Start by setting up a spreadsheet to track your contacts with the following columns: Name, Job Title, Company, Industry, Contact Information, Score (I’ll explain this in a moment), City, First Date of Contact, Last Date of Contact, and Notes.

Download My Contact Tracking Template

Put all of your professional contacts into the spreadsheet. For the “Score” column, develop a system for ranking your contacts based on how often you want to stay in touch: For me “1” means monthly contact, “2” means I touch base quarterly, and “3” means I reach out every six months to a year. In the “Notes” column, write down what interests your contact has, including what you bonded over or what you know he or she likes based on your online research.

Next , make tending to your network a priority by actually putting time on the calendar to do it. I schedule separate times each week for reaching out to new people and for touching base with people already in my spreadsheet. It may sound silly to formally schedule it, but if you don’t, it means you’re not really prioritizing it—and it probably won’t get done.

RELATED: 4 Strategies for Your One-on-One Networking Meeting

Keeping in Touch: Adding Value to the Relationship

Now that you’re all organized, it’s time to go from being someone your contacts met once at a conference to someone they look forward to hearing from. But how do you develop a relationship with someone without being overly pushy? Here are a few of my favorite ways to keep in touch:

Share Favorite Articles

We’ve all heard this tip before, but how often do you actually do it? Emailing links to relevant articles with a brief, thoughtful analysis is probably the easiest way to keep up a relationship. Use Delicious or another bookmarking service to keep track of articles you’ve really enjoyed. Then, when you sit down to reach out to your contacts, go through the bookmarks to see if there’s anything relevant that you can send them (your “Notes” column will be incredibly helpful for this).

One of the best examples of this technique appears in a blog post by Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and Co-Founder at Marketo. While he talks about it in the context of nurturing sales leads, I actually think it works to add value to your network as well. Write emails like these, and I promise that you will not be forgotten!

RELATED: How to Stop Thinking About Reading Articles—and Actually Start Reading Them

Give the Run-Down of a Good Book

Get in the habit of typing up notes on the best books you’ve read that are related to your industry or that are about interests you share with your contacts. Then, convert the notes into a PDF and send them to anyone who might find them interesting. (I learned this technique from a video podcast entrepreneur Maneesh Sethi did with ESPN anchor James Swanwick.)

Bonus tip: If you use a Kindle, you can copy and paste your Kindle highlights from your Kindle account page and then format them to look like book notes (it’s a huge time saver!).

Give Them a Pat on the Back

Show contacts that you’re paying attention by congratulating them on career milestones. Use Newsle to keep tabs on what’s going on in your contacts’ lives (or set up Google GOOG +0.82% Alerts for your closest contacts). When they get a new job, give a great presentation, or publish an article on a major website, send them a quick note to congratulate them on their milestones and tell them that you admire the work they are doing.

But remember to be specific! Telling your contact exactly why you liked his or her article or what part of the conference speech you saw online really stuck out to you will make your message much more memorable than a simple “congrats.”