#CONTEST Leave a Comment, Win a Copy of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

#CONTEST Leave a Comment, Win a Copy of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies 37 One blog comment, one chance to win. Join in before Sunday night, ok? My friend and fellow job search expert blogger Joshua Waldman recently published the 2nd edition of his book Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, and we're throwing this contest to celebrate. How to Enter At the bottom of this article, leave a comment about job search and social media. Some suggestions of what to write in your comment are: A memorable/funny/bizarre job listing you saw on a social network A related pet peeve of yours Tell us about someone worth hiring because of their social media presence, and why Inspire us! Comment noweval How to Win Simple â€" Leave an impressive comment. The winners will be the 3 people with the most impressive comments as judged by me.eval You, or anyone you know, can try to influence the choice of winners by leaving more comments in support. Comment now Prizes 3 free, digital copies of the recently-publishedJob Searching with Social Media For Dummies (MSRP of US$19.99) are available to be won. Here's the trailer for this handy guide: Rules Must be 18 or older. You can comment as many times as you like, but you can only win one prize. Be sure to use a real email address or Twitter account when you comment so that I can contact you if you win. Contest Deadline To be considered as entries in the contest, all comments must be submitted by this Sunday, December 15th 2013, midnight PST, which is 10am Monday morning Israel time (check your local time here) Comment now Good luck!

How to get a six-figure book deal from your blog

How to get a six-figure book deal from your blog Im going to tell you how to get a six-figure book deal from your blog. People ask me this question all the time, and I have been a little hesitant to give people advice because I had only sold one book, and maybe it was luck, because its hard to know how to do anything from just doing it once. But now I feel like I know a bit because I just got my second book contract, based on my blog. Here are ten tips for getting a book deal of your own that is based on that blog youve been writing. 1. Solve a problem. Non-fiction books define a problem and offer a solution. This is what makes the consumer buy the book. A blog can be a fun rant. A book needs to be more than that. Do the how to be test. Can you say, My blog is about how to . And finish the sentence? You need to be able to do that to turn your blog into a nonfiction book. For my book, I said Im solving the problem that most career advice books are irrelevant to the current market. I did a they say/I say section. For example, they say report sexual harassment/I say dont. They say dont lie on your resume/ I say be practical. 2. Have a big idea. A blog is a big pile of small ideas adding up to a community of people talking about those ideas. A book needs to be more than that. A book needs to add up to a big idea. You get your advance based on how big the idea is. One of the hardest lessons for me was that I thought I would just put a bunch of posts together in to a book. But my editor rejected that when I turned it in. The posts need to be organized in a way that builds up into bigger ideas (chapters) into a big, grand idea (the book). Aside from Seth Godin, who is an industry unto himself (mostly as a public speaker), there is no record of printing out a blog and having a six-figure-worthy book. 3. If youre in a niche, make it a big one. Editors dont like to buy a book that is in a field where no other books exist. In the blogosphere, if no one is blogging about your topic, its probably because youre in a very small niche. Niches are fine for blogs, but not for six-figure book contracts. Also, ask yourself if you are solving a problem for a mass market or a niche market. If youre in a niche, you need to expand your reach by choosing topics for a more broad audience. 4. Have a big audience, but say they are old rather than young if you want a lot of money. Most blog readers are young and most book buyers are old. Therefore, books that are geared exclusively toward young people often come out as paperback originals, which dont get huge advances. Figure out how to sell your broader portion of the population. 5. Have a lot of blogger friends to promote the book, but talk mostly about USA Today. Its true that a few books, like The No Asshole Rule and The 4-Hour Work Week, got to the top because of initial support from bloggers. But publishers arent making bets that they can tell which books this will happen with next time. So you need to tell the book publishers that you can get a lot of attention from conventional media outlets. Editors are more comfortable with traditional media. After all, thats what book publishing is. 6. Follow conventions. Most of the non-blog world sees bloggers as the Wild West, at best, and a freak show at worst. The publishing industry is wary of being able to translate bloggers into authors, and there have been a lot of high profile flops. So make your writing look like the kind of writing that agents and editors are used to dealing with. This means not only very high quality writing samples (which will probably be blog posts). But you also need to follow the conventions for writing a killer proposal. 7. Find someone to model yourself after. I am not the only person to get a book contract from a blog. Here are some others: Gina Trapani at Lifehacker, Shauna James at Gluten-Free Girl, and Joe Bageant. When you were in sixth grade, you read five paragraph essays in order to figure out how to write one. When you started blogging, you read other peoples blogs to figure out how you wanted to do your own. Now you should read books by bloggers in order to figure out how to package your own blog into a book. 8. Put your blog in the marketing section of your proposal. A book proposal is about the idea, and who you are and how youre going to sell the book. If you have a large blog readership, you can say that in the marketing section. You cant say theyll all buy the book. If that were true, Gina Trapani would have the one of the biggest selling books ever. But you can say that the blog will provide a lot of buzz and a lot of customers. 9. Trust that agents know a good proposal when they see one, but try again if you get a bad response. Heres how I got my agent: I bought The Writers Market and picked out five agents. Here was my criterion: I only chose agents who said they werent accepting new clients, because I wanted someone who was established and doing well. And I picked people whose last names started with letters at the end of the alphabet because I thought other people who pick agents randomly probably start at the beginning, so people at the end must not get as much mail. This experience makes me trust the agenting system. Its not hard to tell the big agents look at the books they represent. Send your proposal to agents who represent books like yours. If no one likes your proposal, admit that your idea is flawed. Figure out why, fix the problems, and try again with another proposal. 10. Use blog comments to train yourself for rejection. If there is any way to prepare for the constant rejection from the publishing industry, its by answering the negative commenters on your blog. Respond in an even-handed, respectful way. This is how youll have to respond to agents and editors who try to poke holes in your proposal. For example, I wrote eleven proposals that my agent said no to before she sold my most recent one. Thats a lot of work. But, to be honest, its not as much work as posting to a blog five days a week. This is cross-posted at ProBlogger. Which, by the way, is the online resource that has been the most helpful to me over the past year as I have been figuring out the blogging world. ProBlogger has great answers to a very wide range of how-to-blog questions.

Interviewing with Senior Management - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Interviewing with Senior Management - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Everyone thrives to have more influence at work. They want to become leaders, do something great with the career they are given and be better liked by those around them. Additionally, power translates into more money. However, prior to obtaining an executive level position, you’ll notice that its imperative that you learn to interview with senior management. Despite the task seeming highly intimidating on the surface, effective C-level interviewing can be executed at any age. Below, the sales recruiting experts at KAS Placement have listed 4 strategies for interviewing with high ranking personnel in an effective, calm manner that instills confidence and increases likability. The quicker you learn how to ace a high-level interview, the quicker you get ahead in your career. 1. Have your answers paint a picture of success with an underlying tone preaching execution. When the interviewer is discussing issues that need to be overcome, don’t show intimation. Rather, stay calm and note that hurdles exist to be surmountable. Effectiveness is a highly desired trait; display that your thought process is one geared towards solutions rather than perseverating on problems. After all, a hurdle is just another situation that has to be taken care of. While you want to be honest about the work it may take, you don’t want to appear intimidated or daunted by the task. Make sure to maintain a “been there, done that type of mentality. Recognize that achieving the discussed goals will take work, discipline and willpower, however note that anything worthwhile does. 2. Persuade Through Relevant Stories. As a job seeker, you are not going to convince a senior level hiring manager that you possess the traits necessary to be a success by outright stating that you are intelligent, resilient, optimistic, motivational or competent. Rather, to be effective in persuading the hiring manager, vividly discuss instances in which you displayed these behavioral facets and allow the executive to come to their own conclusions. 3. Turn all distractions off. Research carried out in 2005 by psychologist Dr. Glenn Wilson found that persistent interruptions and distractions in the office (or in this case while interviewing) carried a profoundly negative effect on our ability to be productive. The study found that excessive use of emails, social media, text messages and online videos scrambled our brain to the tune of losing 10 IQ points and hindered short term memory. This is twice the amount of marijuana. It is most effective for interviewees to carve out a few hours prior to the interview and get away from the computer (or at least the Internet), turn off the phone and engage in focused thinking. Moreover, the timeout from online activities will allow the thinker to think in a more positive manner and better anticipate a beneficial outcome from the meeting. 4. Act ‘aloof’ to aggressive, manipulative or rude behavior. Interviewees who are unable to adapt to dealing with difficult interviewers forfeit a significant amount of potential career options and most likely lose a chunk of their income potential. For most, their fundamental flaw is that they personalize the thoughts of the interviewer too much. For instance, if a interviewer alludes to the fact that they are interviewing many other candidates, a humble smile will be one of the best approaches. This calm demeanor is paramount to gain an advantage on competing interviewees. Many job seekers will immediately take offense to what is being said and will end up alienating the recruiter or hiring manager. In the End In business, the companies that hire the best employees are the companies that win; the majority of senior mangers firmly this. Remain calm and gain their confidence by viewing the interviewing process more realistically as well as optimistically. Think of the meeting as less of a pressure situation and more of a collaborative conversation.

Practical Online Writing Tips for Personal Branding Success - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Practical Online Writing Tips for Personal Branding Success - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career [Sponsored Post:  Viewbix  helps SMBs, entrepreneurs and bloggers convert video viewers into customers. Viewbix makes ordinary videos instantly interactive with the integration of apps and sharing capabilities that engage viewers and present them with immediate calls-to-action for significantly increased reach and return on investment.] The second edition of Ginny Redishs Letting Go of the Words is good news for recent graduates, career-builders, or job hunters looking for online writing tips to build successful personal brands. Letting Go of the Words is likely to forever change the way you plan, write, and format your personal brand on the Internet. Ginny Redishs Letting Go of the Words offers a clear, concise presentation of proven principles for writing and web usability, ideas backed-up by reams of research data and endorsed by todays leading web usability experts. Subtitled, Writing Web Content that Works, Ginny Redishs Letting Go of the Words communicates proven strategies and best practices for improving the effectiveness of everything you write for online readers. With the exception of the first edition of this book, no book comes as close to providing an in-depth, detailed, guide to the best practices involved in writing for online readers. A visual guide to online writing Letting Go of the Words could also have been subtitled, A Visual Guide to Web Content. Its a book about writing that doesnt have to be read, in the conventional sense of starting at the beginning and moving forward, reading page after page of text. If youre in the middle of a task, like redoing your home page for your website, posting a press release, or creating a landing page for your next information product or event, you can go directly to the chapter and get immediate help. Visual storytelling and teaching. Letting Go of the Words is a visual guide because the annotated examples and before and after illustrations tell the story. Each page contains at least one, and often, several real-world illustrations that reinforce the lessons, best practices, and mistakes to avoid. Illustrations are accompanied by smiley-faces and call-outs describing best practices and mistakes to avoid. One of my examples is an illustrated Chapter 3 Case Study titled, Revising a Poorly Designed Web Page. The series of 5 illustrations show the major improvements in readability that take place as a series of simple changes in type and layout. What online writing and conversations have in common One of the themes that resonates through Letting Go of the Words is the importance of viewing your blog and website as a conversation, rather than a podium to communicate your view of things. Online writing success and strong personal brands begin with analyzing and understanding your website visitors, and anticipating the questions theyre going to ask. Often, these questions relate to specific tasks, i.e., How do I book a flight to Baltimore? or perform a task or achieve a goal in a field where youre an expert. If your website visitors are looking for personalized assistance, or are potential employers, they will be asking, How do I know youre the best qualified to help me? By creating personas describing your blog or website visitors, and predicting the questions theyre likely to be asking, you can pave the way for better online writing and an improved personal brand. Throughout Letting   Go of the Words, the emphasis is always on maintaining the conversation, keeping it moving forward, by organizing your ideas, breaking your ideas into easily-read and easily-remembered chunks of information, and providing compelling reasons to believe your message. Guidelines for effective online writing For me, the two most useful parts of Letting Go of the Words were Chapter 8, Announcing Your Topic with a Clear Headline and Chapter 9, Including Useful Headings. In these chapter, Ginny Redish describes the importance of using a combination of nouns and verbs to write the way you talk. Usually, headings are simply placeholders, nouns used to indicate the end of one topic and the beginning of the next topic. With a little thought, however, againviewing the headings as parts of a conversationyou can create significantly better headings. In Letting Go of the Words, headings within chapters are called Guidelines, which turn ideas into action. Chapter 8s Guidelines include: Use your site visitors words Be clear instead of cute Think about your global audience Try for a medium length (about eight words) Use a statement, question, or call to action Combine labels (nouns) with more information Add a short description if people need it If youre looking for a concise, comprehensive, and visual guide containing hundreds of practical online writing tips for personal branding success will everything needed to take your writing to the next level in Ginny Redishs Letting Go of the Words. Take a few minutes to use the Look Inside! feature of Ginny Redishs Letting Go of the Words on Amazon.com. This could be the most important Holiday Gift book you giveor receivethis year. Author: Roger C. Parker invites you to ask your questions about writing for brand building success. Submit your questions as comments, below, or use my online form.    

Tips For Writing a Resume - Ways to Find a Job

Tips For Writing a Resume - Ways to Find a JobIf you are looking for tips for writing a resume, this article was written with you in mind. Even if you are not a student, or someone who works full time and doesn't have a lot of free time, there are many tips for writing a resume that can help you get through the process of finding the right job for you.Many people never think of the importance of taking advantage of special programs that are available to make it easier to find the right job. These programs can make it much easier to find the right job for you. For example, many state and federal governments now offer free and low cost services for job hunters.Other resources are available to help you understand the requirements and regulations that apply to a job seeker's experience and education. Before you even begin to search for a job, make sure you read all the regulations in your state. You also need to know how long you will have to spend looking for work, and which agencies wi ll be able to help you.Make sure that you are very organized when you start looking for a job. First, make a list of all the jobs you are interested in, and all the companies you are interested in working for. Don't just grab the first job you see. By making a detailed list and following the directions of the company or government agency, you will be more likely to get your foot in the door.Making sure that the position you are applying for is still in demand is a top priority. While you will be spending plenty of time searching for a job, make sure that you take advantage of all the free and low cost resources that are available to you. Even if you have never applied for a job before, you should look online for information. This is where most information about the job can be found.Once you have gathered the right information, make sure that you organize your thoughts and ideas. Use the guidance of a professional writer who specializes in this field. Do this by asking for some sampl es of their work. Reading these samples can provide some great tips for writing a resume.There are many different options when it comes to developing a resume. They can be quite elaborate or very simple. They can contain a short bio, the education and experience, and a list of professional references.Knowing what you are looking for and what your goals are can help you write the best resume possible. With a little bit of preparation, and enough information, you should be able to do well in your job search.

Practice of peace - part 2 - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Practice of peace - part 2 - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Were coming up on the end of day 2 here at the practice of peace conference. If youre interested in whats going on, all meeting transcripts are coming online here. We had a really funny experience today, during a talk about How to bear it when you realize its all your fault?. The guy who was taking notes was doing it on a computer, and towards the end of the meeting, he suddenly says I have a message from a person whos not here. Were thinking Is he channeling the spirit of a dead ancestor, or what?. It turns out, that as we were talking and he was writing, he got an email from a friend in Ecuador, sent her the transcript, she read it and sent a comment back, which he then read to us, the comment being perfectly on topic, by the way. How Smart Mobs is that? Ive also done impro theatre in a session, confirming my knowledge that Ill have to take that up soon. There is so much to learn from the exercises and practices in impro theatre. Tonight Ive offered to do laughter exercises after dinner more on that later. Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related

5 Resources to Help Build a Smarter Job Search - CareerAlley

5 Resources to Help Build a Smarter Job Search - CareerAlley We may receive compensation when you click on links to products from our partners. Imagine what you could achieve if you knew you could not fail Robert H. Schuller When I was in my early teens, my friends and I would buy whatever fireworks we could. They were illegal where we lived, but if you knew the right people you could pretty much get what ever you wanted. Although not technically fireworks, one of our favorites were smoke bombs. They looked like small balls with a fuse sticking out of them. Anyway, we would always argue how much smoke they created and decided to settle our argument by capturing the smoke. So, we decided to light a smoke bomb, drop it into a jar and close the lid. About 1 second after closing the lid we realized that this was not a very good idea and the jar could explode. We ran for cover. Fortunately, only the lid blew off. We didnt settle our argument but we did agree it was not the smartest thing we did. My entire career (which now spans over 30 years), no matter what struggles the companies I worked for went though, I always thought that someone smarter than me was dealing with it. Having lived through my share of corporate drop a smoke bomb in a jar meltdowns, I now realize that maybe the person running the company is not smarter than me. In fact, some of the fatal corporate mistakes Ive lived through could have been easily avoided if not for arrogance or over-confidence. So, whats the point? Underestimating your abilities or thinking that only someone smarter than me could be running the company can be career limiting. Much like todays quote, dont let lack of confidence hold you back. Confidence in Your Job Search Its okay to think you are the best because if you dont believe that you will most likely not get the job. This is a great starting point and if you dont think you have enough confidence, make the change now. 17 Ways To Build Confidence While Finding A Job This article was posted on one of my favorite career sites, Tims Strategy. As Tim points out, looking for a job can be very draining, often with many more you are not the right person than youre hired. Tim lists lots of great tips to help you build and keep your confidence during the process. From Take a day off and help others to Know thyself, Im sure you will find all of the tips useful in your job search. Definitely worth a look. Boost your self-confidence; it could help you find Good article, answering the age old job search question why am I not getting called back after interviews, is there something wrong with me?. The article focuses on what yo can do to build your confidence (like thinking about all of your achievements). One of my favorite points take intelligent risk. If Its Not Working Change It If youve been looking for a job for any period of time and you are not getting any results, you may want to consider changing your approach. 5 Ways to Fix Your Job Search Is your job search not working? Need to get some other ideas? This article, posted on USNews.com, provides a few good ideas to help get your job search back on track. From fixing your cover letter to tapping into your network, this article is worth a read if you feel like your job search is in a slump. While you are there, take a look at their careers section (click the link at the top of the page). How to Choose the Best Resume Format This article will step you through the process of re-formatting your resume. There are probably thousands of resume formats out there and you could spend weeks looking for the right format. That being said, format is important. Readers will not spend much time reading if they are not drawn in. What format is right for you? Take a look at resume samples for your industry or functional background. CHECKLIST: JOB SEARCH Another resource from myfuture.com, this provides a pretty good list of the things you will need to do along with embedded links. And, if thats not enough, take a look at the next link. Job Search Checklist A great checklist from Quintcareers.com, it is divided by each major component of the job search with embedded read more links for each item. Dont forget to check all of the related links on the left hand side of the screen. Good luck in your search. Visit me on Facebook