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When I noticed an error on my Wachovia checking account statement, I immediately dialed the customer service 800-number provided by the bank. For 20 minutes, I was stuck in an automated labyrinth that kept leading me back to the main menu where I could

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EBay is THE most popular home business in the USA, but it’s not without its problems. Many have tried to succeed but have failed due to confusion over what products to sell giant numbers of competitors, copy and picture theft from other sellers and eBay and Papal that eat into profits.
 
One way to avoid this swamp, though, is to do a Joint Venture with established eBay sellers. This allows a JV partner to build her own mailing list and sell products off eBay.

There are multiple advantages to this way of doing business on eBay:

1. The biggest uncertainty for would-be eBay sellers is what products to sell. Sometimes vendors risk large sums of money on untried products, only to lose their investment, become sour and give up. With a Joint Venture there is no risk except for a few hours of time.

2. Since there are no auctions listed on eBay, no one can steal copy or pictures from JV sellers – because there is nothing to copy. In effect, we become invisible – no one even knows we exist and this hidden aspect has many advantages.

3. EBay JVs are usually done with a digital product that can be instantly downloaded. This is great for any entrepreneur because inexpensive auto responders mean that her entire business is handled via autopilot. For more detail visit www.easy-jv-manager.com Contrast this with the usual way of doing business on eBay which involves mailing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of boxes.

4. EBay and Papal have lots of rules. It’s easy to break some unwittingly, and even the most honest seller does so from time to time. A JV merchant isn’t answerable to eBay, however, but only to her customers.

5. A JV seller never directly lists on eBay, thus avoiding eBay and Papal fees.

6. Successful Power sellers have large numbers of customers and there are lots of administrative details involved. Implementing a sales system can cost time and money because without attention to detail packages won’t be mailed in a timely fashion, payments won’t be accurate, and items will be sent to the wrong buyers, and so on. A JV partner eliminates all of that because all transactions can be funneled through a hands-off system.

7. EBay selling lives or dies through the ‘feedback’ system. Negative feedback can kill sales instantly and lack of feedback causes buyers to hesitate and choose other sellers. Feedback is totally irrelevant to a Joint Venture seller because she is using the reputation of carefully chosen other sellers. She knows in advance that their feedback is high quality or she doesn’t do deals with them.

8. Inexperienced sellers sometimes drag wiser merchants into price wars. In a panic over sales, they foolishly slash prices, for more detail visit www.joint-venture-softwares.com beginning a chain reaction that results in bare bones bids that allow no one to make any money. A Joint Venture seller floats serenely above such hiccups in the marketplace.

9. Best of all, a JV seller doesn’t settle for a one time sale. She concentrates her efforts on a mailing list of happy customers that she can sell to again and again and again. In this way, not only is she ensuring repeated profits, but she gets paid for creating this list, rather than having to pay someone else for names.

With its 147,000,000 registered users, eBay is the best source of targeted, Net-savvy buyers on the web. By putting together Joint Venture deals with established sellers, anyone can add large numbers of qualified buyers to their database efficiently and inexpensively.

It’s no secret that JVs (joint ventures) and cross promotions are one of the most productive ways to make high volumes of sales on the Internet. Today I want to talk about why they work so well, and how you can make the most of them to explode your online income.

Traditionally, JVs are most common between two people who have created a product and are selling it online. But that needn’t be the case and I will tell you shortly of a way in which you can get all the benefits, traffic and sales of a JV without even having a product of your own.

But first lets look at the principals of it:

What actually happens in a JV cross-promotion?

Websites promote other websites for two main reasons:

1. To earn income from commission sales.

2. To pay, or earn, favors.

The first of these you might expect, the second is more intricate.

You see, when you’re running an online business, your options and your growth are restricted if you try doing it all on your own.

Sure, there’s pay-per-click advertising, article marketing, traffic exchangers, and a variety of ways you can draw traffic to your site by paying for it.

But nothing beats personal recommendation.

Its human nature: We all prefer to buy through personal recommendation than by enticing advertisements.

And JV’s, or cross-promotions are all about personal recommendation.

The only thing is – as every super-affiliate knows – even if you’re offering attractive commission rates, the site that’s getting promoted always gets more out of the deal than the JV partner who’s doing the promoting. Look at this comparison:

The JV partner doing the promotion gets:

1. A ‘notional’ favour from the site it
promotes.
2. Commission payments, hopefully paid in good
time but always at the discretion of the site
owner.

The site being promoted gets:

1. Lots of new list members
2. Lots of Sales
3. Lots of recognition

Which would you rather?

Can you see now why the benefit isn’t split evenly in a JV deal?

This is one of the reasons why it is more difficult than many people think to get JV partners promoting for you.

No matter how attractive your commission percentages are, you will always be getting more out of the deal than your JV partner. Especially if your landing page is a list-building squeeze page.

But there is an option available. Especially if your aim is to build a list.

You could use a new and refreshingly different kind of site, using a webserver script that gives you a complete solution for building a list and a business online.

One of its features is that it turns the above JV example on its head to provide more of a win-win for both parties. Here’s what you can do with it:

As a list builder, you can offer a squeeze page for your JV partner to promote. He then sends his list to the squeeze page, where they sign up to your list. Then, this is when it gets interesting:

Your JV partner can decide which offer page his signups are directed to after signup.

Gone is the traditional method whereby once his leads have signed up to you they’re yours, to direct wherever you like. With MVS, your JV partner can choose what to show them *after* they’ve joined your list…

It might be to his own product, or an affiliate link somewhere else – or he may choose to use his affiliate link for your product (in keeping with the normal method).

The point is, your JV partner has more say about who benefits from his promotion and how. And that kind of power makes all the difference when it comes to getting others to promote for you, and build your list.

This is one of many characteristics of a system that makes it well worth a good look if you want to start building JV relationships. Whether you are looking to build a list or promote a particular product or service, the power of this kind of marketing is undeniable.

chrisrecord.com Today Twitter launched a new featured called “Twitter Lists. This is a great new tool to help you organize the people that you follow and even more importantly a way for you to organize a Twitter account that follows “thousands” of people! I can honestly tell you that I have been waiting months for this feature and it has finally arrived and has simplified my Twitter experience and taken it to a whole new level. You see, there are generally 2 groups of people when it comes to Twitter. One group follows as many people as possible hoping that most will follow them back in return and this technique really does add Twitter followers in the masses. The other group only follows a small select group of friends so that they can actually follow what they all tweet and not miss anything, but have to work much harder to get people to follow them. Until now there hasn’t been much middle ground. All that changed today. When Twitter came out with lists I was pumped up because I am part of that first group of Twitter users that follows well over 10000 people. With this new feature I was able to create a “friends” list with only 50 people on it and now I can read every one of their tweets and not miss anything! How cool But it got much cooler when I realized that I could also create several friends lists to manage all of the “new” people that I follow from this point forward for marketing purposes. For example, if I specifically target tweets that mention real estate …

The use of auto responders is quickly becoming popular. Given the digital age we have come into at full speed, it is becoming more and more time-consuming to be checking voicemails and answering machines. The digital age is now allocating and advocating the use of these responders as a fax-on-demand-type of system. Read the rest of this entry »