Finding Joint Venture Opportunities
Joint ventures (also known as JVs) are partnerships between two or more people, usually with the purpose of cross-promoting products. There are various types of JVs, and what you offer your JV partners will depend on what you have to bring to the table, and what you’re looking for in return.
Most JVs are really affiliate relationships. You have a product – your JV partner has a forum, website, or email list. Your JV partner sends an email to his list about your product, or puts an ad on their website, blog, forum, etc.
Then you pay that JV partner a commission for the sales he generates. Although this type of relationship probably shouldn’t be called a “JV,” a lot of people do refer to it as such – probably because the product owner approached the JV partner to ask for a promotion instead of the product owner just deciding on his own to become an affiliate.
The most common form of true JV is when two parties with email lists or websites exchange ads. Usually, both parties have lists of comparable sizes in the same general niche, and each person agrees to send a mailing out to their list on the other person’s behalf. You send their message to your list, and they send your ad out to theirs.
Joint ventures are great, because they allow you to go far beyond what you could accomplish by simply promoting to your own list, or on your own site. If you have a list of 10,000 people, and 200 people buy the product you’re advertising, you have a 2{495e61a8be0728ba5e4172c16a68a1b05f8df91b32cf783b0a6ac5a97f0ba813} conversion rate.
If you could find ten other people with lists of 10,000 people to send out your ad, and you also experience a 2{495e61a8be0728ba5e4172c16a68a1b05f8df91b32cf783b0a6ac5a97f0ba813} conversion, you could make ten times the money you’d have made by sending out a message only to your list of subscribers.
Of course, in many niches, lists will often have duplicates. In the Internet marketing niche, many webmasters are on dozens of different lists. When a major launch goes out, you might get five or ten messages about the exact same product on the same day.
But no two mailing lists will be exact duplicates. Even in the same niche, people can attract different audiences. JVs are a great way of reaching more people than you’d otherwise be able to reach on your own.
If you’re interested in doing a JV with someone, you should be well prepared before you write to him or her with your proposal. You must bring something to the table that is of value to the other person. A JV can be a cross promotion or a bartering situation, where each of you offers up a service or skill to jointly create and launch a co-branded product.