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I’ve found one of the best ways to grow your business is by building relationships with other businesses.

In other words, build business allies!

So how do you do this?

We’ll follow along and I’ll show you, OK?

One of my favorite ways to build business allies is by networking.

I try to attend as many networking meetings as I can for groups who have similar or concurrent business needs as my business.

So for example, I do a ton of search engine optimization projects for my clients. So what I do is go to meetings where other website designers are hanging out.

Believe it or not, most website designers have no idea how to properly search engine optimize a website.  They know how to make a website beautiful but they don’t necessary know how to driver traffic to websites.

Now before I get a ton of hate mail from all you web designers out there — I’m not saying “ALL” web designers, but I will say a good amount of them for sure. ( By the way, this is not a slam on web designers, we all need to do what we’re good at and as business owners it is important to know you CAN NOT be all things to all people.)

So what I’ll do is contact other website designers in my community and offer my SEO skills to them as an unbundled service. I’ll explain I need to make “X” per client and they can charge whatever they want for my services as long as I make my fee.

On the flip side, if I have a client who wants a certain type of website and I don’t have the time or the expertise, I’ll funnel my client to the web designer for a predetermined fee.

Make sense?

Can you see how I’ve built a powerful business ally and is mutually beneficial for both businesses?

Try to think of some ways you can build allies in your business. How can another businesses benefit greatly from your relationship.

I’d love to hear your ideas or examples of how you might do this in your business so make sure you leave your comments and thoughts below OK?

Now get busy, Bill Parlaman