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“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind ?”  I absolute love the New Years Eve / Day holiday time.  It’s a great ending to my favorite part of the year.  Christmas, followed by my birthday, and then the culmination of a years of efforts – New Years Eve.

A new year brings brand new opportunities.  It’s a time to reflect on your past and prepare for your future.  As a business owner it is my favorite time because I get to wipe the slate, clean the books, and plan a whole new year of events, ideas, and celebrate methods of new growth.  I get an opportunity to reflect upon my past, and use the lessons taught in 2011 to take me into 2012.  It’s a great feeling to start new and fresh, and new year is just that.  It’s time to not only prepare, but create our futures.  We as people decide to change our lives this day every year, we all pick a goal that we hope to take with us in to the new year to better our own lives and our own persons.

It’s important for us as people to make sure we are on a constant path of self enrichment and betterment.  It is up to ourselves to change our lives, we can’t sit and wait for someone else to do it for us, and this goal setting that New Years brings with it is one of the most profound parts of our existence.  Reflecting and taking action and responsibility.

Why?

Why do we feel the need to wait?

You are in control of your destiny, you are the only one who is empowered to make changes to your life.  Why wait?

A couple of quotes come to mind, both from music because I live every minute of my life with music, it is a deep passion of mine.

“You’ve got no one to blame for your unhappiness” – Wilson Phillips

Ok so the song is cheesy, but this line really sticks out.  You control your life and how you live it, if you wish something on yourself, then do something to make it happen! You can’t wait for someone or something to come and do it for you.

“You don’t have to wait until tomorrow, to resolve for change today” – Nate York

This is of great significance for me and basically sums up what I am trying to convey here.  I really should have made a blog post with just that one line.

If there is something you want, something you want to change, something you have been wanting to do.

Do it.  don’t wait for New Years day to plan to better yourself, why wait? Make resolutions, work towards bettering your life on New Years Day, and every day that follows.

First off, I’m not here to tell you that some relationships are more important than others, because you need to be focusing 100% on ALL relationships, from big timers to small flies, it really comes down to mutual respect.  However, there has been some discussion about JV Relationships not being important, and JV’s are dead, etc, etc, and I wanted to combat that and emphasize how not only are JV Relationships important, they are probably the most important tool you can have for building your online business, especially if you are new to the field.

If you own a network of 15 sites, with over 100k members, sure, maybe you don’t need a JV, maybe your circle of influence is big enough that you can pull enough people on your own.. even if you got a terrible response rate of only 1% to your promotional emails, that’s still 10k people, which is a huge beginning.

The rest of us, however, do.  We don’t have giant advertising budgets where we can blow the money, we don’t have gigantic memberships or lists with hundreds of thousands of people we can contact, we have to stand up and admit that we need help!  Build relationships! Help Eachother!  That’s what JV’s are!

A ‘JV’ is simply an exchange, it stands for ‘Joint Venture’ in that you help me, I help you.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  If you have a list of 100 people, and you’ve built a relationship with someone who’s morals and ideals are in tune with yours, and they also have a list of 100 people. It’s pretty obvious where I am going with this, Help each other!  If you are getting that same 1% response rate (I certainly hope it will be higher!) that is 1 person, well now you also have that other persons 1%, now you’ve doubled your response!

So what’s the problem with that?  Why is it given this evil connotation?  JV Relationships are a great way to help each other grow. Don’t abuse your relationships with your subscribers by emailing them all the time about all of your friends things, but provide them value!  Is this something that will help your members, subscribers, and friends build their business? Does the owners message coincide with yours?  Then what is the problem? What’s so bad awful and evil and ‘Guru’ about helping each other?

Sorry if this all sounds a bit ranty, but saying, especially to new people in our industry that are struggling to build their business, that JV Relationships aren’t needed, is a bit under handed.

The natural progression of serious affiliate marketers is to go from promoting other people’s products, to eventually creating their own, whether it just be an ebook, or a membership site.  The Relationships you build now, today, will help you be ready when you take that step.  If you do not have a solid launch where you can build that membership community, you will struggle with your membership site.  If you can get some help with your friends with whom you’ve already built a solid relationship with, it would be crazy not to.

If you are building a house, and you are building the foundation of it, one block at a time, slowly over a long period of time, you will never even get the foundation done to be able to build the house, if you can call up your friends and have them help you lay that foundation, you will have a solid platform to build that house on.

If you’ve boughten in to the flashy hype that JV Relationships are no longer necessary, or that they are unimportant, try and launch a product completely on your own, as a new owner with little or no advertising income, and see how far you can get.  JV Relationships are absolutely essential to building the foundation of your product from which it can grow.  How many trees can you plant in an hour?  How many trees can you and 5 of your closest friends plant in an hour?

If you would like to build a JV Partnership with Insidmal Design LLC, here is the form to do so: http://insidmaldesign.com/jv.php Let’s help each other grow.