Here’s a tip: If you’re recruiting partners for a product launch, or you want to invite me to join your affiliate program, you just want to ask for help in marketing and promotion. That’s not a “joint venture”.

A joint venture is where 2 individuals or business entities are going to a deeper level of cooperation and collaboration – a prime example is my buddies Amit Mehta and Zac Johnson‘s newly-launched Magnetic Poetry Facebook Application.

There’s joint sharing and investment in product development and marketing, the partners might even form a new business entity to manage the business.

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On the other hand, if you’re looking for affiliates, you’re recruiting affiliates.

If you drop the term “joint venture” and misuse it, you lose a number of points right off the bat.

If in doubt, check out the Wikipedia definition of “joint venture“

Initially set up for the business community to network, share contacts and recommend acquaintances for open job positions, it appears the site has been attempting to expand its scope.

It is a presence on the Internet though, with an Alexa rank of 149 and Google PageRank 7.

Some negative points against it include: Adding Google AdSense ad blocks detracts from its corporate image, as has some discussions in its questions and answers section which seems to have devolved into a discussion of network marketing opportunities and online scams.

Add to that the seemingly limited interaction and communication functions and you might have the receipe for a social network which could be a “killer app” for corporate headhunters, but something that merely stumbles along for the rest of us.

Admittedly, LinkedIn has helped me connect with a couple of university mates, but to squeeze some networking juice out of your profile requires some “out of the box” thinking.

Let’s look at your profile:

The first thing you need to do is to change the hideous: http://www.linkedin/in/473YDSJ3U3 profile URL to something like: http://www.linkedin/in/andrewwee.

If you don’t already have a blog, submitted articles or press releases or have a Squidoo lens or Hubpage up, perhaps this will help you rank for your name.

Be sure to include your profile details, including specializations.

Instead of “content developer” or “writer”, here’s your chance to mention that you’re a “direct response copywriter” or “advertorial writer” or “technical writer”.

Besides making your profile more relevant to human readers, the keywords will help others searching for a specialist to find you more easily too.

So you might list your specialities and perhaps get a job offer direct from an employer. But more likely a headhunter will be farming LinkedIn’s userbase for specific profiles for their database, such as “Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) markeitng specialist”.

Where I think Internet Marketers will benefit more is to find joint venture partners or collaborators who might fill in the missing piece of the puzzle for a project they’re working on.

From the demographics I’ve seen, I’d expect that LinkedIn users would be pretty computer savvy, be technically competent and have a higher education.

To enhance your “findability”, include relevant keywords in your profile so you’ll be more easily found:

Load up on the “groups and associations” and you’ll find others in your community too.

As the profile has pretty limited virtual real estate, you’d probably gain the biggest benefit by adding in your blog and website (and be sure to have a “contact me” link on them).

In the social networking game, I think the adage, it’s not how many people you know, it’s WHO you know, still rings true.

Network long and prosper.

A tactic among spam marketers seems to be placing innocent comments on blog posts to do a recon on the comment procedures on a blog.

It typically involves a generic comment like “Hi” or “Nice blog”, and it may have an originating domain, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Which seems innocent and you might be tempted to approve the comment.

But again, the blog is a reflection of your personal branding. What’s it say about you, if the ‘best’ comments to your posts are along the lines of “nice blog” or “way to go!”

Even if it was posted by a somewhat naive/new reader with the best of intentions, it’s in your best interests to weed those out.

The nature of comments and trackbacks are to continue the conversation or build on the dialogue. If it does nothing to achieve that purpose, I’d suggest to delete without mercy.

If the person is especially flagant about it, label their comment as spam, and your filters will take care of it.

My blog moderation procedures:

• My support staff spends about 30 minutes each day, going through the comments which are pending (all comments are human moderated), and check the originating URL.
• I’ve found that blog registration is an added layer of inconvenience and creates barriers to an ongoing dialogue, so we’re done away with that.
• Comments are usually moderated within 12 hours of submission, though we shoot for 6 hours.
• If a comment contains little content, it will likely not be published.

Link dropping: In my opinion, it’s very bad to drop links in your comments, unless they’re relevant. My tech team has been active on dial-up BBSes, IRC, MMPOGs, online game networks, social networking sites and forums since the early 80s. They’re pretty good at identifying link bait. Unless you’re proficient at dropping links, they’d usually be edited out, or the comment deleted altogether.

Publicity whores beware: On the average, we receive about 3-5 comments each day, which would have been better submitted through the contact form. These are generally of the biz-op or joint venture category.

Take heed if you adopt this as a standard practise. It sends the signal that you’re:

• New at this, and haven’t figured out the difference between a comment and a contact/mailto form yet.
• Hankering for some publicty
• Using some questionable mass blog comment JV strategy (which tells us you really haven’t put much thought into targeting your partners)
• All of the above

We might still have the chance to work together, though you’d likely be flagged as somewhat ‘questionable’ in our books, and a comfortable working level will take longer to establish.