Joint Ventures
There is real value in joint ventures. We have put them in this Traffic section as they generally involve an exchange of customers or traffic.
Take care that you pick the right partners!
Look for businesses that are complementary to yours. If you are in the gardening site business there is no point is signing up with a language tutorial site! But you could get great leverage from a gardening tools site – as they could from you. The basic rule is you should be appealing to the same group of end customers.
You can find potential partners in your own bulk and regular inboxes. These may well be the people who see you as a potential customer. You can check up on how vigorous they are as a potential partner by looking up their site ranking on Alexa.com. if they have a ranking reasonably near your own or higher then go for it. You can use this to check out those who approach you as well.
How do you contact them? Well by email with an outline of your suggestion.
What are you offering?
There are three common schemes:
A shared offering, for example a shared newsletter or product that is jointly named and marketed. An SEO company for example may wish to provide their customers with a wider range of ideas on what can be done with their site. If you are in the business of marketing ideas this could be a valuable joint relationship.
A transfer of customers. For example, a customer has finished at your site. When they move away they get an exit pop-up that introduces them to the partner site. If they have bought something at your site then they will have moved to the payment processing system and this ext pop-up will not work.
Mutual promotion. If you have an email list through a newsletter say, you can make offers of your partner’s products to your list. This is not that much different from affiliate marketing, only there is no cash involved, just a sharing of customers.
Virtually any situation that could involve payment in traffic is a potential candidate for a joint venture.
Measure the success
We have beaten this to death. Whatever you do, measure it. Try to find out what traffic actually came from your partner.
Is this for Newbie’s?
It depends. For a partnership to work you must have some degree of equity. Now that could be from the excellence of your product and its role as a ‘special offer’ with your partner, if you do not have matching traffic t share. Whatever your current position it doesn’t cost anything to approach a potential partner.
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