Q:  How would you approach a competitor so they would be willing to work together rather than a threat?

Well, here is my advice.  Do not ever be worried about approaching competitors because it all in the way that you approach them.  But what I would encourage you to do is be very clear on how you want to work with him or her because if you are not clear then the chances of a deal coming together go down dramatically so you should be very, very clear.

One of the first things that I would do is just look to take a small baby step perhaps approach her and say something such as, “Hey, I noticed that we have very similar target audiences and I was wondering if you would be open to possibly trading links.  I will put a link to some of your articles or publish some of your articles on my site and perhaps in exchange you would do the same thing,” and then that way I mean it is pretty even-steven deal at that point. After that you can discuss working together, using each other’s information, or whatever you want to do.

The big key when you are approaching competitors is just to realize they are people trying to build their business as well as we are all trying to do and so we are looking for opportunities to exchange traffic and promote other people and so forth and if we can do it in a win-win situation I think that is the ultimate.  So there are many opportunities for you to work with your competitors and I think starting off just exchanging links or articles or even autoresponder messages, those are very good places to start and then from that point, you can look to grow beyond there perhaps doing products with them and so forth.

A good example about a year, actually it is coming up on two years ago, I created a course with a good friend of mine and there was another course launching right around the same time on a very similar topic and we were kind of worried about it as far as like it is going steal like thunder. The way the whole thing played out was fantastic.  We are very good friends with the other people that created the course and now we are doing a lot of things together, so it only helps strengthen both sides by coming together and talking about what we could do together.

Tags: autoresponder, autoresponders, competition, competitor, course, email, emails, joint venture, JV, launch, link, links, partner