We do a lot of Joint Ventures here at SoftwareProjects.

Many turn out successful, some fail but every single one is carefully planned and monitored. If there's no money in it after 90 days, we're out.

Most businesses and entrepreneurs who approach SoftwareProjects for a Joint Venture, get rejected by our gatekeepers. Not because it's not a good fit, but simply because most people don't know how to position and sell a JV.

So I've decided to put together a basic "How to do a Joint Venture" guide, complete with a template JV Executive Summary document for you to download.

Step 1: Identify Potential JV Partners

Great tool to find JV partners: Google.

In a typical JV, one partner brings traffic and the other brings IP (Intellectual Property) to the table.

Traffic = Eyeballs. Ideally qualified eyeballs as in prospects who are actively looking for the product/service you're selling

IP = Software product, an ebook, a service, business know-how, a database/list, algorithm, patent etc.

Understand what you're bringing to the table and then Google for matching partners that have what you need.

Examples:

* You have a new product/service, you're looking for a partner with an existing list/website who will promote your stuff to his followers.

* You're a gifted software engineer, you're looking for a marketer to help convert your skills into mega bucks.

Important things to remember:

* Stay away from Gurus. Gurus are in the business of selling their own products and educational information to their followers. Unless you have a prior relationship, you'll have a very hard time selling your JV to a guru.

* Pick potential JV partners who are in your niche. Someone having a huge list of people who are interested in diving equipment, is not a good fit for your vitamin products.


Step 2: Crunch the numbers

Quantify what you've got and work out a business model for the Joint Venture partnership.

A joint venture is all about capitalizing on the strength of each partner, to generate more revenues than what each party could accomplish on it's own.

It is very important to attach a dollar value to what each partner brings to the table. This will help packaging the JV, keeping everyone comfortable about the agreement and determining a fair revenue split.

Examples:

* I have a product that was developed for 3 years by 2 engineers. It sells for $49/month and we've got 100 active customers. I am looking for traffic and willing to pay a 20% recurring commission.

* I have a membership site with a monthly newsletter. The newsletter is mailed out on the first of the month to 50,000 recipients with a 23% open rate and 11% click-through rate.

* I love to travel. I have been traveling around the world for the past 6 years and wrote 200 pages of tips on how to get by when you're traveling abroad.


Step 3: Package and sell the JV

Once you've identified a list of potential JV partners, analyzed what each partner can bring and attached a dollar value to your offering, it is time to approach the prospects and sell them on your idea.

Unfortunately, this is the most important yet overlooked step.

I lost count of how many times we get approached by CEOs of respectible companies, sending emails saying "financial projections are awesome", "we should really do some business together", "let's talk about a partnership" or my personal pet peeve "we have a great product, no customers yet but the market is huge!"

Wakeup call.

This is the information age. We're all suffering from information overload, all trying to accomplish 10 things at once and all have a list of projects on our ToDo list that will never get done because there's not enough time.

To sell a potential partner on the idea of doing a JV with you, send a short one page JV executive summary, outlining in a few short words what your project is about, why you feel this is a good fit and most importantly - the estimated short term opportunity cost / opportunity gain.

If you can't keep everything down to one page (without reducing font size so that I need a magnifying glass to read it), delete all and start again.

Luckily for you, I'm attaching our tried and tested JV Executive Summary. You can download this template here.

-

Remember JV is a numbers game. The more JV proposals you send out, the higher your chances are that you'll get a "yes".

Follow the steps I described, use the attached JV Executive Summary template and you'll significantly increase your chances of making it happen.

Good luck!

View 1 Comment(s)

When tracking affiliate IDs or SIDs, there are two popular methodologies you can choose from:

1. First Cookie

The first affiliate to refer traffic to your website earns credit for the sale.

Example:
Andrew refers Robert
Jim refers Robert
Robert buys
- Andrew earns the credit

2. Last Cookie

The last affiliate to refer traffic to your website earns credit for the sale.

Example:
Andrew refers Robert
Jim refers Robert
Robert buys
- Jim earns the credit

--

Choosing which methodology you would like to go with is strictly a business decision. Once you've made your selection, be sure to communicate this to your affiliates and motivate them accordingly.

Below are the two different scripts to implement first cookie vs last cookie tracking:

Track affiliate referrals by First cookie:


Track affiliate referrals by Last cookie:

Getting quality traffic to your website is one of the biggest challenges you'll face as an online marketer.

Sure, knowing how to convert traffic to paying customers is super important too. But without traffic, there are no leads, no customers and no business to run...

As part of this 3 part post, I would like to touch on the other side of the traffic equation - "Having more traffic than you can handle".

Some say it's a good problem to have.

Most ignore it until it's too late.

But the sad truth is: a single digg submission, media mention, or a link from a prominent site, can easily drive more traffic than your website can handle, bringing your server down.

Think loss of business and damaging your site's reputation.

Here's how to avoid it -

Part 1: Media Files

Every static image, PDF file, video, mp3 or other media file which can be accessed by visitors to your website, should be stored on Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 is a robust unlimited remote storage solution, that can scale well beyond your needs.



Blue Origin is one small company with a big idea that successfully scaled its web site using Amazon S3. On January 2, 2007, the company posted information and videos on its web site about a test launch for a new vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle.

Within the next day, the news was covered by both SlashDot and Boing Boing, sending a tremendous amount of traffic to its web site. With its media files stored in Amazon S3, it was able to instantly scale and handle the 3.5 million requests and 758 GBs in bandwidth in a single day.

Here at Software Projects, we have been beta testing Amazon solutions for over two years now. These days S3 is sufficiently stable and scalable, to a point where we roll out "all media stored on S3" with every new client.

Storing a file on S3 is as easy as calling three php lines:


Amazon generates a unique URL where your file will be stored forever (until you delete it).

You are charged based on the total storage volume and bandwidth.

Rates are dirt cheap, allowing you to store 20GB for around $3 a month.

We've tested all popular hosting platforms, including grid hosting, multi homed hosting and Akamai. Nothing comes close in terms of ease of use, scalability and affordability.

You have no business storing a single video file on your server if you ever expect to get decent traffic. A typical webserver will start crawling once you have more than 50 users per second streaming video/audio.

Signup for Amazon S3 today and start migrating all your media over. This is one decision you'll be happy about when the next big wave of traffic hits your site.

--

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3.

View 2 Comment(s)

Email Marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to convert leads to paying customers.

SoftwareProjects is an Email Marketing powerhouse, currently delivering 5 million emails a day on behalf of our clients.

One of the most popular questions we keep getting asked about Email Marketing is:

"What is the best day of week and time of day to email?"

While there is no absolute answer to this question, as you should test your market/list and check what works best, our experience shows that -

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are the best days of the week to email.

On Monday, your email gets caught up with the weekend's junkmail.
On Friday, everyone are thinking about the weekend.

As for time of day -

Business offers work best during early morning (9am to 11am)
Consumer offers work best during late afternoon to evening (5pm to 9pm)

Google PPC is a great way to generate instant traffic to your landing page.

Too many rookie AdWords advertisers fail to understand the importance of "Negative keywords".

Negative keywords are words and phrases where if appearing as part of the user's search query, will get your ad excluded from the search results.

Why is this important?

Imagine you are promoting "blue widgets". Your goal is to target users who are actively searching to "buy blue widgets".

Without negative keywords, anyone looking for "free blue widgets", "blue widgets manual", "blue widgets replacement" will see your ad, click on it, end up costing you money but probably not convert to a paying customer.

Google's keyword tool includes a tab to help you find negative keywords. But don't stop there.

I would urge you take the time to develop your own list of negative keywords and continue adding to this list on a regular basis, based on the search queries that don't convert.

Remember the keywords you buy on Google don't tell the whole story.

Always consult your analytics software to see what users are really searching for when they land on your site.

To get you started, here's a seed list of negative keywords we use with new PPC accounts. Review this list and make sure nothing here takes away from your target audience.

View 1 Comment(s)

Did you ever wonder how Google decides what sites are "spam" and should be removed from their index?

Google is now more of a human assisted algorithm than it ever has been before.

Google's "secret sauce" have always been known to be their integration of humans into the ranking process.

They continue to recruit reviewers both in the US as well as offshore, with some reports indicating Google now employing more than 10,000 active reviewers.

When you have 10,000 reviewers, it's only a matter of time until one of them starts talking...

So, without further ado, I present to you: Google's Spam Guide

Study it carefully and understand what guidelines you have to keep to avoid your site from getting labeled as spam.