How to Network: 13 Easy Actions You Should do First
Networking is very difficult especially if you are shy. It’s not easy developing connections with people especially if you are thinking of doing business with them.But there are a few easy actions that you could do to attract people instead of them being attracted to you.
In some of these actions, you might do a little bit of approaching people, but you won’t necessarily force contact with them.
These are a few actions you should do first when networking:
Note: These information were based on actually winning over contacts from other countries as well.
13 Easy Actions You Should do First
1. Start with Your Personal Circle of Contacts2. Neighbors
3. Coworkers
4. Social Media
5. Online Meetups
6. Your Contact’s Contacts
7. Always Send a Friend/Catch Up Invitation
8. Own Website
9. YouTube Channel
10. LinkedIn
11. Forums
12. Establish Real and Lasting Connections
13. Don’t Saturate Yourself
Final Words
The Details:
1. Start with Your Personal Circle of Contacts
You should do an inventory of your contact list. Time passes by quickly and people might become more or less important socially. This includes the people you already know.
If you have grandparents, thru age they would have acquired a lot of contacts. If they’re still working, they would most likely be occupying senior positions now or already know a lot of people in senior positions.
It is time you swallow a bit of your pride and ask for help from them and even to your own family. Even your own children might know people who could be important to you.
When I first graduated and with little experience, I found it hard to get my first job and it was my father who introduced me to a contact who helped me get a job. It might have taken me even longer to find a job if not for the help of my father.
If you have maintained good relations with your existing contacts, they would be more than likely to be more receptive to you if not at least listen to you.
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2. Your Neighbors
A lot of people today lead insulated lives. They can be so insulated that they don’t even know their own neighbors.
It might seem hard to know your neighbors especially if you are just new to your place, but simple gestures like smiling at your neighbors and even a friendly greeting can warm up your relations with them.
There would be neighbors of yours who would not warm up to you despite your warm smiles and even friendly greeting, but those who do would more than likely be your first contacts in the neighborhood.
In time, after your repeated smiles and friendly greetings, your neighbors might be the first one to talk to you. For the most part, it takes time for people to warm up to other people.
So don’t stop smiling and greeting your neighbors despite the fact that you might suffer rejections. It’s a numbers game and all you have to do is to smile and greet your neighbors in a friendly manner. Even a head gesture for a greeting would do.
In fact, you should do this not only with your neighbors, but to all people you meet. Smiles have a way of disarming people and removing hostility.
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3. Coworkers
You spend a lot of your time at work, but I hope you don’t spend all of your time working. You should also socialize with your coworkers as much as you can besides working hard.
Begin with coworkers in close proximity to you like someone working near your desk or teammates at work.
This should be a simple task as their physical proximity to you and work social relations makes them close to you.
Lunch, coffee and even smoking breaks provide good opportunities for socializing. Don’t waste the opportunity, mix idle chitchat with information sourcing.
You could ask your coworker about their family and even personal life and then thru this gather information which might be helpful to your networking.
For example, if your coworker tells you about their partner or even children, you would gradually know useful information like who their partners and children work for and even important people that they know.
If you are a bit of a drinker, you would surely find coworkers who sometimes like to drink after work.
Being a male, former smoker and an occasional drinker, I could definitely say that nothing bonds male and even female coworkers together than smoking and drinking together.
But I don’t advise you to do this if you’re not a smoker or a drinker. Nothing turns many people off more than dishonest people who would do anything just to earn the graces of other people.
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4. Social Media
In this day and age, this is how many people find and connect with contacts. Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on have made online connecting very easy.
But don’t make the mistake that all your connections, subscribers and followers on social media platforms are your contacts.
For the most part, your contacts on social media platforms are there to connect with you only online.
If you ask for money from them or ask help with finding a job and similar things, a great number of them would likely be on no help to you and might even shun you.
But don’t be disappointed. There is a reason why it is so easy to get connections, followers, subscribers and so on in social media, because it is more geared for casual connections and you don’t have to take them seriously.
But there would be people who would warm up to you sufficiently online that they actually become real friends and even business contacts.
In this case, it is quality over quantity. Your aim is not to gain the most number of online contacts, but to get only good quality contacts. Unfortunately, many people still make this mistake.
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5. Online Meetups
I highly recommend the social media platform Meetup. This is not your common social media platform where you post something and people would post their comments to your post.
As the name implies, Meetup is a meetup platform. You actually get to join with groups of people in their online face to face meetup courtesy of Zoom.
Alternatively, you could also connect with people in person. Meetup actually organizes face to face meetups in actual locations with like minded people who want to really talk with someone.
You can join business, social groups and any kind of group in Meetup. You can even talk with groups from outside your own state and country.
Meetup actually enabled me to talk face to face with actual businesspeople with no difficulty at all. In fact, I was able to pitch my business plan to actual business professionals and gained actual responses.
I even actually witnessed someone who is unemployed being offered a job by the person he spoke to in Meetup.
But meetup is not the only game in town although it is one of the best. Just Google: "meetup platforms" and you would be shown alternatives to Meetup.
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6. Your Contact’s Contacts
Whenever you contact someone you already know whether closely or lightly, you should make it a point to ask these people for help in knowing other people.
Being a former marketer myself, I learned from professional marketers how to expand their prospects list.
Whenever they approach a known prospect and it doesn’t matter if this prospect turns out to be a buyer or not, they would always ask their prospect for referrals.
Even though you are not a marketer yourself, you can adapt this practice to your business, career and social life.
In actuality, everyone is marketing something. Be it a business, a skill, love or some other thing, you are marketing something.
I actually know of a person who found the love of his life thru networking. He was single and was rejected by the woman he was courting.
Undeterred, he ask the woman who rejected him if she knows of anyone who is looking for a boyfriend.
As fate would have it, the woman who rejected him actually has a friend who is looking for a boyfriend.
He is now actually married to the woman looking for a boyfriend who is a friend of the woman who rejected him. He wouldn’t have found the love of his life if he hadn’t ask before.
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7. Always Send a Friend/Catch Up Invitation
It might mean like a small and insignificant thing, but ending your posts and contact details online with a friendly invitation can attract potential contacts.
Simple endings to your online posts like:
- “Always happy to talk with someone.”
- “Always ready for anyone.”
- “If you need help, please contact me.”
- “If you want clarification, please contact me.”
The message that these simple words convey about you is that you’re an approachable person who is not busy enough not to have time for other people, even strangers.
Not including these words in the end of your posts and contact details might mean that you’re just one of the millions of people who leave an unattractive and not welcoming contact details online.
When I was a newbie businessperson looking for advise from actual legal and business experts, I was taken aback by the sheer number of legal and business experts who leave their contact details online.
By instinct, I actually contacted the ones with “friendly contact details” saying the above words I used as an example. If they hadn’t included friendly contact details, I would not have contacted them at all.
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8. Own Website
Having your own website is like broadcasting yourself to the world 24/7 without you actually repeating yourself over and over.
The contents of your website speak for you and your business or whatever it is that you are marketing without you ever personally approaching anyone.
These days, having your own website is affordable. You can have your own website complete with a domain name and website hosting for as little as USD 150 per year.
Also, having your own paid website adds to your credibility. This is because even today, not many people have their own website and people who do are taken more seriously.
You can also opt for free websites like having a free blog on Blogger or a business page in Facebook, but do remember that you are not in control of your site.
You can be censored, suspended, blocked and even banned from these platforms. Also, you can’t control the look and feel of your free website.
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9. YouTube Channel
Though it takes a lot of work. You should consider setting up your own YouTube channel. Nothing comes close to being personal online than having your own YouTube videos.
This is because your potential contacts can actually see and hear you. They can see you move and talk which means that you’re actually a person.
They know how you talk which makes them decide if they can really communicate with you personally.
They will also probably know where you’re from based from the background of your videos and the way you talk. This easily makes them decide if they would contact you or not.
Also, next to Google Search, people usually find their information in YouTube which is the second most visited site online next to Google Search.
As of 2023, YouTube has 2.1 billion monthly active users all around the world. There is a high chance that some of these billions of viewers would actually watch your videos and contact you.
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10. LinkedIn
If you’re a career professional especially if you’re looking for a job or want to change jobs, you definitely should have a LinkedIn account.
In fact, a lot of recruiters used LinkedIn as a recruiting tool because it is assumed that anyone who is a serious career professional has a LinkedIn account.
There are other business social media platforms similar in purpose to LinkedIn but nothing comes close to LinkedIn is size and popularity.
Do take into consideration that LinkedIn is a freemium platform. This means that although you can use it for free, there are severe limitations on how you can use it.
For example, there are just so many contact searches that you can do before LinkedIn blocks your further attempts at searching for contacts.
Also, LinkedIn can block your account if it deems that you are violating its terms for allowable content.
The steep subscription price of LinkedIn and its big sway in controlling what you post shows how much influence and popularity LinkedIn has in the world of business networking.
Despite this, it is still useful to have a free LinkedIn account so you can be discovered by recruiters and businesspersons who may want to contact you.
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11. Forums
If you want to connect with people because you want information regarding something, then online forums are the best for you.
Forum sites like Quora, Stack Overflow and the likes are a good resource for people who want to answer questions, even very detailed and technical ones.
For example, when I’m programming and in a programming dilemma, I turn to Stack Overflow for answers. Almost always, I get the answer I need.
IT related jobs are even posted in Stack Overflow. If you’re an IT professional, it pays to check out this site.
When it comes to everything else like science and business questions, I turn to Quora for answers. Again, this site has never failed me.
Many members of these forum sites have even become friends with each other due to the sheer fact that they have been active members of the forum sites for so long that they basically know each other already.
From finding unposted job vacancies, job opportunities to finding high echelon executives who are normally out of reach of common employees, you can find hidden gems in forum sites.
What’s more, they are ready to talk and willing to share their knowledge to almost anyone who visits their forum.
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12. Establish Real and Lasting Connections
As you can see, it is not that hard to network with people because there are people who are friendly enough to talk and connect with you provided you know where to search.
If you don’t initially find the persons you want to connect to, then the current people you know may be your bridge in connecting with people you really want to connect with.
But networking with people is not the same as using people. It’s similar to someone who befriends a security personnel just so that they can connect with the person the security personnel is guarding.
When you just use people to network, it gives you a bad reputation which would more than likely follow you around.
Develop real and lasting connections. This doesn’t mean that you should be friends with them, but you rather at least be ready to return the favor should they need it.
For example, if someone helps you to get a prospective customer, you should also be willing to help them in finding customers of their own or some other favor.
Remember that quality connections are not only useful once but many times over. If you use a person once, they would more than likely not help you if you ask for their help again.
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13. Don’t Saturate Yourself
Many so-called social media influencers have been the laughing stock lately because although they have millions of followers, they can’t sell a single product.
Imagine spending a lot of time interacting with your followers in Facebook or Instagram only to find out later that when it comes to proving their loyalty, so few or even none of your so called followers are willing to do it.
Also, how many people can you interact on a regular basis without exhausting yourself? Will this be a thousand, a hundred, ten or just one?
Network only with high quality contacts. Make sure that they are worthy of your effort and loyalty.
Although they can prove their worth to you in terms of money, this is not the only factor to consider. Is you contact a low value individual but with high quality contacts?
Will your contact support you to the end? Will they not bail out on you at the first sign of trouble or inconvenience?
There are people with few contacts, but what they lack in numbers they compensate for in quality.
For example, even having one contact only, but one who is a billionaire and devoted to you in the end is worth more than your millions of followers in social media.
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Final Words
Networking is not as hard as you think. There are many avenues for finding contacts without involving the need to force yourself to connect with people not willing to talk to you.
There are online sites like meetups and forums where you can find people who are willing to contact with you.
But begin with the people you already know like friends, relatives and coworkers. These people are more sympathetic to you when it comes to providing contacts.
Make sure that you don’t use people as a means to an end only. Develop real and lasting relationships with high quality contacts as they can provide you with not one but multiple favors all throughout your life.
Do remember that each person knows some other person no matter how reclusive they are. You might not be in touch with your grandparents anymore, but remember that thru age they have likely met more people than you have.
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