Are you still catching fish one at a time? I hope not.

Gone are the days where you sit by the edge of the lake with a fishing pole hoping something will bite. Don’t do that! There are better, more powerful ways of doing things today.

Use a net instead! Then, go to a spot where the fish are plenty and they’re jumping up at you!

One of the fastest ways of building your customer base is to seek out mutually beneficial joint ventures.

The key words here are “mutually beneficial”. Find marketers and business owners who already have large “responsive” mailing lists and make them an offer they can’t refuse! Just make sure your offer benefits them as well – in a big way.

Many people have tried using this strategy. Most have failed miserably. I’ll tell you why.

The problem with most people is that they are only focused on what they can get out of the deal. You’ll never get it if that’s what your focus is on.

When you’re working on forming joint ventures, focus on the other party and ask yourself “What do they need? What can I offer them that would be of value to them?”

Sure, you can just offer the other person a cut of the profits if they agree to endorse your product to their list. But that’s what everybody does. And these days, that’s not enticing enough. How is your offer unique?

Here’s a better way of doing it…

What if you were to create a product specifically for one marketer. Offer them exclusive rights to distribute the product as they see fit.

You don’t have to create a hundred page masterpiece. It’s not the number of pages… it’s the content! You can have a 5 page report that contains solid gold. And you can have a 100-page mammoth filled with garbage.

Want to do one better?

Offer to help the other party with something first. Anything – without bringing up your joint venture offer. Then, when you’ve created some value for them, you can ask them to help you out with something. (Say a joint venture, perhaps?)

Do you see how this strategy differs from what most people try to do out there?

Heck, I’ve even seen people requesting joint ventures by just sending a one-line email note to the other person which reads, “Want to promote my product? Here’s my link…”

Do they really expect the other person to even respond to that note? It just doesn’t work!

Be unique. Create value for them. Make it worth their while. Make them an offer they can’t refuse!

Keep in mind that…although the above strategy increases your chances of striking a deal astronomically, not everyone will say “yes” to your offer.

I’ve approached some people who just had too much on their plate to begin with and just weren’t able to work with me. It happens.

Don’t take it personally.

The trick is to not quit after the first “no”.

Forming powerful, mutually beneficial alliances with successful marketers is the best strategy available to us. And it is well worth your time to continue pursuing joint ventures until you strike a deal or two. But, you don’t have to stop there either. Get as many as you can.

Remember, you are not just seeking a one-time deal here either. You’re seeking an alliance. Great ongoing business deals and friendships can be formed this way.

Actually, it will do more than that. It will totally change your whole life. If you think I am kidding, here is a real life example of what happened when a fairly successful Internet marketer went from being an affiliate of another person’s products to starting his own affiliate program for his own product. We’ll use pseudo names to protect the innocent and the rich.

John Doe started Internet marketing back in 2003. He really didn’t have a clue to what he was doing and had to learn quite a lot before he finally was able to have some success. He found a product that actually did help him make sales because of its unique form of advertising. He became an affiliate for this product and began to promote it. Because of his ad writing skills he was able to consistently make between 20 and 30 sales of this product each month. He was actually one of the top affiliates of this product on the Internet at the time. He was very proud of himself and quite content with his success, which was generating an income of about $1500 a month. Not too bad for an hours work each day.

But after a few years, John Doe started to get restless. His income wasn’t really going anywhere. He was still making his 20 to 30 sales each month but his own efforts were still only producing about $1500 of income each month. Success was great but John Doe wanted more. The question was, how could he get it?

That’s when he sat down one day and thought to himself, “I’ve learned quite a bit about Internet marketing these past 3 years. Certainly I can take what I have learned and create my own product and my own affiliate program.” So that’s what he did. He put on his thinking cap and came up with a product and created an affiliate program for it.

Naturally, the beginnings of this program were quite humble. After all, nobody heard of this product yet and at first he was on his own as far as promoting it. Well, his first month’s efforts produced all of 13 sales. Not even close to the 20 to 30 sales he was making selling somebody else’s product. But don’t forget, that was an already established product with brand recognition. His was brand new, so it was going to take time.

His second month, again, just from his own efforts, he made 53 sales. Things were really starting to pick up. He was making more sales than ever before with anything else, and all on his own.

And then, it happened.

John Doe got his first really active affiliate to promote his program. His third month he more than doubled his sales to 130. This was just from 2 active people selling the product. This was equal to about 5 months of his sales for the affiliate program that he was simply a member of. He had never seen numbers like this in his life and was in total shock.

But it didn’t end there.

With a couple more affiliates added to his roster of sales people, he made over 200 sales his fourth month. But it didn’t stop there. The sales kept increasing month after month with the increasing number of people selling his product for him.

He was able to quit his original affiliate program that he had been a member of for 3 long years after just a few months of selling his own product through his own affiliate program.

I think this real life example is going to make you see, better than anything else, how powerful creating your own affiliate program can be. The difference will be night and day in comparison to selling somebody else’s product.

The key is spending the time required to design a good product that has value and then promoting it in a way that will bring results. The rest will happen in time.

Explode your traffic, your income, your life.