As a natural introvert, walking into a room of unfamiliar faces is daunting, dismaying, and other ominous sounding adjectives. When large gatherings were removed from the schedule I felt relief from a big stressor in my life. 

Unfortunately, I helped start a small collective of freelancers in March and while in-person networking was cancelled, the need for networking and finding leads was suddenly much more important than it had been for myself in the past. Our bread and butter was small businesses and that crushed our old relationships. People just did not have money to be spending out of house and budgets were slashed. 

With ever-changing social media algorithms and a desire to better my own mental health, spending more time on social media was not something I viewed as a good value of my time. I actively tried to avoid Zoom for as long as I could, but I folded in that endeavor a few months into the pandemic, and I’ve come along too as Zoom is a pretty useful tool for meeting with people. 

So I looked for other ways to network and generate leads. 

We wanted to be more involved in our local Kansas City community, and to spread our name as a new business. I felt the best value of my time was to create valuable content and provide valuable services to people displaced by the pandemic. In this series I’m going to detail some of those content building, networking, and lead generating strategies that helped us draw a little attention to ourselves without exploiting the human beings in our community that were and are hurting from the pandemic.

I am privileged to have been in a position where I could try these methods, since most people don’t have the time to be spending on these content building strategies, and you might not either. At the end of this series, my hope is that while you may not be able to do everything I did, you might be able to add little pieces to your networking and content building game.