We recently wrote a blog post about Joint ventures and how they can help your business to grow. Have you been thinking about trying it out? What you will need to do first is find some suitable JV partners. A good JV partner is a business or individual that shares the same target market that you do, but offers different services. Where do you go to find the right business to partner with?
Here are 5 of the best places to search.
Networks
The most logical place to start looking is within your existing networks and forums. You are already known there so this gives you an advantage when you start asking businesses to join you. You also know the other businesses so it becomes easier to choose which you want to align yourself with..
Forums also offer a great system for private messaging. You can contact the business owner directly rather than going through the email system so you don’t have to worry about it being buried in incoming emails in someone’s inbox...
Start by doing a search based on the keywords that relate to your target market. You can select your keywords and add a location to narrow the search a little, for example Small Business, Sydney. It will bring up a range of businesses that use those words in their marketing. Many of them will complement your own business and would therefore be great choices of partner.
At the side are the paid links which target the same keywords. Often these businesses have a bigger budget to play with so they might be interested in partnering with you.
This is another source of contacts for you. Did you know that you can search LinkedIn? Log in to your account and up in the top right corner is a link called “advanced search”. It will bring up a screen that lets you select the industry you are interested in, the country and much more. It will let you search using your keywords and even let you exclude certain words by adding NOT to the phrase. For example “Heavy Metal” NOT Metallica.
Finding JV partners on Facebook is as simple as typing in your keyword in the search bar. Just type in ‘diet’ and see what comes up. Enter some of your keywords and you will be amazed at who you find. It will bring you up a list of related pages, people, posts that are relevant to the word and even Bing search results.
Have a look through Twellow, which is a sort of Twitter yellow pages or take advantage of Twitter Lists. You can search in Listorious ( a directory of Twitter lists) or you could just go to the page of a business that you know is relevant and see what lists it is on. The lists and directories and useful because they bundle together related businesses into one place.
So there are 5 easy ways to track down businesses to create your Joint Venture with. Good luck.
