How to find mentors

Besides paying people, what are some other ways that you can get people to agree to mentor you?

We want to think about:

What can we offer people and how would we be able to help them?

One way is to help people promote their personal brand.

Here’s an email that I sent to the head of recruiting at McKinsey.

I offered to interview her.

Hey Jesse,

we’re doing an interview series of recruiting leaders from Netflix, Google McKinsey.

Would you be open to a 10 minute interview?

And I’ll share it with ContactOut’s audience.

And it’ll help you build your personal brand.

During the interview, you can just ask them the questions that you’re going to ask if you’re seeking mentorship,

and in that way you help them and they also help you.

Another angle you can use is:

The Expert Opinion Article

it works really well with famous people,

and it’s how I got New York Times best selling authors like:

Adam Grant and James Altucher,

to respond to my emails and to answer questions that I then included on my blog,

The email:

Hi Adam

My name is Rob, I run lifeclub.org, a blog on productivity.

I’m writing an experts opinion article about how to write a book, and I think many aspiring writers would love to know your answer to this question:

1. What is your motivation to sit down everyday and write?
2. How do you keep a regular writing schedule?
3. What do you do to increase productivity and avoid procrastination?

If you don’t mind taking a minute of your time to answer the above question, you’ll be helping out many aspiring writers.

I’ll be sure to include a reference to your website.

Thanks you =)

You want to pick a topic that the expert is deeply passionate about,

and ask questions where the expert can answer within five minutes.

Emphasize all the people that they could be helping and this helps them build their personal brand.

You can tell them, Hey, I’ll like reference you and I’ll provide a link to your site and I’ll help promote you to my audience.

With this approach, I managed to get 30 authors to reply to me.

And perhaps four of them were New York times bestselling authors.

The best part about this approach is you can follow up after the article is live:

Hey, the article is live can you share it with your audience.

So not only do you get free mentorship,

you get free content for your blog by like experts that have like a really big brand,

you  get free promotion.

And all you’re doing is appealing to people’s expertise and making them feel respected.