Joint Venture Lightning

I recently started a local networking and mastermind group for folks interested in internet marketing and e-commerce.

We meet on the fourth Wednesday of each month from 7:00 – 8:00 pm in and around the Roanoke valley.  Our January meeting was a hit. The topic of discussion was my favorite subject…”Harnessing the Power of Web Video.”

I explained how you can use a simple video with some proper keyword usage in the title, tags and description to get your content on page one of Google and grab tons of free organic traffic. I also covered a few free resources for syndicating your web video and using these tools for totally dominating your niche. There were plenty of great questions from those who attended and we tried to answer them all. Most stayed well past the one hour time to network and get answers to even more great questions.

Here’s a short video of comments from the attendees of the January meeting.

Internet Marketing Professionals January Meeting Testimonials from JointVentureLightning on Vimeo.

The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, February 25th from 7:00 to 8:00 pm at the Cave Spring Library on 419. We’ll be meeting in the small meeting room back in the children section of the library.

Full-time internet marketer and SEO / Pay Per Click consultant Zach Thompson will be leading the discussion on “How To Set-up A Website. You can see the full details online and you can join the group at: http://ibd.meetup.com/841/

My 16 year old son Scott and the other 17 members of the Christian Science National Leadership Council class of 2011 are raising $3,000 per student to go an a service trip abroad to help impoverished people.

Their hope is to go to Thailand for 15 days and tutor children in the poor hill tribes there. Unfortunately, political unrest in Thailand right now is hindering trip preparations. So, they have several fall-back service trip options focusing on the U.S. mostly.

Either way, they still need to raise money so they can go on the trip and learn leadership skills through serving others.
To help my son raise the money, I have installed a secure donation widget below courtesy of ChipIn.com

Please Help. Every dollar counts and your donation is vital to the success of this wonderful program.
Thanks.

I have done my share of telemarketing over the years.

It’s not particularly hard to do but it does take a certain mind-set to do it successfully. It also takes dedication, persistence and tracking. I’ll share details on what to track, why track it and a simple spreadsheet to make tracking & analysis easier.

Take a look at the following plan to see how the timing works out.

Example: You have 2,000 businesses to call, each earning $5 million per year or more in annual sales.

You can call a business about every 2 to 3 minutes. So, it’ll take about 2 and a half hours to call about 50 businesses. You can shorten the time to reach all 2,000 if you recruit additional phone callers. If you get others involved in calling then make sure they have a sample script to follow so they stay on message and don’t flub the call.

Be sure to track who you call and what the result of the call was for each business. Do it as you go or you’ll never keep up with the tracking and important notes… like who to call back and when. You can do this with a simple spreadsheet. If you have helpers calling from other locations then try sharing the spreadsheet by posting it on GoogleDocuments. Be sure to set the caller as a collaborator on the document or all they’ll be able to do is view it and that won’t help you much. They need to be able to add their notes to the spreadsheet as they call.

There’s plenty more to be covered for effective calling and tracking but we’ll need to cover that in a later post.
Hope that helps.

Brian

How do you raise millions for your cause in just a few short years?

Well, for starters… try contacting businesses that are earning $5 million or more per year in sales and are located within your service area. Mail the top executive at each business and asked them to please include you in their budget for the coming year with a 4 year pledge.

How do you convert that into actual donations?

You start with a simple phone call to each business and ask, “Who handles your donation requests from local charities?” Once you get the name and are connected to that person, simply ask if they received the letter of request you just mailed to them. You’ll be amazed at how many do not recall getting the letter. That’s fine. It gives you an opportunity to drop by to hand-deliver a more detailed request pack with a copy of the original letter.

This takes time. It also takes timing. You’ll want to mail the letter early in the year and before June because you don’t know which businesses are on a calendar year or a fiscal year. Why does it matter? Because many businesses have donation committees who consider requests and make recommendations for yearly budgets. If the company is on a July to June fiscal year then you don’t want to miss out and have to wait another year to begin the process. If they’re on a calendar year or on a third quarter fiscal year then your June request is a little early… which is fine. You just need to make sure you do plenty of follow-up like providing the committee additional info packs closer to their decision time.

I’ll cover the follow-up calling plan in more detail in the next post. So, stay tuned.

I love shooting testimonial videos.

They’re great for building your self-esteem and confidence. They’re also great for building your prospects trust in your capabilities before they risk contacting you for more details.

I like to shoot testimonials for my clients within the first week or two of starting a new project so that I can get their clients’ perspective on how they do business, what differentiates them in the market, etc. This info helps me focus the sales message and content for the marketing and website.

I like to shoot my own testimonial videos for Joint Venture Lightning after about a month so that my clients have had a chance to work with me and see results.

You can see these new testimonial videos here:

• George Schaefer with TrainingMyHorse.com
• Geoffrey Zimmerman, Author of “Love Never Dies”

If you have ANY happy clients at all then you absolutely MUST get them on video singing your praises.

I use a simple interview techniques so that my clients don’t have to prepare ahead of time by trying to remember some script. I want their comments to be completely open, honest and spontaneous.

You can either leave your interview questions in the video, the way I did with Geoffrey Zimmerman or you can cut them out and just leave the clients comments the way I did with George Schaefer. How do you know when to do either technique?

Simple. If they answer your questions in complete sentences by re-stating the premise of the question in their answer then you can cut out your side of the interview. If they only answer the questions then it makes more sense to leave your comments in the video.

Good luck and Happy New Year. May your 2008 and beyond be prosperous and peaceful.

I first spoke with professional life coach and certified hypnotherapist Gail DaVall the other day to get an idea of how we might be able to work together.

Our first conversation focused on what she does for a living as a life coach and relaxation therapy specialist. Then we discussed why she was looking for a joint venture partner like me. She told me that she had been wanting to launch the online side of her business for several years and had bought domains, invested thousands in internet marketing courses, tried learning how to do all of the technical side of web marketing but she just never seemed to be able to get over the hurdle of actually launching her products online.

So, we set an appointment to meet face to face for later in the week. At the meeting, Gail showed me page after page of how she had planned out her web site, written sales copy, designed layouts, etc. She also brought sample cd’s she had produced as physical product to sell once she had her site up and running.

Once she filled me in on her current situation, I presented some details of how I work, how I select partner businesses to joint venture with and outlined my system of launching e-products works.The meeting took about an hour and a half and ended with me giving her an assignment of setting up some testimonials that we could video record for her new web site.

My first step was to look into her competition and research better domains than the ones she had already purchased. I settled on working with her personal domain first to help her begin building a local client base with www.gaildavall.com.

Our first priority is to help her increase local business to stimulate cash flow before we get into marketing her audio programs. It’s been two weeks and Gail’s schedule has prevented her from arranging the testimonial video shoot for the near futur. So, I have worked on setting up her appointment calendar and auto-responder. I’ll follow-up with Gail early next week to nail down a date for the first video / photo shoot so that I can customize her header banner and load her testimonials page.

In the meantime, I have been busy working on FitClub4.com, JointVentureLightning.com, BrianGDuvall.com and GeoffreyZimmerman.com. I’ll be posting updates on the progress of Geoffrey Zimmerman’s web site in an upcoming case study, so stay tuned.

Here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

“A joint venture (often abbreviated JV) is an entity formed between two or more parties to undertake economic activity together. The parties agree to create a new entity by both contributing equity, and they then share in the revenues, expenses, and control of the enterprise. The venture can be for one specific project only, or a continuing business relationship such as the Sony Ericsson joint venture. This is in contrast to a strategic alliance, which involves no equity stake by the participants, and is a much less rigid arrangement.

Organizations can also form joint ventures, for example, a child welfare organization in the Midwest initiated a joint venture whose mission is to develop and service client tracking software for human service organizations. The five partners all sit on the joint venture corporation’s board, and together have been able to provide the community with a much-needed resource.

The phrase generally refers to the purpose of the entity and not to a type of entity. Therefore, a joint venture may be a corporation, limited liability company, partnership or other legal structure, depending on a number of considerations such as tax and tort liability.”

There are different types of JV deals but the fastest and easiest is probably the endorsed internet joint venture. An endorsed JV is when the company or individual that you are partnering with endorses or recommends your products or services to the customers on their mailing list. One of the reasons that this can be so successful is that your partner already has an established relationship or rapport with everyone on their list… a customer base who values their opinion.

Now there is another way to leverage the value of internet joint ventures beyond simply tapping into somebody else’s mailing list.

You could spend thousands of dollars buying programs from various marketing guru’s. Then you could spend months learning how to do all of the various steps required to build an internet business. I’ll cover the detail on what’s involved in producing and launching your own electronic and physical products in future posts. Here’s a short sample list of some of the tasks that you will face:

• Idea development
• Niche market research
• Content development
• Video production
• Text production (electronic and/or physical)
• Graphic design
• Photography
• Web site development
• List building
• SEO
• Traffic generation
• Deliverability
• Testing and refinement

And that’s just the product side of your business. You also need to consider:

• Accounting
• Business structure (sole proprietorship vs. incorporating)
• Taxes
• Regulatory Compliance
• Employee management
• Payroll
• Expenses

Starting to get the picture? There is too much for one person to do. This is one of the main reasons people never take action on their ideas. Another key reason is uncertainty of what to do next.

Or you could follow Rich Scheffren’s advice and outsource all of the functions that you can’t or don’t like to do yourself and hire an experienced, successful business development and marketing team. Having the experts at Joint Venture Lightning on your team speeds the process and greatly increases your chances for success.

You can see our scope of services on the About Us page. No internet hype, just real world experience from the trenches of the business battlefront.

We are looking to team up with entrepreneurs like you who have great ideas but who need help getting them produced and launched. You bring the idea, passion and expertise and we’ll bring the business experience. Together we can produce real products and real profits.

Be sure to subscribe to begin your joint venture project today.