Get Your Competition's Traffic

A simple, quick way to generate a lot of traffic to your site in a short amount of time involves partnering with your competition through a Joint Venture. It's a time-tested, powerful way to grow any business.

Even the biggest companies use the JV tactic to expand their market reach. Ever seen a McDonald's in a Wal-Mart? McDonald's benefits from the foot traffic of the Wal-Mart customers, and Wal-Mart benefits from the foot traffic of the McDonald's customers. The companies combine their brands to maximize their customer base. It's a win-win situation, and those are the kind of deals you need to broker online to win in your own business.

A Joint Venture is a win-win agreement between two or more companies with competitive products or services to create something bigger than any one company would be able to create on their own. The companies are stand-alone entities that share knowledge, experience, markets, expenses and revenue of specific projects.

Several small businesses can band together to tackle giants in their industry. Big businesses can join JV with smaller business to quickly acquire otherwise hard to obtain resources like technology or intellectual property. Or small businesses can ally themselves with big name brands to accelerate their growth.

An example of the latter form of the JV partnership is a company called Mello Smello. Before they formed an alliance with Disney, their company was unknown. Through the partnership, they developed scratch and sniff stickers of Disney characters and turned their unheard of entity into a multi-million dollar business.

JV's are equally as powerful in the online world.

Like you, other people in your niche are developing lists and gaining loyal customers. By joint venturing with such people, you utilize the relationships these people have with your potential customers by leveraging their assets.

In its most basic form, you leverage each other's assets by promoting your partner to your list, and he promotes you to his list. And you both share in the revenue generated from the promotions.

One way to start generating revenue is to develop a list-building Joint Venture with other ezine publishers in your niche. This is called co-registration and utilizes the space on your subscription Thank You pages.

After a person subscribes to your newsletter, redirect him to your Thank You page where you have ads displayed for your JV partners' newsletters. And after a person subscribes to your JV partners' newsletter, he is redirected to a Thank You page where your newsletter is displayed. This is a powerful way to double the size of your opt-in email list overnight.

Another type of Joint Venture is in the form of a personal endorsement. An endorsed JV involves the person you are partnering with directly recommending you to their list. Endorsements practically guarantee increased response and conversion rates because someone they already know, like and trust is communicating your sales message to targeted customers. Other examples of Joint Ventures you can use to drive traffic to your site are:

1. Exchange banners or text links with related web sites.

2. Swap testimonials for each other's products.

3. Offer your newsletter or a report as a bonus for your partner's products.

4. Develop a web site with your JV partner that you both promote. The doubled marketing efforts mean double the traffic.

5. Combine your products with your partner's products to create one big package. Then split the profits on the sales of that package.

Once you start discussing ways to generate traffic with your JV partner, you'll realize there are no limits. Just be sure you join into joint ventures with reputable people who sell quality products. If you start offering your list junk, soon they will lose their trust in you. Then you'll see a drop in the sales of your own products.