AP 0220: How Do I Find Good Partnerships to Grow My Sales?

AskPat 220 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 220 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have another great question today from a listener. But before we get to that, I want to thank today's sponsor, which is ZipRecruiter.com. So if you're looking to add team members to your business, which is a smart thing to do, especially if you want to grow, you don't want to burn out and do it all yourself. If you're looking to hire the right team members, you've got to do it through ZipRecruiter.com, because you know when you put those job descriptions out there on all those different sites and try to find the right people, it can take forever. It's hard to manage all those different job sites out there. So you can you use a tool like ZipRecruiter.com to do all that for you. Just one description, with one click, and it goes out to 50-plus job sites, and the tool helps you figure out who the best candidates are in one spot. So one fell swoop, you get to hit all the major job sites out there, and you're going to find the right person to help you grow your business and expand your team. Awesome! So if you want to do this for free, all you have to do is go to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. It's that simple. ZipRecruiter.com/Pat.

Awesome, thanks so much. Let's get to today's question from Glenn.

Glenn: Hey Pat, this is Glenn Meder. Love what you do. Thank you very much!

I have a product called The Survival Still, and it's available at SurvivalStill.com. I sell primarily through webinars, and that has been going really well for us. What we do is we team up with people who have large email lists and basically large affiliates. The way I've been finding these people is I've been networking. That's working okay, but I really want to take it to the next level.

How do I find these people that have large email lists, large affiliates, that can really take this message and this product to the next level? Any advice that you could give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for what you do.

Pat: Glenn, thank you so much for the question. It's really exciting to hear what you're up to. So, webinars to help promote your product, and you're getting in front of large audiences, particularly people who have large email lists, which is a great way to approach it. You know that when people are serious about their business and they're building their list, they're going to understand how to use it. Those are great opportunities to team up or JV with those people to help promote your product.

The question is, well how do you find those people? I think you're doing it the best way. It's networking. Putting yourself out there in those situations, whether it's online or offline, conferences, just reaching out to people, social media, or even private emails. Just to get to know people and have them get to know you and what you have to offer their audience. Again, always remembering what's in it for them and their audience. What's going to help make them look better, and that's just, no matter how you approach this, something you have to keep in mind. How are you going to make these people who have these big email lists look good in front of their audience? That's where you come in and your product and everything it has to offer.

Now what are some other ways to find people besides the old tried and true method of networking? Well, it's always good to involve networking because you're going to have to reach out. But where do you start? How do you find these people where then you can begin to build that relationship and offer a JV partnership for you and your product? Well, there's a number of different places I came up with. You may have thought of these already, maybe not, but there's some things to go along with this.

So, the first thing is obvious. The owner of blogs. Blogs that are active that are collecting email lists. It might be as simple as doing a Google search. Now, there are different types of Google searches you can do to sort of hack your way to find these big blogs. Of course, the ones that rise to the top of the search results are typically more popular, but again we're looking for email lists.

So you might be able to do a search like the keyword that you have and then in parentheses put “subscribe here”. Not parentheses, excuse me, quotations. That way, it captures every site out there that ranks for that keyword that you're looking for, but also has the words “subscribe here.” Or you can even try “click here to subscribe” or “subscribe now” or “get free instant access.” All those words that people put in those buttons are calls to action to subscribe to a list. You want to put those in the search, and that's going to help you immediately filter out all the sites that aren't collecting email addresses. Then you can check on those sites individually, and just get to see how active they are, how big they seem. Some of them might even share their exact subscriber count. A lot of people do that for social proof. So that's one way I would go about it.

Another thing you can do is you could look for forums and groups out there. Specifically forums like your old school bulletin board, PHP bulletin board forums. Those will be helpful. The owners of those have access to those email addresses as well. You can tell just how big they are based on the number of people who are in those forums. So typically, when you find those forums, which you can again do by going into Google and typing “forum:” and then the keyword. Find those forums, scroll all the way to the bottom once you get into the part that has all the threads, and the different sections and discussions going on. See how active it is, scroll all the way to the bottom, and typically you'll see exactly how many members are there. I know I have been a part of forums before that have had hundreds of thousands of users. That's a good sign that there's going to be a significant list that you might be able to target. Then you work your networking magic. You reach out, maybe tag that person on Twitter and start that conversation. Then offer what you have to offer to their audience and their forum members.

Groups, like I said, you can do this on Facebook. You can do this on LinkedIn. Facebook, for example, will show you how many people are within a group. Same thing with LinkedIn. So looking at those places to start, especially on LinkedIn. A lot of niches underutilize LinkedIn. I think a lot people I talk to who are doing really successful things in specific niches are using LinkedIn. So I would definitely check that out, and specifically the groups. Getting into contact with the group owners. It's really easy to find the group owners and reach out to them through the messaging system in LinkedIn.

You could also base your thoughts about how big these email lists might be on traffic. One sort of method of discovering how much traffic a site might have—and it's not always perfect, but if you go to Alexa.com, that will give you some insight and some numbers. Not specific numbers, in terms of subscribers, but just how popular is the site and how much is it growing, and that might give you some ideas on whether or not you should pursue those blogs that you come across.

You might even be able to do a combination of what I said earlier. Find those blogs, ones that are collecting emails, and then type those blog names, those domain names, into Alexa.com to see what the growth is like. You can also use sites like Moz.com to insert some information and find out some results of those sites as well.

The last thing I want to say here, Glenn, is not only do you have to work hard to reach out to these people . . . and, like I said, there's a lot of different ways to do that, there's a lot of different methods and variables to discover whether or not a site might be big enough for you and what you have to offer. I'm not sure what the product is, I'm not sure what target size list you're looking for. It can be difficult to find that exact size. But one thing that will work to help you understand what that exact email list count is for people, is not when you reach out to them but when they reach out for you.

So, sharing what you have to offer, putting it out there in the industry and building buzz for it, and then doing sort of like an application process, or having something on your page that is for people who want to partner with you, who want to become an affiliate, and then collecting information from them upfront to understand how big these lists might be. So, a person might apply and say they have a list of 500 people, at which point you might not think that's enough, so then you don't have them qualify to become an affiliate. There might be somebody who comes on who uses your product who loves it, who just wants to promote it to their audience as well. They might have 100,000 email list subscribers and you would know that from the application process.

You could even reach out to people, do a combination of this. Have an application process, a form that somebody fills out online. But you reach out and you reach out to these bloggers and forum owners and group leaders and say, “Hey, I have this product that I think your audience might be interested in. I'm happy to share a commission with you for every product that's sold through a special link I'll give you. To make sure you qualify for this, I'd love for you to fill out this form.” That can have a whole bunch of different fields. One of the fields can be email list account. You can base your decision to work with that person or not just off of that number or maybe some other factors that you can think of as well for making sure that that person is somebody worth working with.

So, Glenn, I hope that that answers your question. Everybody out there, I highly recommend that if you have a product that's doing well, picking out people who that can become JV partners can definitely take your brand and your business and your product and growth to the next level. So thank you for that inspiration, Glenn. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way. For anybody out there who has a question you'd like potentially features you on the show, all you have to do is go to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page, just like Glenn did. For those of you who want a t-shirt, if you get your question featured you get a t-shirt, just like Glenn.

Thank you so much. I also want to thank again ZipRecruiter.com. You can try it for free by going to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. Again, remember if you're growing your team, and you're posting job descriptions out there to find people on many different sites, you can do it just once and have it be blasted to 50 different sites, more than 50 different sites. They will highlight and find the best candidates for you in that position you're looking to fill. So again, go to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. Try it out for free. It's free for you as the person looking.

So awesome, thank you so much. I appreciate it. As always, I like to end with a quote. Today's quote is from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. He says, “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.”

Cheers! Take care, and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat.