So yesterday, I wrote a post about five things you can do if your business is failing. I excluded networking. This is because you should be doing it regardless of if your doing badly or not. Your networking contacts can be of great importance to you.

I want this post not to focus on the benefits of networking (you’ll see them yourself), but instead on how to effectively network. There are three main things I do to network.

The first being that you should join forums. Forums are communities where members can interact and talk about topics. As you post in the forums people will get to know you and you can meet beneficial people there. In fact I met BloggerNoob on Digital Point Forums. I now talk with him whenever we’re both online. As another larger blogger in the same field he’s proved to be a valuable contact.

The second thing you should do is join social communities such as Digg, Mixx, Sphinn, StumbleUpon (to name a few). These communities will not only bring you traffic but link you to other people around the world that you can seek out and befriend. These will be targeted people so should share the same interests as you, and will help you out by giving you their interest and/or traffic.

The third thing you can do is email/chat with webmasters in the same field as you. These people will have been in the industry as long/longer than you and will be able to provide you with insight. A pioneer in an industry has to figure out all the hard pitfalls. Same applies to older webmasters. They’ve made mistakes and will be able to help you avoid them.

After you’ve done these you will have a social network. Remember this network has to be upkept. You can’t forget about it. In the end this network will be a very valuable asset to you. Do you think JohnChow made it to the size he’s at with no contacts? I think not!