I’m sure you can relate to this and agree that selecting the right people to reach out to is the most important step on your way to success (whatever success is, since we’re talking networking).

If you do this right, clearly, you’ll be able to build strong relationships with great people. If you take a more random or less thought-through approach then your mileage may vary, so to speak.

Clearly, contacting everyone whose email address you can get your hands on is not the best idea. You don’t need to be in touch with the whole world. A small group of people who you really want to meet and get to know is more than enough.

Quick note:
This post is a part of a series titled – Networking Guide for Bloggers. Be sure to check back next week for more! If you’ve missed the previous post(s), here are the links:

• Part 1 – Networking for Bloggers: Why It Is Important
• Part 2 – Networking for Bloggers: Setting Your Goals and Rules

Good starting point

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when choosing the people you want to reach out to. First of all, let’s talk the areas/niches those people are in.

There are three main places where you can go to find interesting people:

1. Look into your niche.
2. Look into your passions.
3. Search for like-minded people.

Your Niche

Now, looking into your niche is self explanatory. You simply investigate what’s going on in your niche, and find all the interesting (for whatever reason) people.

There are no rules, someone interesting is simply someone interesting. Once you stumble upon such a person you’ll know that it’s them.

Your Passions

This is an area that might mean exactly the same as your niche, but not always. Consider this example: If you’re a guitar blogger, looking into your niche means going through different websites and blogs, and trying to find interesting authors. But going through your guitar passion means finding other guitarists, guitar teachers, and other people that might have only a presence on Twitter, for example, and not even a website.

Remember, it’s not strictly business, so grading people solely depending on the sizes of their sites rarely turns out well. Even people with seemingly no connections might be extremely helpful for all kinds of advice or help.

Like-minded People

Finally, what I mean by like-minded people are people who share a similar journey to yours. Let’s use the same example. If you’re a beginner guitar blogger, you might consider reaching out to some beginner bloggers in other areas, not only guitar. Also, you might choose to reach out to someone who has already achieved the goals you are trying to reach right now (and they don’t have to be within the same niche as well).

Advice from those kinds of people is often invaluable. Seeing what other people are doing in different niches, and then applying it to your own can give you a real head start before your competition realizes what’s going on.

Different groups of people

OK, we’ve covered some places where you can find interesting people. Now let’s talk what kinds of people to look for. Three categories here: peers, a-listers (E.g. celebrities) and mentors.

Peers

A peer is someone who’s at a similar stage that you are at. In other words, it’s someone who you can share your journey with. There’s rarely anything better than discussing your plans and planning future projects with someone who’s talking to you from an equal level.

How to recognize such people? First, start by searching for some blogs that appear to be getting the same publicity as yours does, or slightly more of it.

Look at things like average number of comments, shares (retweets, likes), PageRank of the blog (you can check this at http://www.prchecker.info/ or by using a FireFox plugin called SearchStatus), Alexa rank of the blog (http://www.alexa.com), number of RSS subscribers (if the blog owner shares this). I know that there are a lot more metrics you can look into, but using just the ones here is more than enough to recognize a peer.

Peers are great for networking. They always keep you accountable, and force you to constantly work on your growth if you don’t want to be left behind. Building a network of peers has a lot more value in itself than just helping you to achieve your initial goals. This is probably the most valuable group of people you should reach out to.

A-listers

A-listers or celebrities in your niche can help you in many different ways. And you don’t even have to ask for that help. In most cases, just the sole act of you doing something for them is helping you already.

For instance, in the blogging niche, the sole act of you working with someone like Darren Rowse on a project bumps up your brand a lot. Even though you might be participating in the project for free, with no actual monetary compensation.

A-listers can also introduce you to many influential people, and vouch for you when it’s really important. Moreover, working with these kinds of people makes you much more experienced, and more knowledgeable about how things are being handled at the top.

Your niche’s celebrities are very easy to find. Probably, you don’t even have to search for them, you just know who it is from the top of your mind.

However, getting in touch with them, and building a relationship is much harder than it is with peers. You have to understand that A-listers are hit from every angle by other people who want to achieve the same thing you want, so getting through the filter is much more difficult.

If someone says no then don’t take it personally. You never should. Just proceed with your strategy like nothing ever happened. Busy people have to say no if they want to be able to do anything in a day, soon you’ll face this situation yourself.

However, depending on the exact person you’re trying to contact you might stumble on different personality types. Just like in real life, some people are great, and some are not. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that every A-lister is a great person, this can’t realistically be the case.

The goal while dealing with celebrities in your niche is to be able to talk to them from the same level, like you’re equals. I know that when you’re just starting out they are popular and you are not, but you are still same human beings, and there’s no point in one of you being treated with less respect. Keep that in mind.

Mentors

Finally, a mentor. Having a mentor is truly a great thing. A mentor is someone who’s much more experienced than you, and hopefully has already done what you are trying to do. Advice from such a person is often invaluable. Especially if you’re stuck at something and can’t find a good way out.

Identifying your desired mentor is not difficult. Simply choose the person you’re looking up to the most. Someone whose actions have always been highly inspirational to you. Someone who’s books/posts/blogs you’ve always been reading.

One more thing to think about is what exactly do you want to learn from this person? What are the first 5 questions you might have for this person? Your mentor should be someone you know you could easily spend many hours talking to on various topics related to what you’re doing.

Once you know who it is, you have to come up with a strategy to get this person to become your mentor (which we will discuss in the next episodes).

Now, your mentor doesn’t have to necessarily know that they are indeed your mentor. For them, you might be someone who they like contacting and talking to or exchanging emails containing various advice.

Also, sometimes you don’t even have to talk to your mentor to get some advice. Sometimes looking up some information on what they did in a similar situation that you’re in (when facing a similar problem), is more than enough to get you going.

Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to be able to connect to your mentor and build any kind of relationship. The problem is similar to the one with A-listers – many people trying to achieve the exact same thing you are trying to achieve. So if you can’t seem to reach a given person you might want to select someone else.

Interestingly, getting a mentor is often easier than building a relationship with celebrities in your niche. I think it has something to do with our mindset. We tend to be much more careful and much more respectful when approaching a mentor.

Action time! Now it’s up to you to go ahead and select the groups of people you want to get in touch with.

A simple path you can follow

1. Select a group of 15 peers, either in your niche, your passions or other like-minded people.
2. Select 5 celebrities in your niche or broader niches (in case yours is too narrow).
3. Select 1 mentor you truly want to contact.

These 21 people are the starting point for you. In the next parts we’re going to discuss how to go about contacting them and building those relationships.

Of course, if you want to select a bigger group of people I don’t advise against it, but you might find it a lot more challenging to be able to handle all the initial communication. And you can’t mess that up. Often, if you fail to make some things happen on your side you might burn the contact completely.

Now, let’s get down to business. The next part is all about ways of approaching people. Until then don’t forget to subscribe to get the posts delivered straight to your inbox.

Did you manage to create your own list of 21 people? Feel free to share your opinion and thoughts you’ve had when completing the list.

For me, there are two things that should be considered as the starting point of a well thought out networking strategy. The headline of this post gives a good hint on what I’m talking about, so let me just say it upfront: start by setting your goals and understanding the basic rules.

Quick note:
This post is a part of a series titled – Networking Guide for Bloggers. Be sure to check back next week for more! If you’ve missed the previous post(s), here are the links:

• Part 1 – Networking for Bloggers: Why It Is Important

A word on setting goals

“Setting goals is an important part of most of our projects, or at least it should be. Goals are a guidance for us on what path we should take.”

It all sounds nice, and surely is true, but what does it really mean, you know, in plain English? Well, my personal approach can be explained by the phrase: “goals are the answer.”

Here’s what I mean. Whenever I’m starting a new project, the very first thing I do is set my goals. From that point on I have an answer to every question I might stumble upon concerning the project.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

What I do is simple. When faced with a challenge or a decision I simply ask myself what solution is the most in tune with the goals I’ve set and brings me closer to achieving them.

Even though it’s not that obvious at first, setting goals is as important for networking as it is for any other project.

Before you do anything, and I mean anything, you have to know what you’re aiming for and why you’re trying to reach out to people.

Now, I’m not going to tell you what your goals should be – this is up to you. I’m only going to give you some hints and possible ideas that are somewhat common for most people.

common goals of networking

The word goals is pretty vague and it doesn’t indicate what a properly defined goal should look like. In most cases, goals are answers to the question of what I want to achieve in a given project – what my desired outcome is.

In other words, by the end of the day/week/year what is it that you want? And I don’t mean the material stuff.

For example, most bloggers have very similar answers:

• “I want to have an established network of friends (other bloggers) who would promote my content to their own audiences and be willing to publish my guest posts every now and then.”
• “I want to have a group of people willing to participate in collaborative projects with me, and help me with my product launches.”
• “I want to meet some influential bloggers who could introduce me to some of the A-players in my niche.”
• “I want to partner with other bloggers in their launches, and be a valuable ally to them.”

These are all valid goals, and they are surely worth pursuing, but what I would advise you to start with, is dividing all the possibilities into two groups.

Short term goals Vs. long term goals

Long term goals are actually better for defining first because they create an overall image of what you’re doing, and point you towards the right path.

Long term goals are also more general in nature, so you can use them as a base for defining short term goals.

In essence, your long term goals are things you want to achieve ultimately. Short term goals are specific milestones that will get you to your long term goals.

For example, your long term goal might be to get to know 5 bloggers and create a strong enough relationship to be able to publish each other’s guest posts and participate in their promotions in the time of one year. To get to this goal you’d have to create a number of short term goals. Things like: contact 10 bloggers and offer them guest posts within the first month. And so on.

Blogging is rarely a strictly business-like activity and, at the same time, rarely a strictly personal thing. That’s why the most common long term goal of networking for bloggers is to simply make friends. To have a small number of good friends with whom you can participate in different kinds of projects, promotions and other activities.

This sort of relationships can be used both for strictly business projects and some personal, social activities. The diverse nature of blogging itself gives you such possibilities. This is something very difficult to achieve in other fields … try to imagine a similar situation in corporate banking, for example.

Here’s what I advise you to do when working on your goals.

1. Pick your final, desirable outcome.

Making friends, in my opinion, is what works best. However, you can also try more business driven approaches. Like building personal expertise in your niche, or becoming the go-to-person for a given (precise) activity.

Whatever you choose remember about two things: your goals have to be exact, and there has to be a deadline.

For example, “I want to meet some bloggers and publish many guest posts on their blogs.” – This isn’t exact. “I want to meet 10 bloggers from my niche and publish 30 guest posts on their blogs.” – This is.

And, of course, the deadline … well, deadlines are deadlines, I’m sure you understand what a deadline is.

2. Try to define a number of milestone goals (Short term goals).

This is where you try to come up with some steps that will bring you closer to the ultimate goals.

Important. You don’t have to design your whole path, so to speak. Short term goals are exactly what the name says, so you only need to define your goals for the next month or so. When the month ends you simply define another set of short term goals.

Continuing the example above; your short term goal could be to “contact 20 bloggers and offer them a guest post within 30 days.” – This is both exact and has a deadline.

However, before you take your goals and do anything with them you need to learn one important thing.

important rule of networking

I won’t keep you hanging here, so I’ll just say upfront that the rule is this: it’s not about you, it’s about them.

Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but … no one cares about you (except for your mom).

OK, it’s not that harsh. Your friends care about you too. But before they can care about you they need to become your friends. Same goes for your online friends.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

Don’t be amazed that some people simply ignore your emails. It’s just life. Strangers ignore each other all the time. And you are no different. When was the last time you deleted an email from an unknown recipient? … umm today?

Whatever you do, remember that you have to give before you take.

Blasting an email to a stranger titled “great business proposition inside” won’t work in a thousand years. You’d be lucky if out of 1000 emails even one gets opened and read.

Now the funny part, giving just like that, out of the blue probably won’t work either. I’d say that there’s another important step before you can even give – introducing yourself.

Remember when your mom taught you never to take candy from a stranger? That’s exactly the situation here.

So finally, here’s a possible real life scenario: introduce, give, take. Actually, a more accurate one is: introduce, give, give, give, give, take … or something similar.

In essence, networking like we’re discussing it here works just like it does in real life. That’s because it is real life, the internet is just a medium, and there are still people on both sides.

As a matter of fact, you have to be even more careful when asking for something online than you’d be in real life. It’s much easier to refuse or even ignore someone over the internet. That’s one of the reasons why some people prefer doing business over the phone to using email. Saying no to someone directly is much more demanding in terms of inner strength than writing it on the screen.

This all makes the whole online environment much more subtle and uncertain; hence the importance of giving before you can take.

It’s time for action, isn’t it? That’s why the next post in the series is going to be all about selecting the right people to contact. Until then don’t forget to subscribe to get the posts delivered straight to your inbox.

I have one more question for you. What do you think about the idea of introducing yourself before doing anything else? Don’t you find giving something out of the blue to be a little strange?

In today’s blogosphere a lot of discussion is going on about various aspects of positioning and growing a blog. Even though the space gets more and more crowded every day, and the game is changing constantly, there are still some things everyone tells you to do – things considered as mandatory for any kind of success.

Among various aspects of promotion, advertising, search engine optimization, social media, and all kinds of other stuff lies the need of contacting other, fellow bloggers, and being in touch with people in general.

Quick note:
This post is the first and a part of a series titled – Networking Guide for Bloggers. Be sure to check back next week for more!

Networking?

Networking is a fancy term, and one that I don’t especially like, to be honest. It strips the whole experience of interacting with other people from all emotion and personal aspects.

Networking sounds strictly “businessy,” which simply doesn’t give a good impression. Reaching out to others, or even making friends are a lot better terms here.

Anyway, we all know that meeting new people is essential for both our own and our blogs’ growth, however in many cases we don’t know how to make the initial step, in a way that we don’t get burned from the get go.

By the way, sending an email with a subject like “link exchange proposition for X” is not an optimal solution! (Please, stop sending me those.)

Furthermore, getting in touch with other people can be even more challenging for people not speaking English natively (myself included). And even when you are a native English speaker it’s not much easier anyway.

Challenges of networking over the internet

You see, communicating with anyone over the internet consists mostly of writing. Essentially, written communication is just that – written, so things like using certain words, and proper punctuation are especially important.

For instance, when you are speaking to someone in person, your tone, voice, and volume of speech create more than 50% of the message, I’d say, but when you are writing the same message none of these things can be used. That’s why there’s so much room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. And I’m sure the last thing you want is to sound aggressive or maybe even offensive.

(Image source: Fotolia)

And then there’s the problem of building up the relationship along with time… not asking anyone to marry you too soon, so to speak.

What I mean here is that most of the time, asking a stranger for help doesn’t work. Simply because they don’t care about you. But asking a friend for help works almost every time. How to turn strangers into friends?

Well, the challenge of making new connections online has to be tackled from more than just a single angle, and this is exactly what we’re trying to do in this series.

What is networking?

As I said earlier, I don’t like the word networking. However, I think I’ll continue using it anyway, purely because it’s a single word, and it’s much easier to apply then a two or three word description.

Anyway, networking is not about getting hundreds of pointless business cards during an event. And it’s not about sending hundreds of spam emails in hope that one or two will get a response. So what is it about then?

(Image source: Fotolia)

For me, networking is the art of meeting new people. Both in the real world and in the online there can be multiple reasons why you want to meet a specific person. It can be business, romance, friendship, let’s-have-a-beer, or whatever else. Here, of course, we’re talking blogging and growing your blog. But blogging is neither purely business nor purely social. It lies somewhere in between.

This makes it particularly difficult because in a purely business-like communication you can send an email starting with “Dear Sir, I’m writing to you to propose my blah blah blah.” In a social relation, on the other hand, you can start with “hey dude, how is U today? Wanna meet 2nite? Blah blah blah.” And in blogging neither one of these is acceptable.

Benefits of networking

Big part of this is obvious. The benefit is that you meet other, likeminded people. So what’s the point of meeting new people? – That’s the question we should be asking.

First of all, there are very few blogs or websites that grew into mainstream popularity all by themselves. Most of the popular sites gained their popularity due to the popularity of other sites. By ways of borrowing it.

Borrowing popularity is a fancy sounding term, but essentially it boils down to getting multiple mentions on other sites. It can happen by obtaining backlinks, being featured in interviews, contacting the webmasters directly, or thousands of other ways.

However, one fact remains, no one, not one webmaster/blogger/website owner will mention you or your site if they don’t have any amount of trust in you and what you do.

(Image source: Fotolia)

You see, it’s easy to mention and link to sites that are already popular – those that have a massive amount of social proof working for them. For instance, if you see a new product at Problogger you don’t need to hesitate whether you can link to it or not. You don’t have to be afraid that the product will turn out awful and people will be very mad at you for pointing them to it. You know that Darren produces great stuff, to some degree you trust him, and he seems like a credible person … the social proof simply does its job for him.

But if you stumble upon something new, you find it a lot more difficult to endorse such a thing or even link to it … “what if it turns out a scam?” … “what if the site disappears tomorrow?” and so on.

It all becomes a cycle of death, so to speak. Here’s the cycle: If you’re just starting out you can’t get no one to endorse you because no one knows you because you’re just starting out. So what’s the best way out of this cycle?

Yes, you guessed it – networking. By networking with others you can break the cycle at the point of “no one knows you,” and then, sooner or later, all the other pieces shall fall as well.

Borrowing popularity through networking

Ultimately, once you know some people you can borrow their popularity to build your own, and that’s a big benefit.

Don’t believe me? Try to imagine what a plain endorsement from both Darren Rowse and Hongkiat would do for your business. I mean, the case where they both say “go there and buy.” Of course, getting it won’t be easy, but I just needed an example.

All I’m trying to explain here is that building relationships with other fellow bloggers and website owners is the best thing you can do for your online presence. There’s nothing that will do a better job at keeping you on the radar.

You can work on SEO, social media, advertising and all the other tools, but these are all things that greatly depend on other company’s opinion of you.

(Image source: Fotolia)

For instance, if you build a good position on Google, but one day you get dropped due to an algorithm update, the next day you wake up with nothing. If Facebook or Google shuts down your advertising campaign same thing happens.

But still, no matter what happens you can work with your network of contacts, participate in their projects, do joint ventures, make partnerships, and so on. Essentially, you’re making friends, and I’m sure I don’t need to explain the value of that.

Moreover, by working with other people you’re positioning yourself alongside them. So whenever a complete stranger is considering whether to promote your new product this social proof is something that is very likely to work in your favor.

When people can see that you’ve been working with “Mr. Authority” in your niche then some of that person’s credibility falls on you. Something along the lines of: “if they’ve been working with X then they must be the real deal.”

If you work on this consistently then you can build up your brand in a relatively short span of time. And I’m not saying that anything will get you overnight results here. You still have to be able to put some serious work, but the benefits make it worth the effort.

Is blogging really a strictly online thing?

Even though blogging or blogging as a business seems like a purely online activity it’s not exactly like that. Most of the things happen online, that’s true – you’re publishing your content on the internet, and interacting with other people via various online services, and so on. However, the basic offline world’s principles of growing your venture/business still apply. And the online world didn’t change anything, it just made certain things easier to do.

For instance, the whole concept of networking is nothing new. However, since the internet is around you don’t have to leave your home, and you can connect with multiple people at the same time, but the whole idea still remains the same. And it’s not much different from what your father or grandfather used to do over the phone.

In essence, I think networking is that valuable because people don’t like to do business with companies, or websites … they like to do business with other people. Until you introduce yourself to your online community nothing significant is going to happen in terms of your brand going viral. If you don’t do this yourself no one will bother to take this step for you.

This concludes the first part of the series, next week we’ll have a word on setting goals for networking. Until then don’t forget to subscribe to get the posts delivered straight to your inbox.

Lastly, feel free to tell me what you think about the whole concept. Do you find networking valuable? Which side you’re on – do you think that who you know matters more than what you know, or the other way around?