Many of the great fortunes of the 19th and 20th centuries were made by simply buying and selling — buying other people’s products and getting other people to sell them. In the world of off-line commerce, this has always been the traditional method of generating wealth. Now, in the internet age, this technique can be done effortlessly with just a click of your mouse.U.S. marketing legends, Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, Ted Nicholas and many others, have taught for years the power of becoming a joint-venture broker and, in the process, have generated hundreds of millions of dollars.
This, in the off-line sense, is where you find a company wanting to sell more of their product, find a company that has the capability of selling more of that product and broker a deal between them in return for a hefty commission on the total sales. On the international stage, the system is also known as an import/export agency where the agent sources products from overseas and finds buyers at home who sell on to the end user. If you’ve bought something from your local hardware store, it probably came in a box marked ‘Made in China’. The storekeeper didn’t spend weeks visiting Chinese factories looking for something to sell in his store! He, directly or indirectly, used the services of an agent/broker.
The same system applies to many other aspects of our lives. For example, a dating agency will introduce two people with mutual interests and, in the process, collect a commission for making the connection. Closer to home, the fruit and vegetables in your local supermarket go through a middleman. He finds the farmers wanting to sell and the supermarket has the ‘list’; the customers who do the weekly shopping there. Prior to the emergence of the internet, brokering deals meant complicated contracts, usually involving expensive lawyers, extensive telephone and telex calls and a fair amount of hard work, often lasting for many months before the commissions started coming in. Now, all that has changed and contracts happen automatically, all contact is done on-line and the only hard work is carrying out a little research and sending off some e-mails.
Transferring this system on-line can see results appearing quite literally in a a few days and all the components of even an on-line business become redundant. No products to sell, no website to build, no marketing skills to be learned and, most importantly, the holy grail of internet marketing: no list required. Picking a category to broker for is probably the hardest first step to take as the internet has an overwhelming range to choose from – just take a look at e-Bay’s category list! A hobby, interest or passion even is an easier place to start and brokering deals on a subject you enjoy will provide the motivation to get going.
Once you’ve experienced the thrill of successfully brokering your first deal, you have many thousands of categories and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of products to take your pick from. Once a subject has been chosen, Google and affiliate directories are used to find products for use with this system and it’s then time to look for marketers to promote these products. Using Clickbank as a springboard, specific search phrases in Google will bring up sties that are already promoting other products in the same category.
Further specific search terms will bring up many more sites that won’t appear in a standard Google search. Depending on how precise your category is, hundreds, but often thousands of sites that have the potential to market your product to can be found with ease. E-zines will also provide an ideal hunting ground and a simple search will reveal many thousands of potential sites. The hardest part of brokering is contacting all the site owners but software can automate much of your work. The e-mail must be phrased to offer a specific benefit that requires only a few minutes work on the part of the owners; that way as many as possible grab the offer.
Not all sites will respond to your offers but those that do will provide a residual income for months or years to come and each new deal will provide another layer of income. There will also be spurts of income levels as e-zines send out your offer to their mailing lists. In conclusion, joint-venture brokering has been producing a comfortable and lucrative living since trading began. Now, thanks to the internet, it’s easier and quicker than ever to get a percentage of the vast sums of money that are moving around the world between buyer and seller. John Geraghty is a professional nurseryman who decided there must be a more comfortable way to make money than being frost-bitten, soaked and sunburnt See how you can improve your comfort zone.