When forming a joint venture with another business, your most important step is the approach you use when contacting your potential business partner.

Participating in a joint venture with another prominent business can be extremely beneficial to ones business. The biggest reason why most webmasters do not get a reply back when sending a proposal, is the approach they use.

I cannot begin to tell you how many proposals I personally have received that get deleted almost instantly. There are some that address the proposal with "Dear Webmaster" or as simple as just "Hi". Some do not tell me anything about themselves or their business (I guess I'm suppose to guess at this one). While others may be run-on, have misspellings, or just plainly unprofessional.

A joint venture is not as simple as lets say a link exchange. It requires a little more research and commitment by both parties.

Although you can send a joint venture through standard mail, consider sending your proposal by email in your first approach. If they have provided their phone number in their contact information, let them know that after a few days, you would like to follow up with a personal phone call to go over the details. Stipulate a time frame that you would like to call and asking them to reply back if the time frame is inappropriate.

Here are some guidelines when sending a proposal by email:

Be precise and clear with your proposal.

Make sure to personalize your email by using their name.

Write an email that shows professionalism and trust.

Complement the positive points you found on their website.

Include information about yourself, your website, your customer base and the services and products you offer.

Point out how you feel your customer base would have an interest in his/her products or services, as well as their customers having an interest in yours.

Highlight how both of you can benefit financially from this joint venture as well as gain added exposure.

Be sure that all spelling and grammar is correct.

When contacting a potential business owner on a joint venture, the key is to highlight the financial benefit to both parties.

If you are approaching a joint venture whereas the other party is just an endorser of your products, (such as an ezine publisher) a larger percentage of each sale should go to the publisher. In this case you have to keep in mind that they are doing all the work while endorsing your product to his/her established customer base.

Once you have found a party that is willing to form a joint venture with you, you may want to consider putting an agreement in writing and getting it signed by your new business partner. Just make sure you outline each of the terms in the agreement, such as precisely what you both agree to, terms, commission, time frame of the venture, how each of you are to get paid, etc.

John Kovacs is the CEO and founder of "A Home Business Opportunity". His website mainly focuses on supplying free marketing tips, resources and support for home startup businesses and Internet marketing. To get a step-by-step guide in building an online business, visit http://www.ahomebusinessopportunity.net