10. Evaluate Trial, Decide How to Proceed - (did trial work, do you want a further relationship/partnership)

If the trial worked AND you enjoyed working with the person you have the makings of a beautiful thing. THis could be the first (or most recent) person you add to your mastermind team.

The value of the consultation, interaction and communication you get can’t be measured in dollars.

They’ll have insights into your business you never would have seen because you are too close to the situation. These kinds of “unbiased” insights can be invaluable to your business and double, triple or more your sales.

When you can get 3-5 people like this on your team you have the makings of a very powerful mastermind. 1-2 of them should make more money than you because you want to learn from people that are on a higher level than you…a level you want to reach.

They have to already be or have been there to be able to show you the way. That’s just common sense but many people don’t do it.

The other 1-2 people can be at the same or slightly lower level than you.

Meet up once a week or every other week to discuss your business issues. With today’s technology it is so easy to connect for free or cheap. And it’s very easy to schedule and have reminders so everyone is sent a reminder the day of the meeting.

This is the most valuable thing to you. Having people in your industry and market that are solid business contacts will make or break your business.

Business networking can be easy and fun when you use the 10 steps I’ve told you about. Get out there and do it today.

9. Easy, Trial Project (initial joint venture, aff promotion, mail each other’s list)

INitiate an initial trial project. Once you’ve determined someone who is a good fit for you and your business take the first step to a working relationship.

SUggest you each send a promotion to your respective lists. This is a simple list exchange that will expose your products to their customers and their products to yours. You reach a new group of customers you probably never would have reached for free.

And your customers won’t abandon you, they’ll just have access to another cool, related product that you turned them onto. You build your own esteem and trust with your customers when you make good recommendations (only make good ones because a bad recommendation will really damage you).

Keep track of the results of this trial.

Did they send your promotion on time?

How did it perform?

Were they happy with how things turned out?

Were you happy with how things turned out?

Do you WANT to work with this person again?

These are important questions to answer. Once you have the answers you want you can make good, solid mutually beneficial business partnerships that will increase your prosperity and wealth as it will for your partners.

8. Build the Trust

Buidling trust in your business and marketing is the most important thing you can do. When people trust you they’ll follow your advice, buy your products, read what you have to say, and talk you up to other people they know.

The major hurdle online is gaining the trust of strangers. You have a guy or girl sitting in a chair or cubicle looking at a computer screen. It seems almost robotic and with the people who’ve been scammed before there is that hurdle to overcome.

He or she wants to deal with a real person not be part of a mechanical system. They want to know that you are a real person and someone they can trust. When they click the buy button they have to know they’ll get the product they’ve agreed to purchase.

And if the product fails to live up to their expectations they have to have absolute faith they’ll get their money back promptly in accordance with the terms of the guarantee.

WHen you become a master speed trust builder the whole world opens up to you. You could have Fortune 500 companies contacting your for help and consulting.

You’ll definitely attract other business members and community members who want to deal with you and network with you.

7. Engage More Senses

Matt Bacak (makes $5 million per year) says to “find prospects online and take them offline ASAP.”  This is great advice. The internet is the cheapest way to reach the people you want to reach. BUt it is limited to a 1-way communication (someone reading your article), or a delayed communication (exchanging emails).

The more senses you engage the more real you become. You morph into a real person a real business contact in the other person’s mind.

It’s been written about that there’s something magical about meeting face-to-face with someone. There’s just something about getting the whole range of communication: the words, body langauge & gestures, facial expressions, and voice tone and inflection.

You really become real now.

Of course, this isn’t always possible. But going back to Skype you can do a web cam chat and give the person the ability to see your face as your talking, hear your voice and tone, and get a better idea of who you are.

I had been working with a business partner for about 6 months online. We had never met but www.taggzilla.com was a business community dedicated to social media domination.  We wanted to make a site where a person with no website come onto TaggZilla, join, and get to the front page of digg, youtube, stumbleupon, propeller, twitter, or reddit within 24 hours.

We knew if we built enough active members it would definitely happen. And it had to be easy. So we had a strategy conference scheduled. I had just bought a $75 Logitech webcam and hooked it up to test it out.

He noticed immediately the difference. He said, “wow, this is amazing, Alexander. I can actually see you and you’re more real now. You’re now a real person to me.”

Those were his words and it made a huge impact on me. Use this to your advantage because it works.

6. Always Offer Value (invite them to get your free info, do teleseminar)

You always want to offer value. Offer to build a couple links to their site by social bookmarking it. Take a look at their site or advertisement.

Even if you know nothing about advertising or copywriting you are interested in the same industry and topic. So at the very least you can tell them how you feel when looking and reading their advertising, your first reaction to it, and what you would suggest to make it resonate deeper with you.

You may not realize it but this is a tremendous value to the other person.

Market research takes time and has tremendous cost in effort and dollars. By taking a look at their promotional materials you are short cutting a big part of that for them because you are likely the exact type of person they are looking to reach that would be interested in buying the product they offer.

Also, you can setup a teleseminar or webinar (phone presentation for you uninitiated) and invite them for free. Even if you are charging the public $20-$30 you can invite them with a free ticket.

Give tremendous training, resources and value on this call that will make it foolish for them to miss. Have what’s called the “Irresistible Offer” where they’d have to be an absolute dumbass to decide against attending.

One easy way to get you started is to poll your network on what questions they have. Send a questionaire to your customers. If you don’t have any customers go into a forum in your marketplace and ask questions. YOu’ll get answers back and they’ll probably surprise you what people want to know.

THis will be the content for your teleseminar. Just do a question and answer. Also, you can open the call at the end to the live participants to ask questions live. You should record this and offer it to those who were interested but had their new son being born and decided they had to see the birth.

Also, you can create a written version of these questions and your answers into a report. When it’s organized well it is tremendously valuable to your prospective clients and customers because it saves them time and hassle of having to compile it yourself and they will trade money for those savings.

5. Build deeper connection (further emails, live chat)

ONce you’ve sent that initial email that’s your foothold. You now have your foot in the doorway to enter the house of communication. You can get to a deeper place of connection and trust.

You’ve probable heard that a person needs to see something 7-12 times before it achieves “top of the mind consciousness”. This means the person immediately recognizes your name, a company’s brand, or a concept.

THe more times you are able to communicate with your new business connection the better you’ll do. Of course, you want to add value and have a good reason to contact the person.

Business networking is not about chit chat. You can put elements of that in your communication but most of the message should be business focused. A good rule of thumb is talk about 80% business and 20% chit chat.

Letting your business partner or new friend know a bit about your life, what you stand for, your values, characteristics and beliefs is a good thing when it is given out in chunks and woven into your business message.

You should always be helping them advance their career, busines, or make more money and gently add in a small part of who you are.

After exchanging a few emails, maybe 5 from you and 5 back from them you can suggest a real-time connection. There are many free tools out there right now. Skype is an awesome free tool that allows voice communication for free using your computer. Facebook has a live text chat built right into their site now. If none of these technologies work for both of you just go old school, tell them to send you their phone number and when a good time to talk.

Be specific. Tell them, “send me your phone number. I am free tomorrow between 10 am - 2 pm central time.  Where in that time range is good for you?”

That time may be no good for you but you want to nail down a solid time to talk without distraction.  They will most certainly suggest an alternate time that will work for them and you can connect from there.

Stay focused and follow the general 80/20 guideline and your business communications will be very effective and bring value to both parties. THis will be the beginning of your mastermind.

4. Start the conversation on the right foot (email)

You will now have heard back from some of your friend requests. Most will send you an email or else the site will tell you they have accepted your friend request and you are ready to rock-and-roll.

Don’t get mad that some of your friend requests slip through the cracks. Like anything in life there is breakage. You send out 10 requests (depending on how focused the site is) you may get back 5 friend confirms. ON smaller dog groomer specific social site you may get 8-9 friend confirms.

Either way you are in action and getting results. This is very good and you will see your professional network growing by leaps and bounds assuming you do this daily. Send out 5-10 requests each day and your momentum will start to build.

A business network must be nurtured. You know that when you have contact with someone the trust and bond between the 2 of you grows. When you don’t have contact for 2 weeks, 2 months and then 2 years the connection you had dims.

ONce they’ve accepted your friend request take the next step and send them an introductory email. Keep it “them” centric meaning focused on them, what they’re doing, what you might be able to do to help them.

Example:

“Hi Sally,

Glad to be your newest friend. I look forward to connecting with you and hearing your ideas about dog grooming. Do you have any pics of your dog you could send me?

Your style matches mine and I’d love to see how your dog looks after you’ve done your grooming magic to it.

I look forward to hearing from you soon,

xxxx”

Sally will be likely to respond back to you because dog owners are proud of and love their dogs. Give the other person the satisfaction, esteem, or other psychological payoff they are looking for. You’ll know what this is because you’re in the same market and know what kind of reasons you are in it and payoffs you get from it.

3. Introduce Yourself

The introduction is a crucial step. Bungle this and you are unlikely to ever form any mutually beneficial partnerships nor affiliate relationships. You never know who is out there serving your market so you want to give yourself the best, highest probability chance to connect with them.

For most sites the initial volley you’ll send to them is a friend request. This is a basic, short and unthreatening communication.

Usually, you click the “request friend” or “add friend” link and a box pops up. You can send the request blind. But I recommend you never do blind requests.

Once you’ve done the hard work to find where your chosen business contacts hang out and spend time and you’ve found some of them you want to connect with you have to stand out.

There is so much spam out there you need for your friend request to stand out.

Write something about them, how you admire their work (give a specific detail you liked so they know you actually read or have knowledge of their work and it’s not just flattery), what you have in common with them (example: your both dog groomers), and a sample way you might be able to help them.

It sounds like a lot but here’s an example sticking with dog grooming.

“Hi Sally,

I see that you’re a member of “Dog Grooming Dixies”. I’m also in the dog grooming game and enjoyed your post “5 ways to groom your dog in under 5 minutes”. Let’s discuss some other ways to improve our dogs appearance.

You’ve accomplished many things here in only 2 lines. It’s a quick easy read for Sally and she can clearly tell you are not just sending out thousands of friend requests. You read her post and feel a commonality with her and she’ll be very likely to accept your friend request.

I’ve used this strategy to gain over 2,350 friends in Facebook so you know it works. Use it.

2. Identifying the Usual Suspects - (sites they hang out, groups within sites to search)

You are now sitting in front of your computer ready to network with other people in your industry and with your interests. You remember from step 1 how you want to be in a casual, real-world mindset of meeting people.

First you have to ask who are you targeting to connect and work with? Are they business people, doctors, dog groomers, hair stylists?

ONce you know exactly who you want to network with it is far easier to find them. In most cases there will be a small(er) social network site that caters specifically to your chosen persons.

GO to this one first. Do a google search “dog groomer social network site” and see what comes up. You may have to search the first 3-4 pages of results. Do that if necessary. THis is NOT  a place you want to short change yourself. Once you have the main 1-2 sites that cater specifically to you and “your tribe” of people you can start to work.

You should also check the 2 behemoths in this space, Facebook and MySpace. They are likely to have a gathering of your chosen networkers as well, no matter how small a group it maybe.

Within these sites you can go into their groups to find people of like mind. Or you can simply do a keyword search and those profiles that use that keyword will pop up.

Now you are ready to start contacting your people.

In this 10 part article series we’re going to explore what works for internet networking for business purposes. I’ll be posting 2 articles per week on Tuesday and Thursday (this one notwithstanding because yesterday got too busy).

How do I know what works? WHat qualifies me to show you how to network?

You can check out my facebook profile at http://profile.to/alexander

Last I checked I had over 2350 friends on Facebook. ANd if you know anything about Facebook you know how strict they are. No scripts or friend bots like you can get away with on MySpace.

So take notes and bookmark these entries in your favorite places because you’ll want to be able to refer back to them often. Building your business network is the most powerful thing you can do to achieve success.

No man is an island!

Some of these maybe common sense to you but I get so many questions about them and I see people doing these dumbass things it still has to be said.

Enjoy and I look forward to hearing your success and money made partnering with your new powerful professional network.

1. Having the right mindset (goals, what are you looking to accomplish?)

Networking for business reasons is crucial to success. You want to setup a mastermind group because all successful people have them. Napoleon Hill talks about the absolute necessity of a mastermind group in his book Think and Grow Rich. It’s power can never be overstated.

Imagine yourself in a real world business setting. The easiest thing to imagine is going into a seminar. You have received some marketing materials probably a direct mail piece or seen a TV advertisement for a real estate seminar. Maybe it was how to make more money or for Weight Watchers (which is a seminar disguised as a “group meeting”).

When you go into this seminar it is held near your location. You go to the physical location and you are certain to meet up with people who are like you. They are interested in the same thing you are…whatever the topic of the seminar is.

So immediately you have some common ground. You grab a seat and most likely have someone sitting on your left and someone on your right. You start to strike up a conversation with them. “what do you most want to get out of this?” And they will answer you.

No way would you immediately launch into your life story, your dreams and how you like to eat raw egg shells every 3rd friday of the 1st and 2nd quarter of the year. This is too much info too fast.

Keep this real world setting in mind and transfer this process to your online business networking. What works in the real world works online because they have 1 thing in common…PEOPLE.

You are dealing with people so start off naturally, have an opener, build to some slightly deeper things, and as the conversation progresses you can ask them deeper personal questions and move the conversation forward. This is the mindset you need to achieve for internet business networking success.