Key people are waiting to spread your message right now. They interact daily in networks that exist today where their influence is felt far beyond your limited vision of what you can do. If you know who to target and where to find the influencers, you can create a firestorm of activity around your project, before you even launch.

In The Regis Touch: New Marketing Strategies for Uncertain Times, Regis McKenna says, “90% of the world is influenced by the other 10%.” If true, you can reach the entire world by reaching 10 percent of it. Let those key people influence the rest of the world. Now imagine that you take it another step. Use 10 percent of the influencers to influence the influencers. You want to make those key people your evangelists.

Many authors have talked about the key influencers and come up with terms to describe them and their common characteristics. The terms differ from author to author, but most of the ideas are similar. In this chapter we’ll explore a number of these terms. As we talk about them, keep in mind that we are really talking about two things:

1.         Networks of people.

2.         Key influencers within the networks.

The important steps that we need to take are to:

1.         Identify the networks that our audience is currently a part of.

2.         Identify the key influencers within the networks.

3.         Motivate those key influencers to spread the word.

Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, talks about mavens, connectors, and salesmen.

Earlier, I mentioned my friend Blake, but one thing that I didn’t mention is that he loves movies. Movies are one of the interests that Blake and I share, but when it comes to movies, there is a huge difference in our knowledge levels. Blake knows incredible mountains of information about any movie. In fact, eventually Blake sees almost every movie produced by a major motion picture studio, and many completely obscure films, too.

Blake is what Malcolm Gladwell would call a movie maven. Blake influences the movie-going habits of hundreds of people based solely on the fact that he knows so much about them. Whenever I have a question about a movie, I ask Blake. Whenever I am looking for a good movie to go watch, I ask Blake. After all, he’s seen them all, and he cares enough about them to know what types of movies I might be interested in watching.

But it’s not just me. Because of his position as the pastor of a good-sized church, Blake also has hundreds of other people who are aware of his specialized knowledge and come to Blake for movie advice. Now, I love movies, but no one is asking me which movies to go see. If I’m really impressed by a particular movie, I might tell someone, but that doesn’t happen very often. On the other hand, people constantly ask Blake what movies are good and he has some great advice that many people take.

There are many mavens in your life. Do automobile repairs challenge you? Maybe you know someone who knows cars extremely well you can ask. Who knows about gardening, pets, or any one of thousands of other subjects? Someone knows and, most likely, you know who that someone for you is.

Clearly, you have identified key people within your own networks who are mavens when it comes to particular subjects. So if you want to spread the word about your new movie, should you tell Blake or me?

Let’s take a look at Malcolm’s second key influencer. Do you know someone that just seems to know everyone? That person may be a connector.

Microsoft commissioned a study of the friendship patterns of more than 10,000 people in the UK and found that the average person in Britain has 33 friends. As we all know, not all friendships are equal. It’s difficult to maintain very close relationships. Relationships take time, and there is only so much time in the world.

As it turns out, some people are very good at deep, close relationships. They typically have a very select group of close friends that they invest a lot of time in. If you are new to the neighborhood, this type of person is less likely to become your friend, because they have already invested in their current friends heavily. They simply don’t have room for many friends. If you are this type of person, you may find yourself actually avoiding new relationships with people. Bottom line: You are booked.

Other people are very good at superficial relationships. They value people just as much as people who cultivate deep relationships do, but they crave bigger numbers. These people are much more comfortable maintaining contact with many people in a way that doesn’t take up large amounts of their time. They aren’t bothered by a lack of contact. In most cases, they are thrilled to revive contact after long absences. People who love to connect to many people are called connectors.

You’ve probably heard the term six degrees of separation. The term is part of a theory that everyone is no more than six “steps” away from any other person. A number of studies have attempted to verify this theory. It turns out, though less than six steps connect some people and more connect others, the number of steps is relatively small in almost every case.

Frigyes Karinthy was a Hungarian author who published a short story called “Chains,” or “Chain-Links.” The story is fiction, but it captured problems that people who study network theory wanted to explore. Karinthy thought that the world was shrinking as technology provided faster communications and easy travel. Networks could cover larger distances and friendships were possible in distant locations.

In the story, Karinthy’s characters believe that any two individuals could connect through a maximum of five acquaintances. The idea took off in the form of a number of “small world” experiments and, in 1967, researcher Stanley Milgram showed that on average people in the United States connected by approximately six friendship links.

What is interesting is some connectors keep cropping up all the time. If you were to flowchart out all of the connections between any groups of people, you would shortly discover that most of the connections travel through a select few individuals. Think about your life and you will be able to identify a few key connectors.

If you needed to find a plumber and didn’t know anyone that knew about plumbing, who would you ask? Why does that person stand out in your mind? Maybe he or she doesn’t know anything about plumbing, but he or she does know people. Find the people who know lots of people and you have a connector.

Malcolm Gladwell’s final key influencer is the salesman. You’ll have to ask Malcolm why he didn’t use the word salesperson, but this one is easy. Everyone recognizes a good salesperson. Some people know how to persuade you to do anything. It may be their charm, their good looks, their intellect, but, whatever it is, they make you want to buy. If you want your ideas, products, and services to spread, you need salespeople to convince others that your ideas are worth having.

Seth Godin, best-selling author of Unleashing the ldeavirus, takes a little different route. Seth calls the key influencers “Sneezers.” He even comes up with sub-types he calls “Promiscuous sneezers” and “Powerful sneezers.”

You can easily persuade “Promiscuous sneezers” to spread your message. In fact, they will spread just about anyone’s message. Unfortunately, because they spread many messages, they don’t get a lot of respect. Don’t let that discourage you. You want the maximum spread for your message, and “Promiscuous sneezers” are important to you.

“Powerful sneezers” are all about respect and trust. If they promote too many ideas, they lose power, so they are very selective about what they spread. When these people talk, other people listen, but it’s much tougher to get them to talk about your ideas.

Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz, talks about Network Hubs and breaks the key influencers into media and non-media types. He calls the media types “Mega Hubs” and includes in that category people who are involved in the press, have a public role (politicians and celebrities, for example), or are acknowledged as experts.

No matter what you call the influencers, it’s obvious that it matters who spreads your message. The real questions are: “How do you locate these key influencers?” and “How do you motivate them to spread the news?”

Let’s talk about finding these people first. Luckily, most of these people are visible so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find them. Also, while you are looking, keep in mind that these roles often overlap. Everyone has some characteristics of all of these role types. After all, we have to make sales every day, we need to connect with people every day, and we need to know things every day. It makes perfect sense that we all need to have at least some of these skills. What also makes perfect sense is that some of us are better at certain roles. Start looking for the best of the best.

Finding Key Influencers

One way to identify people is by their titles. Here are a few titles that key influencers may have chosen for themselves or been called by others:

• Author.
• Expert.
• Reporter.
• Guru.
• Professor.
• Pastor.
• Politician.
• Celebrity.
• Television host.
• Producer.
• Syndicated columnist.
• Professional.
• Teacher.
• Artist.
• Actor.
• Writer.
• Television personality.
• Television anchor.
• Magazine editor.
• Publisher.
• Kingpin.
• Mastermind.
• Executive.
• Millionaire.
• Recognized authority.
• Champion.
• Administrator.
• Boss.
• Leader.
• Ruler.
• Top dog.
• Mentor.
• Coach.
• Knowledge broker.
• Wizard.
• Instructor.
• Director.
• President.
• Judge.
• Inventor.
• Maven.
• Professional.
• Scientist.
• Specialist.
• Pioneer.

A simple search can turn up amazing connections. Try combining some of these terms with the names of the networks you want to reach.

Let’s say that you are interested in reaching the crafts niche. More specifically, you want to reach people who are interested in crafts that involve the use of paper. Trust me: I know nothing about paper crafts, so we are in this adventure together. If you do know something about paper crafts, then you are already way ahead of me.

First, let’s do a search on Google. You can search on single words or phrases or combine them to narrow down your search results. For now, let’s search on the phrase “paper crafts” + expert. The quotation marks around the phrase paper crafts tells the search engine that I only want results that contain the exact phrase paper crafts. That will rule out many advertisements for paper of various types and other irrelevant links. The “+” tells the search engine to add the word expert to the search, so only pages that contain both the phrase paper crafts and the word expert will appear in the results.

We are looking for paper crafts experts and, sure enough, the first listing in the results links to a page on expertvillage.com that features thousands of how-to videos from experts in a wide range of specialties.

In the case of our search, the page shows us an expert that knows how to create “Tissue Paper Crafts.” Other links take us to Web pages that showcase books, articles, or products. If you look closely, you will recognize that all of these pages lead us to people who fall into our key influencer categories.

Start making your lists now. Combine some of the terms in the list on page TK and find your own words that describe the people that you are trying to reach. Each name on your list is a way to spread the word.

Let’s go back to the math for a second. It’s obvious that you want to reach the key influencers, but this could take a lot of time to do correctly. How can you reach key people efficiently? Let me give you an example from my own life.

As I told you earlier, my first big success was with a single influencer. Jim Daniels was what Seth Godin would call a “Powerful sneezer.” Jim had 160,000 subscribers to sneeze at and he didn’t recommend a lot of products. Jim was as trustworthy as they come, and his subscribers believed what he said, so, when he told them to take action, they did. If you are trying to get your ideas out to your audience, then you want to look for people similar to Jim.

The Power of Joint Ventures

What Jim and I did together is typically called a joint venture, so let’s talk about joint ventures for a few minutes. The basics of joint ventures are simple: Two people get together, share assets, and create something better than what they had when they started. In the case of marketing on the Internet, usually those assets take one of two forms: You have products to sell, or you have people who want to buy products.

Whether you are a product developer, a list owner, or just trying to reach a select group of people, you can’t keep selling your audience the same products all the time. That is where the leveraged advantages of joint ventures come in.

Let’s say for instance that I have a list and it has 50,000 people on it. Let’s say that you have a list and it has another 50,000 people on it. The people on your list are not the same people on my list. That is where the advantage of joint ventures becomes very valuable. If I send my 50,000 people to buy a product that you might have to offer, and you send your 50,000 people to buy a product that I might have, then we’re doubling our potential for profit with exactly the same number of assets.

What I’ve just described is really a form of barter. You advertise to your list, and I advertise to my list. We don’t lose anything and it doesn’t cost us anything, but we double our profits. You can start to see that joint ventures can be powerful when used in the right way.

Okay, we’ve talked about the theory. Now let’s just talk a little bit about how it works in the real world. Several years ago, I sent a simple e-mail to Jim Daniels. Jim is a world-famous Internet marketer who has been around for a long, long time.

Over time, Jim built up a list of probably 160,000 subscribers who know him, trust him, and listen to his opinions about new products and services. During the same period of time that Jim was building his list, I’d been working on the Internet slowly trying to build up my subscribers one at a time, trying to find people who would buy my products and services.

I had probably 2,000 people on my lists that I’d built up over a period of a year or two, and I decided whatever I was doing was not a very fast way to build up people. So I put on my thinking cap and I finally realized that if I wanted to reach people I had to go to where they were. More importantly, if I wanted to talk to people and get them to buy my products and services, I needed to get somebody who they trusted to tell them that my products and services were worth what they’d have to pay for them.

Because I’d been reading Jim’s newsletter, I decided I’d send him off a simple e-mail. Here’s what I told Jim:

“I’ve been working on products. I have some great software that I use to build portal sites and I think that you and I could work together and that we could put together something that would be of benefit to both of us.”

Jim and I e-mailed back and forth. We shared ideas, we talked about possibilities for Websites, and eventually we came up with a system that we called Affiliate Showcase. Affiliate Showcase is a search engine and directory for affiliate programs and it has a special twist.

You can insert your own affiliate links and your own affiliate programs into Affiliate Showcase, advertise your own version of Affiliate Showcase, and earn commissions from more than 3,000 programs in the system, plus you can add any program that you want to add. Affiliate Showcase gives you a place where you can promote multiple programs all from the same location.

After we had done our planning and some programming, and put together a beta program, we launched Affiliate Showcase. It almost immediately went into the top sites on the Internet! A large part of that success was because Jim Daniels was promoting Affiliate Showcase to his list. Since then, Affiliate Showcase has done hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business and has earned thousands of dollars for many individuals who have become Affiliate Showcase members.

All of this started from a simple e-mail, and all I did was approach somebody who already had contacts and who had trust built up already. I convinced Jim that I had quality services and products that we could work on together, and leveraged his people and my products so that we could make something that was even bigger than what Jim or I had separately.

I could go on and on about all of the joint ventures that I’ve participated in since then. My membership site, jvAlert.com, is all about creating successful joint ventures, and jvAlert itself is the result of a joint venture that Sid Hale and I put together, but it never would have happened if we hadn’t created our relationship by working together at AffiliateShowcase.com.

Now, I have joint ventures growing out of joint ventures—all of the people that have joined jvAlert.com are becoming partners with me in all kinds of different projects—so it just grows and grows. That’s impact.

So, the next question is: “How do you get started in this? How do you take all the ideas, products, services and resources that you have and leverage them to make your impact grow with joint ventures?”

Before You Start

There are a few things that you want to think about before you even start to go out and approach somebody about a joint venture:

• What the short- and long-term goals of your venture are.
• What kinds of deals you want to get involved in.
• What you should offer and what you should not offer.
• What people will accept and what they won’t accept in a joint venture offer.
• Who is going to have what responsibilities.
• Who is going to own any products that you may jointly produce.
• Who has the copyright or how the income and expenses get split.

If you know—before you start—exactly what you want to get out of a joint venture, you’ll have a lot better luck convincing somebody else to agree to your terms. The one thing that we do know is that we want to make this a win-win situation. So look at this from the other person’s side for just a couple of minutes.

What kinds of relationships do people like to get involved in, and what do you think will work for them? Imagine just for a second that you are that high-powered, top-level affiliate, or top-level Internet marketer—what types of things would you be looking for?

Well, I think one thing for sure would be that you would want to have something that is going to generate a reasonable amount of impact or profit for not too much effort on your part. So visibility, ease of use, and dollar volume always seem to come into play on these types of arrangements. Let’s face it: We’re all lazy, and the easier that you can make things for someone the more chance you have of convincing him or her of working with you. Secondly, let’s remember that top-level marketers are getting dozens of joint venture proposals almost every day. You really need to make yours stand out.

Finding Your Partners

The next question becomes: “How do you find people to partner with who are going to be top-level and give your ideas, products, and services the most exposure?” Or, if you sit on the other side of the equation: “How do you find high-quality products and services that you can promote and make the highest possible revenues from? With thousands and thousands of marketers trying to get your attention, how do you know which ones are successful?”

One of the places to start is Alexa.com. Alexa is a site that gathers Internet information and has a toolbar that people can download to tell how much traffic a particular site is going to receive, or has received in the past. This toolbar is not an exact representation of exactly how much traffic people get, but it is a representation of how many people who have actually downloaded this Alexa toolbar have gone to a particular site.

What Alexa does is rank sites from the most-visited sites on the Internet down to people that get almost no traffic at all. They give you a rating for that particular site, and you can even get traffic details that will show you over time what a particular site has done. So, does this mean if the site is rated number 2,000 in terms of traffic ranking that they really are in the top 2,000 sites on the Internet in terms of the traffic? Not necessarily, but it’s an indication of a site that gets at least some traffic to it, and by comparing sites and their Alexa ratings you can tell whether or not people are going to a particular site on a regular basis.

High Alexa rankings—and by that I mean the lower numbers—generally indicate that a Website has traffic, and traffic is one of the criteria that you want to look for when you’re looking for a partner. Notice I say it’s only one of the criteria. Many sites have traffic, but haven’t really built up a level of trust with the people that go to their site.

You can generate a lot of traffic by buying co-registration leads or by buying advertising, but you haven’t really built up a relationship with that audience until there is an interaction that’s back and forth between you and the potential customer: You give them some sort of value, and they learn to trust you and your opinion on things.

Trust is a huge factor in determining whether you’ll purchase eventually from the person or company that is associated with a particular Website. Some people have built up this trust over years and years and years, and you can capitalize on that.

Who Do the People Trust?

So how do you know who’s built up trust? First, look at the people that you trust.

• What newsletters do you subscribe to?
• Who do you know is a reliable source for information?
• What Websites do you find that are great resources for the type of people you want to attract?
• Where will those people be going, and who will they be listening to?

When I started jvAlert.com, I knew that I wanted to reach the top marketers in the world. The first thing that I did was subscribe to every single newsletter that I could possibly find. There are a number of quality directories of ezines and newsletters. If you go to AffiliateShowcase.com and put “ezine” in the search engine, you’ll get a list of all kinds of resources that you can use to locate publishers of ezines.

If you subscribe to all kinds of ezines, what do you get over a period of time?

Well, very quickly, you:

• Get a sense of who you can trust and who you can’t trust.
• Get a sense of the people who put out quality work and the people who don’t.
• Know who is just putting out hype.

I talked to my girls when they were growing up about liars. I told them, “You may not be able to catch somebody in a lie, but, over time, you usually know who the liars are.” The same holds true when you’re reading someone’s work over a period of time. My guess is that you’re not going to buy from a liar and you aren’t going to buy from somebody who just produces hype. That’s not the type of person that you’re going to want to partner with. You can recognize quality and so can your potential customers.

The Importance of Quality

The main point is to always deal with quality. So you’ve gone out and you’ve identified all kinds of publications and all kinds of Internet marketers. You can grab even more if you just look for search terms such as Internet marketing guru. You’ll find lists of people who you may or may not want to partner with. Pretty soon, you develop a sense of who has high visibility in the marketplace. Does this mean they’re the best people to market with? Absolutely not. What you need to do is find people who recommend quality products to the types of markets that you want to reach.

I want to encourage you to do this right. Take the time that it takes to build relationships with people who will be effective at marketing your products and services and partnering with you. Long before you approach somebody with a joint venture offer, subscribe to his or her newsletter. Spend some time looking at exactly what they’re saying and taking it all in. Build a dialogue with them—don’t make the first words out of your mouth “this is what I can do for you” or “this is what you can do for me.”

Building the Relationship

Every Internet marketer on the face of the earth has seen e-mails that start out with “Boy, I really enjoyed your article” or “I’m sitting here right now at your Website and I really like what you’re doing. I think that this is the perfect opportunity for me to help you out.” Guess what. Immediately that first reaction is: “What are you trying to sell me?” If you’ve seen it in a form letter, you know that the marketer has seen the same thing thousands of times.

So what can you really do to build a relationship? Make honest comments on the work that they’re doing. Ask questions—get a dialogue going. Make this thing two-way, and do it without asking for anything. Then just let some time go by. It’s really hard to believe, but there are people on the other side of the e-mail—they’re human the same as everybody else. They have wants and desires, they have friends, they have wives and children—lots of things that you can talk about besides just making a buck.

Now, I can hear you thinking right now, “But I haven’t got that kind of time—I don’t want to waste time trying to build up relationships with people when I need thousands of people to come to my site and I need it to happen right now.” Part of the reason that we put together jvAlert was to help people do exactly that—to build relationships with people who they hadn’t had any contact with and to know that you are only dealing with quality people that are serious Internet marketers.

Lessons From jvAlert

What Sid Hale and I did when we first started jvAlert was to go out to people who we knew and we trusted, and we invited them to come in and join us in a very, very select group of people where they would know that they were only working with top-level people. Then we asked them: “Who do you respect? Who do you like to deal with? Who are the top people that you would recommend?”

We opened up the group to people who received invitations from our members. The people who got invitations were the people that top marketers thought were the best in the world. Next, we started testing the system.

The system really consists of a very, very specialized search engine that puts together resources from top-level marketers and matches them with joint venture offers.

Because the members of jvAlert know that they’re only dealing with top-quality people, they’re willing to give better commissions and better deals than they would ordinarily in the public marketplace. This data system has run along really well for a long time. We built up a very, very tight-knit group of people who were top, top quality, and we still hadn’t really invited the public at large into jvAlert.

After we worked out all the kinks and bugs, and fine-tuned the system and made it even more powerful, we decided that we would start the launch. We allowed our members to invite anybody that they wanted into the membership of jvAlert. Almost instantly, jvAlert.com went to the top of the charts at Alexa.com for the traffic rankings. People were moving to jvAlert in record numbers, we were generating all kinds of traffic, and suddenly we had new members all over the place.

The new members and traffic generated many joint venture offers. But, did that make the resource more useful? Well, not immediately.

First, people had to learn how to do joint venture offers that worked. The quality of the joint venture offers at jvAlert was the real drawing card for the members there and suddenly the quality of the offers was slipping. The first thing that we did was to put in a manual review system of all of the offers to make sure that the quality of the offers was as high as what our members had been experiencing before we let everybody in.

Secondly, we began a process of educating people. We really needed to teach them how to negotiate joint venture offers that would stand out above the crowd, that would be something special. So how do you do that? Well, the first thing that you need to realize is that if you’re going to go in and just offer the same thing that you offer to everybody else to a top-level marketer, you’re not going to get very far.

So, if you go to a top-level marketer and say, “Look, I’ve got this great product and I’ll pay you a 10 percent commission on it,” you’re going to get absolutely zero. The next thing that people wanted to do was to just say, “Okay, well, I’ll give more commission. So let’s make this a 50 percent commission or a 75 percent commission and people will jump all over this.”

What Else Can You Do?

Well, most people probably would jump all over a 75 percent commission, but if you’re a top-level marketer you’re looking for something a little different. Sure, you want the high level of commission, but you want something extra in addition to that.

One of the things that you need to realize is that high-level marketers generally only have so many opportunities to promote. You can’t keep promoting over and over to the same list with the same products or the same types of products, and expect response to continue in the way that you would like it to.

What you have to do is handpick products that match exactly the type of clients that you’re working with and that have extremely high value for them. Then you have to give them something extra to make it even more enticing to them.

Why not add another product to your offer? Don’t be satisfied with a single offer: Give them some bonus to give away, give their members an extra discount, offer to promote one of their products to your list, give them a related article to publish in their newsletter, or offer to combine your products with some of theirs.

Remember that joint ventures don’t have to be just between two people—lots of people can join in your joint venture, and sometimes the more the merrier. Once you get one top-level marketer to join your joint venture, go out looking for some more. You can use the participation of your first marketer to encourage other marketers to join in. It will give you a sense of credibility and a sense of value for other top-level marketers.

In general, top-level marketers are looking for either high levels of commissions, meaning high-dollar values, or recurring commissions, which also over time equals high-dollar values because they have limited numbers of slots that they can promote in. The other thing that all marketers are interested in is visibility.

One great way to produce a high-dollar volume and high-quality at the same time is to combine multiple products into the same package. Start with your contribution, then capture your first high-level marketer and ask him or her to add his or her product to the list. Then go to a series of other marketers and see if they will add theirs to the package. What you can end up with is a great product, a great value, and a large number of people who are all promoting your product.

E-mail may be the fastest way to reach someone, but it’s not necessarily the best way to build a relationship. In most cases, you can get a sense of a person much more easily and faster using the telephone. Believe me: I know how you feel about using that telephone, but drop somebody an e-mail and ask: “What’s a good time to call?” Then, when he or she responds back to your e-mail, you already have an invitation to give him or her a call—and you’ve started to build a relationship.

Remember that you don’t have to make that phone call to say, “Buy this; work this deal with me.” Just meet the person, ask a few questions about his or her business, explore some of the possibilities that he or she has, and ask about his or her products and services. You know he or she will be happy to tell you about that. You can expand from there. Take a look at all the possibilities. See how he or she can work with you and your business. You’ll get a sense of what he or she is doing, what types of things he or she is looking for, and how the two of you can work best together.

Throughout this whole process, keep in mind that it has to be win-win.

You have to both benefit from a joint venture relationship or it’s just not worth it. The key skill that you need when negotiating a joint venture is to actually listen to the other person so that you can make it valuable to him or her and hear what his or her potential problems are.

Having Joint Venture Success the Easy Way

Here are 10 easy steps to joint venture success.

1.         Define your goals.

If you don’t know what you want to achieve in the first place, how are you ever going to get there? Don’t forget to include both long-term and short-term goals. Make the short-term goals little steps to get towards what you want to get to eventually. Know what kind of a deal you want to make; know what kind of profits you want to make out of that deal; know how much time you’re willing to put into it and what results you expect to get out of it. If the deal that you come up with doesn’t meet your goals, scrap it and start over again.

2.         Make the key ownership decision.

Who owns what, is important. And while you’re thinking about ownership, remember that with ownership comes liability. Who’s going to be responsible when this thing doesn’t work out the way that you think it will? In almost every case, the person that has ownership also has the greatest liability. So make sure you’re covered for that.

3.         Get the responsibilities right.

Make sure you know exactly who is going to do what, make sure you know when they’re going to do it, and make sure that you know what happens when they don’t.

4.         Create deals that people want to participate in.

That goes back to the win-win situation that we were talking about before. Make sure that you’re offering something of value. Make sure that they make money off of it, and you’ll have repeat joint ventures that will do even more. Be creative. People are looking for deals that are new and different.

5.         Find top-level partners.

You want to do this right, so take your time. Go out and find people who you trust; find people who you know and respect, and who others will, too.

6.         Write an irresistible offer.

Make this something that’s going to stand out in the crowd and then put it down on paper—not so you’re locked into it, but so that you have something to work from that clearly expresses what goals you’ve set up and meets them, but is still flexible enough to be adapted for any marketer that you might come across.

7.         Negotiate a winning deal.

That’s back to the win-win again, but this time you want to make sure your behind is covered and that your goals are met. There is no need to give away the whole farm. What you need to do is meet the needs of the person who you’re dealing with. Listen to him or her and find out what goals he or she wants to meet; make sure that you meet those goals, and make sure that you meet yours at the same time. Remember that anything that you don’t give away is money in your pocket.

8.         Make sure it happens.

An incredibly high percentage of deals that have been discussed, negotiated, and all set up, never happen—and usually the reason is just simple follow-up. People’s lives are busy. They get distracted. They do other things. Just make sure that it happens. Consistently follow up with your partner. Make sure he or she is still on the same page. Make sure that he or she is meeting the goals and the responsibilities that he or she agreed to meet, then do the same thing for yourself. Make sure that you have a list of exactly what you’ve agreed to do and then step through that list, one step at a time, making sure that everything you agreed to do—you actually do.

9.         Double your profits by tracking your results.

So many times, we leave out this aspect and it needs to be set up in advance. You need to know where every sale comes from. You need to know what resources you use to get them and how much they cost, both in time and money.

10.       Calculate a return on investment for a joint venture.
Here’s how:

• Put a dollar value on your time.
• Calculate the total investment for each marketing possibility. That’s the time, multiplied by the value of your time, plus any cash required, and that equals your investment.
• Estimate the number of sales or sign-ups from each marketing possibility.
• Divide the total investment by the estimated sign-ups or sales.
• Rank those by the return on investment.

As you go on, test, test, test, and retest to see where you’re actually producing the results and then re-rank your list. That way you know which joint ventures are actually working for you, what they are taking up of your time and resources, and what the return on investment you’re getting actually is.

The bottom line is that you want to invest more time and effort into the techniques that are working for you in actual practice. Also, you want to identify the areas that might not be worth your hourly rate that may be worth someone’s hourly rate.

Repetitive tasks may not be your cup of tea, but you may find areas that pay off big time that are just a matter of putting in time. You may not have the time but, if it makes money, you can find resources that may pay off for you when you outsource repetitive tasks that generate income.

Joint ventures are a great way to find those resources. Or maybe you are on the opposite side of that: Maybe you have lots of time and not so many resources. Time is a great resource to use in a negotiation for a joint venture. If you have lots of it, it’s a great commodity to bargain with.

Do it all again. Once you’ve gone through the process, you’ve developed a great set of resources. You already know some of the people—you have partners, and you’ve built relationships. Now all you have to do is leverage those resources repeatedly.

Exponential Results

Now let’s talk about a couple of ways to produce exponential joint venture results.

The first thing to remember is that endorsements always work better than advertising. If someone who people know and trust is recommending an idea, product, or service, then results are going to be exponentially higher. If endorsements are detailed and enthusiastic, they always work better than short, little blurbs. Endorsements that are made by people who endorse relatively few products work better than people endorsing your product that endorse other products every day.

Generally, the more endorsements that you have the better they work, but that’s not always the case. A very personalized endorsement will always work better than something that reads as if it’s a form letter.

As consumers, we want to know that we aren’t being ripped off. We want to know that people are offering genuine value for the hard-earned cash that we give them. That’s why personalized endorsements always work better than ordinary advertising.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Advertising works.

The question with advertising is: What is the price that we can get that advertising for?

The nice thing about advertising is that you can usually get more of it. So if you can get into a situation in which you can routinely generate the same profits over and over and over again, advertising can make those exponential profits just by increasing the amount of advertising that you do.

The nice thing about joint ventures is that we can work advertising angles, product angles, and personalized endorsements all at the same time. The effect will be exponential, too. Why stick with just one thing? The more possibilities we combine, the bigger the result.

Another way that we can exponentially increase our joint venture results is to concentrate on the back end. Many times, we don’t have the time or resources to build products and services that are complimentary to the ones that we already have.

If you can joint venture with someone who already has those products or services, you can create exponential profits just by offering their products to an already-eager audience who is interested in a particular line of products or services. Many times, you can use a low price item to sell an even higher priced item, which creates even more revenue.

Watching Out for Mistakes

So what kinds of mistakes can you make? The sky is the limit. You have to watch out for the potholes—that’s for sure—and you need to protect yourself.

Legal and accounting issues can hurt you big time, so you need to know what the liabilities are and what the responsibilities are, and you have to know who the ownership sits with.

First, you need to know what form your agreement is going to take:

• Is it just a contract?
• Is it a partnership?
• Do you form a new corporation?

A formal corporation may offer the benefit of limited shareholder liability, but many times contracts require personal liability. A partnership can even be scarier with the prospect of unlimited liability for all the partners with the result that limited liability can be more of a myth than a reality.

Also, with a more formalized joint venture, there is the added cost of setting up and maintaining the accounting expenses for those structures that you’ve created. Most often, some type of a contract is used that allows the parties to separate their respective contributions, and there is some flexibility to actually sharing responsibilities and whether or not you carry out your own part, or what expenses you may be able to write off in the joint venture.

Also, don’t forget the taxman when you set up the form for your joint venture. Eventually, you’re going to have to pay on any profits that you may produce.

You also want to look at how you dissolve the relationship:

• When is the relationship over?
• How can you get out of the agreement and what consequences result from that?

•••

If you plan correctly and think about potential problems before you start, you’ve ruled out a lot of problems.

Now you’ve got all of these complexities going on in your mind, and you’re wondering how you could possibly do this and still make it work. Is it really worth all the effort, the time, and the planning and the building of relationships to create a joint venture? The answer is absolutely.

What Do You Have to Offer?

Feeling that you don’t have much to contribute to a joint venture relationship?

What if you don’t have 50,000 people on your list?

What if you don’t have a great product?

What if you don’t have a lot of money?

The truth is that as human beings we all have something to offer. Usually the first things that pop into your mind when you start a project are that it takes either time or money, and usually both. The “usually both” is where you come in.

If you don’t have time, maybe you have money. It certainly helps to have both and sometimes it’s easier to put two people together to get both aspects of this relationship.

Maybe you don’t have time and maybe somebody else does. If you can work with that person, it makes it a lot easier for you to reach your goals.

If you have a lot of time, but you don’t have much money, maybe you can find somebody who has something of value that you can spend time on to produce more profits for both of you.

Don’t underestimate creativity. Ideas may be a dime a dozen, but good ideas are worth something. All that you need to do is combine your good ideas together with the assets to make them happen.

The biggest asset that you have is the ability to make something happen—to actually follow through on it and see that something is done. That particular trait is so rare that true innovators jump all over it the second that they see it. If I meet somebody who can actually get something done, who actually follows through on what he or she is promising and who does what he or she says that he or she will do, it’s a great value to me as a marketer.

You can develop honesty, reliability, sincerity, and the ability to get things done, and you can sell them as assets. If you produce, people will come back repeatedly to create more joint ventures with you.

I wish that joint venturing was more difficult, more complex, more secret. Just think of all the things that I could sell you. But the truth is that joint venturing is all about building relationships one little step at a time—person to person. It’s getting to know them, building piece-by-piece the little things that make a friendship, and then using those assets that both of you have naturally to come up with ideas, with projects and with exponential results from your efforts.

Here are the basics again:

• First, put together your ideas.
• Know what your goals are.
• Think about what you want to do and how you want to achieve your goals.
• Think about what you want to give up and what you don’t want to give up.
• Plan for the future.

Then concentrate on locating people who can help with your projects. Use the available tools to find out who’s trusted. Who has an audience that listens to what they are saying, that they respect, and that you can trust?

• Build relationships with those people one step at a time—one simple phone call—one idea tossed back and forth between two people.
• Don’t push. Simply explore the possibilities. Build the relationship before you try to make a deal.
• Listen to what people have to say.
• Respond to their needs and try to find situations in which both of you can win.
• When you find those situations, make sure that you meet your partner’s needs and your needs, and when you’ve done that—stop. There is no need to give away the farm, but you do need to make sure that everybody wins.
• Hammer out all of the responsibilities. Find out who has the ownership and who has the liabilities. Then check those situations and find the best form that you possibly can for this joint venture.
• Build your joint venture so that it produces exponential profits.
• Combine with other joint ventures, work with other partners, make something even bigger.

Don’t forget the back end. Many times profits can be much higher on the back end then your original sale, and joint venture partners can help you to build bigger and more profitable products by combining resources, by combining promotional attempts and by combining products to make something even better. I’ll tell you a few more tricks of the trade soon!

The first key to joint venture success is finding key people to joint venture with who can enhance your ideas, products, and services. The second is building relationships with those people, and the third is motivating those people to take action.

But, wouldn’t it be nice if things just happened automatically? Well, it just so happens that there are many ways to make your impact spread without taking constant action yourself. What if you created your own system and it took off as if an Ebola virus? So let’s...

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Ken McArthur

Best-Selling Author, Marketing Expert, and Legendary Creator of Impact Presents "The Impact Factor"