3 Ways to Gain New Clients Through Online Partnerships
Posted on 04 October 2009 by jasonverdelli
I would like to start off by thanking my loyal readers who I have been hearing from just about daily with questions and feedback on how they are using the strategies I recommend. As a refresher, I have been working with clients on a one-on-one basis for 5 years developing online marketing strategies that focus on sales conversions. I have found through experience and extensive research that success using internet does not come in a box, you must pay attention to your business and understand internet marketing in order to leverage it effectively to produce the results you want. This weeks topic goes into 3 different strategies on how to gain new clients by developing online partnerships. Trust me on this one, I have starting to really concentrate on this with my email marketing clients and the results are unbelievable. Hopefully you are excited and ready to read further so with that said, as always, enjoy!
Step 1: Develop the List
Start off and either get out a sheet of paper or open a new Excel document. Make a list of 20 businesses that compliment yours and that also share the same clientel. If you need to use Google then do so if you can’t think of 20 businesses locally. Once you have the list go onto Google and do a keyword search for their company name. Most of the time you will find what websites they are on besides their own of course. You want to see how active they are on the internet. Do they have a blog? Do they have large social networking connections/followers? Do they have a place where you can sign up for their email newsletter? If they have a blog, look at how many people comment on their posts to get an idea of how many people read the blog and actually find it valuable. Give yourself some time to do this research and then be sure to notate your results. Once you have completed this come back and read step 2 below.
Download Sample Excel Document
Step 2: Develop Online Partner Strategy
Now that you have made your list and done your research you may find that maybe only 50% of the company’s you originally chose where active on the internet. This is typical and that is ok. You are off to a great start. Now you want to find a way to incorporate their blog posts, e-zines, website content, links etc. into your current internet marketing presence – for example, if you have a blog you may want to mention how their product or service compliments something that you are talking about in your blog. Once you have determined how you are going to add them into your online marketing efforts you are ready to make the contact. Be sure to notate everything so you remember what you are going to do for each prospective online business partner. After you have completed this, read on to step 3 below.
Step 3: Make the Connection, See the Results
Once you have determined how you are going to incorporate your potential online business partner into your online marketing efforts, it is time to reach out to those companies. It is best to have already included them into your online marketing efforts in most cases. If you are dealing with highly regulatory businesses as with financial advisors or doctors, be sure to ask them first before doing anything so you avoid having to redo your efforts to fit their compliance requirements. Let them know that you are intrigued by their business that you feel their information is valuable to your audience. By doing a proficient job in steps 1 and 2, you can simply ask for a returned favor. Maybe have them include you on their email campaigns, website or blog. You may be able to offer their audience, who is also your target audience, some sort of deal exclusively to their clients. You have now reached a new focused audience of people within your target market thus increasing your chances to increase sales conversions. The best part is it doesn’t cost either party any more money than they are already spending to keep their own efforts going. To put this in perspective for you, imagine you narrowed your online business partners down to 10. Each company had an opt-in email list of 1,000 people. Making 10 connections in this fashion can easily allow you to reach an overall audience of 10,000 quality email subscribers. How do you think this will affect your bottom line? You want to be careful who you choose as an online business partner so I would advise you to contact me with questions. I will be more than happy to discuss. This is a great time to take advantage of my free cup of coffee and internet strategy session shown above. I look forward to hearing from you.
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