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By Shannan Hearne
Your "web" of contacts is your primary warm market.
Whether you are building a business clientele, a downline, a support group,
or even just a group of friends. The place to start is your warm market.
And your warm market is the group of people with whom you have a
relationship. Pre-internet, this was largely made up of people in your
geographic locale. Meaning that those you could touch were literally, people
you could hop in the car and see face to face. Enter the internet. And
your primary warm
market just got a whole lot bigger!
Internet networking is like picking up your telephone list
from your community or your church and contacting the people who know you
and who you know well enough to share your "stuff". Your stuff might be a
business idea, a new product or service, a juicy piece of news, or a
mutually beneficial opportunity.
Only with the internet you begin with your email address
book and your community or portal type URLs.
When you need to build a team, whether it be a downline, a
support line, or a network; you want to begin with people you have already
built a rapport with. You need to work with folks who already see you as a
recognized brand or authority in your field so that you can skip the time
consuming hand-shake process of getting to know each other.
Inter-net-working step 1.
Go to your email address book
and compose a single email blind carbon copied to everyone who makes up your
web of warm contacts. Write in a familiar style as these are people who
know and trust you. Give them your best pitch and invite them to contact
you for more information regarding the great new idea you are sharing. Sell
sizzle and excitement, but don't share so much information as to negate any
reason for them to contact you for further information. Hit the send
button.
Inter-net-working step 2.
Go to the online communities
and forums where your presence is welcome and recognized. Give them your
best pitch as well and invite them to contact you for more information. In
this environment, you may wish to give a little bit more information. But
you still do not need to give away the farm.
Inter-net-working step 3.
Prepare the first response
email and/or telephone outline for your warm market respondees. You don't
need to work directly from a script, or to send a form or autoresponder
email, but you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel 100 times for every
100 inquiries you receive.
Don't make the mistake of waiting for the responses to
roll in before you begin step 3. When people respond to your initial
contact, they are actively interested. If they have to wait a week to hear
back from you, they won't be quite so actively interested and they may have
lost some faith in you for your tardy response.
Inter-net-working step 4.
Recruit into your plan as many
of the respondees as you can. Follow up with the maybes. And file the no's
away for further contact after you round up the affirmative folks and crank
out your initiative.
Step 4A.
Show everyone who comes on board with you how to
do the same thing with their web of warm contacts. Remember that all
networking, both online and offline, follows along the lines of six degrees.
This theory states that you are never more than six recognized relationships
away from any other person that you wish to bring into your sphere of
influence.
Inter-net-working step 5.
Roll out your plan and repeat
with step 1. You will either have come up with additional programs and
agendas that you wish to implement or you will need to bring additional
players to the table of your original plan. Either way, networking is a
never ending process.
By planning and implementing your networking in this
manner, you will continue to enhance your presence with your existing warm
contacts and to grow the size of this contact base. And that's what
successful networking is all about. And with the internet, the
possibilities are truly limitless!
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