In most of the world, it’s been pretty hot, and many of you are either on holiday, or getting ready to leave for holiday. I know that the LAST thing you want to think about is building relationships for business development. But I’ve got an easy challenge for you that will set you up nicely to return to the office in September with some stronger connections and potential for added business, while your colleagues are working to catch up.

Every day, for the next month, reach out to three of your connections on LinkedIn by email.

Now, there are some rules, here, of course.

• Before you send them an email, you should first look at their profile and their recent activity to see what they’ve been up to lately. In reaching out to them, you want to make your email about THEM, and not about YOU.
• Your email is not to pitch them on anything or remind them of services you offer, even if you’re reaching out to a potential client. I know for 99.9% of you reading this, that’s obvious and I don’t even have to say it. But for that 0.1%, I do, so I’m including it.
• Bonus points if you reach out to people who are in your city and offer to meet up with them for coffee or lunch in the next four weeks too. Since it is the end of the summer, you may want to suggest this for September instead, but at least put it on their radar for the future.

We all have a lot of LinkedIn connections these days (it’s really easy to say yes to them!), but how well do we know our connections, and how well are we actually connecting with them? If you’re like me, even if you log into LinkedIn (which I do actually do daily), you’re only scanning through your feed and maybe “liking” a few updates, adding a “congrats!” here and there for an anniversary or new job, and maybe clicking on one or two interesting articles that someone has shared.

So there’s a huge opportunity to amplify my LinkedIn community efforts by better engaging with my network there every day. If I email three of my connections every day for the 31 days in August, that’s 93 people I will have reached out to by the end of the month.