Meeting new people is easy, even from home. With a simple email, you can approach people you don’t know and begin a relationship that can lead to referrals, marketing alliances, traffic to your site, sign-ups for your list, and more.

What do you write in this email?

Tell them how you found them. Say something nice about their website or blog, article, or video, or about their story. Tell them something you have in common.

Then, ask to interview them for your podcast or video channel.

Or, invite them to write a guest post for your blog or newsletter.

Or, ask them if you can reprint their article or post, with attribution.

Or, go “old school” and ask them to tell you more about what they do. You can add that you want to see if there’s a way the two of you can work together for your mutual benefit.

Don’t say that much about your practice. Focus on them and what they do.

The goal of this email is to get a response, not to make an impression. If you don’t get a response, or they don’t seem terribly interested, move on. There are plenty of fish (lawyers, business owners, other professionals, etc.) in the sea.

When you do get a response, continue to exchange emails, invite them to a phone call or video call, and get to know more about them. Look for ways you can help them and ways they can help you or your clients.

Stay in touch and get to know them better. Just like you would if you met them in person.

If you want to learn more about how to find, approach, and network with other professionals, without leaving your home or office, my course shows you everything you need to know.

A headline in an article I saw: “Networking Sucks–Do This Instead”. It wasn’t about alternatives to networking, however, it was about making networking less sucky.

Which is a good thing because if you can take the suckiness out of networking, there are a lot of benefits.

Meeting new business contacts and prospective clients is a valuable business building tactic for professionals.

So, when our ankle bracelets are removed and we’re allowed out of the house, what can we do to drain out some of the suck?

You can find ways to get yourself invited to an event, by a friend or a meeting holder, and have a wing-man available to introduce you.

You can get yourself booked as a speaker at lunches or conferences, and network with people who wait in line to meet you, get your card, and have your babies.

You can organize your own events, and thus have an excuse to invite the kinds of people you want to meet.

You can avoid formal networking completely, and do your networking only “as and when” you happen to meet people.

Or, you can use your newly acquired Zoom skills and do your networking online or over the phone.

But, let’s face it. If you’ve tried networking and hate it in every shape and form, don’t do it.

Don’t punish yourself when there are other ways to build your practice.

On the other hand. . . I have a prediction.

Once things get back to normal, a lot of people who have sworn off networking are going to have a change of heart.

Because while working from home has benefits, humans need to be around people.

So, we’ll go places and meet people and have a jolly good time.

At least for a little while. Until we remember that networking sucks and we go back to our antisocial ways.

How to get referrals from other professionals (over the phone)

If you’ve ever tried networking and stopped, no doubt one reason was that you weren’t getting any business out of it.

Sure, there are other benefits to networking. It’s fun to hang out with people you like and have something in common with. It’s fun to see and be seen.

But if building your network and your practice is a primary reason for networking and it isn’t happening, or you’d like to make your next networking function more productive, according to a study, there’s one simple thing you should do.

Go somewhere new.

Find a new meeting, a new group, a new event, where nobody knows you.

According to the study, “people who are already embedded in a social network of friends and advisors don’t network much at all,” said Sharique Hasan, an associate Professor Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, who conducted the study.

He said, “Once you have a network in place, you tend to explore less. As a result, you likely miss out on opportunities to learn from new people who might be sitting next to you.”

Bottom line, if you network to have fun, stick with what’s familiar. But if you network to meet new people, learn new ideas and discover new opportunities, don’t go to Cheers (where everybody knows your name), go somewhere new.