Tool #9 – Joint Venturing: What it Takes to Make Outrageously Profitable Deals With Yanik Silver

This technique will blow your mind with its simplicity and the powerful results it will produce for you.

By simply getting another business or practice to promote your business or services you can harness incredible profits. Using an endorsed relationship is an easy way to produce to reap huge rewards online or offline.

You can begin to play off literally millions of dollars of goodwill and advertising (I’m not kidding). Think about it. Every business spends thousands and thousands of dollars trying to attract more customers (ads, letters, PR, online, etc). Most, if not all, of these business owners never realize the incredible invisible asset sitting in their customer files.

And not 1 business owner in a 100 will ever know how to use start making endorsements work.

Just ask yourself, who else targets the same type of customers, clients or patients before, during, or after they come to you.

A couple examples will make this perfectly clear:

1. Cosmetic Surgeon – here is a list of complementary businesses that are image related:

• Upscale health clubs
• Nail salons
• Upscale spa
• Upscale hair salons
• Fur stores
• Upscale jewelry shops
• Upscale boutiques, etc. etc.

2. Wedding Florist:

• DJs
• Tuxedo Shops
• Bridal Shops
• Reception Halls
• Stationary store, etc. etc.

3. Painters:

• Real Estate Agents
• Home Inspection Contractors
• Title/Insurance Agents
• Home Improvement Stores
• Mortage Brokers, etc. etc.

Or, your list could be even more generic. Let’s say you own a restaurant, gas station, hair salon, etc. Customers from nearly any business could be perfect targets for you.

Now after your list is done turn to the yellow pages and get actual business names and phone numbers. While you are getting more comfortable working endorsements you should approach smaller companies first.

Basically you go to the owners and explain that you would like to send a free gift to their clients and customers. Make it a free offer they can’t refuse which is coming from the owner or professional.

One good way to make it work is to give a free valuable coupon ostensibly coming from the joint venture partner.

You could actually get your endorser to endorse any part of your services or product, however, I think something free will be the most effective for a couple reasons:

A. It’s non-threatening
B. It’s free

You can never beat free for an irresistible offer, especially to induce other people’s customers and clients to use your services.

Reassure The Endorser Of A Few Key Points:

1. Everything you provide will give incredible goodwill by sending a free gift to their clients and customers.
2. Your business is absolutely non-competitive.
3. You will give complete editorial approval of anything you write.
4. You will pay for all postage and printing

When setting up these endorsements it is best to speak in person. Here’s a sample script of how to approach potential endorsers (the sample is for a cosmetic surgeons):

“My name is (your name) and I am a cosmetic surgeon in our community for over ___ years. During that time I have been lucky enough to help over 2,000 patients (whatever number) with their appearance concerns.

Just recently I was thinking of a way to help market my practice in an ethical manner. And I realized I could do something which would be an excellent opportunity for you to gain enormous goodwill from your clients (or customers) while we both benefit.

I am in the position to let you gift your clients a very valuable service from my practice which will greatly endear your clients to you without costing you a dime.

Let me explain.

I would like to send a letter coming from you giving your clients a coupon for a free glycolic facial peel. These peels will reduce wrinkles, sun damage and leave people feeling years younger. They normally run $50.00 (or whatever value you use).

Wouldn’t that be a great thank you gift from you?

I will pay 100% for all the postage and printing and you can have complete editorial control of the letter. This will in no way take away or be competitive with your services.

I just figured it would make an excellent gift you can give your clients for their business to you and a way for me to get more people into my practice. There’s no strings attached and your clients have no obligation to ever use my services again.

If this sounds like a good idea, I’d be happy to give you (or your wife) a free glycolic peel so you can see how nice it really is.”

Now of course not everyone you approach will be receptive but you should be able to get a good majority of the people. Just reassure them that you are in no way trying to take away business from them.

What if they still don’t want to do it just for the goodwill? Depending on how valuable you think their customer list will be, you have several more options to try.

1. Offer to contribute to their favorite charity, maybe $100 or $200.2. Pay them cash for using their list.
The going rate for list rental is usually about $25 to $100 per thousand depending on how valuable the names are

3. Offer to reciprocate
You can offer to do a mailing to your patient list that endorses them.

4. Another way to reciprocate is to put their flyer as an insert in your newsletter (here’s another reason to not neglect your monthly newsletter)

5. Barter your services
You have an excellent opportunity to exchange your services or product for whatever you want. Plus, this actually makes your endorser more credible because they (or their spouse) has used your services and now can talk about it first hand in the endorsement letter.

Endorsement Letter Example (free offer)

Here is a simple letter you would give to your endorser to send out on their letterhead and inside their envelopes (that’s absolutely critical). Or even better, you send it out for them so they don’t have to do the work.

The Method To Your Madness

Getting prospective customers, patients, clients in for free service does a few things for you:

1. Using packaging and up-sells (each of these methods have been covered in previous tools) you can see an immediate profit from people coming in to redeem their free product or service.2. You also add more qualified names to your mailing list.

Doing Profit Share Deals

You can also do deals where you do profit splits with your endorser (some joint venture partners will go for the free offer for goodwill – others want the cold hard cash) J

These deals follow roughly the same outline as before.

Take you list of potential partners and then contact them with an offer to give them “FREE MONEY”. Let them know they can be making money from an existing asset (their customer base) they are probably overlooking.

Make sure you do almost everything for them. The more turn-key you can make it – the better your chance of getting the deal done.

Typically the split is 50/50. Some people may balk at giving up 50% of their profit but consider this: You will typically see a significant boost in response if an offer is coming from someone people trust.

Here is a letter I used to do a deal with a publishing company that sold to Dermatologists (my target market at the time). It was a 50/50 split where we ended up doing an insert in their newsletter:

Do Deals With “Generic” Businesses

Be creative! You don’t even have to do deals with companies and vendors that sell to similar customers it could almost anyone. Think about it. Does your local dry cleaner or gas station have customers you could use your product or service? If so, you can get them to send out a letter like this coming from them:

Right about now the question usually comes up “Who gets the money?”

That’s not a problem. Usually I’ll let the JV partner collect the money (if they want) and then email/mail/fax us the customer name for product fulfillment. Then we would simply charge the partner’s credit card for 50%.

Many times the JV partner won’t even want the hassle of taking the money so you can handle the whole thing. What you don’t want to happen is let the JV partner collect the money and fulfill your product. That leaves you totally out of the loop and you don’t know how many products where sold.

What about the agreement?

Many times I do deals with a simple handshake agreement. Other times we use a very simple and plain letter of agreement like the one below. I’m not a lawyer so I cannot give you legal advice but I’ve found that many deals will get killed if you introduce the 4-page “legalize” contract. It’s not worth it.

Sample Joint Venture Agreement

Have Competitors Endorse You

This is an advanced tactic – but one that is very profitable for an open-minded competitor. You go to your competitor who respects you and explain how there will always a certain amount of customers, clients or patients who will not use them for any number of reasons.

It could be the way the office looked…

It could be the way a staff member treated them…

It could be lack of payment terms…

It could be the offer wasn’t right…

It could be the customers/client/patient wanted something the competitor couldn’t deliver or didn’t specialize in…

For whatever reason, it just wasn’t right. But that doesn’t mean they have to lose all the money invested in advertising and marketing to get that prospect in the door.

Give your colleague an incentive to allow you to write a letter, coming from them going to the prospect who didn’t order or take action. Make this process completely turn-key like the other endorsements.

Essentially the letter will say something like this (re-modeler example):

Now you may balk at this idea, but think for a moment about how many prospects go through with a purchase?

Is it because they didn’t want anything done? Maybe they weren’t really interested? Or is it more reasonable to assume that were and still are interested but that they weren’t comfortable with your company/practice or your offerings.

This is not an insult. It’s simply a fact that you will never turn 100% of the prospects who come to you into sales. And neither will anybody else. So take advantage of this.

Think of an ethical way to persuade your colleague to seize the advantage here. Remember those prospects have already raised their hands as being interested whatever you offer.

Affiliate programs (also known as reseller programs, associate programs, etc.) are an opportunity for you to get hundreds, even thousands of web sites all driving traffic to your site and making sales for you. (Think joint venture)

And the best part is you don’t pay until they make the sale!

That’s the opportunity (and it really is a great one) but I’m going to give you my realistic assessment from actually doing it. My affiliate program accounts for 50% of my traffic and 40% of my sales so obviously I’m very happy with the results!

It’s been a tremendous success starting with the first month where it brought in approximately $2900 in sales and I paid out $1400 in commissions. From my initial investment of $650 ($450 for software and $200 for additional design work) this came out to a $900 profit, or a 138% return on investment (ROI) just in the first month.

Six months later, it has provided me a 1900% ROI and I know it will continue to pay off for many years to come.

It’s the software that is making the Web such an exciting and easy place to set up joint ventures (your affiliates are really your joint venture partners). It makes it completely easy to track 100, 1000, even 100,000 different affiliates’ sales.

Try doing that in the offline world without a major headache.

The software I recommend to run your affiliate program (joint venture program) is here:
http://affiliateprogram.yanikrecommends.com

The way the software works is that it gives each of your joint venture partners a unique id# that can use to direct traffic to your site. When somebody buys from the referral they’re paid.

For instance, our affiliate links look like this:
http://www.instantinternetprofits.com/?1234

(1234 is the id# of the referring partner)

Now before you run out and start doing deals you need to heed a few important points to making your program a winner for your joint venture partner.

1. Good Product
This goes almost without saying but I’ll mention it again – you’ve got to have a good product that delivers on your promises. This is especially true if you want to attract the big time JV partners.

2. Web Site With A High Closing Rate
You need a web site that sells!

3. High Commissions

Bottom line – the name of the game for most partners is how much money they can make. I suggest you give as much as you can to your affiliates and partners to help motivate them. It’s much easier to do that for a digital product than a physical product (another benefit of creating a digital product).

I give 45% to my affiliates. My affiliate program is also 2-tier. Which means it’s a multi-tier, however it doesn’t expand past the second level so it is not multi-level marketing. On my second level or tier, I pay 5%. For example, let’s say Bob is my affiliate. Bob refers John. And John also becomes my affiliate. When John makes a sale, Bob will get paid 5%. Make sense?

I place a heavier emphasis and commission on the first level because I want my affiliates going out and making sales instead of trying to recruit more and more sub-affiliates under them (like MLM).

4. Tools

I try to provide my affiliates all the tools and assistance they need to be successful. This is absolutely critical. (example see: www.surefiremarketing.com/tools/) I give them pretty much everything.

I started by going to the top search engines and looking for my keywords like “sales letters” and “business letters” to see who is listed in the top 10.

Once there I spent some time looking at the site considering whether or not they might be interested in joining our affiliate program and partnering together.

If the site looked like a match I would open up a new window and go to: www.betterwhois.com. Betterwhois is a directory of domain owners. This way I could gather the correct email address because sometimes an email address isn’t prominently listed on the web pages I was visited.

I found betterwhois.com to be the best source of contact information because it takes registered domain information from all the different registrars. Also, www.allwhois.com is a good one.

So I would do a search on the domain name I was visiting and it would give me all the contact information I needed. You want to look for the “Administrative Contact” – that is usually the owner of the web site.

Here’s a sample:

Domain Name.......... sxxxxeletters.com
  Creation Date........ 2000-01-22
  Registration Date.... 2000-01-22
  Expiry Date.......... 2001-01-22
  Organisation Name.... Txxxx Enterprises
  Organisation Address. PMB 421, xx East xxx North
  Organisation Address. 
  Organisation Address. Logan
  Organisation Address. 8xxxx
  Organisation Address. UT
  Organisation Address. UNITED STATES

Admin Name........... Brian Rxxxxxx
  Admin Address........ PMB 421, xxEast 4xx North
  Admin Address........ 
  Admin Address........ Logan
  Admin Address........ 8xxxx
  Admin Address........ UT
  Admin Address........ UNITED STATES
  Admin Email.......... brian@xxxxxxx.com
  Admin Phone.......... xxx-xxx-xxxx
  Admin Fax............ xxx-xxx-xxxx

Take the Admin Email address given and put it into a spreadsheet. Next, I would add the owner’s first name, last name, site name and a couple comments about his site to my spreadsheet.

Since you’re spending time on the site take a couple extra seconds and write down a few complimentary comments about their site. I would jot down something about their wide array of forms, or easy-to-use letters or any number of things. And all that information goes into another field in my spreadsheet like so:

Once I’ve gathered all the data regarding potential affiliates I would export that file into my email merge software called Group Mail (www.infacta.com). Group-Mail software lets me merge any field I want into outgoing emails so I can send out what appears to be very personalized emails to everyone on this list.

It’s simply a matter of exporting the data (Group Mail will accept most common data formats) and then clicking on the fields to insert them into your outgoing email.

Next, I put together a simple email announcing my idea for them. My goal is to introduce myself, introduce my product, and let them know that it could be an additional revenue source for them with very little risk.

Here’s the email I used to first approach possible new partners:

Subject: {first name}…new idea for your site

Dear {first name},

I found your  site the other night and I was quite
impressed. I especially liked your {comment field}. 

The reason I'm writing is to introduce a
proposition that could provide a great deal of 
profit to you with absolutely no risk.

Let me explain.

My name is Yanik Silver and I'm the creator of a new site that helps
small business owners create powerful sales letters without writing. It's at:
http://www.instantsalesletters.com 
and if you visit my site, you'll see that it seems very complementary to
what you offer.

I think my product could create another source of revenue for you
while providing a valuable service to your customers. We've just setup
an affiliate program where you earn 45% commissions anytime your referrals
buy. Plus, you also earn a 5% on any second tier affiliates. 

You can find out all the details at:
http://instantsalesletters.com/affiliate/

Or, if you'd like to discuss this with me personally you can call me
anytime, toll free at 1-800-896-6979 or email me - 
mailto:yanik@instantsalesletters.com and I'll explain everything
in full detail.

I look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

Yanik Silver

http://www.instantsalesletters.com
yanik@instantsalesletters.com

Where else can you find good online partners?

• Discussion boards
• Networking at conferences, seminars, etc.
• Pay-per-click search engines.

Pay-per-click is one I want to spend an extra second on. Sites that advertise with pay-per-click search engines or ad programs like Overture.com and Google Ad Words are paying out money for every visitor that comes to their site. That means they are probably actively looking for ways to increase their visitor value. If you could show them that by using an “exit pop-up” or a “pop-under” they can recuperate part of their advertising costs they’ll love to do a deal with you.

Don’t Think These Ideas Won’t Work Until You Try Them

I suggest mulling over and thinking about this month’s tool box. Reread it several times to grasp how simple, but powerful this technique is. Don’t discard this option because it sounds too “out-of-the-box” for you, give it a try.