Making Business Connections Online

March 20, 2007

As a small business that works with other small businesses, I often develop a more personal relationship with my clients. One comment I hear from many of them is how alienating owning a small business can be. When people work in the corporate world, there is always someone in the next cube or higher up that you can talk to. When you leave that world to brave it on your own, who do you turn to for advice and support? The answer is making connections with other small business owners like yourself. I will come back to this topic later to discuss other forms networking, but for now we are going to discuss online business networking.

What is online networking? It is when you join an online community through blogs, forums and discussions to make new business contacts. This is an excellent solution for busy entrepreneurs to connect with other like-minded professionals all over the world without the time commitment and expenses associated with in-person networking.

How do you get started? First you will need to find a community that is talking about things that interest you. There are many communities to choose from, so if you have a limited amount of time it is best to find a few that interest you the most. To get you started, here are a few good communities to check out:

The StartupNation Community. This site is full of new entrepreneurs and seasoned business owners who are willing to share their experiences to help you make your venture a success.
Ryze. This site is a connection-based business networking site. All of the connections are done behind the password-protected gateway - which is good and bad. (I’ll explain that more below.) Some people swear by this site, and some people don’t find much use for it.
LinkedIn. Like Ryze, LinkedIn is connection-based, but it is not behind a password-protected gateway … unless you request it to be. (You can make portions of your profile private.) LinkedIn is great for making connections to people you previously worked with or went to school with as well.
WAHM.com. There are many sites for work-at-home professionals, but I happened to choose this one because I am a work-at-home-mom myself. You can also try Jammies at Work Forum, Work at Home Network Forum, or IdeaCafe CyberSchmooze.

What is the next step? Once you have found a few communities, click around to get a feel for the flow and tone of the site. Read a few posts to see if the members of the community interest you. If you like what you are seeing, make a username and jump right in!

CAUTION!! Most people use their business names on these sites because they are trying to make new business contacts. Remember that most of these sites are also indexed by Google so what you say on these sites, using your business name, can be seen by anyone. Be careful what you say, and always be polite! The good side to this is that by participating in networking sites, you are increasing the inbound links to your site, and thereby increasing your Google rank. Add your website URL to your signature on all your posts, and you’ll watch your ranking go up and up! As an example, "nhgconsulting.com" gets 43 hits on Google, my married name gets 343 hits, and my maiden name gets 43 hits. Some of these links go as far back as 7-8 years ago - think about that before you post!

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