Joint ventures sound almost foreboding, but they represent a straightforward means to get past some of the roadblocks that you may be experiencing while trying to build your online business. A joint venture between two or more parties need not be an overly complicated endeavor. In fact, a joint venture could be as simple as two vendors agreeing to recommend the newsletter of the other vendor to their own clients. This is known as an adswap. Adswaps are growing more popular as vendors look for ways to swell their prospective customer lists.A slightly more complex joint venture is the gift giveaway, where a large number of contributors come together and agree to provide a free gift in exchange for the opportunity to have thousands of potential subscribers consider their offer and perhaps decide to join the newsletter in exchange for receiving the gift. This is kind of like a massive adswap, but in this case the contributors do not need to know each other – they are operating under the umbrella of the person who put the gift giveaway event together.Now, running a gift giveaway is not necessarily straightforward. So the person hoping to run the event might find they have to partner with someone who has experience running giveaways. So this becomes a form of joint venture, and is exactly what I found myself doing to help grow my own list of prospective clients.The one obstacle to doing joint ventures is finding people with similar interests as your own. As with most other business ventures in life, the more connected you are the easier this becomes. So how do you get connected? This was a big problem, I discovered. When I began looking around for communities of like minded health and fitness professionals I came up short. So I found myself scanning the web sites of prospective vendors who I thought I might approach for a joint venture. Finding email addresses and contact names this way is not easy!So instead of having to do this repeatedly I decided that it would be worth my effort to build my own database of health and fitness contacts. Better yet, we can all benefit from the initial work required to build the database. In fact, the reason I am writing this very article is because I am hoping you are one of the people who ought to join my list of prospective health and fitness joint venture partners. If you think you might be, get yourself across to my site and sign up. I will even give you a free copy of the eBook “Attract More Health And Fitness Affiliates” to help you get started convincing people to help sell more of your stuff.