 Today on The Journey, we'll be talking about how to get the most out of networking events. If you're not taking advantage of these events, you're doing yourself a disservice of opportunities to showcase your brand and build the opportunity to gain more for what you're putting into investing in your business. I think something that's interesting is when people think networking events, or at least when I think networking events, I think of, oh, I only need to go when I'm looking for a job, but it's actually the opposite. You should go obviously when you're looking for a job and you're unemployed, which we have a great video right here about that, but also when you have a job and maybe you want to expand your network, it's always a great plan to have more connections because you never know when they'll be able to help you or your business or vice versa. And it's important to know that you're building relationships. It's not about just passing out a card and saying your piece and not thinking about the other one. You want to make sure that you're genuinely wanting to connect with these people. So first thing you want to do is some prep work before the event. Last year I did a keynote speech at a conference. Well, there were other speakers there, but what I did was I saw the list and I reached out to them on LinkedIn, Twitter, and I made sure to make a connection so that when the event happened, we had already had that first impression. And they're more inclined to talk to you because they know who you are, you've been interacting, and you can jump right into really meaningful, deep conversations rather than, hi, my name is, and that will stop. Exactly. And then during the event, there's opportunities to have the conversations at the event, but then also online. See if the event has a hashtag that you can be using throughout the event when opportunities arise, great slides that you saw during talks that you really wanted to showcase to your clientele or your audience. And you can be seen as one that creates great content. Another tip is use that name badge. Some interesting things to do is say, hey, I'm looking for the network, or maybe you have a unique name that you want to phonetically spell so people know exactly how to pronounce it. Also, you should use that as an opportunity to share on social media that you are there. So again, use that hashtag, but take selfies so people know, hey, he's wearing a lime green suit today. I need to see that guy. And it'll give people an opportunity to recognize you when they're also looking at the social media posts so they can reach out to you as well. Time to break out my lime green suit. Get ready. So during the event to have some great content to share, take pictures of some of the speakers on stage. You've already done your homework ahead of time so you know what part of those speeches are going to interest you and potentially your audience. And also those speakers, they're focused on their message and their presentation. They're probably not going to have very many opportunities to take photos of themselves. So by you taking photos of them and tagging them and sharing, they're going to appreciate that and it creates an opportunity for you to slide into those DMs, have that conversation. So after your event, you can keep the conversation going because during the event, you know, the speakers, they're focused on what they're doing so they may not have time to interact. A week later, you can mention the event, bring up the fact that you enjoyed a certain part of their speech and continue to connect with them after that. So a really great thing that you can do with all of your awesome speaker notes is you can turn that into rich content for your audience. You can create a blog post. There's the top five things I learned at this conference or this networking event. Or if there's one particular speaker, you can do top five quotes, especially if it's a really high profile person. People are going to be searching for that person and maybe quotes by that person. And so not only is it a great way to get new followers and new readers, but it's also an even better way to show that you are a contributor to that community. Today we talked about how to get the most out of networking events. I would love to hear from you in the comments below and tell us about your favorite part of a networking event that you just went to. And of course, be sure to like, subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you can be notified when our next video drops. Until next time, this is The Journey.