists whenever one of them has a new product. One of them launches a new product and they all mail their lists. Typically, they share in the sales 50/50 so everyone is a winner.

Have you got a list of 200,000 or more? Me either. Most of us in this network have lists with 500 to 5.000 names on them (based on the last edition of the Self Growth Joint Venture Directory). So, if we don’t have a mega list the fact is anyone with a mega list isn’t going to want to mail to their list if we mail to ours. So, you are going to need to find people who have good products that are in the same situation as you are.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Build a ListYou’ve heard that time and time again so you created a “newsletter” and a sign up form on your site. But, you get one or two sign ups a week. It’s going to take years just to get to 1000 names. Here’s a dirty little secret: People don’t read newsletters, and they don’t sign up for them like they did in the past.

The only way to generate a list is to give something away. And it must be valuable, not just a newsletter or a downloadable report. I would suggest you take one of the best products you have developed and offer it free. Think, why do supermarkets give free samples of foods away at the end of the aisle? If you think it is good, you will buy more. Your products are no different. And, let’s face it; if you are not selling a ton of these products now, what does it hurt to give it away?

Finally, your list must be setup in a “follow up auto responder” like Aweber or IConcact. Every week or so, it’s important to send quality information to your list including offers talked about in #3 below.

2. Setup an Affiliate ProgramTheoretically, if you setup a joint venture where you will mail your list someone else’s offer if they mail your offer, you should not need to share profits. He could keep all of his sales and you could keep all of yours. But this arrangement seldom works. It’s based on total trust between the two parties and does not take into consideration the size of the two lists and many more variables.

The best situation is he becomes an affiliate of you and you become one of his affiliates. That way everyone gets paid on the exact number of sales they generate.

Most shopping carts have an affiliate function built right into them, so it’s easier than ever to set one up. There is also third party software you can install and affiliate networks you can join for tracking.

3. Look for Long Term RelationshipsThe “mega guru” example above is not the best template when you are looking for joint ventures. In my opinion, you need to find long term relationships. Someone who will keep sending traffic to your web site over time. These really don’t need to be big players. Again, you probably will only be able to work these deals with sites that are in the same situation as you are in.

The key here is they should add you to their auto responder email sequence and you should add each of them to your autoresponder email sequence. Then, automatically, X number of days after someone joins your list they get a message about one of your joint venture’s offers.

You won’t get a flood of traffic overnight, but you will get some traffic with this method. Let’s say it’s only 5 or 10 people a week that visit your site from one of these joint venture partners. That’s 20-40 per month. Now get 25 of these joint ventures going and you get 500 to 1000 new visitors a month.

The key is it’s perpetual, some like to use the term “evergreen”. Once the emails are setup in your autoresponder, every new prospect that joins your list automatically gets the offer from your joint ventures over time. At the same time, all your joint venture partners are doing the same. It’s a win-win situation.