If you’re doing an event and you want to find joint-venture partners through Facebook, read this excerpt from my interview with Mari Smith at the Virtual eBook Expo 2.

Mari: ….I would look at the groups and the pages. Look to see – just ignore all the rubbish. like I’m seeing here, the Kinky Punishment eBook, what the hell, just bypass that….. So just hop in there, cruise around and see what people are saying in the group and see how you can actually request people to be your friends.

Ellen: Oh, cool. Okay and now you can actually then use that to find gatekeepers and also just to find people who are maybe going to be affiliates.

Mari: Exactly. Joint-venture partners.

Ellen: So how do you approach them?….You don’t want to then go in there and say “I’m looking for you to help me” that you definitely don’t want to do.

Mari: No, you would go individually one-on-one. I’m seeing, I’m looking at a group right here ….. There’s 329 members something like that.

First I would approach the creator of the group and introduce yourself. You approach somebody sending them a message. You can send them a message or you can go ahead and just invite them to be a friend and you include-when you hit add as friend-actually like for example that person there.

Click on his name and then you can click send a message. You can send a message, whether it’s private messages to people who are not yet your friends. If you’re going to ask to be his friend anyway, then I would just click “add a friend” and then whenever you click add someone as a friend you always add that personal message. It says “add a personal message”, it’s a little link.

You’re limited in characters but I would just say “Hi George, John or Jim, I just came across your Facebook group about (your subject) . I’m an (your subject) expert too and I’d love to connect with you” and that’s it.

That’s just a little introduction. Then when that person comes back and accepts your friend request, then you can start getting into dialogue. You can do that through the private email, you don’t have to do that on the wall, back and forth on the wall; you can do it back and forth on the wall, when it makes sense, when you want to have your conversation public.

Otherwise you’re going to go ahead and take it private and talk back and forth through the Facebook email. This is where it can be time consuming but then you can also ultimately leverage yourself, because you’re looking for people like anybody who has an eBook group who’s maybe doing something different than you would be a terrific collaboration partner, joint-venture partner.

Ellen: And the point is anybody can do this in any field. You just go to search and we put in eBooks but you can put in health, self-improvement, you can put in whatever your subject is.

Mari: Exactly. It’s one of the best places one of the best strategies to find related people, to find people to connect with and build out your network with people that really have share those common interests or that have a specific interest that’s related to your area of expertise.

Ellen: Even fibromyalgia, I went to fibromyalgia and there are 194 groups just on that. I did that because I know I had a client, a student in one of my workshops, actually I have quite a few that have written about fibromyalgia.

Mari: God, wow. That’s amazing.

Ellen: Yeah. (There are) support groups and different things. I have a feeling this is going to work in just about anything you know? You have to kind of pick your spots because it can get very time consuming, but the truth is that you do need to be working on expanding your network and your list building every single day.

To watch the video and to order The Virtual eBook Expo 2 Program with 13 interviews (including the Author’s Panel and audios and transcripts) from top experts like Mari Smith, Perry Marshall, David Riklan and many more (That’s over 17 hours of amazing content!) Go to tinyurl.com/ebookexpo2

If you’d like to listen to the free 7 call-preview series go to: www.virtualebookexpo.com/ Mari Smith will be the guest speaker on Tuesday, June 29th, 5:30 p.m. Pacific/8:30 p.m. Eastern You only have to register once to get access to all 7 calls and there is a replay available after each call. Wednesday, June 30th, 5:30 p.m. Pacific/8:30 p.m. Eastern, my guest will be Gina Gaudio-Graves on how to add $150,000 by using JV’s to launch your ebook!

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