3.3 Networking – women entrepreneurship forums and database across project countries

Another way to strengthen the professional environment of e-entrepreneurs is business networking. Unlike business partnership, networking consists of meeting people who might be useful or interesting to know you’re the mentees’ business. Instead of being a contractual relationship, it is a type of business social network which is developed to help business people connect with other managers and entrepreneurs to further each other’s business interests by forming mutually beneficial business relationships.

Networking has many benefits, in particular for starting small e-business owners that have to manage a huge variety of job functions with few resources. Building networks and meeting other entrepreneurs allows them to learn from other experiences and get guidance for important matters. We can stand out some benefits of the networking as for example: strengthens business connections, enables getting new information and access to business opportunities, improves the credibility and reputation of your project, gives a different or external perspective, etc.

In some cases, especially depending on one’s personality, networking can become a hard task even if it has a lot of benefits. In view of this fact, e-entrepreneurs need to work the following skills in order to get successful networks:

• Communication skills: verbal and nonverbal communication.
• Active listening skills.
• Social Skills.
• Public speaking skills.
• Interpersonal skills.
• Empathy
• Confidence
• Ability to accept feedback.
• Consistency
• Email etiquette.
• Interesting speech.

Focusing on the online environment, a key way to reinforce and expand our network is using professional social media (for example: LinkedIn or Twitter). These are spaces that bring together professionals and companies from all sectors where new relationships can emerge easily.

Having outlined the benefits of creating a consistent network and skills needed to build it in a successful way, it is essential to highlight the importance of knowing the networks that already exist around or related to our business. Linked to this, you can find more information about international and local networks for women entrepreneurship in WinOnline project.