Has anyone ever heard of the successful man who sits alone in his basement all day with the door shut and the phone unplugged? I would certainly hope not. In fact it is the successful people that are the most outgoing, the most willing to communicate, the most willing to step into the world and interact with others. Networking, or more obviously, communicating, is vital in the online world for 5 reasons:

1. Networking builds connections.
2. Networking builds traffic.
3. Opportunities arise from networking
4. Networking gets your blog or company established.
5. Networking keeps you informed.

For some reason, networking seems to be one of the most neglected subject in the freelancing niche right now. People are focusing on bringing traffic, SEO, site design, etc. While all of those are vital pieces to creating a website, networking probably takes the cake.

It Builds Connections
When starting a blog or a website, the first step anyone must take is to get to know other bloggers in their niche. This is important for 3 reasons. First, it lets the larger, more established websites know that you even exist. Second, you can use the larger blogs to give more credibility to your own. And lastly, getting in touch with other blogs in your niche is helpful because they give you ideas.

Getting in touch with these people is really quite simple. Just send an email or use a contact form on their website with some basic information. Provide your name, your website, what your website’s intentions are, and why you are contacting them. This can help establish trust and will hopefully result in further emails. Who knows, perhaps a couple years down the road this person might reach out to you for help or advice. Early relationships are really helpful in the long run, even if you don’t see any immediate effects.

Networking Builds Traffic
Probably one of the hardest things a startup blog or website can do is to get their name out into the public. It can take hours of advertising, hundreds of dollars, and lots of time wasted. A quicker and cheaper alternative is to simply network with other websites in your niche. This can be done by simply linking to them in hopes that they will link back. Or you could take a better approach and write a really great article, then ask some other websites to link to it or feature it. Think about this: If you can get one big blog to link to your site, what kind of impression does it give to your readers? Most likely that if you are good enough to be linked to by a big name guy, your blog is good enough to be read. This builds your blog credibility and will hopefully bring you lots of traffic.

Opportunities Can Arise
This area takes a lot of luck, but fortunately it has happened for me a few times in the last couple weeks. What am I talking about? Business opportunities. As some of you may have noticed, I have a few ads running on the sidebar right now. How did I get these ads on my site? I simply built a connection with other people. With each contact I simply started by commenting on a couple of the articles on their blog. This led to an exchange of emails which then led to a business opportunity for both of us - advertising. I am giving them traffic and in return I get paid. Simple.

Of course, there are many other opportunities that can arise. Without disclosing too many details, I found a great website I liked with a product that I really wanted to test out. I simply sent them an email with my situation, some background info about myself and my blog, and requested a test product. Without really expecting it, I got a response and a test product! I’m not guaranteeing this will happen to you, but it just goes to show how the power of networking can really help get your blog off the ground.

Gets You Established
I’ve already touched upon this point, but basically if you can get some of your articles or your links featured on some big-name websites, it helps build up your credibility. Why? In the the readers’ eyes, if you are “good” enough to be featured by a bigger site, it tells them that your site is “good” enough to be read.

Keeps You Informed
Last, but not least, networking can keep you informed. This is quite simple to understand really. If you are in contact with other blogs and sites, you are going to be one of the first to see breaking news or the hottest new trend emerge. Hopefully you can create a good enough relationship that other blogs will tell you about hot subjects or interesting topics before they make it available to the general public. It is this sort of communication that keeps you on top of the marketplace and the niche you are in.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Show your support by commenting with criticisms and critiques!

Brian