HOW TO FRANCHISE?

By Barry Boswell

Forming joint venture arrangements does not have to be complicated if you follow a few simple steps. This chapter will give you a quick method to get you going. The basic premise you need to understand is simply this: If you target a prospect who is a likely candidate for your offer, the odds are very high that he or she will consider your proposal. Notice that I did not say accept your proposal; I said consider your proposal. Your first objective should be to get your prospective partner to listen to you. The more compatible your product or service is with your prospect and their customer base, the better the odds that your deal will be accepted.

Let’s look at how you should begin. The first step is to determine what you are looking to accomplish and what you can offer your prospect. Then select an ideal prospect or candidate who can benefit the most from what you have to offer. The final step is to craft a proposal to your prospect that provides as little downside risk as possible. In other words, structure your offer in a win-win proposal, preferably with you assuming most if not all of the risk. Your odds for acceptance increase as you more closely match your ideal prospect to your offer and decrease the risk that your partner would have to assume.

It is also preferable that your partner do as little work as necessary when structuring a joint venture. The more work that person has to do to implement the arrangement, the less the chance that he or she will accept your proposal. Try to make it as simple as possible to implement.

Let me demonstrate the process using an example of some deals that I recently put together. As a distributor for a manufacturer of a line of anti-aging nutritional supplements, I have an affiliate program. Because of this, I recently began a campaign to actively recruit affiliate partners. The first step was to assess what benefits I could offer my prospective partners. I determined that I could offer the following benefits:

➤ A weekly newsletter, in which any referrals would be permanently tagged to my partner.
➤ Products that have a reorder rate of slightly over 80 percent.
➤ Reports in PDF format that could be personalized for my affiliate.
➤ Lifetime tracking of any traffic.
➤ A monthly continuity program so that customers could have their products on autoship, thereby assuring a continuous income stream to my affiliate partners.

The second step was to determine who could benefit the most from what I had to offer. I decided that an e-book publisher of a health or diet topic was my most ideal candidate. Furthermore, I could approach these potential partners with different scenarios depending upon what systems they had in place. For example, if they did not have their own newsletter, they could brand mine on their site with an exit pop-up box. They could give their visitors and customers a report branded with their affiliate link, offering them viral possibilities.

Or the report could be positioned as a bonus to their product to help them sell more of their own product. These e-book publishers would now have the opportunity to turn a one-time sale into an ongoing source of revenue and offer their customer an additional bonus at the same time. By focusing on how I can add value to my partner, I can at least get webmasters to listen to my proposal—and, more importantly, to join my growing list of affiliates. You can apply this logic to many situations, even if you don’t have an e commerce business. Let me show you how.

Let’s say you come across a product that sells quite well off-line. You approach the owner with an offer to market it online. Now you determine who online has the ideal customer for that product, along with enough traffic to support the venture. You can structure a commission for yourself. The webmaster promoting the product earns additional income by selling the product. You can get a decent idea of the traffic a site gets by visiting Alexa (www.alexa.com). There is also an incredible software package available that will tell you the number of links that a site has. This information is indispensable for doing research of this nature. You can see it at http://scamfreezone.com/t.cgi?a=191230&e=/spider.

I hope you use this information to structure many ethical and profitable relationships.
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Barry Boswell is an active online marketer, specializing in forming wildly
profitable and mutually beneficial relationships. Discover his unique system
at http://HealthyBody.Xtend-Life.com. For additional resources and
information on joint ventures and how to structure them, send an e-mail
to JointVentures@ProReply.com and the information will be forwarded
immediately.