Category: work with others

    What Is a JV Partnership?

    A joint venture partnership is made between two or more individuals or business owners to work together on a particular project, product, or event. The companies do not become one; instead they maintain their separate individual entities while working on a particular goal together. The purpose of a joint venture is to combine resources to maximize efficiencies of each entity for the particular project.

    Limited Time Span

    While some JVs do last a long time, most of them are temporary until the completion of the project. Many businesses find themselves entering into several consecutive JVs due to the success of others.

    Clearly Defined Objective

    Another thing that denotes a JV partnership is that they usually have a very clearly defined objective or reason for being put into place. Each entity involved knows their place and what is expected, as well as the goal.

    Degree of Involvement Is Obviously Defined

    Each part of the JV alliance has a particular thing that they are supposed to do, and this is clearly spelled out in an obvious manner. Each partner knows what is expected, what to do and when to do their part.

    Spelled-Out Financial Contributions

    Since the business entity isn’t going to be formed in a JV, the financial responsibilities of each member must be expressed. Sometimes one person is responsible for the finances, will deduct expenses from income and then distribute the profits as spelled out in the contract.

    Plans Spelled Out for Problems or Disputes

    In a JV that is temporary in nature, there can still be issues and disputes that arise. The contract usually spells out what to do and who will be the final say in any dispute – typically an unbiased arbitrator or in some cases the person with the main financial input gets the final say.

    Termination of JV Arrangement Detailed

    Since a JV agreement is not permanent, usually the contract spells out exactly when and how the arrangement will end and what will happen to the intellectual property when the arrangement is complete.

    Non-Disclosure Information

    Most of the time both parties require some sort of non-disclosure information to keep trade secrets, contact lists, financial and other information private, since some of them will necessarily be revealed during the JV partnership.

    Other Legal Information

    It’s important to check with your state and country about various terms and issues that should be covered in your JV agreement. Together with your JV partners, you may want to determine which of your locations will have the final say on any legal issues that should arise.

    A joint venture partnership is a great way to expand your reach because you get to use each other’s contacts, resources, and skill set. But, it’s important to understand what a JV is and what it’s not. It’s not combining two businesses permanently and it’s usually a temporary joining of forces.

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    Why You Should Enter a JV

    Joining together in a joint venture (JV) agreement with another person or business entity is a common way to join forces without changing the structure of either business. When you join with another business temporarily, you can share resources in terms of people, technology and finances. This can make the combination stronger than each individual business.

    * Grow Your Business – By having access to your partner’s connections, you can get your business known by new people and new connections that you wouldn’t have access to as quickly otherwise.

    * Expand Your Brand – When you want more people to know about your brand, having someone else mention you, and you mentioning them, can create a discussion that helps expand awareness of both of your brands.

    * Build Your Email List – By giving each other access to your individual lists, telling your lists about the other, some of the people will cross over to become members of both lists. This is a great way to build your list with targeted individuals as long as you chose a partner who sells complementary goods to yours, to the same audience.

    * Enter a New Market – There are often several markets for one service or product. Finding a JV partner who deals with a portion of your audience that you’ve never dealt with before is a great way to get your foot in the door to the new market.

    * Develop a New Product – Sometimes two entities can come together using all their resources and create a brand-new product that neither business could accomplish on their own. This is a wonderful reason to form a joint venture partnership. For example, two business owners could come together to create a live event which is recorded to become a new information product.

    * Improve a Current Product – If you both already have similar products but both products are lacking, you could combine the good from each product or service to make a brand-new product or service that provides more benefits.

    * Bring in Skills You’re Lacking – If you are lacking in a skill and don’t want to outsource it, find a JV partner who has the skill that you don’t have. Then you can each do what you do best to contribute to the JV partnership.

    * Improve Your Authority Level – When you hang around other smart people, you become one of those smart people just by association. Surround yourself with really smart people in a JV partnership and you’ll achieve more than you thought.

    There are many reasons to enter a JV agreement with the right person. But, before you get started, know why you want to do it so that you understand, based on your goals, who you should work with. Remember – join with someone who has a complementary business to yours, not your direct competition, and not when it has to do with your main source of bread and butter.

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    Different Ways to Find Affiliates

    Finding affiliates is the next thing you need to do after you create an affiliate program. You aren’t going to get affiliates without telling people about your affiliate program. There are numerous ways that you can do that, but here are a few ways that you might try to find affiliates for your products and services.

    Link to Your Affiliate Program Right on the Product Website

    Don’t hide your affiliate program. Even if you want only buyers to be part of it, use it as another sales page. Link to the affiliate program and then require a purchase to be able to earn commissions.

    Host a Webinar to Recruit Affiliates

    Webinars  are awesome to promote products, but they can also be used to promote your affiliate program. You can attract people who want to earn money within your niche to the hangout, and offer attendees an extra incentive to join and make their first sale.

    Create Awesome Products

    Nothing can beat an awesome product. It’s true – if you create products that people love and talk about, you’ll naturally attract super affiliates as long as you have a good program. The product can speak for itself on many levels.

    Deliver Excellent Customer Service

    Another added incentive to get people to join your affiliate program is your customer service program. Affiliates don’t want to have to worry about returns and problems associated with promoting your product. Be sure that you have implemented an effective customer service program.

    Develop Effective Sales Collateral

    Don’t make an affiliate work too hard, or they won’t want to be part of your program. Offer graphics, text content, images, samples and more for your affiliates to use. Offer to have a webinar for super affiliates or any affiliate who sells more than a certain number of items. The more you can help your affiliates, the more sales they’ll make.

    Give Bonuses/Gifts after Their First Sale

    If you really want to attract serious affiliates, offer them a bonus for their first sale and then progressively better bonuses for their 10th, 50th and 100th sales and so forth. These bonuses or gifts will not only attract more affiliates, but it will also make the ones you have work harder to earn the benefits.

    Run a Make Money PPC Campaign

    You can also use pay-per-click campaigns to attract affiliates. Make the ads directed at people who want to earn a living from home as an affiliate, and also run them directed at experienced affiliates.

    Go To and Participate in Live Affiliate Events

    There are several affiliate events each year that you can attend when you run your own affiliate program. Find them, volunteer to help, offer to host a course, or speak, and get involved so that you will be seen as an authority.

    Offer Lucrative Commission Rates

    Good affiliates aren’t going to waste their time with poor products or low commission rates. Keep in mind that you can afford to give higher commissions when you are promoting digital products. Even if you only make 10 percent yourself, that’s still a lot of money for no extra work.

    Offer Buyers the Opportunity

    A really great way to get affiliates is to offer the opportunity to promote and refer your products to the people who have purchased the product. They’re the ones who will know the most about the product since they are really using it. They likely know people who will want to buy it, too.

    If you want to have a successful affiliate program, these tips will help you accomplish that. Every aspect of your affiliate program, from the product to the execution of the program, matters when it comes to attracting affiliates to your program.

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    Eight Ways to Use PPC Campaigns to Market Your Business

    Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is a great way to break into online advertising without spending a fortune. You can start with a small budget and over time see huge returns on your investment. But before even starting, it’s important to understand all the different goals you can have in mind for your PPC campaign.

    1. Build Your List – Email lists are a lucrative way to market your services and products. You get people to agree to receive marketing message from you via permission-based marketing. That is, they sign up on their own free will to get the messages. Usually, they get a free gift of some sort for signing up.

    2. Promote an Event – Short-term goals are really great to fill with PPC campaigns. Events usually have a set date that they are going to happen, and this bodes well for pay per click because people do not like to miss out. With a deadline approaching, people are more likely to sign up if they hear about it via PPC.

    3. Sell Your Book – Do you have a published book that you want people to know about? Starting a PPC campaign to promote the book is a great way to get more people to buy it. You can let your ad send them to a video trailer of your book and to an order page.

    4. Get More Followers – If you are trying to build up a community on Facebook, running a promoted post advertisement or another type of PPC campaign to get awareness for your group can do wonders for getting more followers.

    5. Get More Engagement – You can run promoted posts on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to get more engagement on a particular post that you want to see people respond to. When you get the engagement though, be sure to respond back to increase the effect.

    6. Promote a Contest – If you have a contest without PPC, you may end up very disappointed in the results. Contests are wonderful ways to build your list and get more awareness about your brand.

    7. Close More Sales – PPC can also be used to promote a direct product for direct sales instead of promoting a list or a post. Sometimes people just want what you have to offer and they want it now, not later. Create an awesome sales page and the PPC ad can link directly to the sales page for best results.

    8. Retarget Consumers – A great use of PPC is to retarget people who have seen your website and offerings but did not buy. Bringing them back is an excellent use of PPC campaigns because sometimes people just left because they got busy and the reminder to go back will help.

    Using PPC campaigns is a great way to improve your business, get the word out and brand yourself. You can also build an email list, make direct sales and more to market your business – whether it’s online or offline. It’s up to you.

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    Improve Your Income with Masterminding

    A mastermind group can consist of two or more people working together for a specific purpose. Masterminds can be formal and informal, but the most effective are formed in a formal manner. When two people bounce ideas off each other, they come up with things they never would have on their own. The same can be said for adding more to the group. It is better to keep a mastermind group small, though, as it’s easier to manage.

    Through masterminding you will get:

    * Answers – If you’ve chosen a group well, you will be with people with different skillsets and experiences, and who are not competitors. This will help you get answers to whether or not what you’re doing is working or can be improved.

    * Ideas – Spending time throwing out ideas on paper alone works well, but when you have someone who is responsive to throw those ideas at, the results will be improved upon exponentially.

    * Experience – Where you may be lacking, another member may have ten years or more of experience. For example, if you wanted to learn how to source products to add products to a service-based business, someone who has a product-based business can be the perfect help.

    * Skills – Even though your peers in the mastermind won’t actually be doing anything directly for you in terms of tasks, they can introduce you to people who have the skills you need, based on their experience. Of course, sometimes they may offer to help physically and you may even end up forming partnerships.

    * Insight – Often, other people looking at your business can offer insight that you never considered. You can show each other your sales pages, product ideas, and more and get feedback from someone who will be honest.

    * Connections – It’s said that your income is the average of the five people closest to you. When you make more connections, you increase your opportunity to raise your income exponentially. The shorter you can make the degrees of separation from where you want to be, the better.

    * Accountability – Another reason you’ll improve your income with masterminding is the accountability the meetings will provide to you. Whether you meet with your mastermind group weekly or monthly, you’ll have to admit whether you met your goals or not.

    * Support – Win, lose or fail, your masterminding will provide a lot of support to you. Not only that; you’ll feel really good supporting others too. One of the things humans need to feel successful, outside of money, is to help others.

    All of these things can improve your income if you put the things you learn into action. You’ll learn from your peers what you are doing well, what you can improve on, and come up with new ideas you never thought of. Thus, you’ll increase your income faster than you would without masterminding.

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    How to Attract Super Affiliates

    Every brand wants to attract super affiliates to their program. The fact is that one super affiliate can generate a full-time income for a brand. That’s why they want them so badly. You too can attract a super affiliate or two to your products if you plan for it and are ready for it.

    * Create an Excellent Product – Let your products speak for themselves. The more value you offer the audience, the better. Be sure that your product over delivers and offers additional value over what you state on your sales pages. This will ensure that affiliate want to promote such a phenomenal product.

    * Develop Fabulous Customer Care – Don’t skimp on customer care, because affiliates do not want to deal with a lot of returns and problems for the products they’ve worked hard to promote. Be clear about how consumers can access customer service and back up all your products with an ironclad guarantee.

    * Offer High Commission Rates – Super affiliates aren’t going to work hard for a dollar here and there; they want high commissions on high value products. If you can offer that for at least one or two products, your other products will also benefit.

    * Create Full-Fledged Marketing Materials – Super affiliates don’t want to create marketing materials. It is likely they will improve on what you do offer, due to their experience, but they’re not going to start from scratch. Create content, email messages, sales pages, brochures, graphics and more where appropriate.

    * Offer High Converting Sales Pages – Test out numerous sales pages until you get it right so that you can offer high converting sales pages to your affiliates. If your sales page doesn’t convert then there will be no point in having super affiliates or any affiliates sending people to the page.

    * Offer a Bonus for Their First Sale – Super affiliates like making money and winning prizes. Offer a bonus right away for their first sale and then additional bonuses and prize opportunities for more sales.

    * Give Them the Product Free in Exchange for Promoting It – Many super affiliates need to see and use the product before they will promote it. If you do your research and choose a few affiliates who are known from being awesome, and who promote products to your niche, you can approach them with an offer.

    * Join an Affiliate Network – Even if you offer an excellent affiliate program on your own, keep in mind that many super affiliates want to join known affiliate networks that they know have rules, and will pay out on time.

    * Pay On Time – Don’t make affiliates wait to earn money or have silly and arbitrary requirements to sell 100 dollars’ worth of product before you pay out. It’s reasonable to wait for returns but outside of that, making people wait for money they earned is just frustrating.

    * Allow Bidding on Your Brand Keywords – Many brands make a huge mistake not allowing affiliates to bid on keywords. Affiliates do a lot of keyword research on the products they promote; if you hold them back you will lose out on them.

    * Treat Them as Valued Partners in Your Business – Affiliates aren’t employees; they are independent contractors who are helping you earn a living. They are more partners in your business than they are employees, and should be treated as such. They can make suggestions, give ideas about new products, and rate the products you have so that you can improve.

    * Don’t Change Things Too Often – When you get a lot of affiliates and especially super affiliates, don’t change the links to the sales page or other things too fast. Affiliates do a lot of research on your behalf and promote your products to their audience, so you don’t want to make them have more work.

    Attracting super affiliates to your program can be exciting and life changing. Business will be awesome with even just one good super affiliate. The way that you attract them is the same way you should use to attract any affiliate or customer. By being the best.

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    How to Choose the Right Products to Promote as an Affiliate

    A major step in becoming a profitable affiliate marketer is to choose the right products to promote. You want to be sure that you choose something your audience needs, that has a good reputation behind it, and is made by someone you trust. After all, if people buy it due to your recommendation, it needs to be good so that you can maintain the trust of your audience.

    * Understand Your Audience – The more you know about your audience, the more you can be sure that you are finding products that they need and want. If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, it will be very difficult to choose the right products.

    * Solve Problems for Your Audience – You want to find products that solve problems for your audience. If you’re not solving a problem, you may be creating one. Find two or three pain points your audience has. Then search for products to see if you can find solutions for your audience for these pain points.

    * Try the Product – It’s probably better (at least at first) that you do not promote products you have not tried yourself. Consider the expense to be part of the cost of doing business, but also as an insurance policy against complaints. If you truly love a product, you’ll feel better about promoting it.

    * Check Conversion Rates – Any product that is worth selling should give affiliates some idea of how high their sales pages conversion rate is. This can help you know whether or not it’s worth it for you to spend time and perhaps money promoting the product.

    * Know How Much Your Commission Is – Always understand up front how much your commission is. Remember to subtract any fees you’re charged via the payment processing center that you use. Read the information on ClickBank so you know what it takes to actually collect there (or any other affiliate network for that matter).

    * Know the Payout Procedures – Every affiliate program out there has a different payout procedure. Some pay out monthly, some make you wait until you have a certain number of sales, and others have even more confusing rules. Read all the rules, and understand when and how you’ll be paid.

    * Stay Digital – The best affiliate products are digital over physical. The reason is that people will buy them faster and get their products sooner. Plus, you’re likely to earn more money per item when promoting digital items.

    * Trends Are Nice – Don’t be afraid to jump on a trend bandwagon if it fits. But, don’t force it. If you can find a way that the trend fits in with your audience, you can capitalize on it in a big way. If you can’t, just let it go.

    Being an affiliate marketer can be a tremendous career. Your income-earning potential is truly unlimited. Only your imagination can stop you from making a good income via affiliate marketing. But, you want to be sure to pick the right products at the right time for maximum impact.

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    Putting Your Best Foot Forward

    When you join a membership such as an “inner circle,” “mastermind group” or a local business club, it’s important to learn how to put your best foot forward. Not only do first impressions matter, so do repeat impressions. You know how a person has to see an advertisement seven times before they choose to purchase? Well, it’s not much different when it comes to building relationships and getting to know people via memberships.

    * Be Prepared – Don’t go to meetings disorganized, dropping paperwork, letting your phone ring, and that type of thing. You need to be fully present at every meeting instead of worried about what’s going on outside of it.

    * Don’t Sell Anything – The worst thing you can do at any membership meetings, or any social gathering at all, is to try to treat it as a sales meeting. You shouldn’t sell anyone anything at these events. Instead, just be yourself, and get to know people and let them get to know you.

    * Dress Appropriately – Each membership has a different personality so you’ll have to base how you dress on the membership. But, you want to show your personality too. Don’t show up in your PJs and looking dirty, but do be yourself and dress right for the membership.

    * Offer Your Hand First – The person who walks up to someone and introduces him or herself is the power person in the group. You need to go up to people, introduce yourself, and offer to shake hands. Look them in the eye, and tell them your name clearly, and ask theirs. Then listen.

    * Get Professional Business Cards Made – Always have cards with you when you leave your office or home. It’s very important because it’s the best way to meet with others after the event. You’ll never remember everyone, so using the card they give you and jotting down on the back something to help you remember them is a great thing to do. It’s something they might do too.

    * Get to Know People – Your entire job at any event is to get to know people. The more you get to know people and they get to know you, the more likely they are to recommend you to others, as well as hire you if they need what you offer.

    * Ask a Lot of Questions – Remember to always put the other person first, and learn as much as you can about them. The more people get to tell you about themselves, the better impression they get of you.

    * Show Up – It’s important to show up to the meetings, events, and luncheons when the membership you choose to join has them. Don’t just sign up and never show up. Showing up is the best thing you can do for your business.

    Whether you have a home business or a bricks and mortar business, it’s important to always practice putting your best foot forward. What that constitutes is different for each type of business and business owner, depending on their audience and niche.

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    Software to Help You Start an Affiliate Program

    One thing you need to run your affiliate program is the right software. The best way to pick the right software is to make a list of the features that you want the software to have. Plus, set a budget for the software so that you can rule out some. But, don’t be too cheap either. If you want your business to grow, you need to pick the right software to avoid too much changing, as affiliates get tired of too many system changes.

    * PostAffiliatePro.com – This affiliate program software can work in the cloud or as a download that you upload and run from your own server. There are different levels that you can purchase for the SaaS program that are affordable. What’s great is that in this case you own your affiliates even though it is a cloud-based service.

    * aMember.com – This is a plugin that works with WordPress and other website software. You can even set up a membership website with this software. It’s a one-time purchase with yearly upgrades and excellent customer care.

    * AffiliateWiz.com – This is software you’ll purchase and put on your server yourself in order to run your affiliate program. It offers all the typical bells and whistles, allowing people to sign up for the program, grab code, as well as other marketing collateral that your affiliates will need. Plus it offers a way to pay out your affiliates via PayPal Mass Pay.

    * E-Junkie.com – This is a simple cloud-based affiliate software that starts at only $5.00 per month. This program doesn’t have many of the features that you may want such as allowing subscriptions, but it does offer many other features such as easy payouts and hosting of products, images and other marketing collateral.

    * ClickBank.com – This is a very popular affiliate network that you can join that will help you run your program in a professional manner. The one drawback is that you don’t own your affiliates, and you will need to ask them to sign up for a separate list or something that enables you to give them more marketing materials to use.

    * JVZoo.com – This is free software that you can use in the cloud to promote your products and run an affiliate program. It has all the bells and whistles, plus you will be part of their marketplace which will enable super affiliates to find you.

    Figure out what features you want in your affiliate software, test out many different systems before picking, and then try to stick to particular software so that you don’t run off the affiliates you do attract. But, if you choose right you’re not going to want to switch. Don’t be afraid to find an experienced affiliate manager to help you set up your affiliate program to get started fast on the right foot.

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    Ten Reasons to Start an Affiliate Program

    Starting an affiliate program is the best way to increase your income and build a bigger business fast. You have a whole army of fans promoting your product, pushing your website up on search engine results, and talking about your product. There are so many reasons to have an affiliate program that you should just almost stop reading now and get to work on starting one. But, if you’re not convinced yet, keep reading.

    1. Low Startup Costs – There is hardly any business that you can start that has a lower startup cost. Depending upon what type of software you want to use and the functionality you want, you can start your affiliate program for just five bucks through E-junkie.com, or for about 50 bucks via ClickBank.com, or a little more by using software like aMember.com.

    2. Low Cost Marketing – Face it; marketing isn’t cheap. But, when you have an affiliate program you get other people to foot the bill for a lot of it. You will need to create marketing materials for your affiliates, but they will often pay for ads and PPC campaigns if your payout is high enough for them to do so.

    3. Winning Business Model – When you consider the business model, it really is just hiring sales people who work on commission only. This means your labor force is very cheap and essentially free unless they make a sale. Sales people have always been around and will always be around. Just because you’re good at making your product doesn’t make you a good sales person, but hopefully you can attract good sales people via your affiliate program.

    4. Easily Scale Your Business – When you have a practically free sales force, that means you can scale your business easily. Once you have enough affiliates you can close or open the program as you wish. You can start focusing on building products instead of selling, and still keep growing your business.

    5. Increases Your Streams of Income – If you already sell products of your own as well as other people’s, then you know what it means to have multiple streams of income. Having many ways to bring money into your household keeps you from having financial problems, because you’re not reliant on just one source of income.

    6. A Key to Higher Profit Margins – Getting other people to do work for you is a huge key to making more profits in your business. Once you get your affiliate program going, and your affiliates are promoting and selling your products, your main job will be to create new products and marketing materials and then let them go for it.

    7. Word-of-Mouth Marketing at Its Best – In many cases affiliates are also users of the product or service. In fact, you can make that a criterion for promoting it if you want. Then you can take advantage of the idea of word-of-mouth marketing with a boost. Affiliate marketing is like word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.

    8. Improves Traffic to Your Website – When you have multiple people sending traffic to your sales page, this is automatically going to create links outside of your website. Many of these will be considered authoritative in nature, which Google Search likes.

    9. It’s Team Building That Gets Results – When you have an army of affiliates working for you, you can get them together and work on team building, even offer them training to help them sell your products better.

    10. Helps Expand Your Entire Business – When you start and run a successful affiliate program, it will shift the emphasis of your business drastically. You’ll be able to hire customer support, outsource more (maybe even product creation) and focus on running your business instead of working in your business.

    An affiliate program is not hard to start, and it’s something that you should definitely consider doing if you sell products and even services (especially if you outsource). Give your affiliates a lot of incentives, awesome products to promote, great promotional materials and you will be successful.

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