Joint Venture Fast Track to Wealth Teleseminar Series starting in the first week of March 2009

Attracting new clients in a recession by using partnering and Joint Venture strategies

Register for the free Teleseminar below

We’re only accepting the first 50 people who register.

If you’re a current business owner or you’re looking to start a new business, you must remap and adopt new marketing strategies in 2009 to stay profitable and in some cases to stay in business. Using low cost, low risk marketing tactics through partnership and Joint Venture deals is a way to increase your profits without increasing your advertising and marketing budgets.

Enter your info below to be notified about the upcoming Joint Venture Fast Track Teleseminar coming up in the first week of March, 2009. This is an invite only event and I’m only accepting 50 people for the first series, so please opt-in below to get on the priority notification list.

By attending The JV Fast Track Teleseminar Series you’ll discover my top 11 JV and partnership systems to:

1. Harnessing Collaborative Intention

Thinking in alliances to create products and services based on existing assets and thinking in one-to-many relationships instead of one-to-one.

2. Collaborative Objectives

What specific business problem, challenge or concern are you trying to solve with your product or service?

3. Relationship Cultivation

Seek out and create mutual, financially beneficial relationships with other Collaboration Actors (other Entrepreneurs and Business Owners).

4. Asset Pools

Tapping into underutilized existing assets instead of building or buying your own. Your positive and influential relationships with other Collaboration Actors will allow you to harness their existing assets pools.

5. Collaborative Context Strategy

Your Collaboration Marketing Strategy. Mapping out exactly how the process will work.

6. Execution

Set your Collaborative Context Strategy in motion. Who is doing what and at what point in time should your process points start and end? Common road blocks you WILL encounter and how to handle them with ease.

7. Pilot and Production Analysis

Working the numbers. Determine the positive and negative effects of your results.

8. Systematization & Scaling

Turn the entire process into a duplicatable system that you or your staff members can reproduce with other relationships and asset pools.

9. Operational Integration Pipelines

Integrate your new Collaboration Marketing System into your daily, working day.

10. Personal Networking Forum

Members only JV and alliance forum for members of the Teleseminar series.

11. Additional advanced tactics

Such as JV Layering, Multi Channel JV’s, Leveraging Affinity Groups and Social Networks, etc.

Enter your information below to receive priority notification of the JV Fast Track Teleseminar.

First Name
Email

How to Effectively Utilize Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

Affiliate marketing, a strategy within the class of joint ventures, is a powerful marketing strategy that companies utilize as a platform to take their business to the next level. Whether you own a small or large business, affiliate marketing can significantly increase your revenues, often exponentially.

The Fundamentals of Affiliate Marketing

Fundamentally, affiliate marketing is an incentive-based program to promote a product or service. Instead of spending significant portions of your budget on internet advertising and PPC, you build a massive sales force known as affiliates. In affiliate marketing, you will pay your sales force based on their performance or output. In short, you develop an absolutely risk-free and investment-free way to market your business. Indeed, the reason this marketing strategy is so powerful is because it’s in the affiliates’ best interest to promote your company.

Affiliate Marketing vs. Traditional Online Advertising

There are several advantages to using affiliate marketing over online ads. Affiliate marketing can help you generate higher sales, without any additional risks or funding on your part. To capitalize upon this strong marketing strategy, you simply need to prepare the affiliate marketing materials and ensure your site is running perfectly. You then let the affiliates handle the sales lead generation and negotiations. The result? You gain higher sales, more customers in your mailing list, and a more cost-effective means of marketing your business in comparison with your in-house employees.

Conversely, affiliate marketing is not a perfect business model. Because this strategy works on a commission basis, some abuse the system by exaggerating product claims just to make a sale. If your affiliate marketing program becomes largely popular, it will be difficult to strictly monitor false ads about your products or services. This deception will lead to customer dissatisfaction, numerous complaints, higher sales returns, and damage to your reputation.

How to Manage an Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy

To properly capitalize upon the potential of affiliate marketing, there are three major management issues you must consider:

1. Business Objectives. Be specific about the purpose of your affiliate marketing program. Do you want it to simply generate more leads or close sales? The role of your affiliate marketing program must be clear and consistent with your marketing campaign. Moreover, you must decide on their limitations. Because affiliates will use different channels such as e-mails, article directories, search engines, or even offline tactics just to close a deal, you must be clear on their focus or channels. Otherwise, their actions may not be in line with your business goals.

2. Incentive program. Your commission structure must be lucrative to attract effective, professional affiliates. Remember, the better your incentive program, the more the affiliates will work to promote your company. The best way is to study the affiliate marketing programs of your competitors and other related companies, providing you with a competitive market perspective on current incentive offers. You will also need to decide how to pay your affiliates. The payment structure can be based upon clicks, leads generated, or sales closed. Review your business objectives to select the best payment structure.

3. Recruitment. Choosing the right people to promote your business is a crucial step in creating an effective affiliate marketing program. How you choose to promote your affiliate marketing program plays a large role in the affiliates you attract. You can post the program on your website, advertise in online magazines, or e-mail your client list and offer discounts to your customers if they become affiliates.

Fatal Joint Venture Mistakes to Avoid

The growing popularity of joint ventures, powered by the significant revenue benefits it brings to businesses, has prompted many entrepreneurs to jump into opportunities without analyzing the situation carefully.

Unfortunately, improperly conceived decisions might lead to fatal mistakes, hurting both brand image and profitability of your small business. If you are not familiar with the inner workings of joint ventures, it may be wise to consult with a joint venture expert, especially considering that the market dynamics in each industry are unique. Here are some of the worst joint venture mistakes entrepreneur must avoid:

1. Lack of Research. Like a marriage, finding the right partner is one of the most important elements in a successful joint venture. You need to understand all the benefits you expect from the joint venture, as well as what you can bring to the table. You’ll also want to ascertain your prospective partner’s relative strengths, such as business reputation and quality of products or services, to ensure it matches your own business model.

2. Penny-Pinching. For a joint venture to succeed, the offers from both parties must be lucrative enough to strike a commitment. A meager incentive plan is a waste of time and money because it will not motivate your joint venture partner. Be reasonable at all times, and do not let greed ruin your business.

3. Not Testing the Waters. Signing a long-term joint venture agreement can be a large mistake – for the simple reason that your strategies are not yet proven effective. If your joint venture flops, you have no choice but to continue at a loss or pre-terminate the agreement and pay for damages incurred to the other party. If you already signed a joint venture agreement, you may want to propose an escape clause in the event the venture is unprofitable. Ideally, you’ll want to negotiate for a short-term contract and conduct test marketing with some of your customers to gauge reaction and solicit their feedback. If you can tweak the problems, then it is time to roll out the joint venture in the bigger population for a long-term commitment.

4. Not Developing Backup Plans. It is faulty to assume that a joint venture will succeed until it does. Even though your joint venture is seemingly impeccable, there will always be some glitches, misunderstandings, or a series of unfortunate events that might befall the partnership. Always have a set of alternatives developed in case an unfortunate event happens. As they say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. This is especially true when it comes to joint ventures.

5. Being Too Open. Joint ventures do not exist if there is no trust. However, it does’t mean you have to bare all and share your trade secrets. For instance, some entrepreneurs share their whole hard-earned client list to their joint venture partners, hoping that it will help build relations. Unknowingly, they are violating the privacy of their customers, as well as losing leverage over the partnership. The success of any joint venture lies in the details, hard work, and careful analysis of your business industry.

Strategic Alliance Line-Up: How to Identify the Best Partner

With the fallout of the mortgage industry and the bottom of the housing market nowhere in sight, consumers are shutting their wallets while retailers are feeling the pinch. As the indicators of an economic recession loom on the horizon, many people have asked me how they can continue to grow their sales. During the economic hot streak of the last five years, consumers spent in over-exuberance, and the question now remains: how can you grow your business amidst a potential recession?

The answer is through the creation of strategic alliances. With marketing budgets limited by the potential flat line of growth in revenues, strategic alliances offer an instant way to increase your market share without high advertising and PPC costs. This translates into higher revenues for you, while you enjoy lower operating costs.

Sounds good? Well, keep in mind that not all strategic alliances live happily ever after. It’s important to conduct a thorough examination of your potential partner before sharing information or signing a contract.

Characteristics to look for when conducting a strategic alliance line-up:

1. Reputation. Considered one of the most important factors of a strategic alliance, is your potential partner’s reputation? The last thing you want to do is get in bed with a company whose reputation is less than par as this can damage your long-term public image.

2. Client Relations. A company with a less than stellar reputation most likely does not have a good rapport with it’s customers, defeating the fundamental purpose of a strategic alliance. The only way a strategic alliance is effective is if your partner has a trusting, reliable, and credible relationship with it’s clients.

3. Synergistic Business Models. Finding a company that is synergistic to your goals is critical to developing a strong strategic alliance. Will their customer base be interested in your product or service, and vice versa? If you are selling wedding dresses, but decide to partner with a dedicated web hosting company, this clearly does not have the same synergies as a partnership with an invitation printing company.

4. Price Point. An ideal strategic alliance partner shares similar price points with your product or service. This further confirms the synergies between both your businesses. If your company sells adware software for $100, then you would want to partner with an anti-virus software company that sells their product in the similar price range.

5. Human Factor. Even if all of the numerical and financial aspects of the strategic alliance are in good order, it’s important to ensure the human factors are in place too. Indeed, it is the human relations of the other company that will determine whether or not the alliance will be successful. If your potential partner is difficult to communicate with, then that element negates all of the other financial factors. They must have an open mind, be flexible, and communicate effectively to be a candidate for a strategic alliance.

Benefiting from a strategic alliance is easy, but finding the right partner is the difficult part. Once you have passed a potential partner through the line-up, however, the probability that the alliance will be economically fruitful increases significantly.

Are you a Smart Entrepreneur? Don’t Compete, Create Strategic Alliances

Smart entrepreneurs go completely against the herd mentality of business. They don’t compete and this is how they build highly successful businesses. How could they not compete you ask, arguing that competition is the core of an economically viable company and economy. Interestingly enough, smart entrepreneurs do not compete, instead they take advantage of their competition and make strategic alliances with them.

Keep Your Business Enemies Closer

Indeed, smart business owners keep their partners close, but their economic enemies even closer. Although this may seem counter-intuitive, developing strategic alliances with your competition to expand the overall pie, ensuring that you both get a larger slice of profits.

The need for strategic alliances is especially strong in industries where competition is fierce. Many entrepreneurs can feel very isolated in their business, feeling as if the competition is closing in on them. With that said, simply by altering your mindset, you can quickly begin to see the opportunities in your industry. Indeed, you can quickly turn the competition lemons into sweet, profitable lemonade for all parties involved.

Shifting from Competition to Strategic Alliance

For the vast majority of business owners, it is not easy to embrace the competition and that is completely understandable. However, once you begin seeing the beauty of your competition, you can capitalize upon their standing in the market place to further your exposure and profitability. There are several modes of analysis that can help you make the jump from typical competitor to smart ally:

1. The closer you hold your competitors, the greater you will understand how to differentiate your niche, giving you an economic edge in both the short and long-run. For example, although two competing companies may sell spyware software, upon closer evaluation, they are not the same. Company A’s target audience are consumers, while Company B targets the technical directors of major corporations. Having in-depth knowledge is incredibly powerful, both in terms of perfecting a branding strategy and generating higher levels of sales.

2. There are plenty of fish available in the sea, especially if you are targeting clients on the Internet. The Internet provides an endless plethora of traffic, which means you have a nearly limitless supply of clients. This eases potential conflict tensions, and instead, boosts the overall exposure for the entire industry. The selection of blogs, all who quote, cite, and link to their competitors, is a testament to the power of strategic alliances within one industry.

3. With enough creativity, harsh competitors can turn into great strategic alliances that boost your revenues and help your business reach the next level of profitability. For example, website design is an incredibly competitive industry, with new companies entering into the field every day. However, it is still very effective for two competing companies to become partners. Every single company, regardless of how competitive the industry is, has a specific niche. In the case of website design, one company may be excellent in Flash, while the other company specializes in Java. Thus, by referring clients to each other that are seeking a specific type of programming, both companies benefit.

The internet has changed the face of business and economic processes dramatically, and it is those smart businesses that can harness the power of strategic alliances that will be able to reach their full profitability potential.

Next Page »