What is a Blog? A Blog, or a Web Log, is an online diary where you can post your thoughts and keep it as a private journal or you can place it where your readers can get together and place entries.

When blog first came, it was adopted by teenagers and later by adults to write about their daily lives. Then writers and journalist entered blog world writing about books and investigative reports. But, there's a few people invented "Business Blog".

Suddenly blogs started appearing on business websites all over Internet after people discover search engine like Google and Yahoo were displaying blogs. The impact was huge.

As a result, people starting creating blogs hopping to get more prospective customers to visit their websites.

User Friendly - Blogs are easy to update and are automatically formatted as you upload them. The easiest way to get started is to create a free account in www.blogger.com. Blogger is part of Google and it offer dozens of templates which you can customize by changing layouts and colors. It allows you to publish your blog without need to know about HTML or FrontPage and FTP etc... All you need to do is write your own content.

If they are done right Joint Ventures can help you start making money almost immediately online.

If you're not sure what a joint venture is, let me explain - here's how it works in very simplistic form :

* A has a product which he wants to get to market

* B has a list which targets just right market for A's product

* A finds B and sets up a Joint Venture with B

* B promotes A's product to his list

* A and B both share profits from sales of product

It's a total win/win arrangement for them both.

But where do you find people to JV with?

Identifying potential Joint Venture (JV) partners for your Niche Business is relatively easy online as there are so many places to locate them. Here's a few examples :

* keyword search on major search engines e.g. Google

* e-zine directories e.g. The Directory of Ezines

* business directories e.g. Business.com

* topic organized directories e.g. DMOZ.org

To do job properly you need to take an organised and structured approach to finding your potential JV partners. Set aside a specific amount of time each day to seek them out. Collect as much information as you can on them and collate it in a spreadsheet. The sort of information you should collect is:

* Contact information - name, email, telephone etc.

* Web site URL

* A brief description of their web site

Once you've collected a decent sized list, it's time to make contact.

>> Contacting Potential JV Partners <<

As you go through your data, you'll see that some sites contain detailed contact information, including a phone number, while others only post their email address.

You should make contact first by phone whenever possible. Not only does this approach show your sincerity, it will cut back on time you spend waiting for business owner to wade through all of their emails and respond to yours.

Your first phone call should be direct and personal. Make sure you have your target's website open in your browser to view as you speak to him. Your introduction should be something like this: