The Easy Way To Find Referral Partners

Referral Partnerships

Joint Ventures

Affiliate Marketing

Whatever you call it they all focus on leveraging the contacts, customers and prospects of businesses and marketers who can help you attract more business.

Developing a strong list of good referral partners should be a high priority for all business owners.

What could be better than having a consistent stream of high quality leads and customers coming into your business without you spending any money on advertising?

But how do you find referral partners that will consistently send quality leads? Well I’m about to show you.

In fact I’ve used this very strategy to create my own list of great referral partners.

As a Direct Response Copywriter and Marketing Consultant, I identified very early in my career that web designers and graphic designers were dealing with the exact clients that I wanted to attract.

So I made it a focus of mine to become the partner of choice for as many of these businesses as possible.

***Now before we go too far there is one crucially important element to this
strategy that you must always keep in mind.***

Referral Partnerships Will Only Ever Work If Everyone Involved Benefits From Them

• Your Partner
• The Client
• And of course your own business must all benefit from this partnership.

In my own business my partners benefit because by providing a quality contact that can ensure the copy and marketing strategy behind their clients websites and advertising is optimised to provide maximum return for their clients.

They also benefit because many business owners find it hard to find time to write the copy for their websites or advertising, which delays projects.

The client benefits because their marketing message and strategy is more effective and targeted, providing a better return on their marketing investment.

I benefit by getting a new client.

Unless everyone benefits there’s no point.

How To Find And Attract Referral Partners?

The first step is identifying businesses that serve your target market but are not direct competitors.

If you’re a Web Designer, you could approach Accountants. (All new business owners will generally talk to an accountant who can let them know about your web design services.)

If you’re a Mortgage Broker obviously a Real Estate agent would be a great place to start.

If you are a Vet, you would want to contact all the local pet stores

Every business has the potential to find partners. You just need to think which businesses are a great fit for you.

Next step is to gather a list of addresses for these people so you can get ready for the next step. Making initial contact. Using contractor from services like Elance.com will save you time hen developing your list.

200 names and addresses will cost around $60

Making Initial Contact

Once you know who you want to approach, you need to create something valuable to provide to your potential partners on first contact.

A short report highlighting the benefits of partnering with a business like yours is perfect.

You’re not saying “Hey partner with me”.

You simply create a list of benefits and help them see the value in the partnership, then let them make the choice themselves.

You only want to partner with people who are 100% sold on benefits of the partnership. Don’t waste time trying to convince people if they aren’t interested.

Once you have your value proposition you then need to write a letter introducing yourself and offering people the information you have that will help them either make more money, save time, attract new clients or grow their business.

Getting this letter right is very important so if you’re not great at copywriting you can always hire a professional copywriter to help. (Yes that was a blatant plug).

Sending Your Letter

As with any type of marketing it is simply a numbers game. If you send out 200-300 letters and can end up securing even just 1-2 new long-term referral partnerships this can add a huge amount of revenue to your business.

Now making first contact and creating a few partnerships is just the start of the process, ideally you want to continue to provide value to your partners by helping to make it as easy and as beneficial as possible to refer to you.

You can do this by…

• Providing a free offer to their client list to get started
• Providing marketing materials to your partner to promote referrals
• Streamlining the referral process
• Paying referral commissions to your partners
• Developing packages deals you can provide to customers

Take Away

1. It only takes 1-2 long-term referral partnerships to generate a great long-term revenue stream.
2. Everyone must benefit from the partnership.
3. Continue to add extra value to your partners and the referral clients
4. Spend time getting your initial contact campaign right
5. It’s all a numbers game

Let me know if you have any questions about this strategy or have some other ideas that could help in the comments below.

Cheers,

James Brine
The Barefoot Marketer

P.S. I’m currently developing some referral partnership template letters as an affordable product that anyone can simply fill in the blanks and send. If you’re interested contact me here.