In this tutorial you'll learn how to find Joint Venture partners. There are several ways that you can do this. One way is to use keywords using the Google Keyword Tool and do a targeted search.

A second way is to use a program called Copernic, a program that will allow you to do highly targeted searching. The program comes in 3 versions: Free, Professional and Corporate. For our purposes, the free version will do the trick. In this article, we'll look at the topic: Pie To get started, click on Search: New (or CTRL+N). In the dialog box, you have several options for searching, which are: All the words, any of the words or the exact phrase. Directly below that is a popup which governs categories. As you can see, there are many options. When I do a search I like to cover the broadest possible area, so I set this to: The Web.

The primary keyword for my niche, which is: pie baking. Watch how that brings up quite a few web sites. Notice on the right that each site is ranked, with the most relevant sites appearing at the top of the search. Hovering your mouse over one of these listings gives you more information on the site. If you want to visit the site, hover your mouse over the URL, right-click on it and in the pop-up window that appears, scroll to: Open in New Window: Web Document. In my case, this opens the web page in Internet Explorer.

Before we go further, you'll need to visit Alexa.com Alexa is a site that gives you important ranking information about sites, including backlink information and more. Before you can take advantage of this information, you need to install the Alexa toolbar. For best results, I recommend that you install in on Internet Explorer. I've had issues with the toolbar not working properly with Firefox. Once you have the toolbar installed, we'll head back to Copernic. At this point, we're going to go deeper with our search. It's fine to search for the primary key phrase, but that's not going to be enough to find joint venture partners. Instead, what you're looking for are sites where they're getting a lot of traffic. To find that, you'll need to add more keywords to your primary search. Some good ones to use are: ezines, blogs and newsletters.

To save time I've already created a search using pie baking blogs. Looking at the results, I liked what I saw with the Allrecipes listing and I decided to check it out on Alexa. Now that we have the site up in Alexa, I want you to look at this number in the box at the top of the browser. This is the ranking given to the site by Alexa. The smaller the number, the better the ranking. To put things in perspective, if the site ranks at 3 million, you wouldn't want to work with them as a JV partner because they're probably somewhere near the back of the search engine rankings. Instead, to find a good JV partner look at rankings of 300,000 or less.

Now that you see this number in Alexa, we need to find out more information about the site, so we'll click on the number. This takes us to Alexa, which displays important information about the site. Among other things, you see the world traffic rank and the country rank. Again this is one of the factors in determining whether this site would be a good match for your JV efforts. Other things to look at are the number of backlinks to the site. As you scroll down the list, you get information about those sites. Some of them might turn out to be good JV partners.

Next, have a look at search analytics and scroll down the page. The first thing you'll see are the top queries from search traffic. As you go down further, you'll see High Impact Search Queries. This is useful, not just for the keywords, but it gives you more info about what's popular on the site, so when it comes time to write your JV intro letter, you'll have lots of information.

The last thing is to make sure you have all the contact info for this site for writing your queries later. When saving this information, I recommend using one of two methods. The first is if you have Acrobat installed on your computer. Use the Print to PDF file option and save all these pages as PDF files in a folder. The second option is to use an image capturing program such as SnagIt, to capture the information, so you can refer to it at a later date. This is all information you'll need for your joint ventures. More is explained in the chapter on Joint ventures, as well as what you need to know when sending out JV requests.