| A good V can create fortunes. It can bring together products and services, free media attention, and resources to cut down the amount of time needed to spend promoting and marketing. There are four players in the JV world, each works together to create a win-win situation for all. It can take a long time to find a list owner who will take a new product. Most list owners want products with a proven value for their subscribers. There are thousands of list owners. Product owners use these lists to leverage their sales and split profits with the list owner. The trick for product owners is to find lists with an incredibly narrow niche. This can be hard. Many list owners try to be everything to everyone. A list with a target audience will produce more sales than a larger list that has a broader audience.
Remember that the brokers and customer list owners have something that you need - trust. You cannot buy trust, so when it comes to negotiating with them, do not try and nickel and dime them, especially if your product does not have a proven track record.
Product owners aren't the only ones who can profit nicely from joint ventures. Often a product owner will offer a much higher to the owner of a large, targeted list, for promoting the product. This is a win-win situation for both parties - the product owner's sales will often explode right after the product is announced to a large, responsive list.And the list owner makes a nice commission on the product, all for taking an extra 5 minutes to mention the product in his or her newsletter.
Some of the best places to build opt-in lists are free and fall under the radar of most internet marketers. For example, did you know that my space now drives more hits to websites than MSN? Or, did you know that you can buy the top space on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AltaVista for less than $50 a month? Yes, that's right. This is a great time to get building a list. The internet is still not awake to the idea that Web 2.0 doesn't work the same way as the old websites. You no longer need to spend so much time optimizing your websites. In fact, MSN is the only major search engine that really cares about Meta tags anymore. The rest of the search engines use keyword density to ban websites that pump more than 5% of a keyword. It is easy to find brokers who will help you build a list. This is because few people work at building lists. The Brokers need these lists to survive.
This is a great job for someone who is internet savvy, a real people person, and who can sell new concepts to people. The first step for a new broker is to join the forums, rezones, and communities that will put them in contact with products, and then do the same with content rich websites that under-utilize their marketing ability. An easier way to do this is to contact hundreds of rezones, and get them to pay a fee for advertising on each other's rezones. The zine owners may pay you $100. In return, they get $1000 of advertising, build their opt-in list, and hike up the prices they charge their advertisers. The providence man searches for great products that have poor exposure. They identify a product or service, review their web site, sales letter, order forms, web design and many other things, and then recommend improvements. In this way, a providence man is sort of like the systems analyst of the brick and mortar world. Then, the providence man will arrange a Joint Venturing agreement with the product owner. This is great for the person who is more at home on the internet than in the brick and mortar world. |
