It seems some people struggle with moving their company and/or brand outside of their own geographic area.

Through on and offline networking you can build global relationships to propel your brand to a global scale.

With the internet, anywhere in the world is a few mouse clicks away.

What do I mean by this? Well, I’m going to write next a few things that have worked for me.

1. Be where your audience is

This means on and offline: use social networks, media exposure, create your own content and get on the current and future mediums as fast as you can in order to make your work global.

AI and VR are the new highly talked about things coming in 2017.

Have you thought about how to leverage either or both?

Maybe they do not make sense for your business right now, but you should be following what is happening with new technologies globally so you can be on them before your competitors, or before your company gets replaced by technology.

I was chatting with a guy whose company is using VR to rehabilitate different types of people. Pretty cool stuff that can really change lives and create an entirely new revenue category in an industry not really known for having a lot of modern hardware and software in it.

2. Leverage traditional media

The second thing that I found really interesting in the last year was that some traditional media is back on the rise and not all doom and gloom like has been covered in the media.

So actually try and see if you can run marketing on many mediums and see what works for your industry.

For example, in San Francisco there are tonnes of ads for software on billboards when driving down the freeway. These make sense for that city but may not work in your local city. You might need to run that same campaign on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Another example of this is while some countries are moving away from traditional radio and going to just digital radio, and podcasts, FM and AM radio are still really relevant in certain parts of the world including North America.

The advent of podcasting might tell you that FM and AM radio are dead, but in my experience, at least talk radio is on the rise and maybe you can run your ads on targeted talk radio shows that cover your industry.

3. Network with people all over the world

The third thing I would say you need to do to move your brand globally is to network with people all over the globe on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

In my case, I have used these three networks, without spending any money. I actually pay for a LinkedIn membership now, but for what I am about to mention, I had the free account.

I tried a little experiment a few years ago where I wanted to connect with as many people as possible all over the world on these three networks.

So I updated my profile and I started randomly reaching out to people in the tech and other industries that I thought I wanted to have connections in.

I kept my work experience up to date, put all my skills in each site profile and kept adding people. Over time people add you back, you reach out to more people and at a certain point it totally snowballs and people will start requesting you to add them to your network. This can take months to really start to snowball, so be patient.

My experience in the field

I always had a dream to write a book. Not because I was a good writer; actually I thought I was a terrible writer. But it was on my bucket list of things to do in my life and get over a fear of writing.

For me,  being in the tech field gave me tonnes of experience with design and some front-end web programming frameworks. I started adding people that worked at tech book publishers.

It took 3 years but finally I got asked if I was interested in writing a book for one publisher. I emailed back right away, accepting, of course, but I never got an email back.

Months went by. Almost a year later, another person I had connected with at the same publisher messages me on LinkedIn. They wanted me to write a book for them.

I messaged right back saying: “yes, I would love too. What are the next steps?” Long story short, the book came out about 9 months after that second email.

The publisher and I never had one phone call. We had contact only through email. During the writing, I lived in Canada and the people I was dealing with were in Europe and India. So keep at it, you never know what will happen, just have patience.

Let me know what you think, and I hope these three ideas can start your journey to get global.

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