Posts Tagged ‘face to face meetings’

These results are based on actual events. This speaks VOLUMES about the power of internet marketing vs the old school way.  I compared the results of 2 hours a week networking face to face with 2 hours per week blogging about valuable tips and tricks.

I use to attend a lot of face to face networking event to grow my business. I’d get up to be at a 7am breakfast each week and spend 2 hours there networking. The people there knew me, my work and encouraged their friend and clients to come to me. 45% of my business came from this breakfast and it was great relationship building. The work from there was built on trust. It was by far my best lead bringer-inner-er I could speak to 10 cold-warm people in that 2 hours individually or as a small group but they were not all qualified.

For 8 weeks on this website I spent the same amount of time (2 hours) at my desk, blogging tips, tricks and little motivators out to the internet apply a handful of marketing advice I read from gurus on the topic of blogging and marketing online.

Over the 8 weeks I went from brand new blog site to 190 readers in week 8. That’s still small fish but as you can see it grew pretty quickly. Considering I did not have a list to market too and this was purely through having my blog automatically put a link back to each blog post on my Twitter account and my Facebook account. That’s all I did!

Best of all… if they are reading your blog posts it’s because they are interested in your topic, which makes them FAR more QUALIFIED than the random folk you might speak to at a face to face networking event!

When I used to do it the old school way with face to face meetings there was traffic to deal with, costs to be members and for the food there, and looking back was a crazy way to try and build my business. Especially my type of business! This does go for almost anyone though. Even if your business is local only… 2 hours a week blogging is so cheap and powerful – it’s an awesome way to get known as the guru.

If you do keep up the traditional way as well you can use your blog as back-up for that person who meets you. They might meet you – google you to check you out, read your blog posts and get to know you WAY more than they could in any 10 minute face to face chat and then they’re REALLY sold!

I used to speak really loudly at events so that other interested standing buy would come over but the most I could get to over 2 hours would be 10 people. Even then the discussions were short so they could mingle with the most people possible in the short time.

Online… you can speak to millions! Obviously you need to get them to come to your blog but there are a whole heap of ways to do that… but they’re a whole other blog post to come