Why You Need a Mentor
- Learning from other people’s experiences is much less-time consuming that learning from trial and error.
- A mentor can connect you with people you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
How You Can Find a Mentor
- Find out who are the 100 most successful people in your industry and connect with them through LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
- Don’t forget the smart bloggers in your market.
- Let your friends, relatives and co-workers know that you’re looking for a mentor and ask them if they know someone who can help you.
- Use these online resources to find mentors.
How to Approach Potential Mentors
- Understand what’s in it for them (yes, mentors should benefit from the relationship too). Some of the reasons someone might mentor you are: to give back to their community, to feel respected and recognized, to learn something from you and to have you do something for them in exchange.
- Do your homework. Do some research before contacting a possible mentor. With social media marketing this is very easy. If they tweeted, “my daughter is sick”, start the email asking them about their daughter. Better yet, find out their daughter’s name and refer to her by her name.
- Be very clear about what you’re asking. Let them know how often you plan to contact them and what kind of help you expect to get from them.
- Don’t settle for one mentor; try to get a few people to mentor you so you can have different points of views about the situations you deal with.
