The Art of Networking

Networking

Networking is always important in our daily/student life and business area. If you want to make a good connection with others or handle every interview you have, you need to know these strategies. With these strategies, you will find it is easy and fun to build your network. I learn those from my friends' real experience. It works for them; it works for me, and it will definitely work for you.

Know the person you will talk to

What I mean by knowing the person you will talk to is that you need to know more than only his face and name. You may do some researches about his background, his interests, which sport team he likes and what kind of person he is. If it's an interview with a company, you may need to know some histories, main products and some other important information about this company. This research will not take too long because you can usually find all sorts of these things in no more than 3 pages.

Have your own blog

To have your own blog becomes more and more important in the Internet age. It is your home base platform to get notice from the noisy world. Don't just use Facebook or twitters, you need to get your own "home"on the Internet. It will help you engage people like you and build strong networks with them. It is very easy to build a blog these days. You can use blog building tools to build one less than 10 minutes. I highly recommend you to use WordPress just like I do. If you really want to make your blog become something gets huge impact, check out this book, Platform. This is a practical book that tells you almost everything to make your blog/platform succeed step by step.

Keep business cards with you.

It is vital to have your own business card. It will not only make you look professional, but also make people remember you more easily. You can put your contact information like phone number and email on it. You'd better put a photo of your face on it as well. Why? Because people get a hard time when try to match one's name and face after the first meeting. However, these things are still not good enough. You need to keep these cards with you all the time because you never know when you need them.

Question: What are your tips about building networks? 

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Why Should You Move to WordPress

WordPress

I’ve used blog platforms like Blogger for more than one year, and finally decided to move to WordPress(WP) for my next blog. I didn’t make this decision until I have done many researches and comparisons. I got 4 reasons for me/you to transfer from any other blog platforms directly to WordPress. If you just start thinking about blogging, take a look at this post before you make a smart decision.

#1: The Most Popular Blog Platform

WordPress is the most popular Blog platform in the web2.0 world. Not just a large amount of people is using it, but also some big guys like NYT, CNN and Mashable are using it too. If something is popular, it will get lots of attention, especially in the internet. If it gets lots of attention, geeks will try to “hack” it and make it better. It is like buying a car, no one would like to buy a car from a company which doesn’t have chain stores. When your car breaks, you want to get help as fast as possible, it is the same thing to blog platforms.

#2: DIY(Design It Yourself)

One great advantage that makes WordPress stand out from the mass blog platforms is something called “plugins”(more than 20,100). “Plugins” are like the apps on your smart phones. And the WordPress is like your smart phone. You can install lots of cool and useful plugins on your WP depends on your own needs. Whether you want to blog music, movies, article or photos, you can find helpful plugins that suit you at wordpress.org/extend/plugins. If you are someone like me that love to design your own stuff, you will definitely appreciate for your choice on WP later. You can almost find any plugin you can think of.

#3: Not Just A Blog Platform

WP doesn’t only help you build an awesome blog, but also help you build reliable business sites, forums and membership sites. No coding required in most of the situations, you just need to simply click the plugins. If you want to build a profitable site, WP can help you build an online store that allows people to buy the goods you want to sell. I choose to use WP to help me build a site that provides leadership skills and programs for youth, and it works pretty well. In other words, no matter what you want to do, if you can dream it, you can make it on WP. most of the time:)

#4 For The Sake of SEO(Search Engine Optimization)

If you want to make your site jump to the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing or some other search engines that you know, SEO is something you really need to take care of. For bloggers, the content is King, SEO is the Queen. WP is the best platform that can help you to ace in SEO. Not only bloggers think this way, but also giant like Matt Cutts thinks this way. You don’t really need to cost thousands of dollars for the SEO service; you can do it yourself with just some SEO plugins. It is that simple.

I have tried several blogging platforms, finally I decide to stick with WordPress. It is pretty simple to use and saves me a huge amount of time which is invaluable to me.

Question: What do you think about WP, or any other blog platforms? 

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