Nine Networking Tips to Speed Sales and Referrals

Networking is an essential part of building your business. Whether you network locally, nationally, or internationally, there are some tips that are common to all businesses.

1. Be crystal clear about what you do and how people can use you. Also know exactly who your ideal client is in case you’re asked. If you don’t do this, you’ll leave people scratching their heads about you and they won’t know how to connect with you even if they wanted to.
2. Follow up like crazy. Write on the back of the business card what you talked about and email the new contact the next day. Offer a free, short session over the phone to see how you might help each other. (I don’t’ recommend meeting for coffee; it’s too time-consuming.) I followed up several times with a prospect who couldn’t afford me and who then turned around and referred a friend to me. I would have never gotten that referral without following up several times.
3. Be in a giving frame of mind. Ask the people you meet how you can help them. You might be able to make an introduction, share a tip, or give a referral. Always ask people who their ideal client is and keep a note in your database.
4. Be open-minded. Don’t just look for prospects who could become clients. Look for potential partners, vendors, and friends. I will likely end up doing a terrific project with a “competitor” because we were open-minded and saw how we complemented each other with different specialties within the same field of business.
5. Bring an agenda to a national or international networking opportunity such as a conference. Know who will be there and invite them weeks in advance (so they can adjust airfare and hotel if necessary) to a one-on-one meeting to discuss possible partnerships.
6. Face-to-face trumps all other marketing methods. When possible, be visible. Go to meetings, accept speaking engagements, volunteer, and display your products at an exhibitor table when they are available.
7. Keep going to the same group over and over again rather than flitting from group to group once. It takes three to six months before people get to know you well enough to refer you. Choose a giving community that best matches your ideal client, and if for some reason you haven’t gotten business after nine months, cut your losses and find another group.
8. Use tools such as an ezine, FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to stay in touch and keep you visible once you’ve met in person. Friend, follow, and connect with each entrepreneur you’ve met at your networking meetings.
9. Offer something free that is compelling so people can get a low-risk taste of your product or service. A free newsletter that helps people make money, a free workshop or teleseminar, or a free no-strings one-on-one phone session are three options that work great to help people get to know you better, which will increase referrals.

Try these power networking ideas to bring new clients into your business.

For more networking tips, grab your copy of my book “Get More Clients”
http://sandismith.com/getmoreclients.html.

Seven Tips on How to Make Money from Social Media

1. Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few — should be considered additional marketing channels – no more, no less. There are other marketing methods that are cheaper – referrals, to name one. So my first tip is to add social media to your marketing mix, but only after you exhaust other lower cost methods.
2. Just like any other marketing method, you have to build and maintain relationships. The content you post should be ½ value-added tips, quotes, and links to high-content pages, ¼ personal or relationship-building, and ¼ sales pitch. Social media is a great way to keep in touch, but unless you direct-message your contacts, you don’t know if you have their attention or not.
3. Use a scheduling tool such as Social Tomorrow to pre-load your content and have an assistant do it from a Word file that you’ve created that has a full week’s post in it. Be consistent and keep up with it every week. Repetition is key because the attention factor is so low. Two to six Facebook statuses a day are enough during rush hour. Ten to twenty tweets per day aren’t too many, but one LinkedIn status a day is enough.
4. Keep business and pleasure separate. It seems so ridiculous to advise you not to whine about your personal life in front of your business contacts, but I see all ages doing it, and it doesn’t make them look good.
5. Use Twitter to announce limited-time specials, such as one hour free or half off a package. Your followers will love it when you do it randomly and infrequently.
6. Tara says to go one step further when it comes to doing research on your prospects. She explains that in the 1960s we learned how to define our prospects in terms of demographics – gender, economic level, education, age, race. In the 1990s we added psychographics – trying to guess motivation and why they buy. Today we add socialgraphics – the details we can find out about our prospects. Using social media tools, we can research and collect information on hobbies, likes, and habits to further develop details about our potential client. We can use this information to create new ways to interact, form bonds, and develop roles to enhance value on both sides of the equation.
7. Learn what your social value is by trying live search tools such as www.topsy.com. Enter your name and view all of the social media links about you and how popular they are. Interesting, huh?