Archive | May, 2019

You’ve just entered a niche that’s brand new for you and you’ve got zero contacts. But you’re creating a product to sell and you need joint venture partners. So how do you get those all important JV’s when you don’t even have any contacts in the niche? Like this…

First, make sure your product is something that gets people excited and wanting to promote it to their lists. You can do this by solving a BIG problem, preferably something that people are already spending time and money trying to solve.

Second, solve the problem with a step-by-step formula – sort of a blueprint to success. You don’t want to just give a bunch of info – they can find plenty of that on the Internet. Instead, it should be a system to solving the problem, such as “7 Steps to Getting 7 Hot Dates in 7 Days.”

Now that you’ve got your product, take a little time to set up a JV page and an About Me page on your website. The JV page should tell about your product and how it will help the potential JV partners’ customers, as well as how much commission they will earn, how you will run the JV, etc. Make it look professional but don’t obsess over this – just get it done.

The About Me page should give some personal and professional info on you – enough so that a potential JV partner learns something about you and gets comfortable with the idea of possibly working with you.

If you’ve already collected some testimonials for your product, create a separate testimonial page. If you haven’t yet collected any, skip this.

Now go find your potential JV partners. Let’s say your new niche is tennis. Go online and search for tennis newsletters and find all the results you can. Search for tennis e-courses and tennis products and anything tennis related – including blogs – where it’s pretty clear that someone has a list of tennis players. Because that’s the key – finding the people who own lists of people who play tennis.

It doesn’t even matter if they have a product of their own – what matters is they have a list of tennis players. Use a little creativity and you’ll find hundreds of people who own lists like these, some of which have never even monetized their lists – they just do it as a hobby.

Social media and Facebook are especially good avenues for finding these potential partners. Focus at first on finding the small to medium sized list owners to build your confidence. You can go after the really big players in your niche when you’ve done a few JV’s and you’ve begun to build a solid reputation in your field.

Ask yourself who is already talking to the audience you want to talk to? Where are the people you want to meet hanging out? This is where you need to be, both online and possibly offline as well.

When you find these tennis list owners, take down their name, URL and email address. If you like, get their phone number as well. Now email them individually, one by one. Don’t do more than a few in one day just in case you get several replies back at once.

When you email, you might tell them how you know them. “I read your book” or “I’m a fan of your blog.” Show them some admiration and respect, but don’t go too overboard. A little is great, a lot might make them uncomfortable. Be specific in your praise. Don’t say, “You are the greatest tennis blogger ever!” Say, “Your article on serving mistakes helped me tremendously, especially that point you made about ___.”

Next in your email, you’ve got two different avenues you could take – the direct and the indirect.

The direct goes something like this:

“Thought you might be interested in doing a joint venture. Here’s an opportunity we have, and if you’re interested, we’d like to get something scheduled with you very soon.” Then give them the link to your JV page, to your About Me page, to your testimonial page and even your sales page. Offer to send them a review copy of your product.

The indirect method is just that – more indirect. It takes a little longer, but it tends to work better, so you decide which is right for you. It goes something like this:

“I would like to support you by creating a mutually beneficial relationship.” Ask them for a quick phone conversation to discuss the possibilities. Include a link to your About Me page but include no other links. If they want, they can search your site and find the other pages, but you don’t want to be the one sending them there yet. Then get on the phone with them and discuss the possibilities, which of course could include promoting your product.

If after you send either of these emails you don’t hear back in a week, send the email again with a one line note that says something like, “Just wanted to be sure you saw this,” or “Gentle nudge,” or whatever is in keeping with your personal style.

Now I know some people will disagree with this method of getting JV partners and you’ll say that it’s best to spend some time establishing a relationship and doing favors for the potential JV partners before ever asking. And without a doubt that’s a great method, one I endorse wholeheartedly.

But if you need money now, this is the way to go. And if your product does indeed solve a big problem in a step-by-step fashion – in other words, it’s a great product – you will get JV partners this way. You might need to contact 10 to 20 people to get 3 JV’s, but it’s all a numbers game and it’s worth it.

Just don’t burn any bridges. If someone never gets back to you, it’s okay. If someone tells you to bugger off, it’s okay. Always be super polite and friendly, never take offense.

You might want to wait to contact the really big list owners until you’ve gotten a few JV’s under your belt. In fact it’s probably a good idea.

But there is a way you can contact the big dogs in your niche from Day 1, if you’re up to it. That is, if you’ve got the confidence.

You’re going to ask for an interview with them that you can add to your product. Most everyone is looking for more exposure and publicity, so this is a great way to get your foot in the door as well as making your product even better. And odds are if they grant you an interview, they’ll also promote your product because it contains their interview.

Here’s a trick: Find the big players in your niche who are doing something now or in the near future. Maybe they’re releasing a new book or a new product, something where they want publicity. This is the best time of all to ask to interview them, as they have their own reason for wanting to get as much exposure as possible.

Another benefit to having well-known names in your product package is you can leverage this to get more JV’s. Some potential partners will be all ears when you start name dropping because they’ll think that if these big names are in your product, then it’s something they want to be a part of, too.

Remember, if you have a great product that creates breakthroughs, you can get partners – you just have to be persistent in finding and asking these folks to JV with you.

Anthony Burgess was just 40 when he was told by his doctor that because of a brain tumor, he only had less than a year to live. It was 1960 and he was broke and worried because he didn’t have anything to leave his wife Lynne.

But for as long as he could remember, there was a nagging little voice in his head that said he could be a great writer.

Unfortunately, Anthony had never listened to that voice before. But now that was dying, he hoped he could write a book that would create royalties for his wife.

So for the next 9 months Anthony wrote day and night, finishing a whopping five and a half novels. That’s more than many professional writers create in 10 years, or for some in a lifetime. And that isn’t even the exciting part.

While he was busy doing what he had known he was meant to do for his whole life – while he was busy being creative and productive, his cancer quietly disappeared.

In his long and prolific life as a novelist, Anthony Burgess wrote more than 70 books, including the famous “A Clock-work Orange.”

But without his death sentence, he may never have written at all.

Just imagine for a moment that you have less than a year to live. What will you do with it? Whether it’s one year, or a lot more, if you are not doing what you were born to do, isn’t it time for a shift in that direction?

Blogging is a proven way to stay in contact with customers, get new buyers, get traffic and backlinks and especially boost your own credibility rating. But all of that blogging takes time. Here are 7 tips to make your content creation, and blogging go a lot faster.

1. Keep a list of your brilliant ideas. Okay, so they won’t all be brilliant but some will be. And if you don’t write them down you’ll lose them. Each time you get a new idea for a blog post, write it down. This simple act frees your mind to give you even more ideas and to improve the ideas you’ve already had.

2. When you’ve got a good idea, start making a list of what you’d like to add to it. For example, your idea might be “10 Ways to Inject $10,000 into Your Business.” As you think of each method, write it down.

3. Do your research. While you might know some of the points you want to make, you can deepen and enrich your post by also gathering information from outside sources.

4. Eliminate the least. In our example of “10 Ways to Inject $10,000,” you might actually come up with 15 ideas or more. Discard the less appealing points so you can focus on only the strongest ones. At this time you might also find that your post will be better served by focusing on just 7 methods rather than 10. This is editing before you write and can save you a tremendous amount of time. Imagine if you wrote your post with your initial 15 ideas and later decided to use just 7 – you would have written twice as much as needed.

5. Create an outline. This step alone can cut your writing time in half.

6. Prepare your work area. Before you begin writing, eliminate all distractions. Close email and social networks and turn off your phone. Set a timer and try to beat it. And then write. Don’t edit. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, etc. Just write.

7. Edit tomorrow. As good as your editing today might be, tomorrow it will be even better as you read your post with fresh eyes.

In addition to saving time, you’ll also notice that the faster you write blog posts, the less you mind writing them. Pretty soon your post-a-week schedule might even turn into 3 or 4 new posts each week. And the more you blog, the more attention you can command!