January 3, 2014

Village Tip: 10 Ways to Screw Up Your Networking Efforts

Our blog will continue to provide information that is useful to entrepreneurs and small business owners.  Frankly, we hope that these 'Village Tips' are useful to many of you!  I have shared tips on 'The Art of Networking' in the past. In fact, I recently shared 15 ideas on improving your networking results.

This time I thought that it would be worthwhile to point out ten things that many of us do to the detriment of our networking efforts. Here are 10 things you should *NOT DO* if you want to make your networking work!

  1. Do not abuse your network. Word of mouth will kill you.
  2. Do not abuse your contacts. Always honor their right to privacy.
  3. Do not burden your network with your problems, but, be willing to listen to advice when you ask for it.
  4. Do not develop a reputation for calling *only* when you need a favor.
  5. Do not ever thing anything can replace real competence.
  6. Do not expect anyone to work harder for you than you are willing to work for yourself.
  7. Do not expect your network to find you a job.
  8. Do not give a referral without first calling ahead to alert your contact.
  9. Do not offer negative feedback callously.
  10. Do not talk excessively about yourself. Learn how to get your network to do this for you!

These are some ideas on how you can maximize your positive results from networking. Have you learned the 'hard way' about any of these ten networking errors in the past? Do you have other suggestions that we may have missed?

I will continue to share these Village Tips on a semi-regular basis!
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