In this episode, host Julie Hood shares secrets to successful joint ventures – including what they are, how to use them, and what to watch out for when connecting with others.
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares secrets to successful joint ventures – including what they are, how to use them, and what to watch out for when connecting with others.
LINKS
See the upcoming Joint Venture events on the CourseCreatorsHQ.com calendar.
Use Calendly to set up meetings more easily – without all the back and forth.
Use Zoom meetings to connect.
Get my Sunday night calendar emails when you sign up for my free course – Is Your Course Idea Any Good? here.
(Some of these are affiliate links and I earn a commission when you sign up. I only recommend partners I have vetted or tools I personally use.)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Joint ventures can be one of the most powerful ways to build your course business.
What is a Joint Venture?
Here is the official “Julie Hood” definition. "A joint venture is any time you work with someone else to connect with their audience."
Joint Ventures give you…
It's a long-term game so start right now:
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Today, let's talk joint ventures. What are they, how can you use them? And what do you need to look out for as you forge ahead with potential partners, joint ventures can be one of the most powerful ways to build your course business, no matter what budget you have. So let's jump into the deep end Of the pool. Welcome to the course creators,
HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood. Let's Start by actually answering the question. What is a joint venture? Exactly. So here is the official Julie Hood definition. A joint venture is any time that you work with someone else to connect with their audience. And in my opinion,
connecting can mean a lot of different things. You might be on someone's podcast. You might share one of their free lead magnets with your audience, or they might share your lead magnet with their audience. They might promote your course. And then in exchange, earn a commission from you, which is a percentage of the course sale, or maybe you're on someone's Facebook live.
Maybe you do a clubhouse room together, or you might participate in a giveaway or a summit that they are doing, or lots of other different ways that you can connect with other people's audiences. And there are a couple more reasons why I really love joint ventures. First, you actually gain really instant credibility and authority. When someone else is recommending you and sharing you and your expertise,
that credibility is hard to build. If you're doing something like advertising, when they recommend you, you get instant authority. And then second, it can be a lot cheaper than doing advertising. You are not paying for the connection unless someone actually buys. So you get to pay on the backend most often. So you get the order and you pay a percentage of the order back to your partner.
So you're not having to put out, let's say, if you're doing Facebook ads, you're having to put out a bunch of money ahead of time. Not quite knowing how the ads will perform. So it's, it's better in that perspective. Third, it's a lot easier to actually zero in on your perfect target audience. Once you find someone who works with the same audience that you do,
and usually it's not in the same way that you do, they are a different service provider, but they help the same people. You can joint venture with them, and then you both win because they're helping their audience and you're getting in front of your perfect person. So example, one of my joint venture partners is a book coach and she works with experts to help them write a book.
Then she can re recommend me to help them create a course. And she doesn't want to get into creating courses or offering that service, but she can recommend me to do it. And then she earns a commission on that sale when she does. So, so I will tell you for my sixth and seven figure clients, joint ventures are absolutely essential to their revenue and how they grow their audience.
At some of the best leads that they get is when their partners will share a lead magnet that they've created. And it's great for the partner because they're giving away really outstanding, free information to their audience. And their audience is like, wow, this is fantastic. And then within a certain amount of time, typically they may get an offer from you,
from me as the partner. And then when they purchase, they earn a commission. So it's a, win-win all around their audience gets great information from the freebie. They may get introduced to something that they want to purchase. So even more great information, you, as the expert, get a lead that comes on your email list. And then you may get a person who is a new student of your course,
and then your partner earns a commission and shares really great information as is, and is known as the person who gives out really good information to their audience. Okay. So hopefully I've convinced you that joint venturing is a really good idea. And so when should you start, if you're in the process of setting up your course business, and actually I want you to start right now.
And the reason is that joint venturing and partnering is really a long-term game. It's not something that you just jump in for a minute. And then you're finished. You want to build partners who are with you for the long haul, who will promote you for years and years and years and finding those perfect people can take a little bit. I've been at it for a year now,
and I've gone through some really fantastic partners that I love and then a few others that it didn't work out. So it does take a bit to get all of this up and running. And the next question I actually want to answer before we go any further is who shouldn't do joint ventures. So if you really don't like networking, it's probably not a good fit for you because you really do have to be interested in the other person,
interested in their audience, interested in helping them. And if you don't like to network, go do Facebook ads, go do something else instead, or hire someone who can be a joint venture broker for you, hire them to help promote your joint venture side of things. But if that's not where you like to play, that's fine. Go find a different playground,
but just, I wanted to make sure I brought that up early on. Okay. So how do you get started? So I'm doing this episode because over the next few weeks, there are a bunch of joint venture events that we'll be teaching you all about how to be a joint venture partner, how to get set up and helping you actually find partners.
They help you learn more about how you can do this, plus they help you connect. So they'll have breakout rooms sometimes in their networking events where you get to introduce yourself and talk about what it is that who you help and what it is you offer. So you can go to coursecreatorshq.com/35 that's coursecreatorshq.com/35. And I'll have a link there to all the current events that are going on so that you can get signed up and jump into the ones that are the fit perfect fit for you.
Next up, I want to talk about some of the gotchas to watch out for, if you were considering doing joint ventures, as I mentioned, this is a long-term game. So you're creating these long-term partnerships, but be prepared for some flaky partners and don't let it upset you, you know, the ones that will be so excited and can't wait to promote you,
and then they just disappear and they don't actually follow through and promote you. It happens. So I just wanted to warn you about it ahead of time so it's not bothersome. When I first started, I got really frustrated with the folks that didn't fall through, even though they said they would. So now I just know that that's happened and my really good,
really fantastic partners. They're the ones who do what they say they will do. And those are my longterm partners. You also might come across a few potential partners who haven't figured out their audience yet, especially for folks who are new to online business. And these are the ones who will promote everything that they come across. Every potential partner is perfect for them.
And so what ends up happening is their email list is really confused about how they're helping them because they're promoting one day, it's a health thing. The next day it's courses, the next day, it's a new business opportunity. And because it's not focused enough, their audience doesn't respond because anytime people are confused, they just click away. They don't respond.
So these are not the best partners. There are a few of these out there. And also you might have to do a, quite a bit of networking to find the best partners for you. So last year I met several that are fantastic supporters, and I really, really appreciate all their support. The other thing is that keeping things equal and win-win for both partners can sometimes be a bit of a challenge.
So there's different levels of partners, often, depending on the size of your email list or the responsiveness of your email list, some partners are just better at promoting you than others. And then sometimes the folks with the larger lists are only interested in partnering with other people who have large lists, the ones who have been at this for a while. They know a lot of the questions to ask and some of the technical sides of things.
So when you're just getting started, it's fine. You can partner with some of the smaller folks who are getting started like you are, and then work your way up to some of those larger partners. The other thing is that you don't always have to promote each other. So there would be times when you promote someone, but they don't promote you or the other way around.
And that's okay. You that too, because sometimes the partnerships are just one way. So for example, let's say I connect with someone who works with health coaches. They help health coaches build their businesses. So they might want to recommend my 24 hour course creator program to their list. It could be perfect for their health coaches to build an online course,
but I don't recommend how to be a health coach program because it doesn't fit with what my audience is looking for. You know, my audience is interested in courses and I try to keep a very tight focus on helping them build their course business. So being a health coach wouldn't resonate with the majority of my audience. So in that case, it would just be a one-way partnership.
Okay. So if I've piqued your interest and you're wondering, okay, where do I start on this whole joint venture thing? Let me get you going first up, you need to get your email was set up. You want to be able to invite partners to share your free lead magnets and then get their subscribers into your ecosystem of your email list. And unfortunately,
social media followings are not the same as an email list. They don't respond the same and they don't tend to click as much at the same rates as email followers. Plus when you share something on social media, yes, it's fantastic. You have this huge social media following, but you can't guarantee that your promotion is going to be shown to all of them.
That's up to Facebook or Instagram or YouTube to see who's actually going to hear about it with email. You can guarantee that your is going to be sent to your entire list. Next up, I want you to start thinking about exactly who your audience is, who is it you help and who do you work with? And can you describe them in just one sentence?
So for example, I, with coaches, consultants, experts, authors, bloggers, and podcasters who want to make more revenue from what they know short and sweet. And when I share that specific audience with a potential partner, they know for sure if we're a good fit or not. So you might also have some details about the age of the audience that you work with,
or whether they're women or men, or maybe, or not their parents, or if they're a business owner, or if they make a certain level of revenue with their business, there's lots of different ways to separate out your audiences is generally called demographics. And I want to also tell you, you might not know exactly when you get started, who you want to work with.
A really does take some trial and error of working with different people to sort of recognize, yeah, this is a good fit for me. This is who I love working with, but this person is not. So I don't want them to be in my audience. So I think it's funny on a lot of times, you'll hear that advice. Like you need to know your customer avatar.
You need to know your customer audience, but if you haven't worked with them yet, it can be a little bit hard to figure that out. So I want to give you permission to try a few different audiences and see, and the more specific you can be as you go forward, the more your message will resonate with the right people. And then it'll turn away the ones who aren't the right fit.
And that's actually a really good thing. So don't say things like, oh, I work with all entrepreneurs. That's way too broad because there are all kinds of different all entrepreneurs. They have all kinds of different businesses and they have very different needs and problems. So it's hard for you to narrow in on what it is they need. You want a small enough group that you can really get a handle on their particular problems and help them with it.
So also, as you're looking for partners, one of the best things you can do is set up a calendar tool that helps you schedule meetings, and it takes away a lot of the time-consuming back and forth of when is a good time for you to meet. And when is it, when am I available? You'll also want to get a free zoom account,
which a lot of you are using any way to record your courses, but it's also a great way to meet you get a personal meeting link that you can use for your meetings. So I use Calendly right now at calendly.com. I'll put the link in the show notes, so you can find it. There are several different tools that work well for this, but basically what you do is you set up the dates and the times that you're available for calls,
and then you say, here's the link to my calendar. Your potential partner picks a time that works with them and then Calendly adds it to your online calender. And it sends them reminders to let them them know, Hey, you have a meeting tomorrow with Julie, and here's the zoom link for the meeting. And it's all automatic. So that is so fantastic for taking a lot of the headaches out of this whole process.
And then as you move forward, you'll also want to set up a few technical things, especially when you start offering your courses and want to give your partners, commissions, A commission is just a percentage of the sale that is paid to the partner. Typically it ranges anywhere from 50% of the price down to 10%. Let's say if you have a lot of individual coaching or personal attention to your course,
then it might be lower. I offer 30% to my partners. So it gives them a healthy percentage of the sale. And it leaves me enough to pay expenses, pay taxes, and then have some profit on the backend. So in order to do this really well, you need an affiliate system to track these partner promotions with each partner gets a unique tracking link.
And then when someone either signs up with that tracking link, or they sign up with a course tracking link, the sale is tracked and you know, that you'll need to pay that specific partner, a commission, and you want a system that's going to track all of this for you. And so it needs to be on the same platform where you are taking your orders.
So for example, Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, they all offer affiliate tracking systems for doing this with joint venture partners. Sometimes it's a higher level. So you may need to upgrade your account in order to use their affiliate tracking system. But you want that all to be available, to do all of the legwork for you, of keeping this straight of who's sending you people and who's signing up,
but actually you, before you need to do all the technical stuff, you really need to get started building those relationships. So remember, this is networking and you're in this for the long haul. So you can start promoting other people and, and building your relationships with your partners. Even if your entire affiliate system isn't set up yet for them to promote you.
And that actually might work better when it is a good fit for both of you to promote each other and you go first, they will really appreciate it and, and be an even more likely to participate partner. And then one more idea for you is to grab a notebook just for tracking your joint venture partners, give each person its own page and then put an index of them in the front and keep notes on each partner.
You know, what are they offering? When is it? How can you both connect, make notes about conversations that you have together? And so there's nothing better than coming back two years from now and saying, we met at that joint venture. I met event two years ago in March of 2021. They'll appreciate your attention to the details and it will definitely help you stay more organized to follow up with your potential partners.
Then jump into some of the joint venture events and the challenges that are coming up. It will teach you a lot and it'll give you a chance to get in front of potential partners and network with them. So go to coursecreatorshq.com/35 for links to all of the future joint venture events. I also share these in my Sunday night email that goes out to help people with planning.
So make sure you jump on my email list. If you haven't already, you can go to coursecreatorshq.com/idea to get signed up for my free lead magnet on is my idea any good? So thanks so much for listening. I hope this gave you some food for thought and has you inspired to think about working with joint venture partners to build your course business,
please, please let me know how it goes. I want to hear how you're doing. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the time and thank you for subscribing and I appreciate so much your reviews. They help us get in front of more course creators. So I so appreciate that you listen, subscribe and review. If you've got something great today,
please leave us a five star review and have a fantastic week. I can't wait to hear about all of your joint venture partners.