CHAPTER-19
The Joint Venture
In the event that you sign up for newsletters and mailing lists from marketing specialists, you might have run into the word 'JV' or 'Joint Venture'. Essentially, a JV is a partnership of sorts, although not in the legal sense.
A JV may take many forms, but it's mostly about collaboration - working together to produce better results than each one of you can achieve by yourself.
Listed here are just some ways you can 'JV' with others:
Tele-seminars and workshops - Partner with a person who is serving an identical kind of client to you to provide workshops where the delegates will get several perspectives (and also you share the job involved with organizing and marketing the big event).
Creating Products and services - By yourself, developing a product (like a CD or online course) may appear daunting but, in the event that you use another person, you are able to brainstorm some ideas and take action in a fraction of the time. Plus, you are able to each market the merchandise to your personal databases of clients and customers.
Product Launches/Special Offers - We recently teamed up with some others who help coaches to promote themselves to advertise a book of ours relating to this topic. They donated a totally free bonus and marketed the book for their e-mail lists - everyone profited. People purchasing the book got an excellent group of bonuses and heard about sites where they could find extra information on marketing. The folks providing the bonuses got additional exposure and PR.
Joint Bidding/Pitching - You might face tough competition when you are bidding or pitching for corporate or government contracts but, with a little team of associates, you are able to stand a far greater chance in the event that you pool your expertise, testimonials, and resources.
Affiliates - You are able to either be a joint venture partner for another person's products and services and promote them as a swap for a commission or look for affiliates to advertise your personal products and services, paying them a commission once the sales are made.
One good free site to get involved with is jvme.com, which is a leading joint venture social network run by internet marketers via Facebook's base software applications.
Whenever you're thinking about doing a JV, one thing to be clear about up-front is how much money and time each of you will be investing and how you will distribute the profits when they come in.
The best option here is to be transparent at the start and keep costs to the minimum required to do the job well.
JVs, with the right people and the right companies, can work wonders for you and they don't have to be as daunting or on such a large scale as some people would have you believe.
CHAPTER-20
Measuring Success
There are several different tools on the market that can help you gauge the success of your sales funnel efforts. In this chapter, we will provide a brief overview of a few of the more popular ones:
Google Analytics is a terrific way to examine how well your web store is working. Once you have built-in Analytics together with your store pages, you are able to access an enormous selection of helpful reports.
Google Analytics enables you to set up a sales funnel and see just how many individuals are deferring at every step of your funnel. That ought to alert you to which areas of the funnel process you need to improve.
Say that, for each 1, 000 people who visit your product page:
100 add the merchandise to their cart 80 of these people go to the checkout 40 of these people complete the checkout form 33 of these people confirm their order
Out of this example, it's clear that many shoppers (fifty percent) are leaving the purchasing procedure when they are asked to fill out the check-out form. This could imply that there's something about the form that's off-putting to people.
StatCounter is also a web tracking service that enables you to access up-to-date statistics about web visitors throughout several sites.
Just like a standard web-stat tool, you'll have the ability to see the details of your unique site visitors, visitors that return, page loadings, and 1st-time site visitors. You can observe the information presented daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually as well as choose specific date ranges.
Overall, Statcounter is a good tool that offers all you need to help make the necessary changes to your website.
Smartsheet.com is a spreadsheet with special features that allows you (among other things) to track company objectives and operations and manage projects and deliverables by teams and individuals. This is a comprehensive solution for strategy analysis.
The sales funnel estimator at mathmarketing.com allows you to approximate your market profitability and calculate precisely what quantity of purchases you can expect from a sales funnel and what quantity of prospects you require at the top of your funnel to reach your targets.
ClickBank Analytics provides you with the capability to interactively set up trend charts based on different topics over customized time ranges. Data and chart tables are supplied to help you witness sales trends along with the information that supports everything in a single glance. Also, the charts could be manipulated in various ways, letting you begin to see the trends you'll need to handle your company.
It's well worth taking the time to acquire and familiarise yourself with these tools because they can highlight vital areas for improvement in your campaigns that you would be unable to identify in any other way.
CHAPTER-21
Top Sales Funnel Products
As well as being a good source of affiliate products for you to promote, Clickbank also sells a number of ebooks and software relating to sales funnels which you would be advised to acquire when you are first starting out. Below, we will give a brief description of a few of the better ebooks (and other items) about this subject that Clickbank features:
'The Silent Sales Machine by Jim Cockrum is one of the best-selling ebooks on Clickbank. It has been sold since 2002 and details a myriad of techniques for creating a recurring income online with a minimum of start-up capital and little or no ongoing maintenance required. It has been updated for 2011 and focuses on E-bay auctions and the power-selling of particular products.
'The Profit Pulling Sales Funnel' by Ben Brooks, shows you how to attract targeted buyer traffic to your website free of charge from a little-known traffic source using article marketing.
The 'TAP Profit Funnel' by Grant J Ferrari, is an unorthodox affiliate marketing system for beginners using Twitter that only take 15 minutes per day to operate. It shows you how to build a sales-focused audience on Twitter quickly and then sell Clickbank products to them.
The 'Video Sales Letter Creator' is some innovative software that will let you professionally video market your products with very little user input. If you use WordPress, it also comes with a WordPress plugin so it will work with your theme. It comes with a whole raft of features for customization and there are no monthly fees to pay.
'Sales, Lies & Naked Truths' by Corrine Edwards is a book aimed at all salespeople wanting the most up-to-date, modern sales techniques. The methods in this book do away with the outdated 'hard sell' methods and are aimed more at making you genuine and likable in the eyes of the customer. This ensures that they will purchase from YOU after you've established an honest relationship with them.
Finally, 'Sales CSI' by Rick Braddy is a complete course on how to maximize the returns from your current marketing campaigns including list building, Google Adwords, Facebook advertising, and how to cut out any wasted spending on advertising that you might be unknowingly making at the moment. This is a unique video training program that outlines where you should concentrate your SEO efforts to increase your ROI substantially.
These ebooks, courses, and software can all be useful sources of information for budding online entrepreneurs and even for more experienced people who want to expand their knowledge or capabilities in different areas.
You are advised to do your own research, as well, because the full quantity of resources available on the internet relating to this subject is, obviously, far too big to completely do justice to here.