7 Ways to Network Better than Your Competition

Now is the best time in your life and in history to network because social media platforms, like LinkedIn, make networking so much easier. Never before has it been this easy to network and take your career to the next level. Here are 7 ways to improve your networking skills:

Step 1 of 7: Have a Superb Search Engine Optimized LinkedIn Profile

If you don’t have a perfect and optimized LinkedIn profile already, then please watch this video  HarounVentures.com/network3.

In the past it was really hard to network. You had to be a member of a far too expensive golf club or you had to have gone to Harvard Business School or other places that have great networks.

Networking used to be based on attending expensive out of town conferences and if you were too junior in the company, the company you worked for would not send you out of town because they would prefer to invest in their seasoned executives. Today a child in the middle of Africa has more access and faster access to information using cell phones than Bill Clinton did in the 1990s. In fact, each smartphone that we all have today has more processing power than all the computers in the world that were used in the late 1960s to put the first person on the moon!

According to Ericsson, there will be more than six billion smartphones by 2021. [1]

You now have access to hundreds of millions of people that you can now contact using just LinkedIn. The secret is to always be building and adding to your LinkedIn profile.

Per the image below, whenever you send an inMail message in LinkedIn you monopolize the real estate in the top right hand corner of the most important networking tool ever created. Sending emails or cold calling doesn't work anymore when networking.

Almost every single LinkedIn user clicks on that red message in the top right hand corner right away whenever they see that indicator. Whenever they log into LinkedIn, they see it. With your awesome profile and with the proper communication to the right people, you'll be a networking giant.

I want to share with you many tips, secrets, and tricks to making these networking meetings a reality for you. Hardly anyone sends messages over LinkedIn right now which blows my mind because it's the absolute best networking tool ever invented. It's a monopoly; no wonder Microsoft bought the company!

More people will now take meetings with you if your LinkedIn profile looks amazing and if you keep it growing.

Email is dead; we receive so many emails from strangers now that we don't even bother opening them anymore. However, with LinkedIn, almost every single message you send gets read by the recipient. The likelihood that the recipient responds to your networking request is based on how professional your LinkedIn profile is which is why if you publish updates and write articles and are thought of as a thought leader, the more likely it is they're going to respond to your messages; in the next step I will teach you how to write LinkedIn articles like a professional journalist does as I have been trained through my Inc.com editor for my Inc.com articles and other publications I occasionally write for.

Step 2 of 7: Write Like a Journalist Does (I Will Teach You How)

Years ago, you could only be a journalist if you worked for publications. Now, for the first time ever, you have the same access to journalism online on LinkedIn that everybody else has (how awesome is that)! I call this friction free journalistic networking.

Please watch this video for how to write like a journalist on LinkedIn and what this means: HarounVentures.com/network4

The barriers to journalism by the masses have finally been breached. By writing often you'll get noticed by recruiters and people that you want to do business with if you write simple articles about your business passion(s) from your heart. And so, I want you to think of yourself from now on as a part-time journalist.

Remember when you were in high school and that one time or two times or three times or whatever where you really poured you heart into writing an essay? You loved it because you wrote it from your heart!

I want you to think of LinkedIn journalism like that.

I want you to take your writing to the next level.

I want you to take your networking abilities to the next level.

And then eventually, I want you to write a book (that’s right).

Step 3 of 7: Write A Book Within 6 Months Of Reading This Sentence (That’s Right!)

Writing a book is a great way to network and it is so darn easy to do. If you can use Microsoft Word and you know how to use a browser to access Amazon.com, then you're done! Then what you'll do is you'll walk into client meetings and you'll bring a copy of your book and you'll give it to them. It's not hard to do.

I am writing this column right now on the elliptical trainer at 24 Hour Fitness in Millbrae California on my iPad using Microsoft Word. I made a simple Microsoft Word template that you can download right now and start writing today.

Download it here HarounVentures.com/networking-book. The name of the file to download is I-WILL-WRITE-A-BOOK-IN-6-MONTHS.DOC . The Microsoft Word template is 9 inches tall by 6 inches wide, which is the size of this paperback or e-book.

Throw down a challenge and tell your family and friends you are going to do this….and then you will! This is what I did and it was so darn painful when they asked me over and over again how my book was coming along : ) HarounVentures.com/network5.

If you write from your heart something you're passionate about, then writing is enjoyable. Who does that? Who writes a book? Who writes a book and gives it to potential people that are going to hire you or to potential customers? Who does that? Exactly. How badly do you want that job or customer?

Simply write it in Microsoft Word and then upload it to Amazon. Amazon takes care of the rest of it electronically. I dictated part of this article using Siri on my iPhone when I would go for walks to Starbucks. 

In electronic (Kindle) format, Amazon does all of the hard work by putting it online for free (see kdp.amazon.com).

In paper format, Amazon does all of the hard work by putting it online for free (see createspace.com ).

In audio format, Amazon does all of the hard work by putting it online for free (see acx.com ).

I know it sounds incredibly ambitious to mention that you should write a book but again, how badly do you want this job or customer? When you finish it, bring copies to all of your meetings. Would your competitors do this? No, exactly. Every battle has been won before it has been fought.

I want to change the lens by which we see the world, so we can capitalize by networking while coming across, as always, as affable, unique, impressive and interesting.

Networking is all about giving first and not receiving. You're writing articles which means you're giving information. So, before all networking meetings, I want you to please think about this. How can I help this person?

 If you give during meetings or if you help somebody out by thinking from their perspective, they're going to want to help you. Let's do this!

Step 4 of 7: Keep Growing Your Online Presence (it Never Ends)

Your LinkedIn profile is a dynamic resume. It keeps growing and you keep optimizing and ‘nurturing’ it. As a result, more people will agree to meet with you if you publish a lot of high-quality content so that eventually you will become thought of as a thought leader.

I'm humbled to be your coach through all of this. There's really no limits to how many people we can meet by networking, except the limits that we set for ourselves. Whether or not you think you can, you're right.

It’s not all about LinkedIn though (this video also addresses how to be careful and potentially remove negative things about you online): HarounVentures.com/network6.

Step 5 of 7: Bond Before Business

It took me 20 years in business to realize that relationships are more important than product knowledge. When we were kids growing up in Toronto, we used to go to Exhibition Stadium, which is the stadium my beloved Toronto Blue Jays used to play baseball in. I am so passionate about baseball….but I was even more passionate about it when I was a kid as I didn’t realize it was a business.

We would go to Exhibition Stadium to watch our heroes, the Toronto Blue Jays, play baseball and we would network as little kids and ask over and over and over again from a young age for autographs.

We were persistent, we were a pain in the ass so we could get an autograph from our heroes, from George Bell or Rickey Henderson or Dave Winfield or Don Mattingly (when the Yankees would come to town and lose by a million runs). We were persistent. Then we reached an age where we started our first full time jobs and we stopped doing stuff like that. For some reason, you stop networking when you get a little bit older and graduate from high school or from university.

Can you pass the O’Hare test? HarounVentures.com/network7.

Step 6 of 7: Ask Often

You graduate from school and then you stop asking for some reason. You think you'll get promoted or you'll get a raise for doing a good job. People will see you and they'll appreciate you. Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

We have to start thinking like when we were kids, and we'd ask for an autograph. We have to ask for a raise and we have to ask for a promotion or to get a customer to agree to a contract or we will never get anything in life! We have to ask people to meet with them.

It's so obvious the only place to get autographs from baseball players is at the baseball stadium. And so, I want you to think about that with respect to LinkedIn. It's so obvious that this is the only place, or the best place, to get access to people to network with. LinkedIn is like an adult's version of my Toronto Blue Jays Exhibition Stadium for the whole world!

Every single job I've received wasn't given to me. I had to work so hard at it by networking. I've changed careers many times by networking; I'll teach you how to do it.

What surprised me was that it wasn't really me asking for help that got me what I wanted, rather, it was me helping people that are more junior than me for some reason…. I just wanted to help and it always comes back to you. Some people might call it karma; I'll discuss this in more detail soon.

You can ask people to meet with you by networking and you can, of course, network by taking meetings with other people that reach out to you, which they will a lot once your LinkedIn profile is optimized.

Step 7 of 7: Give/Help Others and Never Expect Anything In Return

The amazing thing is that the best networking meetings for me ended up being from people that reached out to me that were younger and wanted my career help. In fact, I've gotten almost every achievement in my life not through my outbound networking abilities, but by the inbound ones, by people that were starting out in their careers and I just wanted to help them.

I found that by helping people, I felt good about myself. I really enjoyed it and it gave me an incredible high. You know how good you feel when you help somebody out? That's optimal networking, but also what I refer to as ‘accidental networking’. Those ‘I want to help you and I ask for nothing in return’ meetings would pay off big time. I didn't want anything out of it. I just wanted to help.

The accidental receiving part of networking is a beautiful thing. The whole process of writing articles to post online is also the giving part of networking, which really pays dividends; after a while you'll kind of be thought of as a thought leader.

Give and you will receive in the long run (I promise).