How to Get 1,000,000 People in Your Network

“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”  -Napoleon Hill

In this article I will explain how to get 1,000,000 people in your network (read on to see the math/logic of this thesis). The more people you meet, the more people you will meet; it becomes self fulfilling. If you help somebody with their career from your heart, they will open up their entire network to you. You don't do it on purpose, but it just happens that way.

I find that younger people ("the born digital generation") that use social media have way more contacts than older people like me. What blows my mind is that the jobs and the way that my kids will communicate in the future haven't been invented yet! One thing I am confident of is that LinkedIn has no credible competition and it is the absolute best way to network for all generations.

Let's say that the average person under 30 that has been using LinkedIn has 500 connections. Let's assume that you only take 12 LinkedIn mentoring inbound inMail meetings per year…or one per month with people seeking humble advice. Keep in mind that if your LinkedIn profile is complete and you publish articles on LinkedIn as we discussed in a previous article, then you'll start to get many inbound meeting requests (please take all of these meetings...or at least do calls on your way to work when you mentor others if you don't have the time to meet in person).

Let’s assume that if in one year you mentored 12 people on LinkedIn and they have 500 contacts each. Of course they want to return the favor by introducing you to their contacts, even if that's not the reason you're helping them. You just want to help with your heart.

Let's do some math here:

 500 contacts X's 12 people/year = 6,000 new network contacts/year

These 12 people that you mentored will walk through walls for you (and again, you are doing this because you genuinely want to help them and not to get anything in return). Say you start in your mid-thirties getting inbounds for meeting requests, which you accept. Then by the time you're in your 50s and you mentor only 12 people per year and the 500 contacts times 12 is…

Then by your 50s, you're close to 100,000 people in your network that are there to help you. And that really adds up! : ) This is not a stretch as there are 467 million people using LinkedIn today and the company thinks they can hit their long term goal of 3 billion users.

What would it take to get 1,000,000 people in your network in your lifetime? A lot...but let's do the math: if you take 1 inbound meeting request every other week, then that leads to 26 mentoring meetings or calls per year...and if LinkedIn grows as a networking tool as I expect it to, then assume that each person that you mentor (or just meet/speak with) has 1,000 contacts each. This means you have 26,000 new people in your network per year. 1,000,000 new contacts divided by 26,000 = 38 years of networking. Even if you start only accepting meetings by the time you are 40, then by the time you are 78, you have 1,000,000 people in your network!

This can occur as none of us will be retiring in our 70s give the incredible science advancements we have seen in recent years. Call me the eternal optimist, but I think that the person that will live to be 150 years old is alive today. Why would we want to spend half of our lives in retirement? : )

During meetings when I mentor somebody and offer my humble advice I find that the person I'm mentoring is of course eager to help and quite often during the meetings they offer to introduce me to someone that might really help me a lot in business. Of course that's not why I'm doing these meetings.

Why do they do this? It's because you're helping them from your heart and they feel it and they want to reciprocate. If not now, then they'll reciprocate to you in the future; it costs you and them nothing.

The more people you meet, the more people you will meet and we always know that relationships are more important than product knowledge. This "accidental networking/mentoring" of others has helped me more in business than the many amazing people that mentored me over the years.

Give (from your heart) and you will receive has been prophetically relevant for thousands of years. The most inspirational and successful people in history give more than they receive. Do this and you will eventually have 1,000,000 people in your network.

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