Hey everyone, thank you for taking the time to read my article! I hope some of the tips presented will be of great help if you are interested in doing your MBA. I came from a Biomedical science major and Arts minor background so pivoting into business management was an aggressive jump and I definitely would have appreciated any help to make that transition as smooth as possible!

In this article, I want to focus on networking as it is important to set up opportunities to showcase your business venture or build a professional relationship to help elevate your job search success.

In the past it was really hard to network. You had to be a member of a far too expensive golf club or you had to have gone to Harvard Business School or other places that have great networks. Networking used to be based on attending expensive out of town conferences and if you were too junior in the company, the company you worked for would not send you out of town because they would prefer to invest in their seasoned executives. Today anyone can have more access and faster access to information using cell phones. In fact, each smartphone that we all have today has more processing power than all the computers in the world that were used in the late 1960s to put the first person on the moon! You now have access to hundreds of millions of people that you can now contact using just LinkedIn. The secret is to always be building and adding to your LinkedIn profile. Almost every single LinkedIn user clicks on that red message in the top right hand corner right away whenever they see that indicator. Whenever they log into LinkedIn, they see it. With your awesome profile and with the proper communication to the right people, you’ll be a networking giant.

I want to share with you many tips, secrets, and tricks to making these networking meetings a reality for you. Hardly anyone sends messages over LinkedIn right now which blows my mind because it is one of best networking tool ever invented.

Email is dead; we receive so many emails from strangers now that we don’t even bother opening them anymore. However, with LinkedIn, almost every single message you send gets read by the recipient. The likelihood that the recipient responds to your networking request is based on how professional your LinkedIn profile is which is why if you publish updates and write articles and are thought of as a thought leader, the more likely it is they’re going to respond to your messages.

Years ago, you could only be a journalist if you worked for publications. Now, for the first time ever, you have the same access to journalism online on LinkedIn that everybody else has. This has been called friction free journalistic networking. The barriers to journalism by the masses have finally been breached. By writing often you’ll get noticed by recruiters and people that you want to do business with if you write simple articles about your business passion(s) from your heart. And so, I want you to think of yourself from now on as a part-time journalist.

Your next step (which is quite ambitious) is to write a book. Writing a book is a great way to network and it is fairly easy to do with our available resources online. If you can use Microsoft Word and you know how to use a browser to access Amazon.com, then you’re done! Then what you’ll do is you’ll walk into client meetings and you’ll bring a copy of your book and you’ll give it to them. It’s not hard to do. If you write from your heart something you’re passionate about, then writing is enjoyable. Who does that? Who writes a book? Who writes a book and gives it to potential people that are going to hire you or to potential customers? Who does that? Exactly. How badly do you want that job or customer? Simply write it in Microsoft Word and then upload it to Amazon. Amazon takes care of the rest of it electronically. I know it sounds incredibly ambitious to mention that you should write a book but again, how badly do you want this job or customer? When you finish it, bring copies to all of your meetings. Would your competitors do this? No, exactly. Every battle has been won before it has been fought. I want to change the lens by which we see the world, so we can capitalize by networking while coming across, as always, as affable, unique, impressive and interesting. Networking is all about giving first and not receiving. You’re writing articles which means you’re giving information. So, before all networking meetings, I want you to please think about this. How can I help this person? If you give during meetings or if you help somebody out by thinking from their perspective, they’re going to want to help you.