At Advance Funds Network (AFN), we spent a lot of time talking to you about how unsecured business lines of credit can help restore, rejuvenate, or maintain your business. Did you know that financial capital isn’t the only kind of capital that can benefit your business? These days social capital is proving just as, if not more, valuable in the professional sphere.

We'd like to show you how you can tap into and benefit from a different stream of revenue altogether – a stream of revenue based on your social credibility.

What Social Capital is and How it Works

For the majority of entrepreneurs and SMB owners, networking events are familiar territory. They are resources that you have utilized from the early days of your business.

By now, for many of you, this is an active part of your professional habitat. It's where you're comfortable and where you go when you're on the hunt to make new connections. Have you asked yourself lately what it is you expect to gain from making those connections? The answer usually lands somewhere between generating leads and getting referrals.

While there's nothing wrong with those end-goals, problems do arise in the way you choose to reach them.

Too many people approach networking relationships like they’re collecting friends with benefits. In other words, the conversation doesn't go that far beyond surface details about one another. You invest no time in finding out details about the other person, how you can help each other out, or cultivating the relationship outside of the networking realm.

This approach not only demonstrates callousness, it presents thinly veiled dangers to immeasurable assets like your professional reputation.

Would you Stake your Professional Life on It?

There are costs to creating dispensable business relationships. These costs aren't immediately apparent, but they'll catch up with you eventually.

Keep in mind, every connection you make that you use as a lead or a referral reflects on you and your professional track record. How? Every time you give out a referral, a small piece of your professional reputation goes with it. If that relationship turned sour, the effect tarnishes your professional standing by proxy. If that's not incentive enough to start investing (truly investing) in your social capital, we don't know what is.

You have to build up social capital with someone else before you can withdraw from it for your own benefit. Like it or not, this process takes time and it takes continuous effort on both sides of the relationship. Whenever possible, keep the relationship within professional boundaries, but spend time developing it to find out where your opportunities to be an asset to each other really lie.

Do this properly, and gain social and professional credibility simultaneously. And as we know, there's no better companion to the working capital that is an unsecured business line of credit, quite like well-invested social credibility. With the help of AFN specialists, you'll learn to invest both resources wisely.