If you’re like me, you most likely hate traditional networking, because let’s just be honest, this is what happens. You show up at an event where you don’t know anybody, hoping you can get business from strangers, which if you think about it, is absolutely crazy. Why? Because no stranger with a ton of business is sitting around trying to figure out how to give their tons of business to other strangers. So, what really happens when you show up at a networking event is: you expect somebody else to have business; you find out they don’t have any business, and they expected you to have business, and then they find out that you don’t have any business. It turns out that neither one of you have any business networking because you don’t have a network to share amongst each other anyway.
Well, it can be frustrating for both parties. It can be frustrating for everybody.
I’ve seen a lot of people start up network groups and then let the groups crumble because none of the members had any value to give. A bunch of leeches and a bunch of bloodsuckers showing up at these networking events are never going to give any leads away, but they’re always going to try to take leads from other people. Any time you put multiple folks in a scenario of that magnitude, where they’re just trying to get business from each other instead of giving value to each other, it’s not going to work out.
You don’t really have a choice on who you can connect with when it comes to the traditional networking groups. You don’t know who’s going to be at the next meeting, especially if you’re showing up to a new one. You also don’t know the caliber of person who’s going to be there.
If you hate all of that, I’ve got good news for you.
There is a better way. You see, right now, you can go to sites like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and LinkedIn, and send a friend request. You can follow, or send a friend request to any person you want. In the time you’d spend driving back and forth to traditional networking events where you’re not going to get any business from anyone, you could give value trying to get to know somebody on a social media site. In today’s day and age, people consider their friends online to be just as close as their friends offline. If you translate that concept to the business world, your network online is just as powerful as your network offline. So, try the Lucky 7 Method instead.
The Lucky 7 Method works like this.
Each day, seven days a week, you make three moves. Let me give you a better idea. Click the link to read about social reconnaissance, a previous blog post on this site. Remember, be strategic about the people you’re engaging. These are the three steps: First, write on somebody else’s wall. Second, send a direct message to one person, and the third thing you do, seven days a week, is leave a comment on somebody else’s post.
If you did that three times a day, seven days a week for an entire month, you’d have contacted 93 different people in your network, and if you choose correctly, the ones that you’ll have interacted with would be the ones you’d most likely get business from. So, if you’re tired of traditional networking, if you’re tired of the roaches and leeches trying to get business from you that you don’t have in the first place, try the Lucky 7 Method. We call it the Lucky 7 Method, because it makes a lot of people lucky, seven days a week.
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