What we are looking for is highly trafficked web sites in your target area. These people already have the customers you want, and if contacted correctly, they will give you access to them for free.
You of course are going to have to pay them a percentage per sale. The usual percentage offer to these people if you are selling a product that can be downloaded online and needs no shipping and production costs is 50%
So how can you find people who are willing to sell your products to their loyal customer base?There is only one way now that I use to search for joint venture partners, and it never fails. Sure there are other methods, but why mess with what’s working?
Ok let's start.We are going to pretend that you have a site on travelling, and you have a product (An e-book) about the best places in the world to take your wife or husband on your honeymoon.
So where do you start to find web site and ezine owners on travelling? Easy! First we go to google.com. You probably all know google.com as the major (and dominant) search engine now days. That's right, it's no longer Yahoo.com
We are going to put in the search term "travelling" into google.com without the quotes.
Now let's visit some of these sites and see what they are like and if they could possibly be joint venture partners. (Mind you, you won't be able to tell until we do one more thing in a minute.)
Here are the sites I found. http://www.travelling.gr http://www.travellingwell.com.au http://www.romelimostours.com http://www.Tunu.com
Ok, these sites look good, and they have a high ranking in google.com so they probably get a lot of traffic, but we need to know for sure before we make them an offer.
Before I go any further. Always remember to have a good look around your joint venture partners site before you contact them so it doesn't sound like spam.
You want to be fairly familiar with the site so you can comment on some of the aspects and what you liked about it. This will be explained in the next section about writing your joint venture letter.
Let's now go to http://www.alexa.com Alexa.com ranks all the sites on the Internet with a number, from one to millions.One obviously would be the highest trafficked site on the Internet.
We are looking for partners whose rank is below 200,000
Alexa.com is great. Not only do they show you how much traffic is coming to someone's site, they also show you web sites that their visitors went to after theirs and which sites link to their web sites.
With this, you can now see who has linked to your joint venture partner’s site and other sites of interest (don't forget he's also your competitor, but play nice) and you can then contact those people, so your research is practically done for you.
Ok, back to http://www.alexa.com and we are going to see all the information about www.travelling.gr possible.
Here are the results, which you can also see at http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=www.travelli ng.gr
These people look like great joint venture partners!You can do the same for the rest of the sites I mentioned above and see if you can find a partner joint venture partner, but these people look professional, they have a mailing list and they have lots of quality information, and most importantly, they have traffic, and loads of it!
How do you contact these people? Do you know the best way to contact people these days, especially for important issues like this?
Do it by phone!That's right, the telephone is the quickest and easiest way to contact joint venture partners. Imagine getting a phone call from someone saying they just visited your site, or they've been fans for years and they just released a new product no one has seen, and they want to give you first dibs at promoting it?
Do you think you would be interested? Of course. Not only that, they offer to send you a review copy (no charge) to have a look at the product and see if you like it enough to promote to your loyal readers.
If your not brave enough to do this, you can always use email.During your joint venture process, always get more no's then yes's to your joint venture deals, but you can beat the odds by using a mix of the following.
Firstly, send an email, with your joint venture request and see what interest you get. Secondly, send a real letter to your possible joint venture partner.
Now, after you find the great affiliates if you want them to make you even more money you will need to help them out. Help them out by giving them tools they can use to sell your product.
The easier your product is to sell for your affiliates, the more sales your affiliates will get you. And obviously, the more sales you get the more money you will make.
Ok, so what should you be creating for your affiliates to use?You should give them articles, banners, graphics, different kinds of ads etc.
Articles are a great way to get your affiliates promoting your products. All you have to do is let them change the by-line of your article (the little Advertisement at the end of your article) where your web site link is, to their own affiliate link for your product.
This way, they get a few good articles to promote to their ezine list and they get paid for any sale, and so do you. So this really is free advertising, because nothing is coming out of your pocket.
You should aim on creating four or five articles straight off that they can use, or even turn into a free course if you don't feel like writing one.
Endorsements are probably the best affiliate resource you can give them. Nothing sells better than an endorsement coming straight from the affiliate themselves, so it should be written in the affiliates perspective.
These endorsements will most likely be used in ezines and email mail outs, so keep that in mind when your writing them. Four to five paragraphs long should be all it needs to be.
Of course, web site endorsements can be longer. These ironically enough will be pasted on web sites. They work really well for search engine ranking. A good idea is to design up graphics for these web site endorsements, like book covers and maybe even a spiffy html template.
Solo Ads When ever I advertise with ezines it's usually solely with Solo Ads. These are ads that are sent out by themselves, unlike classified and other ads that go out in the ezine itself.
This ad will go out by itself, so it needs to be a fairly good length. While some people say shorter ads work better for the simple fact the reader has less to read, in reality, a very well written longer solo ad will pull much, much better. There are usually word and length limits to these ads so when you are creating them for your affiliates, it might be good to check around at what the normal length of a solo ad is in your industry. You might even check out the posting guidelines for other ezines so you can know exactly how long they like their solo ads.
The best bet to make a compelling solo ad is to work really hard on the headline. If you can write a very compelling headline for your ad, the rest of the ad should follow.
Free Course Not enough affiliate programs do this. Imagine as an affiliate, being able to give away a free 5 day autoresponder course via email to all your web site visitors promoting your favourite affiliate program.
Creating your own free course for your affiliates isn't that hard. You can use themethod of just sitting down and writing Five articles (you may already have 5 articles written) and putting them together in the form of a free course via autoresponder.
The owner of this product allows the affiliate download a 6 part free autoresponder course and use it in your marketing efforts. It's all written for you, all you have to do is put in your affiliate url.
Classified ads, these are small ads, usually four or five lines long that go out in the ezine itself. They don't work anywhere as well as solo ads, but they are cheap as chips. The secret here again is to write a very compelling headline.
You should also think about telling your affiliates to put their autoresponder link in the classified ad rather then trying to make a sale from such a small ad. They would be better served (and so will you) if they captured the email address of their prospects and sent them the free course.
Banners , while I don't recommend that you place too much time on banners, some affiliates with highly trafficked web sites like them and will produce for you, but in reality, banners very rarely make any good money for merchant or affiliate.
To get your banners created, there are plenty of tools online that you can use to create them on your own. Just put the term "banner maker" into http://www.google.com
Graphics, you will also have to create a few different sized e-book covers for your affiliates to use on their web sites.