I don’t know about you, but I have been to face to face networking events where it’s basically been like pulling teeth to get the people in the room to talk and discuss what they do and the benifits it has for me. There is nothing wrong with the event itself, it’s just some of the attendees don’t know how to network.
Networking doesn’t come easy, you can’t just expect to turn up to an event and it happens, you have to work at it. You have to build the trust and connections with people. You have to get people interested in you and vice-versa.
Now Perth can be busy place, with lots of professional networking events every month, seems that there are even more now with this financial hiccup, as people scramble for those networking contacts.
Funny thing is that most of the new ones now want to sell me something or get me to join some exclusive networking group that will bring me riches and world domination by afternoon teatime. All I have to do is just sign over a few thousand dollars a year and feed thew group them all my business contacts for good measure. Now I don’t know about you but the only bugger getting rich here is the person that set that scheme up in the first place. Pyramid anyone, just without money.
Over the years I have been freelancing in the web industry it has been peppered with it’s good and bad times, when you look back on these times you can see a distinct pattern of things that are good and bad aspects of the freelance lifestyle. Okay this is not going to have every solution to freelancing, but at least you get another view point and a few ideas. Now I’m not discouraging people from taking up freelancing, far from it. It]s just a very good idea if you are considering getting into freelancing that you understand the full implications of what you are taking on. This is the first of a two part article.
