networking :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

In this post I expand on the third tip in my series 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business: Build New Networks

In that initial, overview post I wrote about building new networks:

As my handwritten scrawl shows, the first version of this was “Build your networks”. The trouble is, while the networks we have now might sustain us for a while, our new business focus may demand, not that we trash our existing networks, but that we complement it with new networks relevant to our marketing strategy.

If you are starting your business now or giving it a re-boot, social media offers you literally unprecedented opportunities to build amazing new, and amazingly profitable, networks.

Facebook network, first 100, via TouchGraph

I am not for a moment minimizing the importance of existing networks. Just the other day I was reflecting on the fact that a large proportion of my business over the past 20+ years has come, directly or indirectly, through networks I already had way back when I first set up my consultancy business, literally from my kitchen table. Which means that network has been worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to me.

Our old networks may not serve us adequately into the future

The networks we have when we leave the corporation or the government office may well deliver us plenty of business for a while, and hopefully for a long time. As I have just indicated, I have been fortunate. On the other hand, we need to accept that after a period of time those networks may not be able to deliver as they could before.

Ever go back to a place or group where you used to be a “somebody” and see no one you know or who knows you?

We need to keep building our networks and be careful not just to stick with the ones we know.

As my good friend and master networker, Bill Vick, likes to say about networking, you should dig the well before you are thirsty.

And it’s not just about networking with potential clients. That is thinking much too narrowly. We need to build professional networks in fields where we would like to work and do business. That includes networking with our competition.

For instance, I have a network of coaching colleagues now, which did not exist before 2002 and one in social media, a network which did not exist for me before 2003. I could think of many of those people are competitors. I choose to think of them as colleagues.

And in fact those networks have been immensely valuable in terms of building my business, as well as in providing me with new, trusted friendships and professional alliances. Not least, they have also provided me with opportunities to serve the community, in various not-for-profit organizations within those networks.

I also have a network, small so far, of business colleagues in China or who are very experienced and knowledgeable about business in China.

It gives me great confidence to be able to tell clients that if I don’t know the answer to a question I can probably find someone in my network who does.

Look for scope to expand specific networks

As our business grows and changes, and as we get clearer about what we really want to be doing and the areas we want to focus on, it is a good idea to look at our networks and see where we need to do some more sowing and nurturing to make particular parts of our network grow.

There are now some great visualization tools that can help us with that.

As well as TouchGraph which produces visualizations of your Facebook network, as above, one tool that seems to offer scope for some interesting analysis and strategizing, is the LinkedIn Maps tool from LinkedIn Labs, which produces visualizations like the one below. I’m just familiarizing myself with this but already I can see some scope for thinking about my network and taking some strategic action to expand it in various sectors.

I haven’t figured out the key to the clustering of several groups under various colors. It does look as if:

the pink group, bottom right, is a coaching sub-network
a small, light orange group top right is a China network
the reasonably large, orange group, bottom center, is pretty certainly a social media network

Still working on the others, but the power for me of this kind of visual presentation is that it raises questions which I can usefully address in working out my own roadmap for engagement via LinkedIn for the next year and beyond.

For example, should I be looking to build a bigger coaching network, or say a bigger China network, and how would such decisions relate to and serve my business objectives?

Share your story

I would love to hear some stories of how your networks, old or new, have helped you in business. And of course I’m happy as always to respond as best I can to any questions about how to apply some of this thinking.

The series: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 1: Know Your Market Worth : Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 2: Build an Order Book: Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 3: Build New Networks: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 4: Ask for Help: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 5: Love the Business You Are In: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

I’ve been thinking and writing quite a bit over the past couple of weeks about the LinkedIn professional network. Today, pondering what I might post about here that could be helpful to someone, I got to wondering how useful LinkedIn is for home-based professionals.

My first thought was that a distinction probably needs to be made between the needs of

those who are working from home and at the same time hoping to score sooner or later a position that would take them into a company or organization workplace and
those professionals who are committed, long-term, or at least for the foreseeable future, to working from home and are happy about that.

The short story is that LinkedIn can help both the person working from home temporarily and the one who is in for the longer haul.

Perhaps in different ways, or with different emphases.

The man or woman working from home and hoping to find a position which will take them back into corporate life will want to use LinkedIn to help with that process. LinkedIn is a standard port of call for recruiters looking for people to fill professional positions. Not having a profile there and not taking care of the profile is like not having a resume to send when there is the prospect of a position, or at least an interview. With a resume you send, you would usually have the option of staying up late and working on it. With your LinkedIn profile, you may never know that someone with the job of a lifetime came looking for you and did not find you, or did not find in your profile some information that may have won you an interview but was not there because, like so many people who are technically “on LinkedIn” you hadn’t managed to make time to work on the content of your profile.

So if you are in this “temporarily home based” group you will take care to develop as impressive a profile as you truthfully can and keep it up to date.

You will also use such features as LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Groups to raise awareness of you and your skills – your “Brand You”.

Those who are happy with the idea of working from home indefinitely, maybe even for life, will presumably have some kind of product or service to sell and Linkedin can help there. An informative, engaging LinkedIn profile will still be important – I would say essential – but you will have tweaked it to draw attention to what you are wanting to sell, rather than emphasizing such items as your professional qualifications. Although if your strategy is to position yourself as, say, a thought leader, you may be focusing more on what the profile says about you – you just won’t make it look like an ad for a job. You will also use features such as LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Groups, but you may choose to use them in such a way as to draw attention to your product or service. That’s not the same as being shy or retiring in terms of your particular skills and talents, but rather a matter of what you choose to draw attention to, in terms of your strategic business objectives.

As regular readers will know, I am definitely in the long-term work-from-home category – a lifer you might say.

And I have benefited a great deal from my membership of Linked, especially in terms of the professional alliances and personal friendships it has made possible. In fact I never cease to be amazed at the way, working from home, I can connect with professionals in a global network based on trust. I remember years ago, learning about LinkedIn and wondering how or from whom I could get an invitation to join and being stumped. I can’t recall now whether there was an option, as there certainly is now, to join without an invitation, but I do know that now, with my immediate circle of first level connections, some 495, I can connect with literally millions of other professionals in a range of countries.

On my Des Walsh dot Com site I started, just over a week ago, a series of blog posts with tips on using LinkedIn to good effect. As I go along I think of more things to share, so I frankly don’t know how many tips there are going to be. The first two posts in the series are:

Tip #1: Review Your Profile Regularly

Tip #2: Take Time to Link Strategically

I’ll link from here to subsequent posts in the series. If you want the RSS feed link for that site, it’s http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Deswalshcom

And if you have a story about how LinkedIn has helped you or anyone in a work from home situation, or in other contexts I would love to hear it and I hope you would be happy to share it. Just leave a comment below.