Many coaches get involved in joint venture partnerships, and as a virtual assistant who is familiar with the technical processes involved, I often have newer coaches asking why they would want to do joint ventures and what would be required.
In case you’re not really familiar with what I mean by a joint venture partner, it’s simply someone you can team up with to help sell your products or services. Coaches will often choose to enter a joint venture partnership to share strengths, grow their email lists, and increase their exposure to a targeted audience of potential clients in their niche. JV partners may help each other to make more sales through the increased exposure to each other’s community and email list, and both of you benefit from this through affiliate commissions.
The partnerships and activities may take a number of different forms. Some common examples for coaches are:
- Guest blog posts
- Cross promotion in newsletters
- Giveaway events (you donate an information product for free to help grow your email list)
- Joint teleseminars or podcasts (you may be a guest being interviewed or you may interview your partner, giving them exposure to your online community)
- Telesummits
- Joint webinars
- Joint coaching and/or online training programs, etc.
If the idea of doing these activities intimidates you but you still wish you could, you need to work with a business coach who has clients successfully doing these activities. I feel this is very important for my clients who are new to JV partnerships and are nervous about it, yet still interested. You need that kind of support, guidance, and accountability. You know you are limiting your business growth if you never step outside of your comfort zone.
So, you’re interested in doing joint ventures, you’ve found a coach to help you set goals and an achievable plan of action, now what? Before you make a firm commitment to be a JV partner, you have to know what systems you want and need set up to support your activities.
If you’re only looking to do activities to increase your list size, you may only need an account set up with an email marketing system, which you should already have, and a free gift. If it’s a giveaway event, the free gift may need to be something different than your regular freebie offered on your website, and with a higher value.
However, if you’re looking to have others promote and sell your products or programs for you, you need to have a reliable affiliate system. There are various options, but 1ShoppingCart (and private label systems) and Infusionsoft are two of the most commonly used systems that my clients use. If you plan to host teleseminars, webinars, or telesummits, you also need to decide what conferencing system you’re going to use. There are many to choose from, depending on what you need the system to do for you.
Most importantly, when choosing someone to partner with, you want to make sure that their message and offering is in alignment with your business and that it will be valuable to your contacts, but also that what you are offering will be of great value to your partner’s contacts.
