The Power of Contacts
Written by The Kid on March 9, 2008Everyone has heard the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. While that statement is correct i want to take it one step further, it’s not who you know it’s what you do with who you know thats what matters.
At conferences thousands of business cards are exchanged every day, i picked up a bunch too. Now the question to ask yourself is what is your next step going to be?
Step 1.
Contact all people you met, just a simple email will do, why it was nice to meet them, how you met them and wishing them good luck. If i took your card at Affiliate Summit West or another conference then you may have recieved and email like this from me, if not then it is coming.
Step 2.
Get more information, did the card list any other information? MSN, AOL or Twitter address? Ask them for permission to add them as a friend on your favourite account, this established a much longer term relationship potential.
Step 3.
Build a relationship, not one likes to be bombarded by messages or emails, especially if it is asking for help, the whole “yo man can you help me…” will not work, in fact it will probably just piss people off, the key is to offer useful information, say your new “potential” contact is Shoemoney, i would send him an email about something he likes, i.e. UFC or something along those lines, then he will be reminded of you, keep doing it, but only with useful information and not too often, offer value and people will respond. With all the information out there today it is impossible to read everything but if you have people reading the information for you and sending you useful stuff you will apreciate it and they will want to help you.
These are just a few tips, there are many more ways to connect with people, but the one thing is make sure you do it, otherwise exchanging all those cards were useless and a waste of time.
Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 3:47 am and is filed under ASW, theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
haha, nice closing statement, and very true. i followed up the next day and was glad i got it done quickly. i didn’t get an email from you though. jk
[...] entrance door. In attendance were John Chow, Michael Kwan and his girl Susan, Stephen Fung, Ed Lau, Greg Morgan, Danny Chang and [...]
Not only does he say whats good, he does it too. Thanks for the follow up when I messed up myself.
By the way, those business cards. We were going to order some for ASW, but the company was kinda werid about ordering 4 different kinds of cards. $1199 for 500 cards.
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AIM: T202wes
I’m always on there
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