Joint Ventures Made Easy!
By: Terri Zwierzynski | Leave a comment
It’s sort of an Internet marketing mantra: To be successful, you must joint venture. And I don’t disagree with that. But much of the advice I’ve found only addresses BIG alliances. In my mind, that would mean some kind of formal agreement, that maybe takes a few weeks to work out, an unknown but probably good amount of effort will be involved, and at the end I’ll reap oodles of leads and, hopefully, sales.
So who says all joint ventures have to be a big deal, with big commitments and big money?
I had the opportunity to do a little joint venture a few weeks ago. It took all of two emails to seal the deal. And while it’s not going to immediately gain me $ in sales, it’s certainly had both tangible and intangible benefits.
Here’s how it happened. I belong to a budding ‘women in internet marketing’ mastermind group. Denise Wakeman of the Blog Squad is also in the group, and she had queried the group looking for someone to be a guest author for her Next Level Biz Tips blog while she attended the BlogHer07 conference. The dates fit my calendar, and so I volunteered.
It was easy, and fun! Denise benefitted by having fresh content on her blog while she was away. I got a little name recognition and a modest amount of traffic back to my site. And it wasn’t a hard job — I got to refurbish a couple of old posts (recycling!) and write a few new ones on topics I’d been meaning to write about.
What made this so easy? The risk was low. A bit of trust had already been established — we’d both been invited to the group by the same person. The commitment was short-term and didn’t take too much of my time. And from Denise’s point of view, she could always delete my posts if she didn’t like them!
Big joint ventures can be scary — will this take a lot of my time, will the other person do what they say, will it be successful and profitable? That fear can keep you from doing any collaboration at all! Little joint ventures are much less scary. Think of it like taking one step down a dark flight of stairs, rather than jumping right to the bottom. And the great part…now that you’ve taken that first step, the next few will be easier because you’ve established a trust relationship, which is the key to all great joint ventures.
So don’t pass up all collaboration opportunities just because of a popular perception of JOINT VENTURES. Be willing to try a few joint ventures first.
Last 5 posts by Terri Zwierzynski
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