People in the ‘Make Money Online’ niche tend to behave a little differently from those in, say, the knitting and scrapbooking niche. In some ways, they’re more jaded – they’ve fallen for all the Internet marketing tricks before. One time offers are no longer new and exciting. Countdown timers, viral videos, artificial scarcity – they’ve seen them all. They’re well aware that when they sign up for a free report, it’s not really free at all – they’re trading their name and email address for the shiny new thing.

So on the one hand, they’re hard to impress. On the other hand, they’re quite happy to sign up for your list, provided you offer some value. And if you can get them to stay for long enough to become aware of you, if they see your name in their inbox frequently enough for them to become familiar with you, after a period of time you can get them to trust you.

How do you get them to sign up in the first place? One of the quickest ways to build up a mailing list is through joint ventures. But when you’re just starting out, it’s unlikely that you’ll be in a position to offer any joint venture partners much of an exchange.

A possible solution to the ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma is the JV Giveaway. This is a special kind of joint venture arrangement where you add your gift – a special report, an ebook, a free membership – to a list of giveaways from other marketers. Each marketer then promotes the giveaway event, using their own mailing list, their blog and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. You get credited with the number of subscribers who sign up using your unique link (as well as for any contributors who sign up under you).

The important points are that everyone who wants to download your giveaway has to sign up to your mailing list, and that you benefit from the promotional efforts of all the contributors.

JV Giveaways generally last for a short period of time, perhaps 2 weeks. The rules regarding the type of gift you can offer, the number of subscribers you need to get signed up and your ranking in the list of giveaways varies from site to site. If you don’t have a mailing list, or you don’t think you’ll be able to get enough subscribers to sign up, you can buy your way in – a paid membership generally gives you a higher rank in the giveaway listings, and may also give you premium promotional slots.

I should warn you that by signing up – either as a contributor or as a regular subscriber – you’ll be facing a veritable barrage of product offers. You’ll get upsells, downsells, cross-sells, upgrades, hard sells and soft sells. If you can stay calm in the face of yet another marketer advising you that “There are 3 kinds of people in the world: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen – and those who say “What happened?”, you’ll be fine.

If you’d like to see how a JV Giveaway works from the subscriber perspective, you can sign up for the Christmas JV Giveaway here.

If you’d like to give it a try as a contributor, here are some up-coming JV Giveaways:

The New Years Giveaway (Jan 1st 2010 – Jan 12th 2010)
The Peoples JV Giveaway 2 (Jan 1st 2010 – Jan 31st 2010)
Self Improvement Gifts 4 (Jan 5th 2010 – Jan 19th 2010)

Build Your Mailing List With JV Giveaways is a post from: Online Business Blog