The Power of Joint Marketing Partnerships

A business can't become a success on its own. Every company needs to develop partnerships with vendors and customers in order to generate profits. The potential for profits can be elevated even further with a joint venture partnership. Case in point, the Yonanas machine.

This was a simple gadget that turned overripe bananas into a frozen dessert. The company was humming along trying to break into the big leagues when they formed a joint partnership with Dole. That translated into 100 million bunches of bananas having stickers challenging consumers to "Turn me into a Yonana!" The machines flew off the shelf. Can you think of a joint partnership that would benefit your business? Think about these tips for achieving stronger marketing through a joint partnership.

Power Up Your Facebook Page

Billions of users log onto Facebook every day. Even if you capture just a fraction of those potential "likes" you'll be sitting pretty. Once you've established your Facebook page and have it bursting with fresh content, look for a joint partnership page that you can team up with. If you sell decorative wine corks then finding a wine distributor would be a natural fit. Not only can that cork company team up with a wine distributor, but also a gift basket company. What you'll want to do is reach out to that partner and set up a mutual deal where you're both promoting each other through Facebook updates. That's the power of social media joint partnerships.

Use Backlinks for Your Content

That same exchange of Facebook pages can occur with backlinks on your content pieces. Once again, you'll be working with a joint partner to create content that you can both benefit from. It would be like creating an continuous circle of traffic from your web site to your partner's web site. If you're both using effective SEO then it's going to be a win/win all around.

Share the Goods

As you already know, giving away free stuff is a wonderful way to generate traffic to your web business. However, you don't have to limit yourself to giving away freebies just on your site. You can also share incentives on your joint partnership's web pages. Setting up a contest that shares prizes with a partner's products is another terrific way to pump up traffic between the sites. 

Once you've found the perfect joint partner, there should be no limit to the amount of exchanges you can both engage in online. It will take coordination between the parties but that is easy to manage. Joint partnerships are all about thinking outside of the box and you should already be doing that! 

Top 5 SEO Myths That Need to Be Broken

As you enter into the e-commerce space, you're going to be learning all about driving traffic to your website. One of the first (and most important) concepts you should learn is about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Simply put, the goal of SEO is to increase the rankings of your website when a specific search term or phrase is entered. Depending on the topic this can be a crowded field.

For instance, Google "locksmith" and your hometown. What you're sure to come up with are dozens of pages of locksmiths businesses. If your business is among those ranking on the first page you stand a much better chance of garnering that new customer. Along with understanding SEO you'll also run across some SEO myths.

You would follow these myths at your own peril because they might end up preventing traffic to your site as opposed to increasing traffic.

Here are the top 5 SEO myths that need to be broken.

You only have to optimize your site once.

Wrong. You might get lucky with your first wave of comprehensive SEO content and achieve that number one ranking but you won't be there for long. All of your competitors will be working on their own SEO strategies which can knock you off the top ranking at any time. This means you've got to consistently improve your SEO on a regular basis. Look at it this way: Would you only have one "special sale" for your business to attract customers? Of course not! The same can be said for SEO.

Links to social bookmarks aren't considered SEO.

Actually they are. Adding social networking bookmarks to your content are becoming an important and viable component to a comprehensive SEO strategy. Based on the findings of recent surveys, close to 14% of a website's ranking power can originate from sites like Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. In other words, fire up those accounts and make sure they're part of your website.

You should always be posting content.

Yes and no. The myth is that without new content your site won't be picked up by search engines. The key issue is one of relevancy. Your content needs to be relevant for the search. If it is content for the sake of content then you're defeating the purpose. Making content relevant is at the heart of successful SEO and that will be determined by many factors both on your web pages and off those pages.

Forget title tags and meta tags; they don't work.

That would be a big mistake. This is where those on/off page factors come into play. A common mistake by webmasters is to title home pages as "home" as opposed to the keyword in title tags. Going back to the locksmith example, you shouldn't tag your landing page as "home" but "locksmith in Austin" (or wherever). Focus on a 160-character meta description of your content that will include a relevant keyword phrase and you'll come out a winner.

You can't have enough backlinks.

Yes you can. Backlinks link other websites to your site. It's a way of expanding the potential for traffic. However, once again it comes down to a matter of relevancy. You want to establish your website as a place of authority that means you want quality backlinks and not general spam. Linking to news stories and videos work but you'll have to occasionally go back and make sure those links aren't broken.