Joint Ventures.

Affiliate Marketing.

Strategic Alliances.

We call them all of these and more.

What constitutes a successful joint venture? A successful affiliate relationship? A successful strategic alliance that you might do with another business owner?

When you consider doing a joint venture, or developing an affiliate program, don’t just start sending emails out to people and saying, hey, I have something I want to promote to your list. This happens so often.

You get emails, and requests, from people you know and people you don’t know. If you don’t know somebody, or even if you do, a great joint venture, a great affiliate relationship, is about that… it’s about a relationship. If you’re blasting out emails to a hundred people, or a thousand people because you want to do a joint venture with them, you’re going about it the wrong way.

What happens when you get these requests? You delete them.

All of us want the same thing. We want to make sure the time we’re spending doing things in our business, we monetize and get the maximum benefit we can get.

So, instead of sending out that generic message, I’m going to suggest you send a personal message. Or, that you pick up the phone and call, and leave a voice mail if they don’t answer. Put something in the mail, to the person you are trying to form a relationship with, just a short, quick little note.

Build a relationship with the person you want to do the joint venture with, from the perspective of how you can help them, not the other way around.

That’s a lot different than the generic email from you or your affiliate manager, saying you want to go out to their list with our latest, greatest product, telling me about some arbitrary response rate, and how much money you’re making, asking me to go to your link for more information. I don’t want to go to your link. I don’t know who you are. Give me a reason to get to know you.

And, it’s just as bad to send a generic message to somebody you’ve done things with in the past, that makes it seem like you have no idea who I am, and no idea we already have a relationship, or have done things in the past. It’s off-putting. I know you. We’ve done business before, and you’re sending me the same message you’re sending everyone else on your list – now I feel like a stranger.

Build a relationship.