Create Joint Venture ‘Giveaways’ to Boost Your List

One of the best ways you can give your list building efforts a HUGE boost is to partner with other solopreneurs to create a giveaway event … also known as a joint venture (JV). If done right this strategy can literally add hundreds of new subscribers to your list in a very short period of time. I’ve been involved in this strategy a number of times over the years and have welcomed several hundred new subscribers into my community in a matter of days. The latest joint venture I participated in added 115 new subscribers in just ONE day.

Today I’d like to share with you my all-time favorite type of joint venture – the giveaway event.

What is a giveaway event?

Well, simply put it’s where a group of business owners who all share the same target market, but who all offer complimentary services, come together and ‘give away’ some of their best stuff – there aren’t any teleclasses to host/co-host or affiliate links to mess with – it’s just simply a giveaway. How it works is that one person leads on organizing the event and creates an event page. The other partners all promote the event to their individual lists and networks and point their networks to this event page where the visitor will see a selection of free giveaways which they can sign up to receive.

Let’s just do the math on this, so you can see exactly how effective this strategy is. For example:

If you collaborate with five other joint venture partners, and you each have a list size of 500 subscribers (we’ll keep it simple), that’s a potential target audience of 3,000 – how quickly could you reach that number of people on your own?

Now, supposing each partner’s list size was 1,000 – that’s a potential target audience of 6,000.

Do you see why I like this strategy so much?

Today I’d like to share with you the key steps for creating your own joint venture giveaway event so that you can welcome lots of new subscribers to your community.

1. Plan the Event. Decide on a timeframe for your event. When will it take place? How long will it last? What is the theme of the JV event? For example, is it a New Year giveaway.

2. Create the Web Page. If you’re the organizer you’re going to need to create a web page for it so that you have somewhere for your JV partners to send their networks to. You can either create a page that has the free giveaways listed right there and the visitors simply sign up for the ones they want; or you can require that they first leave their name/email address (which gets added to your database) in order to access the free giveaway materials. If you choose the latter make sure you specify on the event page exactly what a visitor can get access to once they give you their details.

3. Invite JV Partners. Create a list of JV partners. Who do you know who would want to partner with you on this event? Do they already have established lists?

4. Prepare the Promotional Materials. As the JV organizer you are going to have to prepare the emails/promotional material for your JV partners to send out to their lists. You are more likely to create a successful event if you do everything for your JV partners so all they really have to do is copy and paste the promotional information and send it to their lists.

5. Launch the Joint Venture. You’re now ready to go! Simply inform your JV partners the event is now live, and ask them to send out the promotional mailings to their lists. Watch your own list grow!

6. Solicit Feedback. Once the event is over, contact your JV partners and ask them how the event went for them. What worked well? How much did their lists grow by? What could be done better next time?

Now that you’ve successfully created and launched your own joint venture giveaway event, you want to make sure that you add this to your regular list building strategies. Make it an annual event and, not only will you be building your own list, but you’ll be making excellent contacts for future collaborations too.

(c) 2010 Tracey Lawton