Earlier this week I received an email from a reader who was in dismay at the dismal response they'd received as a result of contacting potential joint venture partners with their proposal.

To cut a long story short, essentially they were trying to get mailing list owners to promote their new product to their lists in a revenue sharing arrangement. A great way to drive the sales in.

They had contacted several hundred mailing list owners and received only one interested response that didn't amount to anything. As soon as I saw what this person was doing, I quickly realised that they were making two fundamental mistakes that virtually guaranteed this poor result from the outset.

There are two key joint venture marketing concepts that you need to grasp if you want to see success with any joint venture marketing campaign you're trying to initiate. Failure to do so is going to set you up with some serious disappointment.

Here they are...

Key Concept One

The first concept is what I like to call the ³give $100 bucks & expect to only receive $50 bucks back² principal. It¹s the key to arranging any successful joint venture marketing campaign online.

If you want to secure more high performance joint venture partners working in your niche market, if you want them to take action & really put all of their effort into helping the new partnership work to it¹s maximum ability, then you need to give that partner (and/or partners) $100 bucks & only expect to receive $50 bucks back.

Now I¹m not taking about actual money here.

I¹m talking about benefits.  

The greater the number of benefits you can offer your joint venture partner, the more likely they are to jump in bed with you on your proposal.

Many people seem to be under the misconception that it¹s a privilege they¹re offering to the potential joint venture partner. That is, to actually participate in the proposal & partnership idea they¹ve put together.

They have ideas like ³there¹s no way I¹m offering commissions greater than 50%² and are steadfast on holding their ground when it comes to such issues.

The partner they¹re approaching can either take it or leave it, ³hell I¹m going to make them a ton of money².

This is completely the wrong attitude to take, and if you take it, you¹re severely limiting your success. This is in terms of both the partners you¹re actually able to secure to work with, and the actual results they will produce at the end of the day.

The way you MUST look at the relationship you¹re trying to strike up, and the results you¹re trying to achieve as a result of that relationship, is that those results wouldn¹t be possible without the partner you¹re approaching.

They¹re helping you & your online business.

It¹s not the other way around.

Sure, in a revenue sharing arrangement (as an example), the joint venture partner will make a nice perk (their actual cut of the revenue), but your share of that revenue would be non-existent without actually being able to secure that partner in the first place.

You might be thinking you¹d be able to find someone that would be willing to participate strictly on your terms, and sure you probably could, but why make it difficult for yourself to generate the results you¹re looking to achieve?

You¹ll be setting yourself up for 10 times the amount of work for 10 times less the return.

So you not only need to be flexible in what and "how much" you offer, but you should in fact work to pack your joint venture proposal with so many benefits, that you don¹t actually need to be put in a position that requires you to be flexible in the first place.

That is, you want to provide as many benefits as possible to your potential joint venture partner so they simply can¹t resist giving the proposed partnership a shot.

Look at it this way. The potential joint venture partner you¹re approaching probably doesn¹t need you.

In fact I guarantee you have competitors out there that they could work with to do the exact same thing you¹re proposing to the partner and produce the same results.  

Assuming you have a near identical product or service you¹re trying to market as your competitor (in terms of both the problem it solves for the customer and the quality of the product), and your competitor is offering the same partner an extra 10% in revenue sharing commissions, who do you think the partner would be more inclined to jump in bed with?

The competitor of course.

Now that¹s a bit of a simplistic example but I¹m trying to really drill this home here as it¹s so important. And I don¹t want you to think that this always means giving greater commissions to your revenue sharing partners.

The ³give $100 bucks & expect to only receive $50 bucks back² principal applies no matter what the type of joint venture arrangement you¹re trying to strike up. In fact here¹s a real example of what I¹m talking about.

In July 2003 I developed a software application which I planned to give away freely in order to generate leads (well actually new subscribers to my free newsletter). I had the whole range of marketing techniques in place to really drive this viral marketing lead generator out to as many targeted users as possible.

I optimized the site for the search engines. I organized the uploading of the software to the main software distribution sites. I researched a whole bunch of targeted keywords so I could run a pay-per-click advertising campaign. I had written a few content rich articles which I planned on submitting to newsletters and ezines for free publicity. I had the works covered.

But I knew that if I really wanted to make this thing fly as much as possible, and it minimum cost, I would need to bring some high performance joint venture partners on board. If I could get several large list owners to announce the lead generator to their own subscribers, then I¹d be able to get maximum results in minimum time and without any additional cost.

So what I decided to do was make this a "collective" lead generation tool. I would offer potential partners the ability to generate new subscribers to their own newsletters in exchange for announcing the software to their subscribers. If I could secure 5 such partners then that would be a tremendous amount of additional exposure at no cost.

So I setup a co-registration form on the site where I would plug my joint venture partners newsletter ³advertisements² into. This way, anyone who arrived to download the software, would first need to register it, and would then be directed to a page where they would be offered free subscriptions to my partner¹s newsletters.

Now I could¹ve stopped there. The benefit to the partners was clear. For a one time mailing to their list about this software, all visitors coming through this marketing funnel would be potential no-cost subscribers.

But I didn¹t stop there.

Instead, I also placed the same co-registration form into the actual software itself.

This means that no matter how someone actually got hold of my lead generator (they could download it from one of the popular download sites for example ­ bypassing the distribution site and the co-reg form on the site) my partners would have a good chance of also securing these people as new subscribers too.

And yes, it was. I managed to secure 5 strategic partners in my industry after contacting only 20 with the proposal. That¹s a pretty decent conversion ratio as I¹m sure you¹ll agree.

I also estimate that the actual results I achieved as a result of the entire project, that is traffic received, subscribers generated, and actual revenues obtained, would¹ve been close to 90% less if I hadn¹t brought a few joint venture partners on board with me.

Sure I could¹ve achieved the same results without these partners, but it would¹ve cost me a lot more for a smaller return on my investment.

Powerful stuff as I¹m sure you¹ll agree.

I should also mention that by making your proposed partnerships as beneficial as possible to potential partners, you¹ll not only be able to secure more high performers with less effort, but those partners will be inclined to help you make your mutually beneficial arrangement even more successful.

For example a massive 46% of all people passing through the marketing system I¹ve setup for this lead generation campaign subscribe to one or more of my partners newsletters.

This means that I actually generated close to 2,000 no-cost subscribers for more partners in less than 30 days. All this in exchange for their one time mailing PLUSŠ they¹re consistently generating new subscribers on a daily basis all at no cost.

Based on these results I was able to twist a few of the partners legs into making repeat announcements to their mailing lists, even though this was not a condition of initially partnering with me on the project, simply because they could see how well the partnership was working for them.

What¹s more, I am now working on numerous other joint venture arrangements with some of these business associates because they know I¹m not just making such proposals for my benefit.

So before you even begin thinking about setting up any type of joint venture marketing campaign of your own, you should always think about how you¹re going to provide as many benefits as possible to your potential joint venture partner to ensure they simply can¹t resist giving the proposed partnership a shot.

Give them $100 bucks & expect to only receive $50 bucks back.

Key Concept Two

The second key joint venture marketing concept is what I like to refer to as the ³keeping it smooth² principal. That is, making it as easy as possible for your joint venture partners to do what you want them to do. This is also vitally important.

You need to remove all potential hurdles that would make potential partners reluctant to participate in your proposal.

Many people I¹ve consulted with about successful joint venture marketing online seem to get past the first problem of actually getting potential partners interested in their proposals, only to find that they then have trouble getting those partners to take action on them.

If you make your joint venture partners jump through hoops to carry out what is required of them, then you¹ll find that you¹ll end up hurting the relationship and those partners will be less likely to put in the desired effort.

This means that if you¹re looking to form a revenue sharing arrangement, you need to have the systems in place to automatically track sales made.

If you¹re looking to get mailing list owners to send announcements or endorsements out to their lists regarding your proposal, write those announcements for them and invite the partner to customize it to suit their specific style.

If you¹re looking to exchange links with other sites, put your partner¹s link & description on your website prior to contacting. Then all they have to do is put your link up on their own site, and send you their preferred version of their link and description to edit if required.

Essentially you want the partner to be able do what you want them to do with as little effort as possible.

The easier it is for them to participate in your proposal, the more likely it is they will actually take action. This basically comes to down to good planning prior to contacting potential partners & setting up the required systems and structures necessary to take the proposal to completion.

If you master these two key concepts, then you literally can't go wrong when approaching joint venture partners. Partners who will actually perform.

If you do continue to have trouble however, even though you've made things as beneficial & as easy as possible, then it's likely you have to re-evaluate the fundamentals. Is your product or service up to scratch, how professional does your website and associated marketing systems look etc. Of course, these are things for another day...

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