How to Use Joint Ventures to Boost Your Business

Did you know that joint ventures can dramatically increase your income in very little time? And, if they are done right, they can even be fun? :)

What's a joint venture?

In a nutshell, it's a partnership between two (or more) businesses that creates a win-win scenario for all. For example, joining together to offer a conference to your target market, or collaborating on a teleseminar series to offer to both your audiences. It could be something as simple as a cross-promotion of products, where each of your products complements the other.

There are three key benefits to pursuing joint ventures:

1. You can strengthen your relationship with your current clients and customers by offering them something new and of value.

2. You can leverage your time and talent by promoting someone else's offerings (while they promote yours) while still adding to your bottom line.

3. You can leave the lone ranger behind and add to your own body of knowledge and expertise by learning new ways to create and deliver your material by working with a partner.

Approach potential joint venture partners only after you've gotten to know them a bit through their work. Once you've been able to discern that a win-win relationship could be created, make certain you have an idea to offer to them that answers the question of "what's in it for them?"

Then once you've narrowed your list to a couple of people and have developed an idea that benefits both your businesses, contact them either by phone or email. Be brief, polite, and authentic. Don't push, just tell them in casual friendly terms what your idea is and see what kind of response you get. You might be pleasantly surprised.

After you and your partner have decided to work together, make sure that the terms of the agreement are spelled out in writing. Depending on the size and scope of the project, the agreement can be something as simple as a signed letter stating who will do what and how any proceeds will be split, to a more formal agreement involving your attorney's input.

But to give the idea of a joint venture a try, just start out small. Connect with someone you admire in your niche, whose offerings complement yours, and see if you can't come up with something simple to do within the next month or two. Consider writing a short ebook or offering a one-topic teleseminar. You'll each increase the size of your email list as well as add to your bottom line. Now that's a win-win!

How to Use Trial Offers to Increase Your Sales

Do you ever find yourself tempted to purchase something online, and even with a money-back guarantee, you're still not quite sure about handing over your cash?

Well, some of your prospects will feel the same way as they read your sales page for your product or service. Your offer sounds great, the right guarantee eliminates their risk, but they still wonder if whatever it is they are considering purchasing is right for them.

If you want to increase the likelihood that they will take out their wallet, simply offer them a free or paid trial! Haven't you loved it when you've been given the option to try something out for free or very little cost to make sure it's what you want?

By offering a trial to your prospects, you're doing two things of value for your business-building. One is that you are showing that you are confident in the value of your product to offer a trial, and the other is that you are essentially eliminating the last lingering question in your prospect's mind: "What if I don't like it?"

Allowing your prospects to decide for themselves whether or not your product or service is for them answers that question for them.

So, what kinds of products and services are best for free trials?

1. Downloadable products

If you're offering information products, like ebooks or how-to guides, you can offer a sample chapter as a free trial. If you're offering an e-course, you can offer one lesson as a free trial. If you're offering an audio program, you could offer a 15-minute clip as a free trial. You could also create an introductory component to any of these that gives solid information, but that also leaves your reader or listener wanting more.

2. Membership sites

It's common practice to offer a free, $1 or $4.95 trial for a membership site. And it's common practice because it's a very effective way to convert your trial member to a paid member. Just like your local fitness club's trial period - it's much easier to sign up for a month for a couple of bucks than to pay the entire gym membership in one lump sum or to be bound to a contract for a certain length of time before you even know if the membership is for you.

3. Physical products

Offer to send your product to your customer for a small processing fee plus shipping and tell them they have 30 days to test it out. If they don't return it within those 30 days, bill them the full price for the product (minus the processing fee, if you'd like).

4. One-on-one services

I want to make it very clear that I am not in favor of complimentary 1:1 session for any service professional. However, if you'd like to give a free 15-minute consultation to see if there's a good match between you and your prospect, that can increase your client base.

A better option is to offer a free or low-cost group session. Give an introductory talk about your services and answer questions, perhaps even offer a discount to those who sign up with you right then. This way, you're truly leveraging your time and talent by allowing your prospects to self-select themselves out without your having to go through that process individually.

Just make sure that along the way and at the end of the trail period, you convey the benefits of the paid version in all these cases. Having a quality product or service and following up effectively to convert your trial customer to a paid-in-full customer will increase your overall sales.

So, which of your offerings can you give a trial on? Choose one, create the trial, and see what happens to your bottom line.

Top Secrets Of Profitable Email Lists Revealed

Building a good email list of customers or partners forms is the integral part of doing business in long term. All websites cannot make it to the top of the search results of major search engines. Building a mailing list of interested customers can evade many of the ill effects of not getting to the top of search listings. With a little effort you can collect the email addresses of potential customers. But to build a good mailing list, you need to give something before you get the email addresses. You can offer free tips related to the products you sell or careful advices regarding the service you give. Offering a free e-book with useful information is also a good method of building a business mailing list.

With the stringent laws to fight the big enemy called spam, business houses need to take extreme care that the emails they send out don’t fall to the category of spam mails. You need to implement good measures for careful email list management. With each email you send out, you need to provide an ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘opt out’ option. This is mandatory by the rule of the land.

Managing a business mailing list is always going to be a tough task. Updating, omissions, categorization of the list is necessary. While building an email list or mailing list, the categorization based on location, products and the income stream of the potential customers is important. New enterprises always shall take time to develop a profitable mailing list.

While maintaining a mailing list, it is always necessary to send only targeted mails according to the preferences and interests of the receivers. If you use the mailing list only to promote your products, chances are higher that the receivers will opt out of your business mailing list. Mailing list management is also about sending out useful tips and information that is important for the receiver.

Building a long mailing list from which you can reap profits is a time consuming task. You need to do some search engine optimization works so that your website appears in front of the interested users while they make a search. Give a solid reason for the visitors to sign up for your periodic newsletter. Make the suggestion that you regularly come up with useful suggestions, tips and techniques related to their field of interest.

The spending capacity of the individuals, geographic location, preferences of making online purchases etc need to be assessed to gauge the efficiency of your mailing list.

Giving enough stress to building a strong email list through which you can promote your products or affiliate products somehow minimizes your dependency on costly pay per click advertising to attract traffic to your site. All the receivers may not make a purchase every time you send out an offer. You can also go without a minimum number of sales if you maintain a strong mailing list of qualified customers.

4 Miscellaneous Email Marketing Advices

Email is one of the most personal advertising medium ever invented.  Here are four of the many ways you can improve your email marketing results.

Spread the Word

Get others to sign up for your mailing lists with their consent.  Spread the word about your mailing list through word of mouth.  The beauty in this is that the list of emails will be self-screened and the database will only contain the people who are interested in your offers.  Make sure you have their consent beforehand.  You don’t want to risk losing reputation or SPAM penalties.

Persistence

Before the internet, they used to say it takes around 7.3 impacts to make an impression with an ad.  Today I would guess it to be over twice as high with the internet present.  Make sure you are reaching out to your clients at least once a month in emails or other medium.  Just because you emailed a list of people and had little or no response does not necessarily mean your audience isn’t interested in your product.  Experiment with different emails, get to know which email strategy works best, and keep using it to reach out to your audience.

They Want Useful Information

Emails should contain something that the customer wants.  It shouldn’t be just a summary of your company or your resume.  Focus on giving more than just what you sell.  Specific content, messages, and other targeted information that interests your customers are good to include.  For example, if you were selling makeup, you may want to include advice on how to apply the makeup or any makeup in general.

Make Sure Your Audience Reads Your Emails

Graphics, Flash animations, logos are often blocked by email filters.  Although they look impressive on an email, they will often lower your impression statistics.  I recommend using flat text with hyperlinks to your site.  Once they get to your site, you can show them as many graphics as you want.  Although some businesses have both a plain and a rich text edition of their email, for starters, stick to the plain text.

A Good Mailing List for a Bad One.

If you have ever used a mass mailing email marketing campaign, you know how they promote their services.  The appeal is that, in theory, the service has collected a large amount of valid email addresses that they guarantee will go to real  potential internet customers.  For a fee, they will take your marketing message and broadcast it to that large customer base and the outcome will be that you will see a percentage of those customers visit your web site or respond to the email and from that percentage, a smaller percentage will become paying customers of yours.

There are two problems with this marketing model.  The first one is that no matter how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming a spammer.  Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers.  But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person. 

Life has gotten harder for us because of spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted.  So because of this fresh problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place.  Ironic, isn't it?

The second problem with that marketing model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of dubious value.  For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails.  The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer email are very low.  You have low confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.

A large mailing list is not a good mailing list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales.  This is why a new marketing model is called for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.

That new marketing model calls for you to look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you.  This approach to building your email list starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are looking for and it builds out from there.

You can use that solid customer base to then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will return solid sales to you for your efforts.  Through referrals, viral marketing, contests  and give aways, you can excite your customer base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high quality mailing list as well.  Then you repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.

This process results in a much smaller mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your emails.  Whereas working with a mass marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you know they will come back again and again to buy from you.