When trying to advance your career, making connections is an essential part of being successful. But even if you do regularly make new connections, it is also very important to develop your relationships with the people that you are networking with. Not only can this enrich your personal life, but can improve your career by leaps and bounds. By having the right relationships you can do things such as get a promotion in your job, find a great business opportunity or find a better career for yourself.
As we live in the time of social networks, most professionals have a seemingly very large network. Take a look at many LinkedIn profiles and you will constantly see people that have 500+ connections.
But are they good connections?
For most, that is doubtful.
By not networking correctly you are not tapping into your full potential and could be missing countless opportunities. Here are 2 simple steps that you can take to begin to network and position yourself for success:
Stop Being Shy
Have you ever had a chance to go to a networking event, but have avoided it? Or perhaps you’ve been to an office party and dodged the opportunity to talk to new people.
Whatever your reason, missing out on networking opportunities is something that you cannot do if you’d like to reach your full potential. Be sure to make an effort to go to some events, and what’s more, while at an event go out of your way to talk to new people. In an article titled “How to make new connections wherever you go” by Jacquline Whitmore it outlines some things that you can do to work on your people skills when faced with making new connections. You never know what will come of some of the conversations that you spark up.
In this article by Jonathan Greechan, “4 Steps to leveraging your network to build your business,” he gives some great guidelines on setting networking goals and the importance of doing so. By setting networking goals for yourself before each event that you go to, it will help you hold yourself accountable for making new connections. For instance, if you are going to an entrepreneur networking event, go in with an objective of making 3 solid connections before you leave. This will cause you to naturally want to push yourself and will make the task of networking much easier.
Follow up with all connections
As your career progresses and you continue to make connections, you will most likely end up making the acquaintance of many people. In your effort to make good connections you should have a process on how you develop your relationship with the people that you meet.
Even if you have just met someone briefly and got one of their cards, being sure to follow up through email will help you develop great connections.
Remember, that even if you don’t think that this person will be of any help to you personally, you never know if someone that they know could be of great help to you (their second degree connections.) Here is a process that you could follow to ensure you get the most out of any connection that you make.
- Make the initial connection: At very minimum introduce yourself, ask what the person does and tell them a little bit about what you do. Be sure to ask them for their card so you could contact them in the future.
- Follow up: Email your new connection either a day or two after the event. Let them know that it was great meeting them, and that you wanted to keep in touch with them to see if you could help each other in the future in any way.
- Down the line: After some time has passed, whether it be weeks or months, from your first email that you have sent them, send them a quick update email. This email should ask them what they have been doing, and briefly write about what you’ve been doing in your career and what goals you are trying to reach/any strategic contacts you are trying to make. Whether you are looking for a referral to a new job, an investor for your business venture or a co-founder to your startup you will be able to find who you are looking for much easier by keeping these relationships with your initial connections.
Send your connections an email like this every few months and you will be able to meet or exceed your career goals in a very timely fashion.
Networking is a very simple, yet sometimes tedious task. These are 2 very straightforward ways that you can make significant process in your career by simply creating and developing new relationships.
