Tonight was the first night of the Partnering Profits teleclass by Brian Clark. The first session featured guest speaker Jeff Walker of Product Launch Formula.
The Partnering Profits training sessions are aimed to help you succeed in dealmaking and partnerships in the increasingly chaotic economic climate for 2009. This description to me is both intriguing and vague, so to say the least, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Luckily, I was extremely pleased with the session.
While I won’t give you a through analysis of the 1st session, because: 1. you should have paid for it yourself & 2. because I didn’t take enough notes and haven’t gotten the audio recording yet 
I will summarize what I thought were some of the best and most useful points.
The following ideas are not mine, just summarized in my language 
Basically, there are experts everywhere. Experts on painting, raw food, how to buy a used car, they are everywhere. And they know how to do everything. The problem is, right now, they are sitting at home watching TV, and not being experts at the thing which they know how to do best. Why? Because they don’t have the platform to practice their expertise from, or the platform isn’t big enough. They are experts at one thing, and that one thing does not always include how to build a platform for themselves and then stand on it and shout.
So, if YOU are an expert at building a platform, and then shouting from said platform, this would be a good opportunity to pioneer a partnership with these types of experts. Seems basic, I know, hindsight is always 20/20.
On the other token, if you’re the one with a product to push: “The best way to get traffic is to make someone who has traffic an offer they can’t refuse”. How do you do this? Well, in short, convince them that they will make a lot of money. Here are the steps:
- Convince them that there is big money potential
- Convince them that your product will convert
- Convince them that you will pay them, and pay them on time
- Develop and track metrics from your own small campaigns to show successes
- Convince them of the quality of your product
These steps have to be taken, and you may need to work your way up the ladder depending on where you’re at. The “A” list website or blogger that you might want to push your product might not even consider you if you haven’t had some successes with other websites and bloggers that are “B” list. “It’s all baby steps”
Also, a few notes on general partnerships:
- Have things written down, even something is better than nothing, include exit strategy if possible
- Partner with people that you’d at least want to have dinner with
- All partnerships end eventually, even if its because one of you die, just try to make the split nice
- COMMUNICATE — partnerships go sour when partners stop communicating
Overall, this was a fantastic kickoff to what I suspect is going to be a brilliant program. Hats off to both Jeff Walker and Brian Clark. It’s all about networking, finding partners, and creating promotions.
“Publishing is the best business in the world, there is no better business.” — Jeff Walker
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That’s some good advice. I’ve heard something similar which is if you have a product, don’t worry about trying to create a distribution list because that is a whole job in itself. Focus on making a good product. There are already great distribution hubs out there – email newsletters, blogs, social sites, etc – you just need to partner with them, even if you give them most of the profit at first. Good stuff! Thanks for posting.
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