Business networking is the relational component of business and career success. It is basically a way to promote yourself and your services, to build trust-based business relationships and to develop credibility as a professional.

These effects are all crucial because in today's business environment, quality alone is not enough. People and organizations need to have some clue of the quality you have to offer if they are to decide to work with you.

Business networking comes as a way of revealing this quality and earning others trust that they can rely on you on a professional level. This is why the most successful people today are a combination of competent professionals and good networkers.

If you simply do a lot of networking in your professional activity, that is a very good step. However, networking alone is not enough. You also need to do good business networking.

What good business networking means in not only developing a professional network for yourself, but also making sure that the people in it are the kind that can help your professional life the most.

Knowing dozens of accountants will get you nowhere if you're a professional selling HR services. The type of people in your network is much more important than the number. On top of this, the strengths of the relationships tend to matter more than the number of connections as well.

Although quantity is not to be ignored, good business networking is more about quality than about quantity. This is one of the essential things to understand about it.

Developing a good network for yourself takes time, takes perseverance, patience and a bit of strategy on your part. However, once your business network reaches a certain point, all sort of positive things start to happen: from getting insider information, to getting recommendations, to getting more clients.