Small Business Digital CoachGROW REVENUES BY 25 TO 100% OR MORE IN 90 DAYS OR LESS while reducing advertising cost and effort

“Are we in a recession”?

His response was enlightening.

“Who is We?”

From about 2003 to 2006 many real estate investors (me included) saw that despite the so-called “good times” in real estate, a record number of people were losing their homes to foreclosure…EVERY YEAR!

Charles Dickens put it best when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”. There is always someone having the time of their lives, and there’s always someone in the world going through the worst of the human experience.

That’s why what you need most as a business owner during a recession is PERSPECTIVE.

For any given situation, there is a positive. Allowing yourself (or your business) to be submerged under a deluge of negative economic news could be disastrous for your business. Instead, you can choose to give thought to the blessings you already have.

One of the most powerful advantages that recessions confer on business owners who keep their heads about them, is the ability to prosper through partnerships. Below are 6 quick and easy ways to prosper through partnerships.

1. Recruit talent to work with you.

During a tight job market, you have a far better opportunity to create superior value for your customers and clients by bundling and packaging the services of highly talented specialists. Over the last few months, I’ve been able to build service delivery relationships with world-class marketing and design minds who may not have been available to me a few years ago. They were either unaffordable, unavailable or otherwise unreachable (out of my league).

2. Enter strategic referral relationships with your clients.

This particular strategy makes sense whether there’s a recession or not. However, you’ll find that people are more willing to consider referring you business when they can put a little cash in their pockets and do their contacts a favor.

An easy way to arrange this is to approach your clients and have them promote a discounted offer of your services to their own clients and contacts. This can be done easily through a direct method like a letter of endorsement highlighting your services, or indirectly through their promotion and sponsorship of a workshop you teach.

For those of you in highly regulated industries, skillful use of the “endorsed workshop” technique can work wonders.

3. Cross promotions, Co-endorsements, JV Ad swaps

Another variant of the strategic referral partnership is an arrangement in which you and the other party (a client, vendor or complementary business) agree to promote each other to your respective customers. Cross promotions, co-endorsements, or in the online marketing world, JV ad swaps are all various ways of saying the same thing.

What you have to be careful about here is that you need to put the interests of your clients community first when choosing your partners. You do not want destroy in one day what took you a thousand to build because you didn’t check out your partners product, service or reputation first.

3. Employ Online Affiliate marketing.

One of the highest leverage ways to expand your market reach, increase your income and build long-term leverage for your business system is by attaching an information publishing profit center to your current business. A cornerstone strategy for most successful information publishers is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing marketplaces like Clickbank have over 100,000 registered affiliate marketers looking for products to represent to their email lists and their online audiences.

4. Partnerships with Trade Groups, Chambers, Associations.

Another simple strategy is to partner with non profits, trade groups, and associations to deliver free content to their clients. Whether through live workshops, or through virtual events like webinars and tele-seminars, you can add a ton of prospects to your marketing in a very short time using this method. It is also a great way to raise funds for your favorite charity. Recently I used this method to raise almost a thousand dollars for my church, only putting in a few hours of work.

5. Marketing partnerships.

You can also recruit other businesses (even competitors sometimes) to pool funds and resources for advertising, outreach or publicity purposes. One of the most common applications of this technique is with the “coupon mailers” that you receive in your mailbox. Each of those businesses can get together, contribute a particular amount that covers design, printing, mailing list and postage costs.

This principle can be applied to other marketing channels as well. Exhibits or trade shows. Publicity events. Online marketing, etc.

6. Full-scale business joint ventures and strategic alliances

This goes beyond just marketing partnerships and into delivering of goods and services. Whether it involves creating bundled offerings that combine complementary strengths of 2 businesses, or re-engineering both businesses to create a co-dependent ecosystem, joint ventures can be very powerful tools for business growth during times of macro-economic uncertainty.

If you grab a pen and a note pad and sit down to think about potential partnerships, you’ll undoubtedly come up with many other ways to partner your way to prosperity during this recession.