NewsLetter Marketing - Ezine Joint Ventures (Part 10 - 10)

You should also be creative in your advertising. Instead of asking for cash in return for advertising space, you can ask for a reciprocal promotion on a partner's newsletter. As long as you're not competing, setting up joint ventures with complementary businesses is a great way to increase your customer base--and boost your sales.

For example, you could trade articles or interview other 'experts.' Or offer special deals on your partner's goods.

This is a newsletter joint venture. A user comes to your site and signs up for your newsletter. They then get a thank you message inviting them to sign up for other newsletters that they might find interesting. Those other newsletters are your joint venture partners. In return for an advertisement on your site, you get the same on theirs. You want to be careful not to pester the user so the invitation needs to be kept simple and well targeted.

Selecting the right partners is crucial for the success of a joint venture. As always, the best bets are businesses whose services complement your own. If you're selling CD's for example, you could do a deal with company that sells audio equipment, or a music magazine; if you're offering home-made furniture, you could partner up with other home furnishing companies.

Essentially, you want to be sure that you're both appealing to the same kind of market but not directly competing.

One way to find partners is to figure out where they advertise. As you surf around sites related to your business, you'll probably notice that you keep seeing promotions from the same sites. Those are the kind of people you want to team up with.

In fact, you don't even have to look further than your inbox. You probably already get a whole bunch of newsletters from companies in related industries, and are already pretty familiar with their business. Your first choices for joint ventures then will probably be easy to think of--and they'll probably be the best ones too.