How to Get Others to Sell Your Info-Products for You
By Janet Switzer
All authors and info-marketers would like to see more sales of their information products -- but too often, they lack the necessary marketing skills or the time to more effectively market their titles. Many emerging experts discover that it takes time to build up your own list of customers, prospects and subscribers.
But when you do a joint-venture with someone else who endorses your products to their customers -- you get to tap into and leverage the time, effort and money they’ve spent over the years building their list and maintaining customer loyalty.
When adding joint ventures to your marketing mix, there are four major questions to consider: (1) how to find joint venture partners, (2) how to approach the other party, (3) what kinds of deals to make, and most importantly (4) what kinds of marketing campaigns to conduct with the names once you negotiate a joint-venture arrangement.
To begin with, there are three categories of businesses where you’ll find ideal joint venture partners -- (1) synergistic companies, (2) your competitors and (3) companies that are completely unrelated to you.
Let’s look at synergistic businesses first.
(1) “Synergistic companies” or businesses are those that already sell complementary type of information. What they’re selling is similar or complementary to what you are offering.
Let’s say you’re selling a system for advertising accounting services and you do a joint-venture with a company that provides continuing education credits for CPAs. In the United States, accountants and other types of professional practitioners are required to maintain a certain level of competency and skills, so they take classes locally or at conferences and earn what are called CEUs or continuing education units.
If you have an information product to help these CPAs bring more clients in the door, perhaps you could locate a company that provides CEU classes but doesn’t offer advertising, marketing and practice-building information as you do.
This would be a perfect company to do a joint venture with -- not only because they are acquiring new students on a regular basis, but because these students know them, trust them, see them as a source of expertise and would probably listen to any recommendations they might give about you and your product.
(2) The next big category of potential joint-venture partners is “competitive companies.” Think about it: At the same time your competitor is prospecting and selling new customers, some prospects are not buying anything. Similarly, customers who have already purchased everything your competitor has to offer may be no longer buying or subscribing.
If you can convince your competitor to promote your products to their non-converted leads or past customer names, that’s a phenomenal joint-venture opportunity for the both of you. You could make money, but also turn those names into revenue for your competitor who has most likely given up ever selling them something else.
(3) The last big category of company to look for is “completely unrelated companies.” These are situations to look for where the company isn’t providing anything similar to what you provide, but COULD provide it if you proved there would be value for their customers and prospects in doing so.
For example, perhaps you find a company who sells a money-making program that is vastly different from the income-generation training program you sell. You can still approach these companies to become a recommended second-income idea or an alternative to the one their prospects originally investigated.
To help you execute joint ventures with these three kinds of companies, start investigating professional schools, magazines, newsletters, corporations, speakers, radio talk shows, infomercial companies and other information outlets for possibilities.
___________________________
Janet Switzer is the marketing strategist behind some of the best known celebrity authors in the world: Jack Canfield of The Secret and Chicken Soup for the Soul, One Minute Millionaire author Mark Victor Hansen, personal finance guru David Bach, motivational speaker Les Brown and others. Subscribe to her FREE series of info-marketing special reports at http://www.charlesaki.com/ezines.
All authors and info-marketers would like to see more sales of their information products -- but too often, they lack the necessary marketing skills or the time to more effectively market their titles. Many emerging experts discover that it takes time to build up your own list of customers, prospects and subscribers.
But when you do a joint-venture with someone else who endorses your products to their customers -- you get to tap into and leverage the time, effort and money they’ve spent over the years building their list and maintaining customer loyalty.
When adding joint ventures to your marketing mix, there are four major questions to consider: (1) how to find joint venture partners, (2) how to approach the other party, (3) what kinds of deals to make, and most importantly (4) what kinds of marketing campaigns to conduct with the names once you negotiate a joint-venture arrangement.
To begin with, there are three categories of businesses where you’ll find ideal joint venture partners -- (1) synergistic companies, (2) your competitors and (3) companies that are completely unrelated to you.
Let’s look at synergistic businesses first.
(1) “Synergistic companies” or businesses are those that already sell complementary type of information. What they’re selling is similar or complementary to what you are offering.
Let’s say you’re selling a system for advertising accounting services and you do a joint-venture with a company that provides continuing education credits for CPAs. In the United States, accountants and other types of professional practitioners are required to maintain a certain level of competency and skills, so they take classes locally or at conferences and earn what are called CEUs or continuing education units.
If you have an information product to help these CPAs bring more clients in the door, perhaps you could locate a company that provides CEU classes but doesn’t offer advertising, marketing and practice-building information as you do.
This would be a perfect company to do a joint venture with -- not only because they are acquiring new students on a regular basis, but because these students know them, trust them, see them as a source of expertise and would probably listen to any recommendations they might give about you and your product.
(2) The next big category of potential joint-venture partners is “competitive companies.” Think about it: At the same time your competitor is prospecting and selling new customers, some prospects are not buying anything. Similarly, customers who have already purchased everything your competitor has to offer may be no longer buying or subscribing.
If you can convince your competitor to promote your products to their non-converted leads or past customer names, that’s a phenomenal joint-venture opportunity for the both of you. You could make money, but also turn those names into revenue for your competitor who has most likely given up ever selling them something else.
(3) The last big category of company to look for is “completely unrelated companies.” These are situations to look for where the company isn’t providing anything similar to what you provide, but COULD provide it if you proved there would be value for their customers and prospects in doing so.
For example, perhaps you find a company who sells a money-making program that is vastly different from the income-generation training program you sell. You can still approach these companies to become a recommended second-income idea or an alternative to the one their prospects originally investigated.
To help you execute joint ventures with these three kinds of companies, start investigating professional schools, magazines, newsletters, corporations, speakers, radio talk shows, infomercial companies and other information outlets for possibilities.
___________________________
Janet Switzer is the marketing strategist behind some of the best known celebrity authors in the world: Jack Canfield of The Secret and Chicken Soup for the Soul, One Minute Millionaire author Mark Victor Hansen, personal finance guru David Bach, motivational speaker Les Brown and others. Subscribe to her FREE series of info-marketing special reports at http://www.charlesaki.com/ezines.
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