Working with what you’d call a “preferred partner” is a great way to drastically increase your brand’s exposure for no cost. It’s a form of cross-promotion companies can engage in with a carefully selected partner or partners. An easy way to implement this type of partnership is through an exclusive link exchange. This means you and your partner agree to provide prominent placement on each other’s websites, promoting one another’s businesses.

This concept is similar to a link exchange. The difference is that while some companies have link exchange pages loaded with sites, a preferred partner link is more integrated into your overall site, and your partner does the same for you.

You’ll commonly see this kind of advertising on sites owned by companies with more than one website. For example, the Palmer Cash website gives prominent placement to American Hips, an underwear company owned by the t-shirt label. While it certainly makes sense to promote your own businesses this way, the same type of promotion can be used by companies who share a customer demographic, and sell non-competing products. For example, if you sell bicycles but do not sell helmets or bike jerseys, you could choose a preferred partner company that does sell these things. Your site navigation could include a link to your partner’s site encouraging customers to get bike accessories from your partner. Your partner, who sells accessories but not bikes, could provide you with a link incorporated into their site navigation. The benefit here is that you are both marketing to bike enthusiasts, and this cross-promotion activity makes it easier for you to share customers.

Two of the biggest considerations for selecting a preferred partner are:
1. Do you and your preferred partner have a similar audience? Do you both have customers interested in what the other is selling. The more similarly appealing your product lines are to a customer demographic, the better chance you have of this type of marketing working for you.

2. Do you have a similarly sized audience? A company getting 1000 website visitors each day should not choose a preferred partner getting 100 visitors daily. It’s important to form a relationship that’s going to be mutually and equally beneficial.

This type of marketing can be great, but tread with caution before committing to a long term partnership. When developing this type of a relationship with a partner consider a trial period before you commit to anything ongoing. We recommend you agree to exchange links for 30 days at first, and then evaluate the success of the match up before moving forward.

Some other ways preferred partners can promote each other:
- Print ads
- Email newsletters
- Sweepstakes
- Printed promotional materials
- Word of mouth (This works especially well for service based companies,For e because they frequently talk to their customers. For example, if you provide web design services but not marketing, partnering with an online marketer and mentioning each other to your clients is a great way to build your business.)

The concept of working with a cross-promotion partner still seems to be fairly below the radar with a lot of business owners. The small biz and marketing blogs I read usually talk about search marketing, SEO and social media. These are all good things to talk about too but I am always pleased to see cross-promotion getting some buzz too. Today Dosh Dosh posted about creating strategic alliances (AKA cross-promoting or co-branding). You can view the post here.

Today for cross-promotion inspiration I’d like to share Mesh-Box It’s a blog dedicated entirely to co-branding and cross-promotion examples. Although they pretty much just talk about partnerships between large companies there are plenty of ideas here for the small business owner to borrow.