Working with a partner

[deano6410]

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about <a href="http://deanhunt.com/its-time-for-team/">Working as a team</a>. I asked why people don't pool their resources and work as partners in web projects more often.

So I have talked the talk and now I am going to attempt to walk the walk.

I have a friend and contact who has a lot in common with myself, we both work online for a living, we both have a good knowledge of SEO, marketing and general web site promotion and we both enjoy creating new sites. Up until now we have both worked alone on all our projects but all of that is about to change......

Last night we discussed some possible ideas for web sites and I went to bed with the ideas racing around my head. At 5am this morning I created the concept and over the weekend we will be creating the site together.

This is the first time that either of us have worked on a web site as a partnership and personally I am excited and keen to see how it goes.

There are obvious problems to working as a team though:

<strong>Who earns what %?
Who does what?
Who owns the domain?
Who's server do we use?
Who's adsense/yahoo/affiliate accounts do we use?
Who receives the cheques?</strong>

Providing you trust your partner you have a good chance of working all of the above out. We made sure that one person owned the domain and the other person had the site on their server. This means that we both have control of the site. We also have agreed to a 50/50 split of any profits.

The only other potential problem I see is that we both have other projects to do, therefore we can only dedicate x amount of time per week to this project. How does one person know what the other person has done during that week?

The above is one of the problems we will need to overcome, but I feel that the pros far out way the cons.

Advantages of working as a team:

<strong>You can pool resources

You can share knowledge, tricks and tips

You can share the workload (adding content, link building etc...)

It increases the potential amount of investment in the project

You can promote the site via existing web sites

We all make mistakes and our judgement is sometimes off, it is a big plus to have a partner who can step in when you are heading down the wrong path</strong>

I am looking forward to working on this project and I will try and keep you guys n gals updated of any success/failure the project has.

[SimonDance]

That’s what I thought, and it was all positive in the initial stages. I started a project with a dear friend. I at uni in Newcastle and he in Manchester so we could promote it to different groups and really push forward, I felt that I was doing all the work, writing content and updating the site whislt he just waited for his 50%....... I keep calling him and he wouldn’t pick up my calls as I would often be asking about the site. We took a weekend break away together and I decided to let him run the site……

Maybe I ll get into another partnership something, I think they are a god idea..

Rant over

[deano6410]

Both myself and my partner make a living from running web sites. So we know what to expect and it is what we do anyway.

I am sure there will be a few bumps along the way, but aslong as the pros out way the cons then I will be happy.

Thanks for your input.