Week 1 Check-ins for the 30 Day Connection Challenge

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As you may know the community at Domino Connection is working on building their connections this month. A small group of us started the 30 Day Connection Challenge. After one week we’ve seen some great progress.

I received three insightful check-ins this week that I had to share with you. Hopefully all of you are trying to take daily action on building your connections too.

If you want to start your own 30 Day Connection Challenge just check out a sample chapter to see if you would like to download the full guide today by just signing up for email updates.

It was interesting reading these updates and I thought you could learn from them as well, so I thought I would share them with you.

Connector #1

I have to be honest, I haven’t contacted anyone on my list…yet. Just created a list of people I’d like to get to know better. I’m focusing on in-person, local contacts, which is a challenge as my network tends to be composed of people online or out of my immediate area.

I was surprised I had as many people to contact without thinking too hard. Hm, I didn’t have these people on my list, but I met three women in a workshop yesterday who I intend to follow up with too. So, I guess I did make some contacts this week! Go me!

When you meet someone in person at a conference or workshop, how long do you typically wait until you follow up? A week? Two weeks? Two days? Curious about your process around this. (Editor’s note: I usually try to email people within a few days, so the connection is fresh for them and a chance to build a deeper connection. Then I follow up 2-3 weeks later depending on responses and how much I would like to build a relationship with them. There are some people I didn’t feel much of a connection with, so I just let them go.)

This has been a good experiment so far. Getting a lot out of the process and structure.

Connector #2

I’ve contacted one person, last night, via email. She is someone I know, although have not had direct communications with for awhile. Next week after I get through “crunch time” with creating illustrations/cards, I’ll be reaching out to local business owners and other community leaders I know to get an introduction to a few local shop-keepers and restaurants to see if they want to carry my art cards.

It’s a bit tough at this point as I am still undecided about creating these under my name as an artist, use an existing name that started for coaching, or using another name so that I may include other artists to grow the business.

1) reached out to 1
2) no response yet (sent last night)
3) contacting 5-10 individuals next week once I have products to show them or website up and running (main hold-up being the biz name)

Thanks for doing this!

Connector #3

Thank you so much for your emails, I’ve been bad about replying, but I promise I’m reading them! 🙂

Last week was slow for me; I had a cold + an injured wrist, so mostly took it easy. Decided that I wasn’t going to stress over reaching out… but then I noticed that, while I wasn’t doing any “official” reaching out and making connections, I was being much more active about interacting with my existing social network. Even went out of my way to respond and offer help of some sort or another to a few of my peers when I saw them struggling. So that was definitely a win!

This week, I’m planning on reaching out to a couple of individuals I’ve been following for a while, but haven’t interacted with. They’re in my “field” so could become good contacts in the future – but mostly, I just love what they’re doing and think they ought to know that. 😉

Thank you again!

Here is my check-in:

I reached out to two people on Monday and five people on Friday. Four of them I just reached out to say hello, the other three I asked for interviews.

I only got one response back and he said he was unable to do an interview at this time. Oh well, on to the next person. 🙂

I also hit a couple lucky breaks. This was due to trying to build a connection for many months. I had a guest post accepted and I found an unpaid local speaking gig.

We have a bloggers group in San Antonio. They were putting on a paid event at Geekdom, a small business incubator. I saw that they had a lot of speakers and I recognized one speaker in the lineup. I emailed him to let him know that if they were still looking for speakers I would be happy to pitch in a talk. He told me to email her right away and I sent her an email soon after. It was just a simple email, name dropping my friend and letting her know that if a speaker can’t make it I would be happy to fill the slot. She emailed back two hours later asking what topic I would speak about. I replied with my topic and she replied back and asked if I could fill in for someone. I jumped at the chance. I got to be an expert in a local event, meet other experts in San Antonio and connect with people who could use my help.

I spoke for free, but very much worth my time.

I was also asked to provide a quote for a blogger’s post. She published it here.

I celebrated by doing a little dance and having a margarita after it was over. I also got 10 business cards from people that I’ll be trying to deepen the connection with this week.

Remember to try as much as you can to stick to your plan. The best results are going to come from taking small steps every single day to build new connections.

Have you created your own 30 Day Connection Challenge?

Let us know in the comment section. How many people you tried to reach out to? How many responses have you received? We can all celebrate together. As you proably know celebration is very important to making this a lasting habit.