How To Find Business Partners Online

Learn 5 online ways to find business partners. The methods can help you discover new and profitable business partnerships to grow your business further.

Through New Partners You Achieve New Levels Of Growth

Whether you’re a small business, startup on the rise, or an established corporation seeking profitable business relationships, new business partners is a crucial business strategy to keep growing. 

While this article is mostly focused on gaining other businesses as partners for a business, if you’re a founder of a new venture and seek a cofounder, you can use these strategies to achieve your goals. 

As these strategies are low cost by default and allow scaling to your specific needs, every business type will benefit from this guide. 

But first, let’s discuss the main reasons you should get business partners for your business.

Why You Should Get Business Partners

No one works alone. And all types of businesses require partnerships to function and to grow and achieve their highest potential. 

There are many types of business partnerships you should want to get to your business. 

For example, including partners for: 

  • Sales and Distribution
  • B2B Marketing
  • Problem-solving and innovation
  • Cooperation and alliances 
  • And anything else you might need

The right combination of people and businesses coming together at the right time is indeed a method to achieve growth that benefits all parties. 

Nurturing these relationships through mutual benefit, companies can compete on a larger scale than they could alone. 

As we have the why, let’s start finding business partners online. 

Where To Find Business Partners Online? 

Online is by far the fastest way to research and find business partners that match your needs. 

Not only will searching online will save you time and money, but it enables direct contact with partners quickly, and through filtering, you can find the right type of partners from get-go. 

We will list five methods that you can use to find your next business partner, whatever your specific needs are. 

Some methods below will require you to understand your industry and your direct and not so direct competitors to find more easily business partners that have shown interests by partnering with your competitors that they might be open for partnering up.

To start your business partner search, start with Google by researching with relevant keywords about your industry or the specific problems you want your future partner to solve.

List everything somewhere so you can use the list later easily as you will need the details to use the following methods more in-depth.  

Follow Business Influencers 

You would’ve probably found by now some exciting blogs and influencers on Google. 

Now would be the time to follow these blogs and influencers regularly. Please take a close look at what companies and individuals they share. 

By following these influencers, you can always find new and exciting businesses to partner with that are already established in your industry. 

As these companies get mentioned by these influencers, you can contact them right away to achieve the things you want. 

Alternatively, you can partner with them as they already have shown to partner with companies like yours. 

Influencer marketing by itself can be a great source of new customers and brand awareness.  

LinkedIn and Social Media

The apparent path of finding suitable companies to seek partnership is using Linkedin, the social media of professionals and businesses. 

LinkedIn offers many tools and options for you to find the professionals and the businesses they represent to whom you can send a message and provide your partnership. 

To use LinkedIn more effectively for this purpose, you would get better results if you’d know the companies and even the people you want to find. 

If you use the other strategies in this list, LinkedIn can be an alternative for directly contacting these businesses and the people running them. 

But while LinkedIn is superior for finding business partners across various industries, it isn’t the only one. 

You can find business partners through every social media channel. The key is to understand that every business uses different channels for their variety of needs. 

For example, you won’t probably find business partners through a Facebook Page that the company uses for customer support. 

But social media offers groups and forums for like-minded people, where your future partner may exist and could be an excellent source for these leads. 

It just requires a bit of research to discover where and what your industry usually uses.

The Backlink Research Method

A backlink is a link from a website to another, and when it comes to finding partnerships, researching competitors’ backlink profiles, you are more likely to find willing partners easily. 

The effectiveness of this strategy largely depends on the source data you use in the beginning. A large competitor will have a vast backlink profile you to search from, as a small competitor’s backlink profile might not yield the result you wanted. 

But in both cases, you can find exciting business partnerships you might not have thought about before. 

Usually, these backlinks to your competitors come organically, meaning if you were providing something of value to them, and you could gain the partnerships to your side more easily. 

A backlink is an essential part of search engine optimization. Getting business partners to link to your website will increase your authority and ranking on search engines. 

Whether you’re looking to get a backlink to improve your organic traffic, or find the right business partners to grow your business, follow these steps. 

How To Find Business Partners Through Backlink Profiles

Begin with an SEO tool of your choice. 

Many tools can help you discover your competitors’ backlink profiles and if you have such a tool at your disposal, use it. 

In this example, we will use Ubersuggest to find the backlink profiles of your competitors. 

The first thing is to search with your competitor’s domain (URL).

Search Backlinks With Ubersuggest

After the search, click on “BACKLINKS” to open the backlink profile of your competitor.

inc com backlinks

Then search and analyze if you see any interesting websites and businesses that could be your next business partner. 

How To Find Business Partners Through Backlink Profiles

Searching through backlinks, you will also discover a lot of noise, meaning not every backlink that you find will be helpful. But it offers a quick way to scan hundreds and even thousands of websites that could work as partners. 

Just remember what you were seeking in the first place, and you will discover potential businesses to contact in no time. 

Online Events

As of 2020, many traditional events are becoming online, and knowing which of them is vital to you helps you find new partnerships through these networks.

Being active and participating in online events, you can connect with many partners simultaneously, and it also increases the discoverability of you and your business. 

Look for online events that: 

  • Are industry standards
  • Have social interactions between businesses
  • Look for sponsoring and advertising opportunities
  • It allows direct contacting, and lets enterprises discuss openly with one another. 

The method is more helpful for businesses if the events have modernized itself for networking. Attending these events should come out of a need first, understand what you want instead of blindly seeking partnerships. 

Online events can work as a marketing channel if you can find your target audiences within said events. 

Learn all the marketing channels available for businesses.

Using Online Ads To Your Advantage 

Through advanced targeting options, you can target specific companies and groups interested in your offerings. 

You can create specific landing pages for different business relationships that you could use to drive traffic and conversions and pick and choose from that group for your next project. 

Say you were looking for a company to solve a particular problem that could help your business grow. You could create a landing page that explains the problem vaguely and have a simple contact form or another way of contact and then push paid ads towards that page. 

And collect the necessary leads and choose the best candidates. 

Depending on your target audiences and how they search or interact online, you can use different ad solutions to target them in the best ways possible. 

But it doesn’t matter from where the traffic comes in the end, as long as you have proper web analytics installed (Google Analytics, and FB Pixel to track the performance of these campaigns) on your landing page. 

Some examples of online ad platforms in your toolkit: 

  • Google Ads
  • Facebook Ads
  • LinkedIn Ads

Conclusion

These were a collection of five different strategies you can use to find business partners online to grow your business. 

There are, of course, plenty more, and the guide you just read will give you a headstart to finding the most relevant partners to your situation. 

When you find the companies and professionals you want to connect with, you need to understand how to connect with them.

Remember that everyone bases their business relationships upon the mutual benefits it provides, don’t expect to gain without giving something in return.

The more enticing your offer could be for your potential partner, the more likely they will accept and work with you.