However, no man is an island and while you can work with minimal manpower in your online business, to be truly successful, you have to work with other people whether you like it or not.

This allows you to leverage off their resources that you have limitations on.

There is a Chinese saying by Sun Tze in “The Art of War”: “Know thyself, know thy enemy. A hundred battles fought, a hundred battles won.”

My point being, do you know what they are looking for? Subscribe to their newsletter, check out their website and get a feel of what kind of content they publish. This takes time unfortunately but it is far superior than a shotgun approach.

Look at it this way. If you are looking for a job and you used the same resume and cover letter each time for each different company, what are the chances of them thinking you are a good fit?

However, that being said, do not spend too much time fretting the details. There is a fine line between getting it done and being obsessed over the details.

So to fine tune this, you need a system for each approach to each person for a partnership.

1) Find out more about them. What do they want to achieve in their business? Can you offer something to them?

2) Give to receive. A gift of skills, services, friendship, etc. will often be reciprocated. (The barter system still works.)

3) Keep it simple. Plan and implement a system to make things simple for them to help you. Whatever is it you need their help with (one thing at a time), put things in place to help them to help you. Find out all the details they need and put in on a silver platter for them so all they need to do is decide to push a button for you.

For example: If you need them to send an email to their list, offer something to them, perhaps monetary incentive, draft the email for them and promise results.

4) Think of Win-Win situations. Never otherwise. If either yourself or your partner feels cheated, the relationship will be extremely short-lived. Long term relationships are essential to your success. Heard of compound interest? It works the same way, in this case, intangible benefits which may pay off more in the long term.