July 21, 2026

Three Ways to Grow Your Network

If there’s a “trick” to growing your network, I think I’d have to say it’s this:

Be sincerely generous with people.

This probably sounds obvious, but when people are consciously thinking about growing their network, it is often coming from a place of need - e.g., “I need more clients! I better start networking!”

Even if you DO need more clients, you can’t bring that energy to your networking efforts. It turns people off. You don’t want to be that guy who joins the Slack room with a screen name like:

Bob Roberts - Ask me about discount term life insurance!

:eye_roll:

Okay, but what DO you actually do to grow your network?

Here are three things that have always worked for me:

Participate in online communities—Contributing in a subreddit or a free Discord or a paid Slack or a private LinkedIn group or even an old school listserv where birds-of-a-feather are active is pretty fun, low intensity, and effective. It doesn’t really matter if the members aren’t your ideal buyers. What really matters is that they’d recognize your ideal buyer if they ran into one and trust you enough to make an introduction.
Start a podcast—Being invited to be a guest on a podcast is pretty flattering. And the recording gives the guest an artifact to share with their network that increases their status. Make a list of 100 people who you’d like to chat with for an hour, design a show that would make sense for them to be on, and start sending out invites. “Would you join me on my show to talk about $thingTheyAreObsessedWith?” is a much easier YES than, “Can we get coffee so I can pick your brain for an hour?”
Start writing a book—What do you do if some of the folks you’d like to meet are too mic/camera shy to appear on a podcast? Start working on a book and ask if you can interview them for the chapter on $thingTheyAreObsessedWith. NOTE: I’m not suggesting that you pretend to be working on a book... everyone reading this should probably be working on a book right now, so if you’re not, you might want to do something about that :-) Still... if a book is too much right now, you could ask to interview them for some other type of written piece, like a study, report, article, etc., but that’s less likely to get a YES unless the piece is for a famous outlet like the NYT or something.

Here’s the thing...

If you start doing these three things on a regular basis, you’ll immediately see your network start to grow.

But!

It’s not a quick fix or some BS hack.

It’s more like gardening... do a little bit every day to be rewarded in the future.

When it comes to networking, slow and steady wins the race.

Yours,

—J