How a Joint Venture Partnership Scored Me Free Content

So I’ve recently started to utilize a great joint venture partnership with someone who simply shares a similar common interest as me. I wanted to write a blog about this and give some examples of how powerful this can be, you can use this for just about any business, website or blog you choose if done properly.

Back in April of 2012 I started my own WordPress site based around a niche idea of promoting music video content for a specific genre of metal music. Since this was a growing community and bands are emerging left and right, I knew this would be a great idea for a website if done properly. I researched themes for WordPress, found a good domain I liked and got started. My website was never really intended to contain a lot of actual content besides videos but I was open to possibly writing reviews, I never really had the motivation or a great drive to really write quality posts about a specific album or new bands.

I started my own Facebook fan page and I put up a main Facebook fan page ‘Like’ button widget on my sidebar. So I slowly began to get followers here and there from website traffic, I didn’t want to put any money into Facebook ads or really go crazy with promotional strategies. My website was already averaging 50-100 hits a day from simply Embedding YouTube videos. I decided to start looking into ways I could get more traffic and maybe even find my first joint venture partnership.

How searching for people with common interests landed me my first joint venture partnership

Since this sub-genre of metal was getting bigger, I decided to start seeking out Facebook fan pages that might promote this kind of music. I found a page with around 8000 followers. I sent them a very straight forward message letting them know about my site and what I’ve been doing. Here would be an example of what I would say if you are looking to introduce yourself:

Hey, how’s it going? I saw you run this page and promote Metalcore music. I personally run a website that promotes Metalcore Music videos. Do you have any interest in possibly working together to promote this music?

Now in my case, I found out it was a single person that was running the page as opposed to multiple people and he was a huge fan of this music, he also wanted to help spread the word to other people. This was perfect!

So for months I had a form on my site that allowed people to submit an inquiry to me if they wanted to participate by helping out on the site to submit content. Every once in a while I’d get an e-mail, with most people I’d spend a lot of time going out of my way to show them over Skype/screen share or even talk on the phone to guide them on how to get started. One guy I even did a screen share with and he refused to chat over the phone, so I typed out the instructions over Facebook chat to get him started. What a time consuming nightmare this was! Come to find out he writes 2 paragraphs and never even published a single article.

I couldn’t find any solid people that would put in a real effort into doing anything, even if I showed them how to do it they never took action and did anything with the opportunity.

How benefiting others in a joint venture partnership will bring you results

Since Andrew, the owner of this Facebook fan page actually had an interest in working with me he also spent the time with me to talk over the phone, spend over an hour on a screen share with me and learn about what I was doing and how he could help me. In exchange I decided to offer to promote his fan page on the main page of my website http://www.metalcorekingdom.com

Over a span of about 4-5 months, Andrew’s fan page grew from 8000~ fans to over 10,000 fans. Considering I average 50-100 visitors a day there is a high chance a lot of fans discovered his page when they were browsing my site. When Andrew hit 10,000 fans he decided to make 5 YouTube videos talking about his story and how he got into this music in the first place. He asked me to simply share his story on the site. I decided to not only share it, but feature it on the main slider of the home page front and center for any new visitors.

The joint venture partnership free content promotion

Simply asking Andrew for a favor at this point was mutual, I helped him not only promoting his fan page but even featuring his story on my site.

I sent him a message asking if he could write to his Facebook fan page of 11,000 people to see if anyone is simply interested in submitting content to the page, the last thing I expected was to receive near 25 e-mails from people that wanted to help, some to go as far as viewing the application like they were submitting a resume asking for specific qualifications.

I was blown away! To think I was struggling to find people that were willing to work on my site and now I’ve got people wondering if they are even good enough to work with me!

I decided to setup a training series with detailed instructions, it took me about 2 hours to create and all I had to do was simply send all the interested people the how-to setup. Within a few days I had people submitting music videos and content.

Hopefully you enjoyed this post about my joint venture partnership with Andrew, If you are thinking twice about finding others to work with or to promote your blog, website, or business re-consider the long term benefits!