Profitable Partnerships: Creating Win-Wins & Getting More Done

My goal for writing this quick post is to encourage you to seek new business partnerships in order to achieve more success. The reason being that I believe strategic business partnerships are largely under-utilized and a BIG opportunity missed.

As online entrepreneur doing your thing day in and day out (night in and night out maybe) it is VERY easy to get stuck in the rut of being a jack of all trades. Slaving away daily to churn out tasks; even those that are not even in your skill-set and therefore take three times as long to complete and are a grind to execute.

STOP

Notice the last sentence there? Think about it for a moment and ask yourself the question:

What am I really good at that I could be doing more of IF it weren’t for all the crap I’m doing that I’m not so good at?

There’s a chance the scales will be tilted in favor of the crap. And that’s because as solopreneurs doing our thing online, we often get stuck in a rut of going DIY on everything.

You can outsource to VAs, but the reality is that managing VAs takes time and the quality, at best, that a VA can produce is about a 7 out of 10 standard. VAs are fantastic for helping with the lower-level activities that absorb precious time, but in when it comes to producing the 9/10 and 10/10 quality that’s required for a true authority site or high-quality niche site, you’re going to have to produce that yourself or find a partner.

And so what happens,even when you have VAs helping, is you spend all your valuable time picking up the $5 bills, while the $100 bills float by. You see, you’ve got skills that you’re a pro at. These are the $100 bills. Someone else that you probably already know has an opposite set of skills that they’re pro at.

What if you partnered up and you worked on a project together, each leveraging each others skills? Now we’re getting somewhere!

Partnerships have been a cornerstone of my entire business career offline and online and although having a mix of solo and partner projects makes sense, I don’t believe in the whole “partnerships are just made to break up” and “you never do business with friends and family” bullshit that’s out there. Partnerships can and do work.

I’ve had winners and losers, but my net gain through entering into partnerships has by far outweighed what I would have been able to achieve on my own. Heck, I wouldn’t be writing this post if it wasn’t for deciding to partner with Hayden after completing an Internship back in July 2012.

The benefit of partnerships has become increasingly apparent to me over the past couple months, particularly on the back of some really cool results from a batch of partner sites we worked on with Interns from our Jan and Feb 2014 intakes.

During those intakes, the arrangement was as follows:

Interns went through a 6 week course, during which time they built out two money sites + a PBN site.

Hayden and I:

• Provided the initial training and coaching on all the processes we’d used to build profitable niche sites and PBNs
• A PBN (including the domains, hosting, post moderation etc) was provided to link build from (ended up being 60+ sites)
• Coaching on all aspects of their sites > keyword selection, site build out, monetization and then how to link build with a PBN

The Interns:

• Built and managed the sites (site size ranged from one page to about 80 pages in content, most were 15-25 page range)
• They did the link building from the PBN provided (writing, or outsourcing and managing, the link building articles)

Despite the September 2014 the PBN Update taking out a chunk of the sites, about 50% of the Interns we partnered with have either 1 or both sites still live and kicking, many doing very well.

In fact, we have two on the Empire Flippers marketplace currently for a combined $80k value and about a dozen more that are being prepared as either passive income sites or for flips also.

Side note > If you’ve got a site that’s earning a few hundred or more per month and you want to realize the upfront cash to reinvest in other projects, reach out to Justin and Joe here. Their marketplace has really solidified the site flipping business model. They took a calculated risk when they dumped all their other projects to focus on their marketplace business and that risk is paying off for them and the wider SEO industry. You can now build a site to profit and know that you’ve pretty much got 20x worth of monthly revenue there for the taking as soon as you’re ready to sell the asset. It’s super-valuable.

Back to the post….

Starting partnerships: What Can You Offer?

When it comes to partnerships, you have three things to offer potential partners:

1. Knowledge/Expertise
2. Assets/Money
3. Time

So in the partnership sites I referenced above, Hayden and I offered up our knowledge (training course and coaching) and assets (the PBN) and the Interns offered their time.

The end goal for everyone was a potential for financial gain by way of  passive earning sites of flips. For Hayden and I, the most important thing we get from partnership arrangements like this is a way to gather more knowledge without having to invest the time. Teaming up with a group of 20 partners working on 40 sites allowed us to take a high level overview of what’s happening with sites and SEO as opposed to having to do the nitty gritty detail of building out sites. That’s super-valuable, particularly given time is our greatest commodity.

On the flip side, most of the Interns in those Internship intakes had available time, but required the knowledge from us and were able to use an existing asset of ours (the PBN).

So our trade of Knowledge + Asset game us Time (Interns working on sites that we did not have to actively spend time on beyond the initial training).

Interns traded their Time for access to our Knowledge and Asset.

It’s a true definition of a win-win partnership.

Just An Idea….

Chances are, if you are reading this you have an underlying skill-set and asset there yourself > that being your knowledge of SEO and how to build sites. You may not have a ton of free time.

How about this for an idea?…

You find a family member or friend that has an interest or expertise in a particular topic, but zero SEO and money site building skills.

Partner up with that person and have them be the face of the site, provide all the content and unload their knowledge on the topic, whilst you do the technical SEO analysis.

In not having to produce the content, you’re saving a TON of time and this allows you to focus on what you’re good at, which is SEO.

You leverage your partner’s intimate knowledge of the topic and can focus on your main skill-set (SEO and building the site)

Your partner can leverage your SEO skills to monetize their knowledge on the topic.

Even with a 50% revenue split on a partner site, it would be highly likely that the end result of you creating two partnerships like this would be far superior to if you built a single site and took 100% of the revenue for yourself.

Seriously > how many people do you know that have knowledge or skills that they could monetize IF they knew how.

And how many more sites and online businesses could you launch if you didn’t have to worry about creating and managing the content of the site?

Working on a partner money site is a small-scale partnership example. The IM/SEO space is filled with examples of successful partnerships:

• Justin and Joe from Empire Flippers
• Pat Flynn and Chris Ducker partnered on 1 Day Business Breakthrough
• Dan and Ian from TropicalMBA

Successful partnerships are everywhere. They allow you to get more done and work to your strengths, so why not you?

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