Use Joint Ventures to Grow your Business

Use Joint Ventures to Grow your Business Copyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com By Armand Melanson So let's talk about "joint venturing". The term sounds daunting like it is reserved to people who are already at top, but that isn't at all case: a joint venture is simply two companies working together to increase value they provide to their customers. Let me give you an example of a simple joint venture that I just setup which required about 1hr of my time. When I initially setup my lessworkmoremoney.com website, I did a pretty thorough review of webhosting companies. I went with a big company that advertised all of things that I knew I wanted in a webhost. After a few weeks of hassles, I realized that they were too big to deliver high quality service, so I revised my search criteria & starting looking at smaller companies. I fell upon a small webhosting company http://fastwebsites.com & really liked what I saw when I reviewed what they had to offer. So I setup an account with them & got lessworkmoremoney.com up & running. Over next few months & had to contact fastwebsites.com several times to request help on various issues. I always got prompt & very helpful service. So one day I was thinking about how others would benefit from my search for a great webhost & I decided to write up a recommendation for fastwebsites.com. I also started to do math on lifetime value of each customer who signs-up with fastwebsites thanks to my recommendation. I figured why not email them & ask them if they would be willing to give me an incentive for any subscriber who signs up. Here's what they had to say: "Ok we will offer you 1 months hosting fee for any clients you refer. We will add a referrer entry in referrer drop down menu on he order page. You must let your customers know to

How to Harness the POWER of Pay-per-Click Search Engines

How to Harness POWER of Pay-per-Click Search Engines Copyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com By Armand Melanson

Unfortunately, I get email every day from people who have setup their websites to sell but they can't get any traffic to their site - they are going out of business fast. So let me emphasize an important element of online success: Find markets that you can quickly penetrate via pay-per-click advertising at Overture. What is a pay-per-click(PPC) Search Engine(SE) you ask? PPCs are changing face of Internet advertising. Let me explain how. With regular SEs, you have to write your marketing copy to create proper keyword density, then submit & wait for SE to spider your site. It can take anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks before you actually get listed. Then you have to start tweaking your site to try & move up ranks. It's a slow & labor intensive process. With Overture - biggest PPC out there - you can join, bid on particular keywords & get listed within 5 days! Your bid will determine where you rank. For example, if you are selling cigars, you can bid $0.20 for keyword "cigar" and that bid will determine where you rank when someone searches for "cigar". You pay $0.20 every time someone clicks on your listing for keyword "cigar". Everytime a search is done at Overture or its partner sites, keywords which have been bid on appear above non-bid keywords. So even if your competition has created a highly keyword focused site but hasn't bid on words you have bid on, you will be above them in search results. This means that even if you find a product which is in great demand, you should 1st determine if you can get a top 5 position at Overture for most relevant keywords before building your website. This is very important because if you can't get a top 5 at Overture, then you will not get sufficient traffic to your site to make money from start. Of course, you can go long route of using search engine submission tools, link trading, banner ads, ezine ads & what not. But this will take some time before it pays off in sufficient traffic to make you some real money. If you want immediate results, you have to be able to get a top 5 spot at Overture - top 5 is key because Yahoo, one of Overture's partners, picks up top 5 Overture results. If you can get top 1 or 2, then even better because Overture's other partners (MSN, ALTA VISTA, LYCOS, etc.) will display your results. But top 5 alone will produce good results because Yahoo is huge & gets a massive number of searches. ----------------------------------- MATH IS FOR PINHEADS?? - NOT!!!!! ----------------------------------- The way to calculate how high you can bid at Overture is pretty simple: Let's assume a very conservative 1% conversion rate at your site - that means 1 out of 100 visitors buys. Determine your profit on 1 sale of your main product - if you are selling widgets at $30 a piece (expensive widgets I know) & your cost is $10, then your gross profit is $20/sale (haven't factored in other expenses yet). If rough profit per sale is $20 & you make one sale/100