To grow your business, collaborating with a Joint Venture partner allows you to ping a totally new audience who is interested in your topic.
Of course, the most important challenge in this option is to find a great collaborating partner. Connect with a colleague with a sizable footprint AND works in a related (but not identical) topic area.
Working with a direct competitor is difficult because you’ll run the risk of producing similar products and fighting for the same one-on-one clients. But if you’re in similar fields, it’s safe to promote each other’s products or classes without any fear of diminishing your own following.
Unfortunately, many online business owners will use the size of your email list as a determining factor of whether a collaboration will be a good move. As we all know, having a monster size list doesn’t mean they’re converting, whereas a small but targeted list can be worth its weight in gold because they love almost every offer you send.
However, someone who has 150K names may really hesitate to join someone with only 20K names on their list simply because they may be afraid that you’re trying to poach customers. When approaching someone about a Joint Venture opportunity, you always want to frame the opportunity as a win-win for both of you. If your chosen prospect feels like you’re just trying to get in front of her audience without any benefit to them, move on to another JV prospect.
When we talk of collaborating, this doesn’t mean you’re committing to building an empire with this person. Go back to marketing basics 101 and find natural ways to collaborate to get in front of these new audiences. Here are some ideas:
Swap blog posts with your Joint Venture partner.
Also known as “guest blogging”, you publish your partner’s blog post on your own blog, and they publish YOUR post on their blog. You’re providing relevant information to their audience, and your partner gets to take a day off from writing. You can turn this into a summertime-only gig or schedule once per week or month. Take advantage of using the author’s bio to include a link to your freebie or webinar.
Take over each other’s social media feeds for a day or week.
This is a fun way to share your partner’s perspective on topics other than business. Of course, agree beforehand which topics should be kept off the feeds (usually emotionally divisive topics like politics or religion) and agree upon how many times a day you’ll both post. As always, answer questions or respond appropriately to other comments, but use your own name.
Record a video together.
Or, if you’re adventurous, a series of short videos with calls to action at the end. Video doesn’t mean you and your Joint Venture partner have to be on screen. You can each divide up a certain topic into smaller bits and record your own video with a voice-over. These can be uploaded to each of your social media accounts and promoted to your audiences.
If you want to both appear on-screen at the same time – like how online summit interviews are conducted – use software such as Zoom to pre-record your video or be Live if you both prefer live streaming. You can also add some humor to your videos, find an animator who can draw your caricatures or turn you into cartoon characters while you both provide the voiceovers.
If you’ve worked together well on a few small projects, you may be up for the challenge of taking on bigger challenges. As the old saying goes, “Two heads are better than one,” and you can zip through the workload faster, too, by having a partner. The following ideas are bigger in terms of scope and preparation, particularly because you’ll offer paid products as opposed to just offering free content in the last ideas.
You’ll have more details to work out, such as whose shopping cart will you use; whose PayPal account will receive the payments; how will the payments be split and in what time frame; who’s email service will hold the list?
Host a webinar with your Joint Venture partner.
This requires a bit more time to plan and produce than recording a short video but can be equally beneficial to you and your Joint Venture partner. Planning is imperative so you know how the webinar room charges will be split:
- who’s creating the webinar slides
- who’s writing the email sequence
- which product is getting promoted
- will you split sales with the partner in exchange for their collaboration
- how often will you both promote the webinar, etc.
Don’t go into this plan blindly or you’ll likely come out resenting your partner if you feel they didn’t pull their own weight.
Host an online event, such as a bundle or online summit.
Much like hosting a webinar, planning how to split up the work and the profits is imperative for the collaboration to succeed. These types of events also require a bit more work since you’re dealing with contributors and guest speakers respectively. But that doesn’t mean it’s an impossible feat. One way to split the work is for each partner to focus on their own strengths. For instance, if one partner is a real people person, they can oversee contacting guests. If the other partner is a real behind-the-scenes guru, they can create the landing page and stay in touch with guests via email.
Create a membership site with your Joint Venture partner.
Membership sites require quite a bit of interaction and content creation, which should be split equally between the two partners. You’ll need to decide what type of content you’ll produce each month as well as how it will be produced. For example, will you hire a Joint Venture production team, or will one partner’s team be responsible for all the production? Memberships are much like webinars in that they need to keep the members’ attention for an extended period, so creativity is important here. You’ll also need a plan for those who give up their membership; what can you offer them to keep them within your funnel?
This brings us to this last very important point: Don’t create fluff!
Make sure the content you create is interesting and valuable. You’re not fooling anyone by talking in circles or over-promising and under-delivering. Customers are savvy these days and if you’re not producing top-notch content, they will let you know! Build your business and your reputation based on the content you create and the desire to help your target audience instead of focusing on how to make a quick buck.
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