Networking plays a huge role in maintaining any business - and finding creative ways to begin or continue networking with our contacts can be a challenge. A great deal of time and effort is necessary behind the scenes before we reach out to create dialogue with a contact, and then even more time goes into building a positive relationship with them where both parties benefit. Therefore we need our networking efforts to be as effective and efficient as possible. At the same time, we should want those networking connections to continue indefinitely. So when we are approaching a new networking contact, it is important to keep in mind that our goal is to create a long-term relationship with them.
At first, several ideas will pop into our creative mind - ways we can support others, what we may be able to offer, what we are looking for from them, options we may want to consider in the future. That is great! Do those, but pace them out so that we are not doing all these things at once. Spread the networking opportunities out over several months, perhaps over several years or longer. When these immediate ideas run out there are plenty of options to brainstorm on including collaborating on a community fundraiser, hosting sales on the same day, utilizing each other's social networks, distributing each other's coupons and perhaps referring each other to interested clients.
There are many things we can do online as well that can maintain these networking relationships. Online Bulletin Boards, for instance, act like those familiar website pages we've all seen before listing resources or referrals... but instead, the board has the visual appearance of an actual bulletin board.
Sometimes the website manager will ask for a nice blurb and a link, they may want a logo image that they hyperlink. In other cases you may need to design something with more imagery - similar to what you might do for flyers, posters, banners, bookmarks or business cards. Each image that is tacked onto the virtual board, referral listing, business listing or resource page will also be hyperlinked so people can just click on the image and find out more.
Whenever we are invited to submit an image, it is important to examine what other people have done on that specific page. We need to determine how we will stand out among them. Knowing where we want to drive the traffic to (the URL) and understanding the audience that is visiting that page will determine the keywords we choose to utilize and the copy that we write.
Be sure to keep the text simple and as large as can fit in the image - we don't always need to have complete sentences on resource listings or e-bulletin boards, just a few words to create enough interest that the viewer will click to learn more from there.
So put on your purple snowflake marketing hat and get ready for an exciting and inspiring networking adventure!
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