Health and fitness product creators have a habit of working by themselves. This is not unusual, and may be partly due to the fact that many of them get their start offline working directly with their clients to help them meet their health and fitness goals. But eventually it dawns on the product creator that they may be able to significantly expand their business by taking their product online and reaching out to the huge consumer base that it represents.

It is usually at this point that they get a bit of a shock and discover that working online is a whole lot different than working offline. Instead of the one-on-one interaction that they are used to dealing with when meeting with their clients, now they are broadcasting into the void and often finding that the void is not responding. The internet, they discover, can be a lonely place for a health and fitness marketer.

Whereas offline they may have built up a client base that trusts them, when they go online they are effectively starting over from scratch. Now they have to prove their worth all over again, one customer at a time. For many, it is enough to drive them offline again. The thought of having to master article writing, web site building, and the art of site monetization are enough to make one wonder whether it is all worth the effort.

But it need not be as difficult to pull off as you might imagine. Not if you can find the right people to help guide you. Perhaps even the right people to take some of the work off your hands in exchange for a piece of the pie. Sure, you can pay people to do the work for you if you can afford it. But many cannot afford to go that route, and instead they look more closely at the idea of joint ventures. The joint venture, or JV, is a collaboration of two or more parties who share the workload of a project, preferring to concentrate on just that part of the work that they are able to do more easily, either because they have the experience, or because they have the natural talent for the work.

The joint venture can achieve what the work of a single party cannot achieve on its own.

So, if you are an exercise video producer who has no trouble creating good exercise videos, but you are terrible when it comes to putting together a website that can actually convince people to buy the videos, then a joint venture might be the way forward. You might think that you can simply outsource the design work, but the reality is that if you work with someone who has experience in the niche that you are selling to, your likelihood of success will be a good deal higher.

This means that you may want to try to team up with someone in the same exercise niche as yourself, but who might be marketing a completely different product - exercise clothing, for example, or an information product that relates to losing weight through the same exercises that appear in your own videos. If the other party already knows how to build a web site and get clients, but they have never had any experience producing video, then a joint venture between the two of you might make sense. You can each achieve something that neither party might have succeeded with alone.

This is the idea behind Carolyn Hansen's joint venture membership database for vendors in the health and fitness industry. If you would like to learn more about joint ventures in this area, and get to know other health and fitness professionals, get yourself across to Carolyn's site and join up today. Admission is free.