Building a successful network is a product of great planning and effort. More you plan and put in effort to build the right network, more productive it will be. It has to be understood by you the type of network you plan to make. It is impossible for everyone to network with everyone and maintain the relationship. If you are a student, the best network you would have would include your fellow students, some professors and teachers, some parents of students who can be of your benefit by helping you attain summer training or even startup jobs and so on. You can have a checklist of the network startup as follows:

1. What kind of network you would like to have
2. What is the size of network you are looking at
3. What you plan to achieve out of this network. Make sure that you do not start right away with the benefits from this network or else it might crumble or may end up earning a bad name for you. It is a long term benefits you plan to have.
4. What you can give for nurturing this network ie. (Visiting them during festivals, sending them cards, calling them regularly, mailing them some good opportunities or my magazine, inviting them to your home for parties, can gave a social group formed with a goal in mind, create a study group, etc.)
5. Ensure that the above activities do not eat upon your essential and productive time.

Using the latest techniques you can have a lot of people networked over internet. The popular networking sites are “Linkedin” “Rediff Connectinons” and many more. However, it has to be noted that any fruitful networking also needs your personal touch. A friend of mine who did this planned network building could setup and grow his business to a great height just through his contacts. His contacts consisted of business people in various countries with whom he interacted through phone and email regularly, some budding entrepreneurs who wanted his help in growing but brought special skills to his plate, political leaders, and social activists and so on.

There is however a catch – One must know when and how to say “NO”. This is a technique which will help you plan your time, resource and help you weed out unwanted contacts in your network. As a graphologist, I will be also telling you how to change your handwriting to get this effect in my later posts. “The art of telling ‘NO’” would be my next post which certainly is something which most of us need to know to be successful and lucky.

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