Looks like Fridays are turning into sharing my revenue streams. I didn’t mean to be so transparent about this, and I’m a little uncomfortable as I feel I’m kind of opening the kimono … something I wouldn’t have been comfortable doing a few years ago.
But I talk a lot about income security and multiple streams of income. And I want you to know what I’m doing, so perhaps it can somehow inspire you to think about your own income security, and your own multiple streams of income. Last Friday I wrote about my 5th revenue (or, income) stream: professional speaking. Today I’ll talk about my second revenue/income stream: JibberJobber Partnerships.
Kind of lame that I’m writing about this today instead of a few weeks ago, because today is the last day of a special offer to career coaches and resume writers. Also, I hope in this post I can communicate that I hope to drive value and help 1+1=3, rather than taking advantage of anyone (my partners).
A bit of history. In my last company we had web technologies that we licensed to organizations. Our target market was alumni associations (for one product) and facility maintenance companies (for another product). I was heavily involved in every aspect of that, from product design to sales to implementation to customer support. It was fun to add value to customers, and have a bleeding edge product line.
When I started JibberJobber I went from B2B to B2C. I didn’t realize how hard it was to get one person to sign up for a service, much less upgrade. I realized it would be easier and better for me to work with a handful of career professionals who would evangelize JibberJobber, and encourage their clients to sign up and/or upgrade. I could go back to my comfortable spot of doing B2B, and incorporate a similar business model in JibberJobber.
I started the Partnership program about two years ago. I got 30 partners, and then kind of shifted my focus to other areas. However, in the last few months I decided to revamp the partnership program, figure out how I could add more value to my partners, and work on getting more. I hope to eventually have 100 partners, who are career experts, who can add value to my users, and who I can refer my users to.
One of my goals is to have partners who say “most of my business comes from JibberJobber referrals.”
How cool would that be?
I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off, but I thought I’d try pretty hard. In the last few weeks I’ve had about 5 new partners sign on, and there are another 5 or so who I’m talking with next week to discuss details.
You’ll see more about my Partners on this blog, as well as on the JibberJobber One Thing (each One Thing for next week is all from Kristen Jacoway, the Career Design Coach).
We also recently introduced a very, very lightweight rotating “ad” spot on the top of JibberJobber for the logged in users. It’s something we’ve been meaning to do for a long time but finally got it in the system, and we’re happy with the results already! This ads value to my Partners, who can communicate their offerings to my users.
My goal to my partners is to add value in three ways (which I share with them). My anticipation is that they add value to me (which they do).
And that, I think, is a healthy revenue stream. It’s also complementary to my other revenue streams… which well talk about next Friday!
Have you figured out what an additional revenue stream for you might be yet?
Jason,
How are you going about discovering what your potential partners value?
Kent
Good question Kent… First, I’m assuming. Not good, right? I know what I can bring to the table, and think that some of that is good for each partner. Aside from that, I hope that we are asking enough so that we understand how we can really help each partner. I’m sure there is more asking we could do….
Sometimes it is best to offer a “menu” of choices since that would be the easiest for you to prepare and for them to choose from. Often times we don’t know what we want until we know what is available. So if you gave a listing of services or consulting subjects that you are willing to offer it would be better than having them try to come up with something. You are constantly amazing me with the number of things you know and are incorporating into your repertoire. Your Business Partners are also quite astute and good marketers. The one immediate value to both JibberJobber and them is the name recognition and client base you both bring to each other without duplication.
Another approach is to ask your existing partners questions like:
“How’s your business going really?”
“What’s your biggest challenge?”
“What gets in the way of your success?”
And other open-ended questions targeted at discovering any “pain” your partners are feeling and sorting out whether or not you have a way to alleviate that pain.
This kind of conversation, by the way, is best done live rather than using electronic media. You want to hear where the pauses and signs are!