« Women Business Owners – Now Is the Time to Lower Your Prices | Main | Women Business Loans: Ultimate Funds for Women Entrepreneurs »
Easy Small Business Networking Tips
By admin | September 10, 2009
Small business networking can become second nature and easy to do if you follow these simple tips. They are easy ideas to remember and implement not only in your home based business environment but also in your personal life as well.
You will use these techniques quite easily once you get used to them. When you learn how small business networking is done you will be able to increase your home based business influence and revenue.
Some Networking Tips:
* Set Objectives
* Use Business Cards
* Take Notes
* Be Yourself
* Help Each Other
* Stay in Contact
* Grow the Relationship
Set Objectives
Before attending a small business networking event such as the chamber of commerce meeting or trade show set clear objectives. Is your objective to get a new supplier, an employee, more funding or to sell your products or services? Are you looking for a qualified professional to work with?
Write these objectives down so that you will be able to focus on what your most wanted outcome is. Some questions that I ask before an event are: Who do I want to meet? Why do I want to meet them? Will there be enough of these people at the event?
With your objectives in mind you will be able to make the best use of your time while you are attending the event. You will know the people you want to meet and be able to start building a strong relationship.
After the first event, you can continue to use this objective planning strategy to find events that will allow you to meet more of your desired small business networking contacts.
Use Business Cards
A simple small business networking tool is to carry business cards with you at all times. Whether or not you are attending an event, you should never leave your home based business without them.
There are always excellent opportunities to hand out your business card and it is such an easy and inexpensive way to market your home based business. People are always receptive to your business card when it is given in the right atmosphere.
Take Notes
It is very important to remember the people you meet and the conversations that transpired. I take mental notes but as soon as I get a chance I write them down on a notepad that I carry with me. If the person handed you a business card you can jot down some of the notes there first. Then transpose them to your PDA, Business Planner, Notebook or Computer Database.
Taking notes will help you remember your conversations and have information available when you follow up. Get as much information as possible about personal and business information such as birthdays, anniversaries, business interests and hobbies.
All of this information will help you to build strong relationships with people. It will also show them that you were paying attention to the conversation. Check out my article; What did You Say? – Ways to Create Effective Listening Skills for some great information that will help you with your small business networking skills.
Be Yourself
In small business networking your attitude and persona can have a huge impact on how effective you efforts will be. Be sincere and keep the conversation at a low pitch by not trying to oversell your products or services. Remember, they don’t know you yet!
As you continue build your relationship you will be able to find the win-win situation that I talk about in my article; Enhance Your Business Communication Skills.
Once you have a strong relationship you will be in a better position to ask for their help or to be able to offer your help in their business.
Help Each Other
Once you have started a relationship with people listen to their needs. Is there something that you can offer to help them with? There may be a person that you know that you could introduce them to. What about sharing home based business resources such as an attorney or marketing firm?
Small business networking begins with you offering your help, then others are more receptive to giving you their help.
Stay in Contact
Once you have met a business contact it is important to follow up and stay in contact with them. Follow up is the back bone of building a strong small business network. Try to stay in contact as soon as possible after meeting them. The next day would be the best since you are still fresh in their minds.
There are various ways to stay in contact and follow up. Some people may prefer the e-mail approach while a simple phone call may be more effective. You usually don’t have to say more then; “Hi, it was nice to meet you yesterday”. If they had offered a referral thank them (of course after you spoke to the referral).
This might be a good time to send them the information you had spoken about, possibly send them a link to a news article or product that you may have talked about. Also if you had referred them to someone or suggested something you should always follow up so that they will know that you care and are interested in them.
Grow the Relationship
This is the simplest and most fun part small business networking. It will be up to you to continue to contact and grow the relationship. Business networks will thrive if you continue to foster the relationship. Some easy ways could be an invitation to breakfast, lunch, dinner, events or special occasions. A quick phone call or e-mail that has relevance to the relationship can work wonders.
When you stay in contact by reaching out to maintain and grow a relationship, the other person will realize just how sincere and valuable your relationship with them is.
Final Thought:
Small business networking is invaluable to your home based business success. You will find great long term relationships that will keep expanding. A great network is one that is alive and growing daily. These networking tips can be for personal and professional use. Just remember that it is up to you to foster the relationships.
Watch the video related to small business networking
You can try to avoid it, but there will come a time when you have to get out there and network to grow your business! Communication Strategist Michelle Yozzo Drake offers her best tips for surviving networking functions and walking away with solid contacts for future success.
Help answer the question about small business networking
How do you network printers and scanners in a small business computer networking?How do you network printers and scanners in a small business computer networking? What equipment do you need (i.e. plugs, devices) in order to do this? Is networking printers and scanners provided by computer networking IT like at&t, or something with no service cost you can do on your own? Is it in anyway correlated with wireless internet networking in a small business office?
About Author
Paul Kopp is the Founder and CEO of Kopp Enterprises, Inc. Paul has been a Home Based
Business owner for over 7 years. Currently he operates 2 online businesses and also is involved in numerous non internet related businesses. Paul created
Home-Based-Business-Solutions.com to give quality information and resources to start and run a home based business smoothly and profitably. He covers all the topics from A-Z for home based businesses. This article and others can be
found at his Business Resource Center.
Topics: Networking | 18 Comments »
September 10th, 2009 at 9:32 am
this is good
September 10th, 2009 at 10:14 am
this is bad
September 10th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Nice work. keep it up. mean time come for social media marketing for esteembpo**com
September 10th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
i just hav a question. my family has a linksys router, and were all on the same connection. for some reason, we didnt do anythin, and all of our computers were linked. my printer is an old HP Deskjet, and it doesnt have any ethernet connections, it plugs into my laptop. so my mom wanted to print sumthin from her computer, and wen she hit print, it printed on my printer. i was on a wireless network. one day we all wiped out our drive and lost the network. how can i set it up again? i dont kno how
September 10th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Printers and scanners, you can use a network USB device from Walmart, this puts the devices on the network. Then you need a switch , for the network, A router, CAT5 cable, Wireless router, and so on. Questions.
How many computers?
How many Laptops?
How many Printer , Usb or network?
Start at the link below
September 10th, 2009 at 10:23 am
join the local chamber of commerce
September 10th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
I don't know where your from but here in Ontario we have this thing where the government will give you $3000 + a mentor to start your own business. For young people anyways.
You should do some research and see if you have that where you live.
Good luck!
September 11th, 2009 at 2:54 am
easily, work hard and you can do it. good luck
:> peace
.
September 11th, 2009 at 3:11 am
hmm..there are a number of things you can do to be secure.you need the software.lets see.as far as a firewall goes i reccomend comodo firewall.its free for lifetime,it blocks all open ports so nothing bad can get in without your permission,and warns you when something is trying to connect to the net.as far as anti-virus goes,you should look into avira anti-virus,its the best anti-virus with very good detection.also up in the ranks is NOD32.but thats commercial.avira is freeware.not sure if they charge for commercial use.
comodo firewall.
http://www.comodo.com
avira antivir
http://www.filehippo.com/download_antivir/
you dont really need any other programs.with those 2 youll be pretty safe as long as you dont visit any malicious sites.
September 11th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Look around what other similar service providers are charging, and charge about 30% more than that. Offer the 30% as discount to the guy who gets you business.
September 12th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Every night, using either a full or differential backup.
Differential or incremental will give you the ability to restore to a certain point back to the full backup.
A very common method is doing a full backup one day a week, and doing differential or incremental the other days.
The difference in incremental and differential is, to restore from differential, you only need the full and last diff. backup. With incremental, you need each backup you made stepping backwards to the last full backup.
Good luck!
September 12th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
i don’t think that DMZ is the best way how to access your PC from internet. for services such a webserver is better to setup port forwarding and not to leave whole PC open as DMZ does.
September 12th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
You may want to check with your local chamber of commerce. Also, a nationwide small business networking group is http://www.bni.com.
September 13th, 2009 at 5:52 am
fastmetrics offers these bundles for $125/mo
6mbps fast DSL.
5 managed voip lines.
2 IP fax lines.
FREE unlimited calls within US & Canada.
Keep your old phone number.
24/7 support & monitoring.
September 13th, 2009 at 8:14 am
thanx, this really helped, better than my teacher!!!!
September 13th, 2009 at 4:30 am
September 13th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Nice try. Keep it up check out esteembpo + com for social media marketing. dfhbgfh
September 13th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Hi great video and content. If you are watching this then you must be interested in starting a profitable home based internet business then make sure you watch Wonderweb Home based business videos, we have numerous tutorials varying from SEO, MLM, PPC and how to get quality traffic to your website aswell as that we also have a website with quality content which is regularly updated. hope to see you soon.
WonderWeb