In the world of online marketing—as opposed to law—a "joint venture," or simply JV, is a relationship in which two people find mutual interest and benefit in promoting and building one another's businesses. I used to teach a course on this, and I can't tell you how many times I'd see people approaching it in the wrong way.

Just like all aspects of internet marketing, it has more to do with understanding the subtleties of what make us human than any clever tactics. So when finding new potential JV partners, you'll want to keep these three keywords top-of-mind:

• Relevance
• Respect
• Relationship

Let's break them down one-by-one:

Relevance refers to the alignment between your message and the “gestalt”, or overall interests, style, and aesthetic of the person you want to contact. Will your idea help or interest their readership? Is it peripheral or directly related to their core content and mission?

Respect refers to the manner in which you must approach your contact. He or she is a person who has a busy schedule, family, friends, hopes, dreams, empathy. In other words, they live in the real world, just like you. And if they know a lot of people, they're really busy. This is all to say that you want to contact them with a brief, respectful, straightforward, non-hyped, and personable email. Don't construct a sales-y sounding message. Write them as you would any reasonable human being; keep it brief, and simply ask if they’re interested to know more or speak further.

Relationship refers to the fact that whenever you reach out to someone, you're forming, even if only briefly, a human, or emotionally felt, bond. Email, as Seth Godin says, is cheap to send, expensive to open; that is, it's no sweat off your back to ask someone to feature your content, but it takes time, consideration, and contemplation on their end to decide whether it's appropriate to engage in a relationship with you.

Everyone's human, and no one is ultimately immune to the most common responses and reactions that are intrinsic to our humanity: the desire for empathy, for appreciation, for gratitude, for opportunity, for reciprocity. Realize that, to an extent, you're placing an emotional burden on your contact by requesting something of them. Be considerate and realize that you're dealing with a real human being who's just like you.

The post above was excerpted from our new book, Evolutionary Marketing, which you can download free here.