
People of all sorts are looking to promote and share their profiles on-line - some are happy to share, swap profiles, banners etc. others think that you have strangled one of their pets/kids if you so much as mention you are on-line to network and/or you dare leave a link or banner to it, they class you as a spammer performing illegal, unspeakable acts on their page!
I have a slightly different approach to it, maybe it's because I started out on traffic exchanges and FFA lists years ago when if you got spammed, it was kind of more serious and it either meant a hacker had blasted your phone companies servers out of the sky with a rapid fire wave of 1000's of e-mail attacks and/ or a trip to PC hosptial after it possibly also fried your machine during the process.
OR or it meant a 'gang' of driveby spyware merchants had got together and pounced on your helpless PC, infesting it with worms and non stop "pop up windows" containing naughty 'adult material' that would make a dock worker faint
- so I guess when I see someone whining about a contact
actually contacting them or getting highly offended and screaming SPAM if someone dare leave a link or banner I get the urge to tell them to shut up already and quit moaning, you never had it so good! - I remember the Internet when it was all fields (academic, advert free and open source uptopia - if you liked that kind of thing)
I still believe in certain rules of taste - like you don't add a massive advert or collection of "matrix explosion" mlm banners to someone elses profile or group without a personal explanation of some kind like they said "hey Bob can you put your top 10 favorite ground floor matrix explosions on my profile I want to give myself a seizure..."
and you pay attention to the type of person you are dealing with like maybe they do actually have fits from flashing banners - and they might benefit more for a link to some banner blocker software to keep them healthy while surfing...
Another Example - if a person is selling sunflower seeds to grow sun flowers - a good text link or pretty picture with a "hello I saw on your profile that you are selling sunflower seeds, I'm selling these flower pots with daisies on that would look nice in a flower garden ..." etc. or a text link to a blog article about flowers and an ebook selling "how to keep your sunflowers looking healthy all year..."
It doesn't take much extra thought or time to pair up/ cross match products and services so they compliment a persons page rather than make it overly flashy and ugly.
Just my "two cents" - and here 20 Ning groups (my own included) where networking with articles and links should be alright to post on your profile page and your own blog.
So really it's just a matter of seeing what the main subject of the Ning network is about then going through your affiliate folder for articles and programs that match / fit in alright with other items on the website.
Personally if a network won't let me add a link of some kind to the end of my blogs I tend to quit those networks, as there are plenty of other places you can post that doesn't call in the guards for posting to your own blog.