We started off the series with this article which gave a good overview of the basics of getting together a joint venture (“JV”) deal. Now we can look at more specifics.
Affiliate Program Versus A Joint Venture
One of the most common misconceptions is that people often confuse a joint venture with a simple affiliate program. They are not the same thing.
If you approach a possible partner with a typical 30-40% commission, you aren’t making a joint venture proposal you are pushing your affiliate program.
You save joint venture proposals for influential sites that could really put a huge boost in your profits. You want an influential site for obvious reasons. You need to keep in mind however that:
- They get approached pretty often for joint venture deals
- They are not willing to risk upsetting the members of their site or list with a risky or half thought out idea
- They probably won’t even consider your offer unless you make it well worth their while.
Finding Possible Joint Venture Partner
As you run your online business, you should always be aware of other businesses that could make good joint venture partners.
Frequently you are going to run across their names during your day to day business. When you have repeated exposure to other businesses with a similar focus as yours, they are worth looking at to decide if they are approachable for a joint venture deal.
It is important to keep in mind that joint ventures can happen online as well as off the Internet. Although these articles will focus primarily on online joint venture deals, you should always be thinking about joint venture deals that happen off line too.
Your “homework assignment” is to start paying attention to other influential sites and people online who are in your field:
- As you visit forums related to your business, do you keep seeing certain names come up repeatedly?
- Do you subscribe to any email newsletters that you really enjoy?
- Is there some sites that are considered “the place to go” for a certain source of information related to your online business?
- Put yourself in your prospective customers shoes. Envision someone needing exactly what you have to offer. What steps do they go about to finally get to you?
Study the sites that they are likely to come across before and after coming to yours. These could make some potentially good joint venture partners.
When looking for potential partners, you want to focus on those with these qualities:
- High traffic site
- Big email list base of subscribers
- A compatible product or service which you aren’t a direct competitor of
Aim For High Traffic Joint Venture Partners
To figure out how much traffic a site is getting, you can get one of two free tools to install on your web browser. You should download the free Alexa toolbar and also the google toolbar.
Both of these free tools show how popular the site is that you are thinking about approaching.
After installing Alexa’s toolbar, you can look at its ranking. The more traffic it gets, the lower the ranking number will be. So the top visited site on the Internet should have an Alexa rating of 1.
This can help you determine how much traffic a particular site gets compared to others. As a general rule, if they have a rating of 30,000 or less, they are getting a good amount of web traffic.
Until Next Time…
Start taking a look around for possible joint venture partners. Make note of them and start saving their information by either bookmarking their page or starting a spreadsheet with the information.
We will find out the techniques for joint venture approaches that work. You don’t want to blow your chances before they even get started so that is the next article in this series.