Evan Carmichael shares three ways to maintain a professional network: create regular content so people feel connected to you at scale, track your top 30 relationships in a spreadsheet and use tools like Newsle to catch when contacts make news, and hire a part-time assistant to monitor messages and personalize outreach.
Chapters
How do you keep in touch with your network? I'm going to answer that question in today's episode of Lunch and Earn. So I recently got asked a question from one of my loyal YouTube fans, love you guys, new future builder who wrote in to say, I know I still struggle with this in some aspects of my business, especially when it comes to keeping up with people. Any suggestions on how to remain in contact with your network? Anyone have a particular strategy or schedule to follow up with contacts? This is a fantastic question, and I have 3 strategies that I think will help you. Number 1 is connect at scale. So instead of trying to keep in touch with everybody one-on-one-on-one-on-one, you can use social media to help you. My favorite way is to use YouTube. I make videos all the time, and people watch the videos, and they feel like they know me, they know what I'm doing, they know what I'm up to, they know what I care about, what I'm interested in, because they watch my YouTube videos. And there's a lot of people who I've never met who feel like they know me and stop me on the street and come up to me at conferences and want to take pictures and say, you know, start talking to me about something that was in my video, and I don't even know who they are, but they feel like they know me because I'm creating content. So if you are creating content on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, you can do things at scale for people to stay in touch with you even though you don't necessarily know who they are. Number 2 is filter key contacts. One of the tools that I use for maybe a decade or more was I used to get a list of the 30 most important people in my network, people that I wanted to stay in touch with, and created an Excel file on them and just kept track of the last time I was in touch with them. And then every day it would automatically increase the date by 1, and I can go to it and see when was the last time I was in touch with them. And I would find a way to then send in emails, connect with them on social media, something, some kind of touchpoint once a month just to keep my name top of mind. I've stopped doing that, I think more because I focus my energies more on the YouTube, more on the mass side, and I'm getting a lot of people come to me. Maybe I'm fortunate that way, but it was a really effective tool early on as I was growing my business. The other cool tool is called Newsle, and this is what it looks like on the screen. It allows you to keep in touch with all of your Facebook friends, and it tells you when they are in the news. And so every day it looks at all your Facebook friends and then compares it to the major news publications and alerts you by email every time your friend has been in the news. So if there's any way to add your contacts as a Facebook friend, you can then sign up for Newsle, which is a free service, and get updated every time they've been in the news, which is an amazing way to be able to reach out to them and say, hey, congrats, I saw you in the Globe and Mail or in the Wall Street Journal. And it's an extra way to get another touchpoint in with them. Number 3 is hire someone to help. One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make is they try to do everything themselves. And so this is something that is high leverage that you may be able to give somebody else to help you with. You might be the one doing the communication, reaching out, but maybe they're helping you find something to share, helping you find a recent tweet they sent out. If you know they like camping, maybe helping you find a recent article on camping that you can share. Having somebody help you do a lot of the work will save you a lot of aggravation and allow you to focus on the bigger picture things. So as an example, Nina helps me with a lot of the comments on the channel. I love you guys, I love the comments, it's part of my daily routine, but there's too many physically coming in for me to keep up. And so Nina checks out a lot of the comments, and part of what she'll do is if there's something that I need to see, something that I need to reach out to, someone that I need to get back to because you've left an important comment, she'll flag it for me and I'll write back to them. Otherwise, I would have missed that because I can't keep up with them myself, and I would have missed some important communications. And so I'd be thinking about if this is something that's high leverage for you, something that's really going to help you grow your business, maybe you should hire somebody on a part-time basis to help you do some of the research, the background work, the follow-up, so that they save you time and allow you to focus on the big picture things to grow your business. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know what you guys think of these strategies, and also what are your favorite strategies to keep in touch with your network. Leave it in the comments below. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.
