Recently reading a blog post, The 5 Keys to Content Marketing Mastery, and I started thinking how the points made by the author could be related to networking and growing your business through word of mouth marketing. My reasoning relates to the fact that much networking these days can happen online hence content becomes important.

If you want to think about improving your networking, here’s what you need to look at:

Get out of your comfort zone but not so much that you are scared off- If you are going to the same old networking events and hanging out with the same old people but not growing your business you are definitely doing something wrong. Perhaps the people you are seeing at the events you go to do not actually fully understand what you do? Perhaps your elevator pitch sucks? Perhaps you are actually at the wrong events. Get out of your comfort zone and do something completely different.

Keep working on your networking and strive for constant improvement- When you are networking, don’t just go through the motions. You can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results.

Look at the results- If you aren’t tracking your results you won’t know if you are successful with your networking activities. Track your results regularly and make adjustments accordingly.

You should actually be mentally and physically tired when you get home- If you aren’t tired when you get home from an event, then you aren’t trying hard enough. You are not engaging with people enough, you are not being in the moment and you are not giving your all to the event. No wonder you are failing.

Make sure that you have actually set your goals before starting so that you can measure success- Goal setting is vital as the first step to measuring success is knowing what you want to achieve.