I get asked for joint ventures all the time. A day doesn\’t go by without some message landing in my mailbox from someone saying they\’ve got a killer product and that I should tell my entire list about it.
And each of those days ends with just about all of those emails landing in my trash box.
Yes, some products I\’ll be happy to recommend to people who are trying to build Internet businesses. Usually, they\’ll have come from people I know, people I\’ve met at conferences and people who arrive with personal recommendations themselves.
The products will always have blown my socks off. Before I stand by them, they need to have made me slap my forehead and wonder why I didn\’t think of the idea first.
But these aren\’t joint ventures. They\’re carefully chosen affiliate relationships. My only contribution to the success of the relationship is to tell everyone that this is a tool or a strategy that they should have.
A real joint venture is about more than bringing a market to a product. It\’s about bringing together partners whose skills complement each other.
When I first came across the site that would become Yahoo! Games, for example, the place was a mess. The idea was fantastic and the games were great but no one was playing them. The guy who had built it was a very talented coder but he was a terrible marketer.
I knew that I could bring players into games like these and I knew where the improvements should be made. But I also knew that if I tried to code games like these myself, they would have more bugs than a Brazilian rainforest.
We teamed up. He brought one skill, I brought another and we achieved together something that neither of us could have achieved alone.
Success in Internet marketing is usually the result of a series of joint ventures. You\’ll have affiliate relationships too but it\’s the JVs that will form the foundation of your business.
To create those relationships, you have to understand the strengths that you can bring to the partnership – and you have to recognize and accept that there are some things you\’re better off trusting someone else to do with you.