This week’s episode of Good Girls Get Rich is brought to you by Uplevel Media CEO and LinkedIn expert, Karen Yankovich. In this episode, Karen shares how to grow your network.

Virtual networking has never been more important. To grow and cultivate your network, start by taking a look at your first-, second-, and third-degree connections on LinkedIn.

#GoodGirlsGetRich

We want to hear your thoughts on this episode! Leave us a message on Speakpipe or email us at info@karenyankovich.com.

About the Episode:

Have you ever heard the phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? I’m sure you have. And there’s a lot of truth to that saying. As we’re all navigating this unprecedented time in our lives, virtual networking has become more important than ever.

In-person networking still has its value, but while we’re under shelter-in-place orders, now is the time to take full advantage of virtual networking opportunities. And that starts by growing and cultivating your connections.

LinkedIn’s First-, Second-, and Third-Degree Connections

As you’ve most likely noticed, LinkedIn has three different degrees of connections. Ever wondered what the degrees mean? A first-degree connection is someone you’re directly connected with on LinkedIn. A second-degree connection is someone you’re not connected with, but you have mutual connections. Lastly, third-degree connections are the connections of your second-degree connections.

Cultivating Your Connections

The first place to start when virtual networking is to look at who you know – your first-degree connections! Find the people you’re connected with that you meant to follow up with but never did. Then start a warm, heart-felt conversation with them. Remember, this isn’t a sales pitch!

Growing Your Network

The next step in growing your network is to take a look at your second-degree connections. How do you know these people? Maybe you’re part of the same in-person network. Maybe you know them from high school or college. Perhaps you’re even both members of the same business group on Facebook.

Find the people you can relate with and start connecting with them. Keep in mind, you don’t want to connect with just anyone and everyone. Make your connections targeted.

I want to see you succeed. As we’re all weathering this COVID-19 pandemic together, virtual networking is the tool that will help you grow your business in stressful times.

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: karenyankovich.com/120
  • “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” (1:46)
  • The fastest path to profit (5:59)
  • The skill and value of virtual networking (7:56)
  • First-, second-, and third-degree connections on LinkedIn (8:28)
  • Go through your first-degree connections (9:31)
  • Look at second-degree connections (12:49)
  • Think about who you used to know (15:24)

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

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Read the Transcript

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast Episode 120.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are, girl. Stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies, and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
Hello, I’m your host Karen Yankovich. And this is Episode 120 of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast and we’re brought to you by the She’s LinkedUp Accelerator Program where we teach simple relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing to women. We get you on the phone consistently with people that can change the course of your business and your life and your career forever. People who you can’t wait to have the opportunity to chat with and this episode is gonna tell you exactly why that’s so important. We basically teach digital marketing with the human touch so you know that if you listen to for if you’re loving what you’re hearing today, we love to hear from you. So you can subscribe to this podcast, wherever you’re listening, take a quick screenshot of the show. Right now while you’re listening and share it on social media tag me, I’m @karenyankovich, use the hashtag #goodgirlsgetrich, and that allows us to see it and we can then share your post with my audience. And that’s how we will get more visibility. We have a link to Speakpipe in the show notes where we can get your audio reviews. So you can leave us an audio review there. Just give us a chat and let us know who you think we should have as a guest or topic you’d love to hear us speak about that link is in the show notes at karenyankovich.com/120. That’s where you’ll find the blog for this page where you’ll see all the other links we talked about and all that all the good stuff that you want to follow up on.

So I know that you’ve heard over the years that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, right. We’ve heard that. I mean, I’ve heard that I feel like I’ve heard that forever. Right. And I you know, I think Listen, I think you also have No, I think is also what you know, right? Like you, if you want to be if you want a sustainable business, you got to be good at what you do. And but a lot of times, we’re really good at what we do. But we don’t we overlook the who we know, right? We work so hard on the what we know that we don’t really put time and effort into the who we know. And that is exactly why I teach LinkedIn marketing, because that’s what I teach you how to do. I teach you how to build relationships. And sometimes we have to reignite relationships with people we know. Or we’re looking to intentionally build relationships with people. Because when you have contacts in places that can more easily open doors for you. Yeah, when you show up and the doors open, you got to be able to deliver, right, so you absolutely have to know your stuff. But if somebody can open the door for you or somebody can make an introduction to you, it just makes things so much easier. And you know, somehow we got stuck in the past 10 years of social media, I think on this cycle of growing our networks. growing on networks and having a million followers and you know there’s there’s a lot of value to that in a lot of ways I’m not gonna say that there’s not value to that I you know, having a lot of followers on some of the platforms helps establish me as an influencer. It helps me land gigs when I need them. But if you had to ask me today, which is more important, having a lot of followers are having specific people that can open doors for me 100% I would say, who I know is more important than having tons and tons of people who follow me. Can you relate to that? Can you think of a time Have you ever experienced a time where one solid introduction changed the trajectory of your life or your business or your career? Maybe it’s even when you were younger and somebody you know, you know, one of your high school friends had a job somewhere and they were able to get you in on that job right or somebody you know, worked for a company that you really wanted to get in on and they were able to get you hired there right they got you the interview. You know, you still have to do your thing and you know, you have to show up and and do a good job but it You know, that somehow when who, you know, let you know that there is an opportunity, right? And who you know, that can introduce you to people, that can be the big context, the important context in your life. Right. So, maybe you’ve experienced this at some point in your life where, you know, somebody, you know, either introduced you to a client, that was a huge opportunity, or somebody, you know, just put you, you know, we say, I was in the right place at the right time, but why were you in the right place at the right time? Right? Maybe you somebody, somebody put you there, somebody introduced you to someone that got you there. So, you know, thinking back to that, I want you to now fast forward to today to future you to current you’re not future you to the you have this in this present moment in time. And, you know, as I’m recording this, it’s spring of 2020. And we are reimagining what our businesses look like in many, many, many ways. We’re reimagining what our careers look like and I think certainly in my business, and in Many of the people I speak to in their businesses, we are starting to realize that this is the beginning of the new normal, right there is no flipping a switch that’s gonna put us back to how it was in January it is this is the beginning of what the new normal looks like, and remembering the who you know, value in your business in your career now, and developing and strengthening and, and, you know, building relationships with people that, you know, one person at a time, not by getting hundreds and hundreds of followers. That is, it’s kind of almost remembering how powerful that was in your earlier in your life. I know that’s how it was been for me, and it’s why I teach this because I’ve known for years how powerful that those one or two relationships are, you know, if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that there’s lots of people that teach you know, connect with 100 people a week or 100 people a day and that is absolutely not what I teach. I teach Connect with five people a week, because I want those five people to be people that can get you in front of big audiences, people that can maybe feature you in their magazine, people that could maybe you know, I don’t know, the big clients not, you know, not the numbers, I want you to be really intentional about who you connect with. Because I know that that’s the fastest path to profit, not by having lots of followers by being really intentional and building relationships specifically with the right people. And you guys know what I mean, right? You get you probably are getting lots of LinkedIn connection requests from people immediately followed by by my stuff, right? I don’t want you to do that. I want you to be think think long and hard about warm opportunities to connect with people, even if you have to create those warm opportunities. So let’s talk about this as it relates to LinkedIn for a second. You know, LinkedIn, to me is about building relationships. And we’ve talked about this before. You know, if you build intentionally build relationships that you think can bring value to you and your career and your business, the sales will follow. You don’t have to lead with sales. So on in my world, LinkedIn is not about selling, it’s about relationship building. And then of course, it is all business. So everybody knows you’ve got you’re there to build your business and to grow your business. So it’s okay to talk about business. It’s not okay to just build relationships with the intention of just selling, right. Like, you know, if you’ve gone to a chamber of commerce event or a networking event or a women in business event or, you know, be in a meeting, whatever, and you go to these meetings and injured people, somebody introduces themselves to you. And they say, you know, hey, yeah, I sell widgets and you need widgets. I’m like, really? Do I really need widgets? I don’t even know you and you’re already ready to sell me widgets, right? Doesn’t happen as often as in person as it does virtually. But I want you to think about, you know, using LinkedIn As the virtual networking, right virtual networking, and you wouldn’t, you know, if you’re doing in person networking properly, you wouldn’t be walking up to people and immediately pitching your services. I think that virtual networking is a skill that is going to be really valuable to us in the next six months. And maybe for the rest of our lives. I mean, I think it’s always valuable, right. But I think it’s going to be particularly valuable to us for the next six months. So that’s what we’re going to really be talking about here. So on LinkedIn, I want to talk a little bit in case you are not familiar with how this works. on LinkedIn, you have a network, and you have first degree people in your network. You have second degree people in your network and you have third degree people in your network. And if you and I are connected on LinkedIn, we are first degree connections. My second degree connections are your connections that I’m currently not connected to. Okay, so so by being connected to you, it opens your network to me as second degree connections. Now there’s probably people you’re connected to, that I’m also connected to, and those remain first degree connections. But if you’re connected to 200, people 10, of whom I’m already connected to, then you’ve opened me up to 190 second degree connections that are new to me, right. And then a third degree connection are people that you and I are not connected to, but are connected to my second degree connections. Okay, but for the most part, the power in LinkedIn are those first and second degree connections. And that’s what we’re going to talk about here in this episode. So the first thing I want you to do in this virtual networking world is to take time to go through your first degree connections, you probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of people that you are currently connected to on LinkedIn, right people that you connected to, or they’ve connected to you, and you never really took the time to build a relationship. Now, I don’t want you to be building relationships with every single one of those people, because I don’t know who they are. But I do want You go through them. And and if you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we’ve did a couple episodes on that we can link to the them in the show notes, it helps you do this even more powerfully and more quickly. But whether you’re using Sales Navigator or not, go through them and start to make a list of people that you are connected to first degree connections that you want to get to know better, right? Because who, you know, you want to make sure you know them. They know who you are, and you’re looking for opportunities to collaborate with these people. And your message to them is, you know, hey, Mary, it’s Karen, we’ve been connected here for a couple years. And then whatever is true, you know, we haven’t talked in two years or we met at that event, and we intended to follow up and somehow we never made it happen, right, whatever is true or maybe it’s, you know, we connected I’m not even sure how we initially connected but it looks like you’re doing some really cool things. And it looks like we serve a similar audience. I you know, I’d love to get to know a little bit more about what you’re doing. I’m taking this time of being you know, have a Having a little bit more time in my day, while we’re still sheltering in place, and I thought I would reach out to some people on my LinkedIn network that I that I want to get to know better. So it is as simple. You’re not pitching them, please don’t pitch them. Okay? Because it is true networking. But you probably have gold in your first degree connections, okay, you probably have gold, but you have to go through it to see who those people are. So whatever you think is going to be valuable to you. Now is the time to do this. Because we are open now I’m finding people are more open to those deeper connections to the opportunities to get on the phone and have an actual conversation, maybe jumping on zoom, which is the closest thing we have right now to face to face. Right. But you are you probably have a lot of gold in your first network right now that you haven’t tapped. So I want you to go in this week and tap that and just five people a week. Five people a week. Reach out to them as well. message as you can, as warmer messages you can you’re going to hear an upcoming episode, I interviewed Nigel nickel and episode that’s coming up in a few weeks. And one of the things that he talked about doing, which I thought was such a great idea, he has packs of business cards from people he’s met at events, and most of them are in his LinkedIn network. But what he’s doing is he’s going through the business cards and saying, well, this person could be really valuable to me taking a picture of the business card, and then messaging it to them on LinkedIn and saying, Hey, Joe, you know, look, what I just came across. How cool was it? You know, it’s been four years since we met, and I got this card. I know, as you’re not even at that company anymore, maybe it’s time to catch up and see how we can support each other, right? True networking. He’s not pitching him, but you’re doing it intentionally. You’re not doing it to everyone. You’re doing it to people that you think for some reason or another could be really valuable to you on the other side. So the next thing I want you to do is start to take a stab now, at your second degree network. And this is not something you’re not going to go to your second degree network. This is going to be enormous. Okay. But I want you to think like have your second degree network in the back of your mind. And then think about maybe I want you to build out your network, I want you to start to connect with five people a week, micro targeted, we talked about that a lot here, micro targeted five people a week. So five people you already connected to reach out to them, and five new people. Maybe you belong to an organization, maybe it’s nabo, National Association of women business owners, maybe it’s a chamber of commerce, maybe it you know, whatever you belong to, maybe it’s a Facebook group that you think is got your ideal client, your ideal people in it, go through those two member directories, whatever that looks like for you. And I don’t want you to, it’s not about I don’t want you to, you know, I want to make sure you’re following the rules. If there’s rules in the Facebook group that says you cannot reach out to people outside of this group, then don’t reach out to people outside of that group. But if you are, maybe there’s probably threads in that group. If you search for enough, there’s probably threads in almost every Facebook group that says hey, let’s connect on LinkedIn. Go to those people. Red’s pour through it, see if there’s people in there that you think could be valuable. take a little time to do this. All right, don’t don’t rush this, because I want these to be incredibly valuable to you, I want you to have a microphone in front of their group at the end of this conversation, I want you to, you know, have them say, let me introduce you to my, you know, cousin, Sue, who’s going to be the biggest connection you’ve ever had in your life, right? So start to build out your network and start with your second degree connection. So like, if you are part of let’s use us nabo and they probably have a LinkedIn company page, right? You could say hey, you know, I’ve been and I’d start with your local chapters, by the way, because it’s just the warmer you could make this the better shot you have getting on the phone with people, you know, hey, we’re both members of Nova we’re both members of this chamber of commerce wherever that is, and I’m, you know, I’m taking some time now to really look at the people and then in the, that our other members because I joined this organization, because I knew they were really cool people that were also members, but I haven’t been You know, I’ve kind of dropped the ball and haven’t really made the time to get to know these really cool people that I joined to meet. So that’s what I’m doing now. I love to be connected to you here on LinkedIn. And you know, learn a little bit more about what you do. That’s it. Okay. But the warmer you make that the better shot you’re doing it now you’re building out your who, you know, network, but you’re doing it in a really specific and targeted way. Right. And then I want you to think about who you used to know maybe these are people you went to high school with, that you went to college with, like, dig deep, okay, dig deep, open up your high school yearbook, open up your college yearbook, open up your sorority, you know, alumni directory, go like Who did you use to know that now would be a good time to rekindle that relationship. Maybe when you’re going through those business cards, you’ll see some people that you’re not connected with on LinkedIn already. And you can, you know, you can connect with them. So think about who you used to know That you can reach out to now and say, you know, I was going through my directory. And you know what, just for kicks, I was like popping up names of people we graduated with on LinkedIn. And you know what, like, it looks like we serve the same kinds of audience. I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing and catch up. Right? So who did you use to know that now would be a good time because again, you never know who they know, okay? You never know who they know. So taking time now to go through your first degree connections to see who you’re already connected to, that you haven’t really made the time to reach out to start to build out your network, using organizations maybe you belong to or warm, make this as warm as you possibly can, using your second degree network to do that, and then thinking about who did you use to know maybe there’s a company that you used to work for me, you know, there’s just there’s no end to this stuff, right? Because there’s so many people, I don’t want you to to reach out to everyone. I only Want you to reach out to people that you think if you can get on the phone with them could bring real immense, huge value right to your network, to your business, to your career to your personal brand. And that’s it. Right? Remember that one solid opportunity could be gold, that one person that got you that job when you were in high school that led to this great career you have right? Like thinking back to that it could be gold. So you know, there’s a couple things you need to keep in mind with this. You have to be open. The goal is not to just be connected to them. By the way, the goal is to take that conversation and try and get a phone call out of it. An actual dial the number talk on the phone with your headset on to people, okay? I want you to look to actually get on the phone with these people because you don’t really know them if you haven’t had at least one phone conversation with them right? So get on the phone with them and but here’s the thing when you get on the phone with them You’re still not pitching them, you are just open to seeing where these calls go. You have to be truly networking, not just selling, truly networking. And we know that networking is valuable actually looked up the definition of networking, and Webster’s is the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups or institutions. So the exchange of information, not just the push of information, and then specifically the cultivation of productive relationships, for employment or business, specifically, the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business, do this really specifically, virtual networking is, is going to be a skill that’s going to make, I mean, I’m going to say it’s going to make or break you, in this moment in time. It’s if you can, I’m not gonna say it’s gonna break I’m not gonna say you won’t be successful if you can’t do it. But if you’re struggling, virtual networking can take you to the next level. And the other thing that was in Webster’s and I don’t know who how, I don’t know who this person is, how long can I didn’t I didn’t really look them up I should have I guess, networking networking remains the number one cause of job attainment. Okay? That is the same thing for sales attainment and networking. Networking can be done right now. virtual networking is being done get on the phone with people don’t be afraid to do this right now. This is the beginning of what this next season in your business and your career and your life is. So start to be networking and building relationships and building the who you know. Rolodex now Rolodex I just tells you how old I am, right? virtual Rolodex, I don’t know. But you got to do this now. People are investing right now. People are there’s many, many people that are taking this time to invest in their learning to invest in their businesses and in their careers. You know, I want you to do this but I want you to do this with integrity and with authenticity. So I if you want to dive a little deeper into this stuff, we are doing our Mastersclass which you can check out at sheslinkedupmasterclass.com. The She’s LinkedUp Masterclass get you more detail on all of this, how to find these people that are your second degree networks, right goes into some other stuff too about your profile and, and why now is the best time to be doing this, but just know that I know you I’m hoping that as you’re listening to this, that little niggling thing in your head is going yeah, you know what if it wasn’t for this person, right, this and this and this wouldn’t have happened, start meeting those people now get on the phone with those people you don’t know which one of those people are going to be the one that’s going to, you know, catapult you but it’s so nice when when you say I wonder who I know that works for this company and you pull it up. And not only is it somebody that you’re connected to on LinkedIn, but you’ve had a phone call with them, they will remember you and they’ll be more likely to support you and help you with whatever it is you need help with. Right? We’ll talk about this rising tide lifts all boats, right I do this podcast to support you. If you’re supporting each other if you’re supporting people in your network and they’re supporting You and you’re lifting each other up you’re both going to have a better chance of, of surviving and thriving in this new season of your world. So you know, let’s lift each other up. Help me help you share this podcast. again take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone if you like this, share it on social media that helps me and then I will help you by sharing it with my audience. And that’s how we lift each other up join us for the sheslinkedupmasterclass.com. It is the time to do it. We are focused on connecting while disconnected. So we get to detail on a lot of the things we talked about here in this episode. And let’s kick some 2020 booty together. What do you say? I want this to be simple for you. I’m here to help you make that happen. And I will see you back here again next week for another episode of the Good Girls Get Rich Podcast.