The Internet Marketing Joint Venture Process
SOME BACKGROUND
To many, the internet is a marvelous venue to build relationships, connect with people, conduct research on practically any subject under the sun and to create business opportunities. Unlike off-line businesses, the challenges of growing an online business, rests squarely in two areas. First, understanding how to attract web traffic to the website and second to establish online credibility, but lets focus a bit on the former. The issue of website traffic.
A POWERFUL EXAMPLE
The success of Google as a search engine platform, for example, rests on that company’s ability to continuously out compete and out perform new and older search engine companies, in continuously attracting a steady flow of traffic. Alexa.com reports that global search engine traffic over the last 3 months, from January to March 2009, sees Google.com with a traffic rank of 1 has 30.85%, Yahoo.com 26.54% and MSN live.com with 19.33%. To put this data in perspective internetworldstats.com reports that there are 1,596,270,108 internet users globally and of these 30.85% of there online search activities goes through google.com!
Well that’s all well and good, if you are google, yahoo or msn, but for an individual with a websites and a product to market through that website, the likelihood of receiving even 0.00001% of that traffic is a major undertaking. Achieving that goal would require really good search engine optimization strategies, building social networks (i.e twitter, facebook, myspace etc), running ad campaigns, and e-mail campaigns to name a few. Again to put this into perspective, according to alexa.com the website luxurylaunches.com, with a traffic rank of 64,281, sees just over 0.002% of all global web traffic!
THE PURPOSE OF YOUR WEBSITE
Websites are designed to achieve wide and varied goals, based on the niche, the content, the type of audience etc. Understanding how to bring traffic to a web site, for what ever reason is therefore the key behind successful websites and the down fall of others. For simplicity however we can reduce the over arching goals of a website to three key objectives.
1) To provide a continuous flow of quality information to visitors.
2) To gain information about your customer or visitor, i.e. e-mail and physical addresses, telephone numbers, product tastes and preferences etc
3) To facilitate a commercial transaction for goods and services i.e. digital products (software, electronic books, audio books, music, etc), physical products (cars, appliances, clothing etc), membership sites and so on.
The problem is that, with a new product or service in hand ready for marketing online, you probably don’t have any traffic coming to your site. This creates the perfect opportunity for you to begin looking for a JV partnership.
THE INTERNET JOINT VENTURE
The purpose of an internet joint venture (JV for short) is to harness or leverage traffic coming to a website with products that visitors to that site would be willing to take 1 of the 3 above action.
From a theoretical point of view, the joint venture is based on what has been described as the so called “1 (JV Client) to 1 (JV partner) to X (target audience) model”. In which one client with a single product or group of products, partners with a large list holder or JV partner, to gain access to a specific customer base that can range from thousands to millions!
Sounds simple doesn’t it? And it is once you understand the rules, the objectives of the client, the partner and the needs of the online consumer. As the number of internet users has grown, so has the opportunity and need for product owners to want to form joint venture partnerships to strengthen their product’s position in a very competitive market place. In the next article we will tackle the anatomy of an internet joint venture.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Recent Comments