JV Recruiting: Joint Ventures Partnerships and Affiliates

What are joint ventures?

Historically, JVs or Joint Enterprise Partners refers to individuals who joined forces to collaborate and partake in a business venture. Today, particularly in the field of Internet Marketing (IM), it has a slightly different connotation. "JV" has become abbreviation for "affiliate," or someone who refers traffic to your offer in exchange for a commission on each sale. To be honest, this has created some confusion because, even with IM, a JV partnership in the conventional sense is still possible. For instance, if you've created a video course and an ebook but lack the expertise or resources to get it online, you may partner with someone who can handle web design and development and split profits 50/50. The fact that those two JV partners typically begin recruiting "affiliates" to drive traffic to their product while referring to those affiliates as "JVs" further complicates matters, especially when those two JV partners divide earnings AFTER initial distributions to "their JVs" (affiliates). This occurs frequently in instant messaging, and it's tough to decipher what someone means when they say "would you like to be my JV?" However, for whatever reason, the majority of the time, a person just means affiliate. To be honest, the IM community made a terrible error by confusing the concepts.