I would venture to guess that 95% of all beginning internet/affiliate/viral marketers don’t believe in the need to build relationships when starting their online business. I was the same way. I’m working online from home to alleviate the need to build relationships and talk to people, right?

Wrong. It wasn’t until I started actively pursuing relationships that my business started to grow. Irony? I don’t think so. If you want to really grow your online business, start treating it like a real business and less like a hobby where you spend a few hours a day just having fun. Mindset is everything.

Here’s 3 relationships you need to build, and how they will help you grow your business beyond your belief.

Necessary Relationships for an Internet Marketer

Depending on the nature of your business, you may value these relationships differently. For my business, internet marketing with an emphasis on affiliate marketing at this point, these are the relationships you must have if you want to excel.

1. Affiliate Managers

Many marketers have mixed feelings about building a relationship with your affiliate or network managers. With the right affiliate manager though, they are absolutely vital to your business. Here are just a few benefits I have reaped from building solid relationships with my affiliate managers:

• Top payouts – This has become a canned term for sure, but when you have a relationship with them, it’s default that you will get bumped to even test an offer. If street payout is $6.00/lead on an offer, my manager will give me $7.50/lead to just test the offer. Without a solid relationship, you would run at $6.00/lead for a few weeks and then you might ask for/get a bump.
• First to enter – There have been a few times when an affiliate manager tells me that there is a new offer coming up and to build out my campaigns. If the offer is exclusive, I can be sure that I am the absolute FIRST to enter the market (whichever market I decide) and can take huge margins while other competitors are building their campaigns.
• Some truly care – Most of the affiliate managers I have worked with made it real clear that if I wasn’t doing volume with them (or running anything) that they didn’t care about me. However, there are a few that really do care about you and your business. If you aren’t running traffic they are actively giving you ideas of what to test based on what you have had success with in the past. Also, they go out of their way to give you payouts above even the ‘modified street’ to help.

It takes time to build a solid relationship with anybody, and an affiliate manager is no exception. You can generally decide pretty quickly whether or not your affiliate manager really cares about you and your business though, and when they do, it makes you want to work harder because you know they are on your side.

2. Marketers in Similar Niches

I would say that every single marketer when they are beginning works extremely hard to keep their niches and promotional methods as secret as possible. However, it is safe to say that there are other marketers promoting the exact same product/service using the exact same promotional method as you on the same traffic sources. Once you realize this, it will help you understand why networking with other marketers in your niche can be very beneficial to your business.

• Help each other – Of course you don’t want to cut into your profits, but if you are willing to give a little, you might get much more in return. A couple years ago I was promoting a PPC campaign, and I was actively talking to another marketer promoting it the same way I was. We exchanged ideas, tips on what helped increase landing page CTR, keyword topics, and even the best converting offers. Overall, this helped grow my campaign from losing $50-100/day to making $500/day. I’d say it was worth it.
• Cut deals – If you have a good relationship and are more familiar with a certain traffic source, you can work out a deal where you will promote the niche on Yahoo/Bing and they can promote it on Google. This way you can test everything yourself while they test it too. Compare tests and implement ideas from each traffic source. This works well for niches that are MASSIVE or if you are a beginner and looking to feel out the traffic sources or niche.
• Brainstorming – Before you will tell someone your idea for a promotional method or niche to run, you have to trust them. Otherwise you are going to withhold information and not benefit as much as you could. Also, there will be times when you found a campaign that could definitely be made profitable but you have shifted gears. You can essentially give the campaign to a friend to take over. This happened about a year ago when a fellow marketer said he tested an offer on Facebook but it has since died off for him. I tossed up a few campaigns and they profited from day one.

Worry less about protecting what you are doing and you will notice growth. This doesn’t mean tell everybody your exact campaigns and keywords, but once you build trust with someone, be open and the favor is usually returned.

3. Marketers in Different Niches

Not only different niches, but with different promotional methods. If you are big into PPC, networking with SEO marketers might be very beneficial.

• Growth – The niche you are promoting on PPC might be very saturated, but from an SEO aspect it might be incredibly easy to rank. I have seen an additional 25% of revenue from an SEO campaign which only gives you more leverage to dominate your niche in PPC then.
• Brainstorming – Yes I mentioned this in part 2, but this is why teams work so well. You get people with different mindsets working together, and each person views the niche/idea from a different angle. This helps the “think outside the box” mindset.
• Make more money – Who doesn’t want to make more money? If you have no desire to enter the SEO market for an obscure niche that is profiting hard for you on PPC, you can trade ideas and help each other make more money.

Building relationships with ‘outsiders’ is a great way to learn as well. You can exchange PPC tips with SEO tips and help each other build campaigns based on your expertise.

Conclusion

Like I said, it wasn’t until I started networking and building relationships that I started building consistently profitable campaigns. I don’t think it was irony either, because I was using ideas that I learned by networking.

Networking is key if you want to build a business.