The Internet has changed all that. Partnering and leveraging your partners brand has never been more public. Companies right and left, sometimes companies in totally different market segments become allies. The reason they do it is obvious, they want to see their business grow and they perceive some value in the alliance. Here are some recent examples.

This month a joint Yahoo!/MCI venture will go live on the World Wide Web. Under the agreement Yahoo! will provide Internet access with MCI Communications Corporation. Called Yahoo! Online powered by MCI Internet, the service is forecast to bring Yahoo! a possible $20 Million in bounty (referral fees) from MCI according to Alan Braverman, an Internet and new media analyst at Credit Suisse/First Boston, New York.

Yahoo! Online's home page will offer customized content and draw on Yahoo!'s existing news, entertainment and financial content. Yahoo! will sell ad space on the home page and retain all ad revenue.

Meanwhile MCI will handle the Internet dial-up service and customer support. MCI and Yahoo! will market the co-branded service separately. MCI will continue its own MCI Internet service and homepage. Jeff Mallett, Yahoo!'s chief operating officer said the main target for the service is "near surfers"- people without Internet accounts who normally access the Internet from school or work. MCI long distance will also be targeted said David Trachtenberg, director of brand marketing at MCI. "We'll be using off-line and online marketing vehicles." said Trachtenberg. 

In February Wire Networks' Women's Wire, one of the web's most successful sites for professional women ( see Work the Web, October 1997, iBiz) and Bloomberg, the investment services company, will launch an area on Women's Wire targeted at two hotline ad categories- women and finance.

The new area will be called Money and will replace the old financial section called Cash. While Women's Wire has had a financial area since it was launched in 1995. The company believes the new alliance will bring greater depth to the site and increased revenues to the bottom line.

Ellen Pack, founder and VP of product development for Wire Networks said, "Our strategy is to create the best web sites we can create, and often we can partner to offer breadth and depth along with top quality- while we work on serving the audience we know best which is women on the Internet."

Jonathan Fram, Bloomberg general manager of new media, said the deal is the first in a planned series for Bloomberg. They will partner with other category leaders for similar ventures. "We have found the women on the web are sophisticated and insightful investors." Fram said. "The key for us was finding the right partner with the right demographic."

Paul Krasilovsky, online analyst with Arlen Communications, agreed that partnership of women and business makes sense. "The women online are professionals, in a disproportionate comparison to the men online. Finance and business are good niche areas to target women. Women's Wire already has very elegantly targeted women with a wide variety of topics."

ONSALE Inc, a pioneer and leader in interactive, 24 hour, online auctions created strategic alliances with Netscape, Netbuyer, Excite and CBS Sportsmen late in 1997.

The official Internet shopping guide published by Netscape features ONSALE in the shopping section of the guide and under the Electronics heading of the Computer section. ONSALE appears on the homepage of Excite's Shopping Channel under the "Auctions and Bargains" heading. ONSALE is also the primary tenant on the "Auctions and Bargains" homepage as well as having promotional and banner placements throughout Excite. ONSALE will be the premiere auction-based sponsor of NetBuyer, Ziff-Davis' shopping web site.

On ONSALE's own site it has launched a co-branded section with CBS Sportsline, a leading Internet based sports media company. Jerry Kaplan, president and chief executive officer at ONSALE said at the launch, "We believe sporadic banner advertising is less effective than creating permanent links from high affinity sites. Market leader such as ONSALE are getting permanent "real estate" on related sites to launch key target consumers and creating extensive cross-links to drive traffic from those sites."

He added, "Secondly we intend to continue growing our merchandise categories beyond our original core business of computers and computer peripherals. We look forward to partnering with companies like CBS Sportsline to provide quality goods with a wide appeal to web shopper."

Even the biggest Internet players see the advantage in partnering. In September 1997America Online, Inc and Microsoft Corporation created an agreement whereby AOL would offer Active Channels on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.

Bob Pittman, president and chief executive officer of AOL Networks said, "This agreement will benefit both companies as we together raise the consumer's cyberspace experience to a new level of richness and convenience. For Internet Explorer 4.0 users, the AOL channel will serve as an important introduction to the engaging content of the world's most popular Internet online service."

Yahoo! and VISA are doing it. Yahoo! will produce and develop the "Visa Shopping Guide by Yahoo!" It will be a comprehensive guide of merchant and product information and will make shopping over the Internet faster and easier. Together they will launch a Visa card designed specifically for Internet users.

Wired and Barnes and Noble have a partnership for both online and off-line promotions. Wired Digital has created a co-branded Barnes and Noble book shopping area on its Shop Wired market place (accessed through its www.hotbot.com) with links to BarnesandNoble.com for purchase. Off-line efforts include special in-store Wired displays nationwide this summer.

Online music retailer N2K has launched a co-branded version of its Music Boulevard for iVillage.com. iVillage will incorporate Music Boulevard's music news, information and retail options into the site.

Everybody's doing it!

There has to be a reason and in most cases it comes down to a single one, traffic. The more people that see your product or service offering the more money you're likely to make. The greater the traffic the greater the potential gain. Yahoo! has 26 Million individual visitors a month. That's a lot of people if your site appears on half of them and 10 percent of the people who see it click through. 

A part of the flurry of partnering and co-branding comes from the very nature of the Internet. Every one of the 120+ million people worldwide connected to the Internet is just a single click away from your site. It is a medium of selection where the viewer chooses what he wants to see next. If you want people to visit your site you need to let them know you're there. If you're on the Yahoo! home page a lot more people are going to have that opportunity than if you're on the Left Overshoe, NE, Trapper and Fisherman homepage.

But the partnering has always been a part of the World Wide Web. Banner exchanges were it's first manifestations. Then came banner advertising based on the advertising/mall model. We have the traffic so you pay us for access. The more traffic the higher the price. But the buyer also gains.

The advertising partner gains prestige from being on a popular site. On the World Wide Web those are the search engines. 95% of all searches are done on 8 major search engines. In fact the only Internet businesses to have substantial real earnings from advertising revenues in 1997 (according to an Advertising Age survey) were search engines.

There's also a gain from having a well known brand on your home page. If you're an auto repair business and you have GM, Ford or Chrysler links on your site it is a kind of endorsement by association. You look better, bigger and more established because the big boys are there. 

Can it work for You?

In a way it always has worked for anyone. Because every one depends on links. Every web presence larger than a personal home page is built on hyper links. That wonderful ability to instantly jump anywhere on the network. In the beginning many sites were just a list of links. People linked to information sources or other sites they thought their viewers might find interesting.

It was an easy way to increase content and make your site more valuable to your visitors. That ability is what gave rise to banner advertising and banner exchanges. Both are still alive and well and both offer an opportunity for small businesses to increase their site's value tp their visitors and add revenues to their bottom line. I don't think any one is making a living from banners on their site, but many people defray the costs of creating and maintaining their site with banners.

Banner exchanges for the most part don't make money. Their primary purpose is to generate traffic to your site and from yours to other exchange members. If you have an eComerce site and sell directly over the web, a banner exchange can be beneficial in exposing you to more prospects than you might reach on your own. Some of them cost money to join, others don't. In either case you should check and see who the other subscribers to the exchange are before you join. If you're selling toys you don't want a stream of pornography banners through your site.

If increasing traffic by association is desirable you should also look into Web Rings. Joining a web ring associates you with other sites with similar content. Rather than a banner, you get a graphic and HTML code that directs visitors to other sites on the ring. For more information on Web Rings see the January issue of iBiz online at http://www.ibiz.net/jan98/webring.htm.

If you are interested in banners as an income stream there are two basic plans. In these plans you don't get any return traffic. In the first, if you have a banner on your site for Zed Transistors and one of your visitors clicks from your home page to theirs and buys something, you get a percentage of the sale. The other model pays you for each click-through. Both depend on the premise that some people are already coming to your site and will click through to the banners that appear on your site. 

Besides the ability to make a modest amount of money, banner programs provide associative branding for a site. The amazon.com associate program is one of those that has prestigious co-branding associations for a small site owner. 

Everyone knows about amazon.com the biggest business on the Internet. They will pay you 15% of any sale coming from your site. There is no fee for becoming an associate and beside the possibility of income, you get the association that comes from a world known web presence. You are for all intents and purposes co-branding your site with the largest bookstore on the web.

Another nice thing about their program is, it is not just a click to their home page. You pick the books you want to provide links to. Zed transistors might want to feature Electrical Engineering books, books on physics theory or the biography of Enrico Fermi. You can check out the associates program from their homepage ( www.amazon.com ). 

Fatcow web hosting (www.fatcow.net) has a banner program that pays you for click through on one of their banners. The payment rate is $.13 per unique visitor. Once you participate you can view their stats on the traffic from your site. When your totals reach $10.00+ you submit an online form to receive payment. An arrangement like this can be beneficial if you already have considerable traffic on our site. A certain percent of your visitors will click through just out of curiosity. The industry average seem to be about 2-3%.

Both these programs depend on you to add the hyperlinks to your pages. The banners are created and the code is done for you it's a cut and paste operation. If you decide to use them do it judiciously. There is nothing more irritating than a site where you have to wade through a slough of banners to get to the content.

If you'd like to check out more banner partnership opportunities www.globalpromote.com has a list of free banner exchange programs all over the world. There are some muti-lingual programs as well as indigenous language programs. 

Whether you want to use these forms of partnering to increase traffic or revenues, check out the program by talking to other participants first. See how they're doing before you join. Any legitimate program won't have a problem with that. You don't want to do business with anyone unwilling to give you references. And remember there's nothing with creating your own banner exchange.

Call your suppliers or other businesses within your industry and ask if they would like to partner. A web site doesn't do anyone any good if no one comes to it. Most businesses are actively looking for ways to increase traffic. If they're in a similar, but non-competitive, business you could both benefit. Because that is what partnering is all about mutual benefit. It's a good strategy for increasing traffic and potentially, revenues. 

 iBiz.