This is a great question, because a lot of online marketers don’t think beyond the typical affiliate marketing partnership or joint ventures. They go out, they recruit affiliates, maybe they even do some co-endorsements with these affiliates, and they call it a day.
Guess what? If you’re not leveraging partner traffic for anything beyond the basic affiliate agreement, you’re missing a big opportunity. So that’s why you’ll want to think outside the affiliate marketing box and check out these five ways to leverage partner traffic…
Do Co-Endorsements
The idea here is to share links and calls to action about each others’ products on your respective web properties and platforms.
Now you can do this in a variety of ways, including:
- A one-time co-endorsement. For example, you and your partner might agree to promote each other in your respective upcoming newsletters.
- An ongoing co-endorsement on one or more platforms. In this case, you and your partner would agree to promote each other regularly. For example, you might make an agreement to promote each other on your social media pages once per week for at least the next two months. Or perhaps you’ll put your partner’s ad in a prominent place on your blog, and he or she will do the same for you.
- A fully integrated, ongoing co-endorsement arrangement. Here you might swap endorsements in a variety of places for an ongoing length of time. For example:
- Every newsletter you send includes a link to your partner’s site.
- Your newsletter confirmation page includes a link to join your partner’s newsletter.
- Your product download pages include a link to your partner’s product.
- You regularly promote your partner on social media.
Next…
Create a Product Together
This could be an ebook, a piece of software, a membership site, a home study course, a live event or anything else. When you’re all done, you both have a product to sell (and you created it more quickly than you could have done on your own).
TIP: Look for a partner with an established reputation in your niche. When you create content with this person, your name gets associated with their name, which means you get to borrow their credibility.
Next…
Hold a Free Webinar Together
The idea here is to create a lead magnet together, one from which both you and your partner benefit. There are multiple ways to approach the promotional/monetization part of this webinar, including:
- You can each promote your own product within the webinar. Obviously, your products should be highly related so that it makes sense for you to create a webinar to promote both of them. One good example is if one of you is selling a diet guide and the other one is selling exercise videos. These are related products that go well together in a single webinar.
- You promote just one person’s product, but you do so using the other partner’s affiliate link. That way, both of you make money when viewers buy the product.
Naturally, both of you will offer the recordings to this webinar to your prospects and customers, since increased exposure benefits both of you.
Swap Content
As an online marketer, you always have a need for two things: more content, and more exposure to your audience. A content swap delivers on both of these benefits. You get free content from your partner, and you also get free exposure when you create content for your partner to use on his or her sites.
Here are five ways to swap content:
- Swap newsletter articles.
- Do guest blogging for each other.
- Exchange videos to post on social media.
- Create bonus products to give away to customers.
- Agree to do an interview for each other.
Next…
Exchange Ride-Along Mailers
If you send any physical shipments, then this is a great way to get partner traffic. Simply find other people in your niche who also send shipments, and then agree send each other’s flyers, discount coupon codes, brochures or other mailers in your shipments.
TIP: Look for eBay sellers in your niche, as well as those who sell physical products directly from their own website.
Let’s wrap things up…
Summary
So you just discovered five different ways to take advantage of partner traffic. But the truth is, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to joint ventures. Your ability to benefit from this strategy is really only limited to your imagination and the number of good partners you bring on board.
Which brings us to this question: Just how, exactly, do you go about finding, recruiting and managing partners?