We’ve already mentioned  joint ventures briefly, but in this chapter we’re going to look at these kinds of partnerships in much more detail. I can’t stress enough how important joint ventures are in creating a profitable online business. It doesn’t matter what products or services you’re selling, there are always people that you can partner up with in a way that will bring benefits to both of you, without costing you a penny.

It’s those savings that will boost your profits dramatically. In this chapter, I’ll explain how to find partners, reveal several different joint venture ideas that you can put into practice with your
business, and I’ll show you how to keep track of all your deals.

Choose Your Partners
Selecting the right partners is crucial for the success of a joint venture. As always, the best bets are businesses whose services complement your own. If you’re selling CDs for example, you could do a deal with company that sells audio equipment, or a music magazine;
if you’re offering home-made furniture, you could partner up with other home furnishing companies. Essentially, you want to be sure that you’re both appealing to the
same type of market but not directly competing.

One way to find partners is to figure out where they advertise. As you surf around sites related to your business, you’ll probably notice that you keep seeing promotions from the same sites. Those are the kind of people you want to team up with. In fact, you may not even have to look any further than your email inbox. You probably already get a whole bunch of newsletters from companies in related industries, and are already pretty familiar with their business. So your first choices for joint ventures should be pretty easy to think of, and those may be the best ones too.

If you want to expand the scope of your partners beyond the immediately familiar though, it’s worth visiting Alexa.com. Alexa is a useful site that ranks other sites based on the volume of traffic they receive. This is very useful when you want to confirm that a potential partner has a relatively high volume of visitors to send you. Alexa can even tell you the name of the webmaster and give you the contact information you need to contact the webmaster.

Of course, it’s one thing to get in touch with a potential partner — it’s quite another to get them to agree. In my experience though, this isn’t really a problem. About 80 percent of the people I contact already know me and understand exactly what I have in mind. Once you
establish your position in the marketplace, you’ll probably find that’s true for you also. The whole negotiation takes nothing more than a couple of emails and maybe a five minute phone call.
Even a cold call gets pretty decent results. In general, I start with an email introducing my site and suggesting a partnership. It’s pretty rare not to get a reply, and about half of my proposals result in a deal.

So what sort of partnership do I suggest? In practice, that depends on who I’m writing to. Clearly, you want to make sure that you create a joint venture that uses your partner’s strengths to strengthen your own services — and your profits.
Here are three different joint ventures that are used regularly:

Joint Subscriptions
This is a newsletter joint venture. A user comes to your site and signs up for your newsletter. They then get a thank you message inviting them to sign up for other newsletters that they might find interesting. Those other newsletters are your joint venture partners. In return for an advertisement on your site, you get the same on theirs. You want to be careful not to pester the user, so keep the invitation simple and well targeted.

Exit Pop-ups
Exit pop-ups have become an increasingly popular way for Internet-based companies to work together. The fact is only a tiny percentage of the people who visit your site will actually give you money. The rest will just click straight through. The problem is that you’re paying for all of those visitors. Whether you’re buying them on a search engine, an advertisement or some other deal you’ve set up, you’re still paying for them in one form or another. The more ways you can find to turn those visitors into money, the better.

Exit pop-ups present another website to visitors as soon as they leave your site. The advantage is that your visitors aren’t bothered until they actually leave (in which case they’re no longer your visitors), and you can choose which pages generate the pop-up. So if a user comes to your home page and then clicks away, they get offered your joint venture; if they purchase, they don’t. You can approach another site directly to arrange an exit pop-up joint venture.

Plug Your Pals
There’s no need to be too subtle with joint ventures. There’s nothing wrong with using your email list to simply send a marketing letter to your subscribers to plug your partner’s products. You'll have to negotiate a good deal for this in return — one that includes a mailout of at least a similar scale to their list.
Ultimately, a successful joint venture depends on providing services that are truly complementary. Offline for example, a computer technician could make a deal with a computer store offering customers free installations and support in the first three months after their purchase. He’d get access to a pool of potential customers; the store gets an extra service to offer its customers. Online you can use similar special offers to truly boost the power of your partnerships.

Strengthening Your Joint Ventures
The best way to make your joint ventures truly successful is to use exclusivity. Offer your visitors something they can’t get anywhere else, even if it’s someone else’s services, and you make your visitors feel that they’re getting a real value by knowing about your site. Of
course, if you want your partner to give something truly valuable to your visitors, you’ll have to do the same for them. You don’t have to give everyone gold watches, but you can offer them a discount or special offer of some kind.

For example, I get a newsletter every week from a marketing guru. Just about every edition he sends me contains at least one offer of a book or some other product at a barga in rate. Those products come from his joint venture partners, and I assume that he’s doing the exact same thing with his products in their newsletters. I get a lot of newsletters, but his is one I always read. I never know what sort of deal I’m going to be made next, and I know that I’m getting a real value in return for my free subscription. If you’ve got a good relationship with a joint venture partner, these are easy to arrange.

Track Your Joint Ventures
Whenever you enter a deal, whether it’s listing a keyword on a search engine, buying a banner ad, or entering into a joint venture, it’s crucial to track your progress. The only kind of joint venture you should enter into is an equal one. There’s no point in sending thousands of visitors to a site that only sends them back in the hundreds. You’re going to wonder what
you’re getting out of the deal and if you can’t get more somewhere else. In most cases, you probably can.

How you track the responses will depend on the particular joint venture. If you’re swapping visitors, any traffic-monitoring script should keep you in touch. Otherwise, you’ll have to monitor sales which is ultimately the best way to track your progress. Joint ventures are one of the most enjoyable ways of promoting your business. Working from home can be pretty lonely. When you start to set up joint ventures not only do you get access to the customer bases of other entrepreneurs, you also build up a network of other people working in the same industry which can be very helpful.

Keeping Your Customers
The whole point of joint ventures is to generate customers. But even more important than getting them is keeping them. It’s much easier to sell something new to an existing customer than to sell something to someone who has never purchased from you before. In fact, at the end of every month I sit down with my stats and sales figures, and try to figure out answers to the following questions:

1. What percentage of my sales came from repeat customers?
2. Do my customers believe that they are important to the success of my business?
3. Did I go out of my way to learn all about my customers and keep them interested in my products?
4. Did I check out my competitors to see if they’re offering customers something that I’m not?
5. If a customer complained, how quickly and adequately did I respond?
6. Were orders filled correctly and did I offer bonuses to particularly loyal customers?
7. If I heard about a customer who went elsewhere, did I try to win him back?

It doesn’t take long to answer these questions, although it does take a bit longer to put new procedures in place if an answer comes up “no”. But it’s definitely worth the effort. I’ll confess, I got into this for the money, but I love getting letters from satisfied customers praising
me for my service. The fact that it pays to do that too, is a real bonus.

Essentially, there are two golden rules for providing great customer service: punctuality and politeness. Always answer your customers as soon as possible and deliver their goods as quickly as you can. And always maintain a professional, business-like manner with them. It doesn’t matter how much they complain or moan, or how unreasonable they are, remember that you’re a professional and keeping your cool is part of your job. So now you know of a whole range of different ways to promote your website. You know how to use search engines, buy advertising and build affiliate programs. You understand the benefits of newsletters and how to set up joint ventures with other people selling on the web. In the next two chapters we’re going to look at precisely what you can sell online, starting with information products.