JointVentures

 Creating True “Win-Win” Joint Ventures Online

By Yanik Silver 

You’ll hear the word “JV” tossed around and banted about – but most people use it completely wrong. In my opinion, a true joint venture is a partnership where two or more parties come together to create something that’s better and bigger than what they could do on their own.

Partnerships and real joint ventures have been very, very good to me, to the tune of millions of dollars in extra sales. In fact, this is has been one of the driving forces behind my business growth without hiring additional employees.

I don’t have room to cover all aspects of joint ventures, but I want to introduce to one idea that could have a significant impact on your bottom line.

***Joint Venture on Services***

Think of all the money-producing tasks that you don’t have time to do or you don’t have an affinity for. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head…

* AdWords/PPC * Direct Mail * Product Launches * Buying Advertising * Testing * Telemarketing * Affiliate Management and Recruitment * Product Creation * Search engine optimization * Publicity * Copywriting * Coaching * and so on

Each of these and more can become a joint venture of sorts with trusted individuals who will help you make more than you could make on your own. In fact, that’s one of the criteria for a good joint venture for a service is a task that can be paid out of additional profits and measured that way. I like that.

For example, I know one information marketer who joint ventured with a telemarketer to run a phone room. He pays them a large percentage per sale for the events and high-end products they sells, and that’s it. This venture brings in millions and millions of dollars of additional revenue, but he doesn’t have the headache of babysitting and training a bunch of telemarketers. Or if I joint venture with a partner to do search engine optimization for my sites, it’s a pretty clean relationship because I can simply give them their own affiliate id# and let them have at it.

Personally I’ve worked with several partners on these service joint ventures. The first one is with a friend of mine, Rob Olic, to help me run all my direct mailings.

--- Side note: I’ve harped on this before. If you are only using email and online marketing you are missing serious revenues and not maximizing your profit. ---

Now I don’t feel like tweaking copy, handling my mailing list, coordinating with vendors, etc. If I had employees this would be a function of one of them – but since I don’t want employees at the moment I’ve gone to partnerships.

So Rob does all those duties to make sure the piece gets in the mail. He’s also a good copywriter, so he’s written the teasers on envelopes, lift-notes, etc., all the little things needed to get a good direct mail piece out. Now I pay Rob based on results. I think that’s the best way because we are both in it together. If I do well – he does well.

I pay him a percentage of profits – which is figured by gross sales from the promotion less mailing costs (postage/printing/graphics), credit card fees and cost of goods. Rob also has a sliding scale of percentage depending on the total volume of sales generating via direct mail. Now if the direct mail is a postcard that drives people online – I just give him an affiliate id# to track the sales.

***Product Launch Partnership***

The other experience with partnering up on a service was just recently for the Underground DVD launch. I recruited one of my former Apprentices, Chris Zavadowski, to help coordinate and run the promotion launch. Chris was someone I knew got things done from working one-on-one with him. I approached him and offered a percentage of gross sales from the launch for taking care of activities like running my blog, posting to my blog, helping with messages on the blog, getting the video clips edited and online, coordinating with affiliate partners (we had individual pages/links for each partner), working with my tech guy, etc. Basically all the details and things I didn’t want to do. Chris was happy because he got a chance to work with me and learn some new things and I was happy because I was off running with the bulls in Spain one week before the launch and things were running without me.

Now one of the secrets was I wasn’t greedy. I gave Chris a very fair percentage of the sales. I don’t want to reveal the specific percentage, but I'll put it this way – it was enough to buy him a new car.

The other key aspect of working with partner on a service is to be specific in their duties and how they are going to be paid. You don’t want to upset people because of a misunderstanding later on. Chris knew he was paid on every DVD set sold except those sold via direct mail, because Rob was paid on that.

The other thing a good joint venture service partner brings are their own ideas and initiatives. Chris helped me come up with the idea behind the "real-time inventory countdown script" – and he spearheaded developing the whole thing on RentACoder.com.

One last point I want to leave you with is to get your agreement in writing. Even if you are best friends with your joint venture partner – it’s always best to get in writing (especially if you want to remain a friend). Memories fail but a nice simple written agreement helps alleviate discrepancies. Even if you just email your partner the key points to an agreement, that’s better than having nothing in writing.

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Yanik Silver is the creator and author of several best-selling online products, but he still can’t build his own website.

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