If you’ve been around online marketing for any time at all, you’ve heard about joint ventures and how valuable they can be for building your business. What you may not know are the variety of ways you can structure joint ventures.

(In this article, I will refer to a product, but this may also be a service or program.)

1. Endorsement Marketing

This is probably the best known and most often used style of joint venture. One person promotes the product of another person.

For this to work well for both parties, the promoter must have a fairly good sized list to promote to and must believe in the product’s value and benefit to her audience. The product creator must be willing to offer the promoter something – usually a commission – for each customer that comes from the promoter’s list.

Sometimes the product creator also grows his list of prospects even beyond those who become customers. This can happen, for example, when there’s a free call or webinar the promoter’s list is invited to. People who choose to attend opt-in to the product creator’s list and some then also become customers. The product creator can now develop his own relationship with these people.

The benefits to the promoter include the commissions, being seen as a helpful resource to her list, and a relationship with the product creator that may provide additional benefits in the future.

2. Co-Authored and Co-Promoted Product

This is a traditional partnership where both parties help to create the product and both promote it to their lists and elsewhere. They may even enlist other joint venture partners to promote to their lists via endorsement marketing.

An arrangement like this works best when the partners have complementary expertise. The resulting product is more valuable than one either partner could create on her own.

The partners’ audiences should both value the product being created. It’s also simplest if the two partners have lists of roughly the same size.

If either the list size or the level of expertise is skewed too much in one direction, the financial agreement may offer one partner more than 50% of the profits.

Another style of partnership might have one partner creating the product content while the other handles the marketing and e-commerce mechanics. I’ve seen this work quite successfully.

Either way, the benefits to both partners include creating a superior product, getting visibility to the other partner’s list, and having a built-in accountability partner so the project moves ahead.

3. Thank You Page Marketing from Subscribers and Buyers

This technique is a simple, passive endorsement. It’s so easy I’m surprised it’s not used more.

The idea is that when someone opts in to a list or buys a product, he lands on a thank you page. On this page, he sees an offer to opt-in to another’s list or buy another’s product. The link for the offer will be the site owner’s affiliate link so she will get a commission if he ends up buying something from the other person.

While there’s an implicit endorsement of the product, the site owner doesn’t need to do anything other than put the offer on the thank you page. And the product creator only needs to provide the offer copy and an affiliate link.

While simple, this technique can be very effective. The subscriber or buyer has just taken made a commitment to the site owner and is still in that frame of mind when arriving at the thank you page. He may well be willing to make a similar commitment to the other business owner in this moment.

4. Collaboration Product

This can take one of two forms. First, a relative newcomer to the market can gather a group of veterans to participate in creating and marketing the product. For instance, each person could write a chapter in a book around a particular theme.

If each veteran has a decent list and they all market to their lists, the product could sell well. The profits could be divided between the newbie, who’s getting paid for organizing and physically (or digitally) creating the product, and each of the veterans.

Even if there aren’t huge profits, each veteran benefits from having a published book (or whatever the product is) and from being associated with all the other veterans. The veterans’ expertise spills over on the newcomer, and he develops valuable relationships with the veterans. Depending on how the deal is structured, he probably grows his list as well.

The other form of collaboration consists totally of peers. One person recruits colleagues to contribute to a product and they all market it and share the profits. The organizer may benefit a bit more to compensate for her additional effort. This might be in her share of profits or that customers land on her list.

5. Telesummit or Websummit

A telesummit (held on the phone) or websummit (online webinars) is quite similar to a collaboration product except instead of a product, there’s an event.

The organizer – either newcomer or veteran – recruits people to interview around a specific topic and these calls or webinars are scheduled for people to listen to. These interviews may all be scheduled in one week, several times a week over the course of 2-6 weeks, or once a week for months.

Typically, telesummits are free to listen to when scheduled. but may have a fee to access after the fact. Often, the person being interviewed will have a free gift for listeners that requires they opt-in.

The benefits to the interviewees include getting exposure to the other interviewees’ lists, growing their own lists by giving away their free gifts, and showing their expertise.

The benefits to the organizer include growing her list since listeners must subscribe to attend, revenues from selling the recordings afterward, and sometimes affiliate fees from sending listeners to get their free gifts through an affiliate link. The organizer also gains visibility as an expert from interviewing the experts and develops relationships with these experts that can be valuable in the future.

Telesummits can be complex and time consuming to organize, but the benefits can be huge.

Now that you have several ideas on how to use joint ventures to build your business, go forth and partner!

And if you had a great success with one of these methods, or if there are any other ways you’ve benefited from partnering with others, leave a comment and share it with us.

Hopefully, you’ve developed the habit of regularly publishing blog posts to your own site. Have you considered branching out and becoming a guest blogger on others’ sites?

Posting articles on other blogs will expose you to a broader audience and boost your reputation as an expert in your field.

The posts you create will include an author box at the end with your name and web site address. If readers of your post appreciate your article, you may get new visitors to your site and even new subscribers to your list when they click through the link in your author box.

Also, if the publisher of the blog is willing to put an author tag on the post for you (and you’ve set up a Google profile), your photo will show up next to the post in Google search engine results, giving you even more visibility.

So there are clear benefits of becoming a guest blogger, but how do you go about becoming one?

First, find some blogs with good sized audiences in your target market, but where the site owners are not direct competitors of yours. You want to find the blog of someone who provides something different than you, but to the same people.

Write a blog post suitable for his or her audience and send it, along with an offer to provide more posts on a regular schedule. It could be one or month or more, depending on what you and the site owner agree to.

Can you use one of your own blog posts as a guest blogger?

You can, but there are drawbacks:

• Blog publishers may not wish to use a “recycled” post.
• If your target market reads your blog and one or more of the blogs you’re a guest for, they’ll see the same article in multiple blogs.
• Search engines will only list one of the duplicate blog posts, and it may not be the one at your site, so you may be damaging your own site’s search engine position by reusing blog posts.

Of course, to implement this strategy, you’ll REALLY need to be disciplined with your writing schedule. You don’t want to slack off on your own blog posts, or fail to meet your commitment to the blog owners with whom you have arrangements. But if you can pull it off, becoming a guest blogger can be a terrific way to become more visible and valuable to your market.

In the last post, I shared some tools I use to help me generate blog posts. This time, we’re going to discuss techniques and habits you may want to consider to help you create blog posts on a regular basis.

Many people are concerned that they won’t be able to think of anything to write about. One technique is invaluable in alleviating this concern. Keep a notebook with a page of topics. Every time something comes up with a client that you think might be useful to others, write it down. When you see an article, blog post, or content on a website that triggers an idea, write it down.

As you start doing this regularly, you’ll find that you begin seeing potential topics everywhere. Once you’re mindful of capturing ideas for posts, you’ll end up with enough to write about for months in advance. When you’re ready to write, just pick a topic and go!

The next issue is about when to write your blog posts. There are several possible habits you can develop here and I’ve seen people use each of them successfully. First, pick a day (or days) of the week and do a blog post every week on that day. I have a few clients who are very disciplined about this. One writes a post every Sunday to be published and emailed to her list Monday morning.

Another option is to create an editorial calendar – that is, plan out your posts for several months and up to a year in advance. Then pick one or more days once a month or quarter, and just sit and write blog posts. For example, you could plan posts out for three months and once a quarter reserve three days to write and edit all the blog posts for that quarter. Once you post them in your blog with the correct future publish dates, you’re all set until the next quarter.

The method I use is a little more ad hoc, but it can work as long as you stay somewhat disciplined. Whenever I get inspired or have some time on my hands, I sit down with a list of general categories for blog posts, see what ideas come up, and start writing. Once I get in the “writing groove”, I can blast out two to four posts in a couple of hours.

This technique is particularly useful if you find yourself with some time on your hands and no internet connection. You can just open your text editor and go.

The danger with this last technique is that you won’t get the time or inspiration frequently enough to post as often as you wish, so a certain amount of awareness of your timeline and how many posts are currently scheduled is necessary so you publish consistently.

When you actually sit down to write a blog post, there are also techniques to help you structure it. Some people are able to just start writing and when they finish, their post is ready to go or just needs a little polishing. Most of us, though, need to think a bit more about our little article before we start writing.

A technique I learned in high school English class works well for me. (Wouldn’t those teachers be amazed!) When we learned to write essays, we were taught they should be comprised of an introduction, three to five points, and a conclusion. And that’s how I construct my blog posts. One difference, though, is that in high school, each point would be one paragraph. It’s important to have short paragraphs with a lot of white space with online content, so I often divide one point into multiple paragraphs.

I’m able to design the structure in my head and then write it. If that’s tough for you, go ahead and write down an outline containing at least your three to five points. It also can be helpful to wait until the rest of the article is done to write your introductory paragraph and the title. By then, you should have a good idea what your post is about.

I hope you’ve discovered the tools and techniques you need to post to your blog regularly. Comment and share your experiences. What works for you? What doesn’t?

At first blush, this seems so obvious. After all, who would hire you or buy your product if they don’t know you exist? And, of course, that’s completely true. People don’t buy services or products they don’t know about. So that’s one reason visibility is important. But there are others.

1. The more your prospective customers see, hear, and read about you in more places – web sites, Facebook posts, articles, radio shows, blog posts, etc. – the more you are seen as an expert. Your content may even be similar to other information they’ve already heard, but the fact that all these sources seem to have sought out your opinion and your audience sees your content everywhere they look, automatically gives you star ranking.
2. When people see and hear what you have to say, chances are they’ll go to your website to learn more. This is a terrific opportunity to get these visitors on your list and show them what else they can get from you, whether free or paid. Once they’re on your list, you’ll have an even better way to stay visible to them!
3. When your prospective customers are ready to purchase what you offer, you want to be the first business that comes to mind. If you stay in front of them on a regular basis, you’re more likely to get the call or the sale when someone is ready to buy.
4. Being consistent with your marketing efforts is itself attractive to potential customers. If you’re on schedule and steady with your own business, chances are you’ll bring those traits to your work with clients as well.
5. Visibility also attracts affiliates, partners, and joint ventures. Not only are you seen as an expert by these people, too, but your effective and consistent marketing is seen as another benefit of working with you.

So now that you’re thoroughly convinced that visibility needs to be a key part of your marketing strategy, how do you accomplish it?

Decide what activities you want to do on a regular basis to be visible to your audience. These might include:

• article marketing
• Blog Talk Radio
• social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• blogging
• forum/list participation (Warrior Forum, New Coach Connection Yahoo group)
• podcasts
• video creation and distribution
• attending events
• hosting events
• blogging
• free teleseminars
• live networking
• ezine publishing
• direct mail
• social bookmarking (Digg, Technorati, etc.)
• speaking
• publishing a book

You may think of others. I suggest picking two or three that appeal to you and start doing them consistently. Once you’ve got your system in place, you can add in others.

If your chosen techniques include creating content, keep in mind that you can create one piece of content and re-purpose it in written, audio, and video formats. Once it’s created, you just need to distribute it.

The good news is that there are many tools and services that can help you with this if you want to do it yourself. I know many of you don’t want to spend the time to first learn and then implement all the techniques to effectively and efficiently use this visibility strategy for your business. So, in the next few weeks, I’ll be offering several different ways I can do it for you.

Whether you do it yourself or get help, your business need to be consistently visible. What’s your plan?

Did you know that you can browse blogs and forums your target market reads for about an hour a week and be marketing your business? You can!

First, find blogs and forums that attract your target market. The topic should generally be related to your business in some way, but probably not published by a direct competitor. The objective in selecting these sites is that your actual or prospective customers are reading them on a regular basis.

Next, read through recent entries to find posts where you have something useful to add to the conversation – preferably on a topic that’s directly relevant to your business.

Your goal in your comments is to be as helpful as possible. You want to do more than add a comment just agreeing with someone else or making a generic comment. You want to use your business expertise to assist the readers. The benefit of doing this is that people reading these sites will begin to see you as knowledgeable in your area and may choose to check you out further.

When you add a comment to a blog post, you’ll have a hotlink on your name that points back to your site. Forums often allow you to create a signature containing your site address that’s automatically included at the end of each post you make. Not only do these links help readers find your site, they may also help you build additional links back to your site that search engines see and value.

The more links to your site that exist – especially from ‘popular’ sites – the better your organic (non-paid) search engine rankings will be.

The ‘nofollow” Tag

Note that some blogs will have the ‘nofollow’ tag set on their comments. This tag tells search engine spiders not to give the commenter credit for the link to his site. Blog publishers do this to discourage spam comments that have only the goal of getting links back to a site and not providing anything of value to the websites they were posted to.

While adding quality comments to blogs not using the ‘nofollow’ tag will help you with both readers clicking through to your site as well as search engine rankings, you don’t need to avoid the blogs that do use this tag. As long as you’re adding valuable comments, readers will click through to your site, and that’s who you’re trying to attract, right?

Also, the ‘nofollow’ tag does not stop search engines from following the link, it just prevents any of the weight being carried from that page to the page it is linked to; the search engine spiders still do follow the links.

Blog Comment Tool

I use a tool called Comment Kahuna to find relevant blog pages by using keywords I specify. It will show me which blogs use the ‘nofollow’ tag so I can decide whether or not to post comments to them or only to ones without it. I can specify the minimum page rank of each blog page and how many results I want.

Once the program returns the results, I can go to each page to decide if I want to add a comment. If so, the system will auto-fill my name, email address, and web site URL and I’m ready to add a comment. If not, I can tell the program to skip this blog and move on to the next one. I can stop at any time and the system can pick up where I left off next time.

The best part about this tool is that it’s free, so give it a try!

Forum Comment Tool

For finding appropriate forum threads, I use another free tool called BotSurfer. With this tool, you must find a list of relevant forums and input their URLs into the tool. It will then find threads within these forums that contain the keywords you specify.

To find relevant forums, just go to Google or Yahoo and type in your keyword topic: Online forum + Keyword

You can find this tool at BotSurfer. Check out the forum posting tutorial links at the left, too. While they’re oriented toward affiliates of Article Marketer (I am one), the principles are applicable to anyone wanting to use forums to attract visitors to her business.

It goes without saying (I hope!) that you shouldn’t post comments to blogs or forums that are just links to your site. They will be considered spam, almost certainly be removed, and may cause you to be banned from the site.

Get Started!

I put aside about an hour each week to comment on blogs and forums. You obviously could spend much, much more time doing this, but remember this is just one of your marketing strategies and don’t get too carried away!

If you’ve been using this technique, post a comment and let us all know how it’s worked for you. If not, give it a whirl and let me know what you think. And, of course, if you have any questions, post them and I’ll reply.