Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website, and this is a key technique for a strategic marketing platform.

Search engine optimization drives traffic to a website by matching targeted keywords with searches performed by a search engine like Google or Yahoo. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the list of search results, or the higher it ranks, the more people will visit that site. If someone performs a search for “cosmetics” and your website comes up in the first position on the first page, more people will go to your site than the site in the first position on the second page, or even to the site that is the fifth position on the first page. Search engine optimization can also target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, industry-specific, and vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s placement and relevance, search engine optimization considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. Search engine optimization may involve a site’s coding, presentation and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site.

Another class of techniques know as black hat search engine optimization or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm the search engine user’s experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.

SEO History

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

SEO for Your Strategic Marketing Strategy

Having your website high in the rankings of a search engine is a strategic marketing way to increase your exposure. The higher you rank on a search engine, the more likely people are to visit your site.

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages are found automatically and do not need to be submitted separately. Some search engines, notably Yahoo, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. These programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.

These are a few ideas on how to start thinking about applying search engine optimization to your business-marketing plan. The first step to gaining new customers is by driving them to your site. Search engine optimization can be an important part of your successful strategic marketing plan by increasing the easy search-ability of your company’s website and making your business more noticeable.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

If you need to write your own content, to update your blog on a regular basis, you might want to consider investing in a speech recognition software package. Two of the most popular ones are MacSpeech Dictate, for the Mac platform and Naturally Speaking Dragon for the PC platform.

Face it, writing good, unique, quality content takes time. If you want to optimize your site’s SEO and indexability, it’s vital that you have unique content. Using private label resell content may get you some ideas, but you still need to reword your article by at least 30% so the search engines will consider a unique.
If you’ve never used speech recognition software before, I think you’re going to be amazed by how much time you can save by talking your concepts, ideas, and thoughts into your favorite word processing program and having your ideas come to life at the speed of sound.

It’s human nature to think and speak. Thinking and writing can be a more complicated process. Once you have an idea or concept in your head is simply a matter of putting on your headphones and speaking in your natural voice as you watch the words that you’re speaking as almost magically appear on your page.
Personally, I’m a Mac guy. While I run virtual machines on my Mac to run programs that will only run on a PC, 95% of the work that I do is all based on the Mac, so I’m actually writing this article with a program called MacSpeech Dictate. Not only can you speak words that are transcribed, but you can also control 80-90% of the commands that you usually use a keyboard and mouse for, with your voice.

For example, I can create new documents by saying, “create new document” or I can save my document by saying “save this document”.  It’s that easy! Once you work with the software for about an hour, you start to get comfortable with how to speak, what the basic commands are, and most importantly, the tremendous momentum that you’ll gain by speaking your thoughts directly onto your page instead of the more tedious process of thinking, typing, editing. Don’t get me wrong, you still have to make edits as the recognition software isn’t perfect, but the time you’ll save in typing and editing alone is worth the price of the software tenfold.

There is one more benefit of using speech recognition software besides the obvious time saving results you’ll get. If you’ve been typing more than a few hours a day for several years, you may experience some type of pain in your wrists, hands, or fingers. You may even be suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. If this is the case, by using speech recognition software, the time your fingers are actually on the keyboard and the mouse can be reduced by as much as 80%!

Regardless if you’re an author, writer or blogger, I’d highly recommend investing in some type of speech recognition software to optimize your time and effectiveness whenever you need to create unique, written content.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

This post is part of my new “Technical Quick Takes” series. Meaningful examples of quickly executable content that will help you attract new visitors to your site. The posts are short, to the point, and immediately actionable.

Google has a slew of tools to help you analyze, optimize, and understand what’s going on inside their index.

If you want to find out what keywords Google actually has in it’s index for your site, you’ll need to register for their Google Webmaster Tools. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes to setup. You can start by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/

The picture below is a snapshot of the actual keywords and keyword phrases that Google has inside their index. It’s very informative to know which words and phrases actually are inside their index compared to what we “think” Google is indexing.

Action Tip Takeaway (ATT): Register for a Google Webmaster account (or have your Webmaster do it) and get your site setup so you can find out what keywords Google has in it’s index for you. After you find your indexed keywords, you may want to alter some of your HTML content and tags to align with what’s in the index.

Evan Sohn, a Business Networking Specialist from New York shares his insights on how to attract new clients for your business.

All businesses share the challenge of finding new business.  We recently conducted a survey of 700 small businesses.  43 percent of them needed to add over 10 new clients a year.  It should come as no surprise that $90 billion is being spent by businesses in the US to grow (American Marketing Association).  $20 billion is being spent in online marketing alone.  The common marketing portfolio for a company includes advertising (online and offline), public relations, event marketing (tradeshows), client marketing (referrals) and telemarketing (cold calling).  An effective marketing strategy will employ multiple initiatives under these areas targeting their customer/prospect segments.  Each of these items is important (in different varying levels) to achieve marketing results.  But, is there a way to achieve consistent marketing results without having the budget of a Cisco or a Microsoft?

Having been in technology marketing for nearly 20 years, I have seen various marketing methods emerge and some fall to the waste side (does anyone remember direct mail?).  The Internet has also provided alternative marketing methods by establishing new channels to targeted customers.  Our survey pointed out that most small business are not only concerned about getting good results from their marketing campaigns but are also concerned with high upfront costs of specific marketing campaigns.  With this in mind, here are ten low cost and low risk ways to drive new clients for your business.  By the way, it goes without saying that you have a clean web site that provides enough of a user experience regarding your service and easy links to the appropriate calls-to-action.

The top ten low cost and low risk ways to drive new clients for your business:

1. Client Referrals

Your path of least resistance to new customers is often from your existing client base.  Assuming you are delivering quality work, getting a client to refer another client often happens without even asking.  So why not ask?  Put together a campaign to drive new client referrals offering incentives to your existing clients.  Perhaps make a donation to their favorite charity, or discount on your service or even cash!  Be prudent in tracking client referrals as it is likely that your best referrals will originate from the same set of clients.  Always send thank you notes although I recommend David’s Cookies or Dale and Thomas Popcorn (a real office pleaser).

2. Blog yourself

While I know I am merely inviting you to join the myriad of people out there who are sharing their views, opinions and thoughts via the web it really is a good way to get the word out there.  Blogger and Wordpress are two free Blog site that make it really easy to set up and publish your blogs.  Blog regularly and more importantly make sure you publish your blog on your social network pages.  Blogs are often tapped right into the search engines so even by doing nothing you are getting the word out there.  (Check our Fastpitch Networking Blog promotion tools.)

3. Inverse Public Relations

Have you ever read an article online and seen a trail of comments and responses to the article?  Well why not do that yourself (assuming you have something interesting to add).  If you are a subject matter expert (and even if you are not) why not add your two cents to topical articles.  Include a link to your Blog or your web site in the response.  Of course it is self promotion but it is promotion nonetheless.

4. Socialize yourself online

Word of mouth is always a great way to drive new business.  Working ones rolodex was often the terminology for the art of taking out ones rolodex and “dialing for dollars” - reaching out to your contacts to see who might be able to refer some business.  Social networking and moreover professional networking has added a whole new dimension to managing ones rolodex.  Networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook as well as niche professional networks such as BizNik and Fastpitch make it easy to establish an online profile and provide good tools for reaching out to your network.  Join a group on Facebook or set up a live event on Biznik.

5. Face-to-face networking

Although there is a fee for the more popular networking groups they are a great way to meet other professionals all of whom are interested not in sharing photos or videos but in growing their businesses.  There are online versions of these groups such as Network for Professionals and a number of Meetup groups.  Start a Meet up or join one inviting everyone to happy hour (on you of course).  You’ll be certain to draw a nice crowd of likeminded professionals.

6. Web site optimization

Having a web site without it being optimized for search engines is like having an unlisted telephone number - both are bad for business.  You need to make sure that people could find you.  Go to Guru.com or eLance and find an expert in SEO (search engine optimization) and pay some money to make sure that your web site is posted across the internet.

7. Pay-for-Performance

If you don’t have the stomach to deploy a PPC campaign and wade through all the unqualified leads and responses why not look into a pay-for-performance model.  These are also called CPA or cost per acquisition.  Usually the vendor will determine the price per successful lead acquisition.  This could be paying only for leads that complete a registration process for instance.  Salesconx.com (self promotion) also employs a pay-for-performance model which allows the buyer (the marketer or business) to establish the price for being introduced to a potential customer.  Salesconx has one advantage over current CPA provides insofar as having no minimum commitments.  This lets you get up and running very easily, quickly and inexpensively to closely monitor your return on investment.

8. Share the Wealth (Partnering)

Aligning yourself with another company is a great way to “double up” on your sales efforts.  If you providing expertise in X and a likely other vendor of your customer provides Y why not partner up with that company.  Create an incentive for the other company such as a percentage of revenue generated.  You could share clients and create targeted marketed programs reaching out to both your client bases.  Maybe deliver a unified presentation or online seminar to draw the synergies of both your companies.  This is generally an easy initiative to ‘kick off’ but often a bit harder to deliver in full.  To make a partnership successful requires investment (mostly of time) so be patient.  Keep in mind that your object is to add N new clients from this partner.  So as long as you are meeting your objective it is certainly worth the time and money.

9. Expert yourself

Assuming you are knowledgeable in a certain field why not make your expertise available to others ‘free of charge’?  For example, if you are a Tax specialist why not offer your community church or local library a free communal lecture on “Tips and Traps for Tax Preparations”.  Many organization and institutions are regularly looking for topical content and experts so why not offer these folks your services.  My mother was an interior designer in her own practice and started out by writing articles for the local paper on low cost decorating tips.  If you are in the health sector try the local gym - they regularly have evening informational classes.  Local chambers of commerce also have periodic meetings are often seek panel representatives.  Any opportunity for you to speak in front of an audience where you look like an expert in your field is a solid opportunity.

10. Independent sales reps

If you believe that your product or service is easy to understand and relatively straightforward to sell, why not recruit selling professionals that are paid only on commissions.  It wasn’t too long ago that most sales representatives were independent and there are presently 2.4 million independent sales representatives in the US alone.  Granted most of these folks aren’t selling synergistic products/services but, it does demonstrate just how many folks out there make their money solely through sales.  Try placing an advertisement in Craig’s list for independent sales reps in your industry or marketplace and see what happens.  It does require a good of time to train and manage independent folks but getting a few more clients into the pipeline thru a commission only source is certainly worth the effort.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

If your ready to look under the Google covers and discover ways to search “deep” into their index to find partnering and JV deal data, take a look at this advanced Google search cheat sheet.

It can help you find some real gems for your partners, companies, content or research projects.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

As you may or may not now, Twiter.com is a hot social networking community right now.  According to compete.com, in November, 2008 Twitter had approximately 3,478,239 people visiting the site.  Twitter grew 640% between November 2007 and November 2008.

So how can you harness all this growth into a relationship building system for lead generation or joint venture alliances? How do you provide value, direction, and an authoritative impression in the minds of your followers?

Here are 6 effective ways that I’ve found to contribute to the Twitter community that can be beneficial to your business or consulting practice.

1.    Target your market to follow the right people

Ask yourself, “Who’s my ideal client?” Once you define your target market, finding other people who share an affinity for your products and services is much easier. Twitter may have over 3.5 million users, but that’s not your audience. More than likely your universe is much smaller than that.  Even if you’re in abroad spectrum market such as “online marketing” or “social networking specialist” you’ve got to narrow down your focus to a definable niche, industry or demographic.   Instead of being a “social networking consultant” to all companies, being more to less is a smart idea. For example, narrow your target audience or define a specific program for Graphic Designers who want to increase their sales by using social media.  Once you’ve got your target market clearly defined, you go can use Twitter based tool sites such as TwitterGroups, http://twittgroups.com/showgroups.php or the Twitter advanced search page, http://search.twitter.com/advanced to find other Twitter pages that contain specific keywords to find specific people.

2.    Offer actionable advice

Once you define your target audience and search them out, you should be focusing your tweets on solutions to issues, concerns, cares, and problems that your target audience may have. Focus your Twitter posts (tweets) on providing useful and actionable solution to problems that your ideal clients are facing. You don’t want to use blatant sales pitches here. Remember, your objectives are to offer advise, direction, and act as an authoritative source of answers to your target market. Offer them advice (not just rehashed information), case studies, software, specialized articles, etc.  Anything that may help them do their jobs better, easier, faster, more efficient or provide them a higher level of achievement, joy, and satisfaction.

3.    Use your 140 character wisely

Just because your have 500, 1,000, or 5,000 followers doesn’t mean they’re all going to read your tweets.  It’s human nature to only be interested in things, ideas, and tweets that are important, interesting, or provide value to what’s going on in your follower’s life at this moment.  So consider what your followers want to hear about. This goes back to number one on our list. Targeting your market. If we’re searching out a specific audience, your tweets are essentially your headline. The reason why someone is going to take the action to click your link in your tweet to find the benefit that you’ve promised in your headline.  Don’t just write, “marketing ideas for Graphic Designers”.  Even though you’re talking to a specific group of people, the phrase “marketing services” is vague, undefined, and abstract. Use a more defined, tangible, and clear benefit in your tweet, such as “Traffic conversion best practices for Graphic Designers”. See the difference, one is a general blanket statement, yet the other is focused to solve specific problem that your target marketing may be facing.

4.    Your offer and call to action

Obviously you can’t provide much of a solution within 140 characters. So providing a link back to your site, ideally your Blog first before directing them from Twitter to another site.  Think about your end objective here. If you’re trying to build your opt-in list, then posting your tweet with a link to another website defeats the purpose. What I like to do is write my tweet as a Blog post on my site first, then copy and paste my Blog post link into the tweet box. This way, I have the opportunity to get a new or returning visitor to my Blog where I can provide useful solutions to their problems or concerns, but I can also present them with the option of joining my opt-in list. You can see an example of this on my Blog if you click here.

5.    Frequency of your tweets

If your serious about using Twitter as a lead generation tool, you’re going to have to tweet a minimum of 3 times a day. I’d suggest once in the morning, once midday, and one at night. Reason being is that your target audience is online at different parts of the day. If your followers have  a large following of themselves, your tweet will only be seen by a small fraction of your followers.

6.    Tracking your results

One way that I’ve found to track your tweet subjects is by naming your Blog post the same as what your use for your tweet post. For example, if I create a tweet called, “8 quick tactics to find joint venture partners”, I’ll create my Blog post to be, www.christianfea.com/8-quick-tactics-to-find-joint-venture-partners. I suggest you use Google Analytics to track your website traffic. It’s very in-depth, easy to use and it’s free. All you have to do is copy and paste your Javascript code into your Blog page header and every page on your site will be tracked. If you don’t know how to do this your Webmaster can set this up for you in less then 10 minutes. By doing this you’ll know exactly how many visitors you’ve gotten to visit your site and your can test different tweet topics to see which ones generate more clicks for you.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.
Join his JV Wealth e-zine.

Understanding the Hawthorne Effect – Experiments in Productivity

Productivity can have a profound effect on your joint venture relationship teams. Understanding how to increase the productivity or work output of your team or of your joint venture partners team can increase your profits as well as create future partnership projects.

This is an interesting experiment done back in the 1920’s by a manufacturing plant on human productivity.

Quoted from by John C. Harrison’s work on the “The National Stuttering Project”

A little history.  The Hawthorne plant was the manufacturing arm for the telephone companies of the Bell System.  It employed over 29,000 men and women in the manufacture of telephones, central office equipment, loading coils, telephone wire, lead-covered cable, toll cable, and other forms of telephone apparatus.

In the mid-1920s, the Hawthorne plant undertook a series of studies to investigate how it could improve worker output.  In particular, the company was interested in discovering whether manipulating the lighting, break schedules, and other workplace conditions would lead to higher production.  It was thought that even slight improvements could have significant impact on the company’s bottom line because of the enormous volume of products that the plant turned out for the Bell network.

One of the earliest experiments involved a group of six women from the coil winding production line.  These volunteers were pulled from the line and relocated into a smaller room where various elements of the environment could be manipulated.

The first experiment looked at whether changing the intensity of the lighting in the working environment would have a positive impact on production.  The experimenters started out with the same lighting intensity the workers were used to on the production line.  They then increased the light a few candlepower.

Production went up.

Pleased with the results, they increased the room light by another few candlepower.

Production went up again.

Now, quite confident that they were on to something, they continued to increase the room lighting a little bit more each time until the illumination in the room was several times the normal intensity.  At each increment of change, the production of the six women continued to rise.  At this point, the researchers felt a need to validate their hypothesis that better lighting was responsible for the increased output, so they brought the lighting intensity back to the original starting point and dropped it by a few candlepower.

To their surprise, production continued to go up.

Was this a fluke?  Simultaneously bothered and intrigued, the research team reduced the lighting by another couple of candlepower, and sure enough, production continued to rise.  They continued to reduce the illumination in the room until the women were working in the dimmest of light.  At each lower lighting increment, production was still a little bit higher, and it continued to rise until the lighting was so dim that the women could barely see their work.  At that point, their output began to level off.

What was going on?

It was clearly not an improvement in lighting that increased production, especially since production continued to rise in the face of less favorable lighting conditions.  After testing numerous other environmental factors, the answer emerged.  Although these changes in the work environment did have some lesser effect, the reason for the higher production lay in the fact that bringing the workers together allowed them to coalesce into a cohesive group, and it was the creation of this group dynamic that had a profound effect on the mindset and output of each individual group member.

To better understand what happened, let’s look more closely at the differences between the two work environments and how these differences impacted the women in the coil winding room.  While they were just nameless cogs on the production line, the workers lacked any sense of importance.  They had few meaningful associations with their co-workers.  Their relationship with their boss was primarily adversarial.  He (and it was always a “he”) was the whip cracker, exhorting them to work harder and faster.  There was little personal responsibility for turning out a quality product.  Someone else set the standards, and they just performed according to instructions.

There was not much pride in what they did.  It was, to conjure up a familiar phrase, just a job.

But all this changed when the six women were pulled from the production line and given their own private workspace.  From the very beginning they basked in the attention paid to them by the research team.  Each of the women was not just an impersonal face on the production line.

She was now a “somebody.”

For further explanation of the Hawthorne Effect, download the usability study at: http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/jus/2007may/hawthorne-effect.pdf

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

Creating a successful online business is not an easy endeavor, but your probability of success increases proportionately with the size of your online client list. Indeed, the larger the targeted email client list you have, the greater the chance they will turn into repeat customers.

Think about it this way: You have a client list of 100, and your conversion ratio is 10%. Thus, you sell 10 products. In stark contrast, you have a client list of 1000. With a conversion rate of 10%, you would sell 100 products. Or, you could have a low conversion rate of only 5%, but still sell 50% products. Although the mathematical calculations are simple, the value of volume in your client list is dramatic.

Strategies you can utilize to build your email client list:

•    Engage in a strategic alliance: The tried and true method of growing your client list is to find a strategic alliance partner that has synergies with your business. For example, if you sell accounting software, partnering up with a small business consultant could be a fortuitous strategic alliance. You can either choose to exchange your client lists, or provide each other’s clients a discount, which will lead to additional referrals that grow your email list.

•    Select targeted clients: One of the most cost-ineffective mistakes business owners make is purchasing email lists from companies. There is a difference between a real lead for your client list in comparison to a list of emails. There is a high probability that nearly all of the people on the email list you purchase will not be interested in your product or service - it is too generic. The key is to target clients that are niche to your product or service offerings. For example, if you sell wedding invitations, your niche audience is very niche, and buying a general email list is essentially useless.

•    Utilize a squeeze page: Properly implementing a squeeze page can significantly increase your client list, as well as your conversion rates. In a good squeeze page, it details exactly what the subscriber will receive in exchange for the email address, and it is important that a privacy policy is also included. With growing Internet crime and consumer hesitation to give out email addresses, it is important that the squeeze page not only exude professionalism, but also assures that the information will be kept safe.

•    Implement a joint venture: Another savvy strategy for building your email client list is to utilize a joint venture partnership. Similar to strategic alliances, you approach another business that has similar synergies to your client base, offering a commission structure. Your partner would then broadcast out your product or service offerings, and then the interested clients will choose to opt into your email list before they obtain the free product, discount, or other offerings.

The Internet provides business owners with easy and effective ways to build client lists. By capitalizing upon these strategies, such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, and squeeze pages, you can successfully grow your client list to lucrative levels.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

Which one are you?

A Business  Owner?
An Employee?
A Consultant?
A Single Parent?
A College Student?
A Grand Parent?

Regardless if you have an existing business, are an employee of another business, are a consultant, or you’re someone who’s considering starting your own business, Joint Venture Deal Making can be one of the most profitable ways available to you to create “Income at will”. You don’t need any special education or lengthily training.  You can start putting deals together with just a few hours a week. Once you understand the fundamental mind set of doing Joint Venture deals, you may just rethink the way you do business or create income for the rest of your life. It’s that powerful, diverse, exciting, and profitable.

If you’re a business owner, you can implement a Joint Venture Marketing strategy to create new profit centers with little to no money or risk. If you don’t have an existing business or you’re an employee of another company you can broker deals with your employer or create an additional profit center outside your full time job.

Let me fill you in on an overlooked and underutilized fact about 95% of all businesses out there (this is were you come in). It’s something so fundamental that it’s often overlooked and not given nearly the amount of attention, care, and time that’s needed to create additional profits.

Ready…

“The majority of all business’s have underutilized assets”

That may not be very exciting at first read, but let’s dig a little deeper. These underutilized assets represent huge opportunities for additional income for you.

Let’s define what an “asset” is.

A quick Google search defines an asset as being:

1.    Anything owned by an individual or a business that has commercial or exchange value.
2.    A possession of value, usually measured in terms of money.
3.    Valuable items, encumbered or not, owned by a person, corporation, or entity.

So it’s basically something of value that a person or business has that is not being optimized.  Now remember I just told you that the vast majority of business owners have “underutilized” assets. This is where it get’s interesting. This is where you can provide a way for these business owners (and yourself) to create income from the sale of their existing products or services by combing other complimentary type companies “assets” with their “assets”.

Let me give you some background and a quick example of what an underutilized business asset is.

“Simon opened his Web Design Company with a passion for creating websites, logos, and custom graphics for his clients. Simon was a skilled graphic designer, but his sales and marketing skills were based solely on theory and what he learned from a few books he had recently read. Simon wanted to do a promotion offering 25% off his services for new clients. Simon and I had a conversation about this promotion and asked me my advice and thoughts on this type of promotion. His objectives were to find new clients quickly without spending a lot of money on marketing. I told him that he had two primary objections to overcome since his business was new, he currently had only one client and his competition in the Web Design space was fierce and while competing strictly on a discount price point may work, I suggested he use a Joint Venture Strategic Alliance to keep his prices at a competitive market rate to obtain new clients.”

So we see that Simon has an underutilized asset, his time and his Graphic Design services. He’s only got one major client, which is a dangerous thing for Simon if that client decides to go elsewhere and stop using Simon’s services.

Remember when I said that a Joint Venture deal is about combining underutilized assets? Well, in this scenario lies your opportunity to make extra, recurring, residual income.

Let’s continue with the story.

I suggested Simon call local printers, illustrators, and web programmers in his area. I had him pick local vendors (so he could actually go meet these other business owners, which builds rapport and trust) that work in complimentary, not competitive businesses. Simon contacted a local print shop, introduced himself and offered to provide a “Web Design” division to the print shops existing base of over 300 clients. Within one week, Simon and the owner of the print shop wrote an email letter to his existing clients announcing the new service. Within two weeks Simon gained an immediate influx of client requests with an acquisition cost of zero!”

So you can see how Simon used his underutilized asset, his time and Graphic Design services to incorporate into the printing companies underutilized asset, their existing clients. This is only one type of Joint Venture scenario that can generate additional income very quickly. Simon only did this type of deal with a single company. What if he did it with 5 other companies that offered similar type services?

If your thinking, “Christian, that sounds all good and interesting, but how does that effect me or my ability to make more money?” Good question. This is why I asked you at the start of this conversation about “Which one are you?” You see, it doesn’t matter if you have an existing business or if you’re an employee, a student, or even if you’re currently unemployed.

Please take what I’m about to tell you very seriously…

“Just about every business owner is silently begging to find new clients”

Read that 5 times.

Business owners are constantly trying to increase their profits from their existing clients, yet they’re so busy running their companies, they don’t spend nearly enough time on this. This is where you can earn extra money, possibly a lot of money if done consistently and executed correctly.

Take a look around you and see if you can find any businesses that you know of that have underutilized assets that you can recommend to other companies. As I said, just about every business out there either needs or has assets that other companies can benefit from. You just introduce the two companies and make a profit for structuring the deal.

I hope this has gotten you intrigued about the possibilities of using Joint Ventures to create additional income for yourself in a very short amount of time.

I’ll be showing you many, many more examples of how to create these types of profitable relationships in the days to come.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report