What A JV Attempt Looks Like From your prospects point of view.

Let me give you an insight as to how this kind of thing happens and how JV deals usually come together. This is an example of an incoming approach for a JV deal.

[hidepost=1]

So here I am sitting at my computer at three in the morning. The milk float woke me up so I decided to grab breakfast and get started writing nice and early so that I would have the rest of the day free. I jump on the computer, check my mail, reply to some people that I know about a mix of personal and business topics and reply to my programmer giving him an overview of the next project we’re going to be working on. After the standard stuff is out of the way, I sit down to start doing some writing. After working for several hours, I get an e-mail from a budding online marketer who I haven’t heard of before (which wouldn’t have been a bad thing if they had introduced themselves).

What they’re wanting from me is a joint venture. They want to get their hands on my resources, my list and my customers to advertise their product. His product is a light, ninety or so page version of his techniques and how he sees the world of online marketing a whole. So he offers me his product along with higher commissions for promotion to the tune of an additional 25%. He shows me I’ll be put in at the top of an elaborate payment plan. Let’s ignore the fact that I have no idea who he is and he didn’t introduce himself. Let’s look directly at what he’s just offered me. If you were in my position, would you have accepted?

Let me tell you that I didn’t accept and there were many reasons behind my decision. Let’s look at them. First, his ideas were way off. They may have been good in his eyes, but in the end I find it hard to believe that anyone else in my position would have accepted. Remember we talked about equal gains? Well to put it bluntly, even though the commissions were quite a solid chunk higher than the standard, the gains were not equal. The reason why we’ll look into in a moment. But, bear in mind I was busy, I’d almost reached the end of my working day and I was about to log off and enjoy the rest of the morning. Are your prospects going to be in the same position? Most likely, yeah they are.

I didn’t have time to counter offer such a proposal that was way off in the first place. In the end, it would have taken up a heck of a lot more time than was necessary. However, there is a situation in which I’d have counter offered, and that would have been if what he was offering me was of any value in the first place. I might have been seeking to increase my gains from the deal, but as it was, it would have ended up having to be me who created the deal and not him. This is because he hadn’t done much forward thinking about what was valuable to me. Without even knowing what the problem was, this should demonstrate to you how the average joint venture proposal goes. If you’re way, way off, the other person will most likely not have the time to draw up a brand new deal for you. This is also a part of why I talk about joint ventures being very personal and fluid in nature.

Here’s The Mistakes He Made

First let’s look at the specifics of exactly why I didn’t accept his proposal on the basis of what he was offering. First, look at the commissions. This is something pretty valuable that forms the base of many joint ventures of this sort: earning more money from sales than the standard affiliate. The only time that commissions may not come into the equation is if you’re dealing with long-term contacts from an already established business relationship. There’s nothing wrong with that, in theory, but look at what I was doing already. He’d written a generic marketing report that was in competition to something I was already writing. Why would I promote something so similar to my product for 75% gains when I can promote my own stuff for 100% of the gains?

You might ask, though, how would you expect to partner with similar-minded marketers to promote your products if they’re creating material so close to your’s? The answer boils down to presentation. You want to pitch something that talks about a specific aspect of something they want. Perhaps create a more fine-tuned, free report that targets a particular niche but is designed to market your actual product.

Unless I know him personally, or knew he had already built the resources to return the favor with my products, I wouldn’t have considered promoting products in direct competition to mine.

And Here’s How He Should Have Done It

You can see from the above example what goes through the mindset of the person you are approaching for a JV deal. Since the product is potential competition, the most important thing to me is that I get access to the bulk of resources that he’s built up already. So I would change the initial deal right away to include access or a long-term relationship, allowing for alternating cross promotion at a date of my choosing. Either this or I would have initially tailored my intro product into a specialist subject that can serve as marketing for the main product.

It is important to look at the activities of your potential JV partner so that you know what they are offering. You don’t want to pitch a product that is direct competition to their’s. There is no reason to accept an affiliate commission on a product when they can sell their own and make 100% of the profit.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the person’s product was, if effect, preaching to the choir. A generic “internet marketing” report is not going to interest a person who has been doing internet marketing, and writing about it, for a long time.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I know everything there is to know about online marketing. Things change all the time. I’m also not saying that I never want to learn anything new or new ways to do things, but without some sort of specialized differentiation between his product and all the books and guides I own, why would this be of any value to me? I don’t need to learn how to make money online anymore, so his book is moot. With a little use of the powers of deduction, he could have figured this out, and offered me something of real value. A specialized product or an offer of turnaround JV’s to return the favor in the future.

So you see, the above should show you how a little research, forward thinking and deduction on your part will save you from the black hole that is no joint ventures to add to your list.

This also goes to show that you cannot simply send form-letter requests for joint venture deals. Each request has to be tailored to the marketer and to their target market. It requires thought on your part. It requires knowing what they are doing. The best way to find this out is to subscribe to their mailing list and observe what they send out. By knowing a little more about what they’re doing, your success rate of scoring new JV deals can go up tremendously.

Lets Get Personal

I can hear the groans now as people start to realize that they have to take the time to set up individual deals tailored to each person. No one said this was going to be easy. However, with all the research you have coming to you, without you having to go out there and try to search out your answers, it’s real quick and easy. The only catch is it won’t happen overnight. Give yourself around two weeks of receiving regular mails before you try to pick out your joint venture partners so that you can get to know them better and thus be able to accurately deduce a solution for the circumstance.

Remember, this isn’t something that you have to do over and over again regularly. Over time, you will find that you don’t have to always following this procedure of watching a mailing list and tailoring a JV offer to them. Joint ventures will continue to happen of course, but as we spoke about earlier, they will come from other sources. In the beginning, pitching JV deals can make you feel like a used car salesman. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone who thoroughly enjoys doing this. It’s from this I’ll conclude that most of you reading won’t particularly love it either. Until you start to find yourself with a bunch of long-term contacts, of course, then it’s a different matter. Rest assured though you won’t have to do this forever but you will have to do it, in some form or another, at some point if you want to launch your marketing career with a bang. But hey, given the rewards, surely that’s not such a bad thing is it?

Time To Get Practical

In the next report we’re going to take into account everything that we’ve just discussed, and I’m going to take you through five examples. Through a process of elimination, we’ll deduce the correct ways means and methods to approach people, depending on your situation, their situation, and how your product and your deals relate to both of those factors. Once we have a few examples down, much like the one above, you will be able to produce solutions for these situations without anyone’s help or guidance every single time.

[/hidepost]

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below: