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 the 3 categories of relationships you should be building.

When networking, where do you start? Who should you be connecting with? How do you make it worth your time? Find the answers here.

#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:

Networking can be intimidating for people… for a lot of people. It can be hard to know who to connect with, how to best spend your time, how to even get started.

There are three areas you should be focusing on to make networking effective. First, focus on the people who will be beneficial for your business. Next, referral marketing is of extreme value, so set aside time for referral marketing. Lastly, connect with journalists in your industry.

If you focus on these three areas of relationships you should be building, your networking efforts will be effective!

Episode Spotlights:

  • Where to find everything for this week’s episode: https://karenyankovich.com/205
  • Introducing this episode’s topic (2:00)
  • Category One: go straight for the sale (6:20)
  • Category Two: referral marketing (9:06)
  • Category Three: find the journalists in your industry (13:52)
  • Episode recap (17:17)

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 205.

Intro 0:05
Welcome to the good girls getrich 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 0:22
Hello there. I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is episode 205 of the good girls get rich podcast. And this episode is brought to you by she’s linked up where we teach simple relationship heart based relationship marketing, a LinkedIn and PR marketing system that helps women get on the phone consistently with the kinds of people that can change your business, change your life, and increase your bank balance for ever. Our goal is to create more wealthy women of influence. And if you listen to episode 203, you know how passionate I am about that. So I hope this is helping you take a step in that direction, where we basically teach us digital marketing, right? We use LinkedIn as the tool, but it’s just the tool that we use, you know, it’s really human to human marketing, right? It’s digital marketing with the human touch. So if you’ve listened before, or if you love what you hear today, you know, we love to hear from you. So make sure if you love this episode, take a quick screenshot of it, share it on social media, tag me share it with your audience, if you tag me, I then I can see it. I’m at Karen Yankovich, everywhere, all the links are in the show notes or wherever you’re listening to this. And then I can share it with my audience and get you more visibility. And that’s how we lift each other up and help more women become wealthy women of influence. In the show notes. There’s a link for SpeakPipe I love getting audio messages from you. If there’s a topic you want to hear me talk about a question you have for me a guest that I should interview, jump into SpeakPipe leave us a message there. And I would love that. So again, just go to Karen Yankovich Shaw comm slash 205. To see the blog for this page, you’ll see the link for SpeakPipe you’ll see all the links I talked about on the show today. So you know you may I mean, if you’ve been listening for a while, then you know, even if you go back to the earlier episodes of this podcast, you know I had a little eye you know we all get shiny object syndrome right when I started my business, I was not just teaching LinkedIn marketing, I was teaching digital marketing, social media marketing. And what I found over the years, just kind of pulling from my years in sales before online marketing was even a thing for online was even a thing. That’s how old I am. You know, I was teaching digital, my background was in relationship marketing. So I was in sales my whole life. And to me it was really about meeting people and having conversations with people. And when I moved my business to online marketing, and started to take courses and learn and experiment and teach people how to use these amazing digital tools that we have to us to grow our businesses. You know, for me, I think I just naturally stayed in that place of human to human right building relationships with people, which is really what ultimately led me to be focusing on LinkedIn, because that’s really where we can build relationships, right and talk to people. And, you know, I talk to people all week long. Every week. I love talking to people, you know, there’s links on this page where you’re listening to this to book a call, I’d love to try to chat with you. And when I talk to people or when people on my team, talk to people about you know, the our products and services, the biggest fear and it is a fear that a lot of people have is that outreach is that conversation? How do I start these conversations? It’s so interesting to me, because once you learn this process that we teach, it becomes simple. It’s just part of what you do naturally. I never ever, ever want you to have to cold call anyone ever. I

am never ever advocating for people to spam their LinkedIn network to spam anything. There are so many ways that you can do outreach, even if it’s cold ish, right? Maybe you belong to the same organization, right? You don’t really know the person. There’s so many ways that we can build relationships that just feel natural. And that’s what I want you to understand that you don’t have to be afraid of this. Because here’s what I know what I know for sure channeling Oprah here is that the people that have the most profitable businesses get their highest paying clients when they talk to them. Nobody’s giving you a $50,000 or $10,000 contract, over tweet if there’s not, you know, I mean, no matter how good a job you do at at building your influence, no matter how much media opportunity you get, no matter how much you do all of that. At the end of the day, it is so rare, that that’s where the actual business happens, right? They may learn about you that way. They may see a tweet or an Instagram post or something and then from that platform reach out to you. And I’m not dissing those platforms. I’m saying that at the end of the day, if you want a business that’s selling a million of something that costs $1, then LinkedIn is not the place for you unless you want to get a distributor that wants to buy a million of your things that costs $1. What LinkedIn is for, it’s the place to have conversations with people for the highest ticket opportunities you can create in your business. And what we’re going to talk about today on this show are the three categories or relationships, I like to see my clients building. And I do like to see, there’ll be a mix of these. In fact, we, you know, we just recorded all the content in our she’s linked up program. And you know, I’m highly encouraging, I want to, I want you to write down who you connected with. So I can see if you’re mixing this up, because I know that it can be simple. The people that I work with are busy, successful women, they don’t have time to do this for 10 hours a week. So it’s a very simple process that takes a half hour a couple times a week. But I do want to see it get mixed across these three categories. And there’s a couple reasons for that. But what I want to talk about just for another second, before we get into talking about the three categories is that in all of these categories, there are ways to do that, from a place of service from a place of support from a place of genuine, authentic connection, and not from a place of spamming and selling in all three categories. So let’s talk about first category. And this is the category that honestly I pay the least attention to, but obviously, we need to talk about it. And that is going straight for the sale, we may come across people in our marketing in our daily lives in our networking and what we do. And somebody’s like, you know what I want to really hear about what you do. So I’m not going to overlook the cat the importance of understanding that sometimes we’re going straight for the sale. But the last thing I ever want you to be doing is doing outreach to people and saying, Here’s what I do, give me your credit card, like that is just not the way you sell your highest ticket packages. And, you know, if you’re listening to this, you’re like, I don’t have a high ticket package Karen, then we haven’t talked yet because I can help. That’s one of my favorite things to do is brainstorm with people and what their higher ticket package is because people need you. I spoke to someone the other day who had just a brilliant business. And you know, she’s she’s she’s worried about getting on the phone with people. And I just kept thinking like, there were so many people that are not being served, because you and I’m not there’s an inherent in the hanging on her right. But I but I wanted her to understand that it’s really coming from a place of service. And the longer she waits to do that, the more there’s people that are not being served by what she’s so passionate and serving people with. Right. And that same goes for you. And Pete, there are people, you know, I and if you’re sitting there thinking this somehow this turning into a high ticket lesson. So we’re gonna, I’m gonna ship that right now. But before I shift it, just know that the more high ticket packages you can sell, the more people that can’t afford you, you can serve on a scholarship level. So don’t tell I don’t even hear that your people can’t afford you. There’s lots of there’s lots of opportunities back to the categories, though, right? When you’re having these conversations with people, the first category of people just that obviously would be clients for you listen, I want you to get really clear, and be really picky, and be really selective, and be you know, pay and not be reaching out to everyone but being very discerning and who you reach out to. Obviously, in our minds, we’re hoping that maybe they would might become a client. But that’s not the the outreach to them. Right? The outreach is,

here’s what I do, who do you know, we’re talking about that second category in a minute. So we want it no matter what these categories are, the ultimate goal is feeding our business. Everybody on LinkedIn knows that, right? You’re on LinkedIn, just like you are, if you walk into a networking meeting, you can be having a conversation with somebody about how good the chicken, you know, skewers are at the networking meeting. But at the end of the day, you both know you’re both there to grow your business. The same is for the conversations that happen, that are started on LinkedIn, everyone knows you’re there to grow your career, to grow your business, to build relationships, and to grow the people that you know, right. So we want to not overlook the importance of being really clear on exactly who it is, that is your ideal person that you want to work with. Right. And that is one category. The second category, and this is my favorite category. And I would say the vast majority of the work I do on LinkedIn is in this category. The vast majority of the work my students do in LinkedIn is in this category. And that is like Joint Venture Marketing, referral marketing, right? Having conversations with people that might know people that need what you do. And I know that that sounds like it’s another step. And it’s complicated. Who’s got time for that? I promise you, when you have these conversations coming from a place of service coming from a place of genuine, authentic networking coming from a place of truly wanting to serve them as well. The business follows I promise you because it becomes a little bit like a toy, it takes on a life of its own right, it becomes a little bit like an avalanche. You started talking to one person they refer you to and they refer you and then they refer you right. So that is the best way to get business because you borrow their credibility, right? You borrow their credibility. If I meet someone in the back of an Uber and I’m like Hey, you know, I’m Karen Yankovich. And I teach LinkedIn marketing. They’re like, hey, that’s great. I, you know, I’m a yoga teacher, whatever. But if Mary, if they’re talking about meeting a new job, and Mary sitting in the Uber with them and says to them, You know what, you really need to meet my friend, Karen Yankovich, because she’s really, you know, enter all the accolades here, and she’s gonna get you where you need to go. Now I get to borrow Mary’s credibility, and now I have a higher chance of working with that other Uber passenger than I would if I went for them directly, right. That’s that second category, thinking about who are those people, and not being afraid to have those conversations, not being afraid to have those conversations I have had, I mean, I can, I can probably I can probably name 10 people that I could probably think of off the top of my head right now that I can walk back five years or maybe more, the people that had that I had to meet to get to the conversation that I’m having with that person right now. Right? But it all starts by having that first conversation, you have to have that first conversation. And you

have to not be afraid to worry about what it’s all about. Right? So let’s so let me give you an example. If you are feeling a little jiggy about doing outreach on LinkedIn, and you’re not sure, and like it, just it just, you know, you just want to teach yoga, right? You just want to be a coach, you don’t want to do all this stuff. I want you to understand that the best the I mean, you can’t avoid this, you have to under you have to have some kind of marketing plan, right? So let’s say you belong to a chamber of commerce, right. And in that chamber of commerce, you know, you’ve not connected with everyone you get when you join the chamber, you pay a couple 100 bucks, you get their directory, right? You go to that directory, you cherry pick through that directory. Now remember, everyone’s in that chamber of commerce to grow their business, just like everyone’s on LinkedIn to grow their business, right? When you reach out to people, and you say, hey, you know, my name is Karen, I just joined the your chamber. And I see that you’ve been a member for a while, you have any tips for me, like, I’d love to talk and understand a little bit about you and your business and how I can support you. But also, you know, the benefits you get from the chamber and what you know, like something like that, right? A conversation like that might feel a little uncomfortable at first, if somebody responds and says to you, what do you want, right? Then they’re not your person, just let it go. Just let it go. Right? Because there’s no way in business that you’re not that you don’t that that’s not ever going to happen, it is going to happen. Just let them go. They’re not your people, the vast majority of the people are going to say, I’d love to talk to you, I’d love to tell you about my business, because maybe you know, somebody they know, right? So that conversation, you’re gonna when you have that conversation, right? Then the conversation leads to, you know, tell me what you do. And then you genuinely want to think about are the people I can introduce them to, and then that 10 conversation, hopefully, well, you need to you need to make sure that conversation then changes over to you where you can say, here’s what I need help with who do you know, and those conversations, if you do one of those conversations a week, life, and business will change forever, I promise you. And we’re just not doing that. And people are just not doing that enough. Right now. If you do two or three a week, imagine what can happen there. Right? That’s how you get to a million dollar business. It is that simple. It’s not 100 You don’t have to call 100 people not to reach out to 100 people, you don’t have to do like the million things you think you need to do. You just need to do outreach to a few people. And I promise you, the people that are in my shoes linked up program that are doing this piece of it are the ones that are having the best success. We have procrastinators you guys, if you’re listening, you know who you are, well, Carrie, and I need to tweak my profile first, or I need to, I was gonna make some calls today. But here’s what happened, right? I get it. And that’s why I’m here to support you. And that’s what we’ve got mindset support in the program. It is I’m telling you this because I want you to know you’re not alone. It’s okay. And you’ve got to get over it like you just do. And there’s ways to do it that feel yummy and feel good. Okay, and that and that can be the same for you. The third category that I want to talk about are who are the journalists in your industry that write about what you do? And are you building relationships with them? This is the fishing in a barrel. Okay. Like journalists are prolific. They write articles, they record podcasts, they do videos, they’re on TV, right? So it’s so easy to kind of pick 10 that you want to have on your radar and you want to be BFFs with and you want them to know who you are and what you do. So the next time they’re writing a story about that, they call you right? And it happens like that, right? It’s happens that simply all you got to do is reach out you know, share one of their articles and tag them in it and say I just read this article by Mary Smith. Oh my gosh, she describes ABC like nobody I’ve ever seen describe it. Y’all need to watch this Mary thank you so much for shifting my mind about this. I never thought about it like that. Right now. If you do that on LinkedIn and tag Mary and if Mary’s part of a you know, a publication company, a newspaper or magazine or whatever, and they have a company page tag that company page, I promise you Mary’s Gonna see that, and she’s going to be happy about that. I mean, any of you guys that are listening that, you know, if you’re listening in you, you’re a content creator of any any kind, right? Like, for me, it’s my podcast,

if I wake up on a Tuesday morning and somebody on LinkedIn has shared my podcast with and tagged me in it and I never saw it, I love that. That’s why I asked you to do that in the very beginning, right? Because it doesn’t happen as often as you think if you’re the person doing that, I will notice you. And if you want to be interviewed on my podcast, you had a much better chance of being interviewed on my podcast. If you do that, then if you just keep sending me pitches, without having any personalized information attached to it, right? If you’ve listened to a show, if you love my show, if you resonate with what I do, you know, it, maybe even add your point of view. And you can tag me say, Karen, have you ever thought about this angle of that, like, I want to hear that I want to know what your ideas are. And maybe it’ll be something I want to talk about on my show, right? Because the media and journalists are so prolific, it’s so easy to get their attention. And I know you think people are doing this all the time, they are not, they are not. And this is universal. This is not just me, this is universal. sure it happens. But it doesn’t happen. As often as you think it doesn’t happen 10 times a day, you’re not gonna get lost in a sea of people tagging your favorite journalists about an article you loved you’re not so so make so and what that does, okay, let me talk a little bit about why I think that third category that the journalist is so important, when you are quoted in the news or in the media, as an expert, people look at you differently, it gives you the credibility, when you are, let’s say, you’re a coach, and you’ve got competition for getting a particular client to come into your mastermind, if you are the one that’s quoted in the news and the media and has the credibility of that, and your competition does not, you’re gonna get that gig, you’re gonna get those clients. So as much as I’d love to sit here and say that getting quoted in the news is gonna get you a million clients, because people are going to have more visibility, I hope that happens for you, doesn’t necessarily happen as much as I would like it to have it. But know that what where it is powerful is the credibility that it gives you, and you get to hang out and meet cool people doing really cool things, right. So I want to recap these three categories. And then I want to have one more important thing that I want to tell you about this. Category. Number one is obviously people that might be a potential client for you. Right? Let’s not overlook that. And while you’re going through, like your chamber of commerce directory, the category two people, you know, obviously, cherry pick people where when you describe who you’re looking for, they say, Well, maybe me, right, but you’re not asking them that you’re saying, Who do you know, right? If you do a good job on on the research, before you get on the calls, hopefully, some of those people are gonna go on maybe me Tell me more, right. But category one is really just looking, you know, you there’s obviously opportunity sometimes for people that are just interested in what you do category two, and two, and three are the most valuable categories. And this is where I’d like to see spending the most time Category Two is people who know people, right? They can refer you to people, when I talk to people and ask them where they get most of their business from 99% of the time, they tell me referrals, right. So let’s make referrals repeatable. Let’s talk to more people that can give us more referrals, okay, and grow our business, rapid fire. And then the third category is the journalists, the journalists to talk about what you do. So here’s the here’s the kicker to all of this, though, all of this works so much better doing this on LinkedIn and doing it from a LinkedIn profile that you have done, or you have worked hard on to position yourself as worthy of their time. Right? If there is somebody I want to reach out to, let’s even just say from a chamber of commerce, right. And again, it’s a warm outreach, even though it’s you don’t know them. So it’s cold ish, but it’s warm, because you’re both you’ve got something that connects you. And you’re doing it via email, they don’t know who you are, they don’t know anything about you, you’re just as random chick that reached out to them via email. But if you do that same outreach via LinkedIn, and you they can see in your profile, a that you’ve been featured in the media over and over, right, and be that you’ve got credibility, you’ve got lots of recommendations, you’ve got testimonials, you’ve got, you know, you talk about the results that happen when you’re in, you know, in people’s lives. They’re gonna be like, hell yeah, I want to get on the phone with her. Right. So the the secret to the success of making connections, and all three of these categories is making sure you’ve done the profile work first. Here’s the thing, a lot of people do the profile work, and don’t do the second this piece we’re talking about today. And having a beautiful LinkedIn profile. And not doing this outreach is like having a beautiful flyer that you nailed to a tree in the middle of the forest. Okay, no one’s gonna see it, who’s gonna see it, do the work on your profile, and then come and then do make, do some outreach, a couple of week to a week and each of these categories, everything changes for you. I promise you that’s how simple this can be. If you’re coming from a from a great profile, and if you’ve got a strategy behind who you’re reaching out to, and being really discerning about who they are and exactly what you’re saying that profile, you’re going to have a lot higher success rate.

And if you’re just sitting there thinking, Well, all I got on LinkedIn is just a bunch of crap emails from people I don’t even want, I don’t even use it. That’s because you’re not doing this. If you’re doing the outreach, you’re doing it from this place of genuine, authentic, caring, it’s okay that you want to build your business people know that right. But if you’re doing it from a place of, I saw your blog, I heard I heard you interviewed on Karen’s podcast, I wanted to reach out to you, like find a reason to connect, if you’re going to conferences, how many people how many speakers are at the conference? Have you once ever connected with a speaker at a conference or go into on LinkedIn and said, I’m really looking for your forward to talk at that conference? Right. And then at the end of the conference, your goal is to get on the phone with them? Right? Who do you know, here’s what I do? Who do you know, right, that second category. So I hope that this is helpful to you. And I hope you understand that this can be done from a place from a heartfelt place. Okay, I understand that it takes some mindset shifts to get there. I understand. He says, We’re not this is not something we’re used to. Because we’re getting on the phone, you have to build that muscle, right? We’re getting on the phone with people with no idea what we’re talking about. You’re just gonna, we’re just gonna get together and say, you know, let’s see how it goes. Right? It takes a little bit of courage to do that. But once you start doing it, and you see how engaging and enjoyable these conversations can be, and how you get to meet such cool people, when you’re genuinely interested in what they do, and you’re asking them lots of questions about that. I mean, of course, what you’re doing in your mind is pre qualifying them, right? But you’re genuinely getting to know them. It’s so much fun, and it is absolutely, it’s absolutely a more feminine model to approach your business. So I hope that this helps you if you want any. If you want to know what it looks like to get support with this. You know, I’m always here to talk to you. Just go to Karen yankovich.com/call get you on our calendar, I’d love to talk to you about what it would look like to get some support on this. And you know, know that our goal is to create more wealthy women of influence in this world, it has never been more important. Let’s lift each other up. Help me help you share this podcast. Take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone share that on social also so that I can share it with my audience and helping you get more visibility. And let’s do this together. I’ll see you back here next week.