S3 Blog

For any business to succeed and be able to compete alongside other businesses that offer similar products and services it is a good idea to generate strategic partnerships with others. Strategic partnerships are a formal alliance that is normally between two commercial businesses with a contract involved. Such partnerships however are not legal partnerships as neither party wants to internally develop the other and vice versa.

Instead these partnerships are formed when each side has an asset or more that will assist the other, a good example of this is the relationship between a manufacturer and a developer. Typically the manufacturer would be a larger company and they would provide the product, capital needed for growth, marketing and distribution and the developer will provide the technical knowledge and expertise to enhance the product.

Another example of a strategic partnership is that between a supplier / manufacturer and the distributer. By creating a close relationship between the two separate and very different businesses enables them both to share the marketing, development, branding and so on of a service or product.
It is essential that strategic partnerships are formed as there are few business that are large enough and wealthy enough to be able to complete the entire cycle for a product or service alone. There are of course many who think that they can and this overestimation of capabilities is one of the reasons that a lot of businesses fail – they do not have strategic partnerships.

So how does a business go about generating strategic partnerships? One way is to look at your competitors and see if they can do something that your business can’t, then see what your business can bring to the table and get in touch with them. Speaking to competitors in this way can sometimes help to build a strategic partnership which can be mutually beneficial to both sides.

Are you involved in a business to business industry? If so you might already have relationships with other businesses, so why not see if a strategic partnership between yourselves and them might be in the interests of both sides? That way both businesses could drive customers to each other and reap the benefits. Say you sell gardening supplies and you form a strategic partnership with a business that sells electronic gardening equipment, a simple link to each other’s sites can provide huge traffic to each other that would not necessarily have been there otherwise.

To generate successful strategic partnerships it is also worth noting that all transactions between the two businesses need to be open and honest – as without these fundamentals trust will quickly be lost and this can be difficult to repair, if not impossible. So when generating these partnerships make sure that everything is out in the open as this is the only way in which partnerships like these will work. So follow these hints and start to make positives steps to creating and generating strategic partnerships that will benefit your business and raise your revenue quickly.

For anyone who doesn’t know blogging is another term for the phrase ‘web log’ which is very much like an online diary. However unlike a diary a blog can be seen by anyone as they are published on websites for other people to read. Blogs can be about anything and there is no limit to the amount of posts the owner of a blog can make each day or week. Many blogs have links within them which will direct the reader to another website which may be selling goods or services, often for the purpose of turning this visitor into a customer.

As the success of blogs is rapidly rising it is no wonder that businesses are recognising just how valuable a blog can be to promote themselves and create more customers in the process. If you are wondering what the benefits are for marketing your business with a blog here are some of them:-

1. Blogging is free – the only thing you have to spend on a blog is your time, or you could get one of your employees to run your businesses blog for you.

2. Blogging is easy – there are an abundance of blogging sites on the internet all of which are straightforward to use, the majority even have mini tutorials about how you go about setting up and running a blog.

3. You can reach a much wider audience then before – there is nothing wrong with having a great deal of presence online and the more people that read your blog the better. Research the market and see what other kind of blogs are out there.

4. Blogging is instant – you can write your blog in the morning and have it online almost instantly, so anyone who reads your blog will be able to see these updates.

5. Blogging can help you to build links with other websites and blogs – this means that your network can grow as you place more links on your blog all pointing back to your businesses website.

6. Blogs are one of the most popular forms of communication on the web and any business that has a blog is seen to be keeping up to date with technology and this is seen by consumers as a good thing.

As you can see creating and running a blog can be highly beneficial for a business as not only is it a very cheap form of advertising but it can quite easily generate more visitors to your businesses website who will hopefully spend money there.

So why not set up a blog for your business and see how many new customers it can create for you. Things might be slow to begin with but the more posts you have on your blog, the more chance there is that people surfing the web will see it and want to know more about what our business does. If for some reason your blog doesn’t do as well as you would have hoped don’t worry – you won’t have spent money to find this out.