“Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.”
— Mark Zuckerburg

Recommendations are a wonderful way to give back to your network and to the great people you have worked with. Giving a recommendation is relatively easy and doesn’t take much time, yet it can significantly affect someone’s business and life for a long time to come.  Just one recommendation can make a big impact.

There are many benefits to recommendations. Often, the person who is recommending you has already done the selling for you so that you don’t need to sell yourself, and the person who you have been recommended to is friendly and ready to work with you.  They know and respect the person who recommended you and respect their opinion. This is a major advantage of recommendations.

Recommendations boost the credibility of the person you are giving the recommendation for as well as your own credibility, and help to establish you and the person you are recommending as experts in your fields. Recommendations also strengthen the relationship between the person giving the recommendation and the person being recommended.

Offer recommendations to people you have had a good experience working with.  Before connecting people, make sure that there is a good chance for them to be a good match. Sometimes people connect people together who are not a good match, such as competitors. You do not want to waste people’s time so it is a good idea to first check with the people you are thinking of connecting to make sure it would be okay with them.

One way to connect people is by writing an email and sending it to the people you want to connect.  Another way is to offer recommendations on LinkedIn.  You can also place recommendations on your website or in your newsletter.  Another place to offer recommendations is in social media posts.  You might do a recommendation exchange with businesses so that they recommend you on their social media channels in exchange for you recommending them.

People are often happy to receive a recommendation and will look for opportunities to return the favor to you. Some people also pay for recommendations, have an affiliate program, or give a gift for being recommended.  The more people you help, the more you will be helped in return.  As Zig Ziglar said:  “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”  Who can you think of that would benefit from a recommendation from you today?

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