A friend asked for networking advice for tech writer who claimed they were “too introverted” for LinkedIn, Twitter, and professional chat and discussion communities.

Being introverted can feel like a major hurdle to finding work and developing skills, and it’s especially acute for tech writers, a field that seems to attract the quiet loners.

Whether or not you subscribe to the dichotomy of extroversion and introversion, it definitely feels as if professional networking favors the social butterflies who are invigorated by small talk and glad-handing. If you’re on the other end of the spectrum, then you may think you’re at a huge disadvantage.

Thankfully introversion and even outright shyness are not true barriers to networking. I'm a huge introvert and lightly misanthropic on a good day. It’s not a showstopper, I promise. But it does require a different, perhaps even devious, approach.

Get lower and slower expectations

Networking, as a term, comes with some baggage that can make it feel both high stakes and insincere. Supposedly, it’s going to be the way you meet a hiring manager, schmooze them, and soon land that dream job.

Dump the baggage and set your expectations much lower.

No, I said lower.

At its core, professional networking is about being present often enough that people remember you. That’s it! And if we reduce networking to that core, then the low-risk, low-effort, introvert-friendly approach to networking is to do the following:

1. Reliably show up in industry spaces.
2. Give people a chance to get to know you (and for you to get to know others).
3. Harbor no further expectations.

It’s a slow game, but you don't have to be particularly talented, charming, or motivated to make connections and even get work this way.

In the words of a better networker than me (Sam Wright), when it comes to networking, “don’t expect results in the first five years” (this is a conservative estimate). It’s possible to speedrun networking with conference talks, informational interviews, and other high-stakes, high-reward efforts. But you don’t have to make networking any harder than it has to be—and we’re not done with ways to make it easier.

Increase the odds of success by bringing a co-conspirator

I’ll concede that merely showing up in some industry spaces—whether that’s your local meetup, an industry Slack chat, or LinkedIn—can be intimidating, even with lowered expectations. But you can control the relative difficulty level.

You don’t have to do the work alone. Bring a friend!

Recruiting others to join you may seem to run in the opposite direction of introversion-friendly networking. But it does an important thing: reducing the odds that you, alone, must carry forward every high-intensity conversation with a stranger. Instead, you and your buddy will be splitting the effort.

For example, don’t go to an industry meetup for the first time by yourself. Instead, invite a colleague or friend to come along with you. If you’re starting from scratch, you don’t even need someone who works in your industry to come along. Anybody with a pulse can go to a meetup under the pretext of “considering a career change.”

And once you have an accomplice with you, it opens the door to an even better move: conning yourself and others.

Commit fraud

Once you’ve brought along a friend, you have a huge advantage: you can practice networking together in ways that lure in others. Here’s a somewhat elaborate example:

I once had a private conversation with someone about an industry practice. After realizing that I had learned a lot from the conversation, I arranged with that person to go have the same conversation again in a public channel, where we could both be seen asking for and sharing information. Soon, others joined the conversation.

That example was situational and high effort. But here are some simpler pitches to put the concept into action:

• “Hey, let’s sign up for this forum and post our introductions on the same day.”
• “I’m going to share a blog post on LinkedIn. Would you like it and repost it for me?”
• “Let’s stand together at the meetup, but make sure to leave room for another person to join us.”

It’s a confidence trick, though one in which you are your own mark: you pretend to already have a network, the very exercise of which causes a network to spring into existence.

Get started

If you’re ready to start networking smarter, not harder, then develop a plan that follows this outline:

1. Set goals that are comically easy to achieve and repeat, such as meeting one new-to-you person at a meetup, or saying thank you to someone for sharing something useful in an industry forum.
2. Get a friend to join in on your goal.
3. Together, deploy fakery in service of your networking scheme.

When it comes to being sociable, I commit fraud and you can too!

If you liked this, then subscribe to get updates on making documentation, tech writing, and docs as code. When you sign up, you’ll also get The 30-Minute Information Rescue, a short guide to interviewing subject matter experts when there’s no time to spare.

Subscribe

Subscribe for periodic articles and offers. I won’t sell, rent, or give away your personal information. Unsubscribe at any time. Read my privacy policy for details.

Don’t want more email? Subscribe to my RSS feed instead.