Joint Venture Secrets

One way to make a lot of money without much risk is through joint ventures. A joint venture is a deal, between two marketing partners, where each brings something of value and both profit. For example, you might have a hot product but no money to advertise it. You could take your product to a company with a large customer mailing list and do a joint venture with them where they’ll spend their own money to market your product to their list in exchange for 50% to 60% of all sales made. It’s a win-win situation. Your joint venture partner creates cash from a product they didn’t have to create and you make money without putting up any of your own cash.

Personally, I’ve had incredible success with joint ventures. A few years ago, I did a joint venture with a company that had tens of thousands of customers. I had a $997 product that sold very well to my own small mailing list, but I ran out of customers to sell it to. So I took my offer to this larger company and made them a deal. If they paid to print and mail the sales letter to their own mailing list, I’d let them keep 60% of all of the sales that came in. They accepted and immediately mailed out approximately 20,000 copies of my offer to their best list. Long story short, that one offer generated roughly $1.1 million dollars in just 12 short weeks! And with my 40% share, I made about $440,000.00 with NO Marketing Costs! Of course, my joint venture partner profited, too-- so we both won big!

Editor’s Note: A reader asked how the money is collected, how is the deal set up, and how are the order fulfilled. The truth is that there are as many ways to structure joint ventures as there are potential joint venture partners. However, in the previous example, here’s how the joint venture worked. I gave my joint venture partner the original files of my sales letter and order form. They changed the order form so that all phone, fax, and mail order were to come directly to them. They processed all check and credit card orders in-house. Then, every day, I received the original order forms by fax. (Today, I would request that the orders
be emailed daily in an spreadsheet.) At least once a month (often twice a month), I was written a check for 40% of the gross sales made since my last check was cut. I shipped all orders from my own office. Also, as customer’s had questions about the product, they were directed to contact us, since we were the creator of
the product. If a customer contacted us for a refund, we would either refer them to our joint venture partner to request a refund – or simply contact the joint venture partner ourselves to have them process the refund. Our portion of each refund was either taken out of future sales – or, once sales stopped coming in, were sent as a check back to the joint venture partner. Of course, you can set up your joint ventures to run in any way you and your joint venture partners choose. 

To do joint ventures, you must have one of two things. Either you must have a HOT product with a high profit margin (since you’ll be giving up a substantial amount of your profits to your joint venture partner), or you must have a high-quality customer mailing list. 

IF You Have a High Profit Margin Product or Service-- finding joint venture partners can be as easy as contacting companies selling similar products to your target market. For example, if I’m selling Internet advertising, the best company to do a joint venture with would be a company selling website design. In fact, one of the very first extremely profitable joint ventures I did in the late 1990’s was with a company selling website design. I had just started selling Internet advertising on my website and created a special “Advertising Package” for $497. I mailed a special letter to 5,000 of this company’s best clients and generated 282 sales or roughly $140,154.00 in gross sales. I split that with the website design company and kept about $70,077.00! Since then, I’ve let many other companies promote my products and services to their clients in exchange for a portion of the profits. Once you find a potential joint venture partner, setting up a deal can be as easy as sending a letter, fax, or email and explaining your proposal. Remember, the more profits you’re willing to give to your joint venture partner (50% to 60% or so), the more likely they’ll be willing to work with you.

IF You Have a High-Quality Customer Mailing List-- then you may not have to do anything to engage in joint ventures. I know of many companies (mine included) who are contacted on a regular basis by other companies wanting to do joint ventures. This goes back to what I said earlier in this book. Your mailing list is your most valuable asset. Products are a dime a dozen. Everyone has a book or course they want to sell. But a mailing list is incredibly valuable. So if you have a list, you’ll probably start to receive many offers for joint ventures. If
you’re not receiving offers, you can contact companies advertising products or services you wish to promote to your own mailing list. Finding a company to do a joint venture with can be as simple as picking up a magazine in your niche market or doing a fast Internet search. Very quickly, you can have 5, 10, even 20 potential products that you can promote to your mailing list. Now you simply contact the company selling the product and suggest a profitable joint venture for them. Remember, since you own the mailing list, you’ll want to keep a good portion of the profits per sale, from 50% to 60% or more.