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November
2002
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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