Archive for April, 2010

“If Your Resume is the Cake, Your Cover Letter is the Icing.”

Cover letter writing is almost as important a skill for a job seeker to learn as resume writing. The cover letter accompanies the resume at all times as the primary support document. Whether you use traditional mail, email, faxing, or another type of electronic submission, this should always be sent with the resume. There are, of course, other tools you’ll use when job seeking. Your cover letter and resume come first of course, followed by follow-up letters, thank-you letters for after the interview, reference sheets, salary histories, and job acceptance letters. If you have good cover letter writing skills, and good resume writing skills, the other written tools should be a snap to compose.

Your goal in this is to get the attention of the hiring manager, just as it is with resume writing. The method and format are a little different however. Your resume will cover all, or most of your professional career, and will be from one to two pages. Your cover letter will be a very brief page serving as an introduction to the resume. Cover letter writing style must be direct, to the point, and able to grab the attention of the reader quickly, with a goal of making the reader want to read the attached resume.

Many people, when engaged in this type of writing, have a tendency to say too much. Good cover letter writing is short and punchy, and will take two or three key points from the resume and emphasize them. The old adage “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them” holds true in both resume writing and cover letter writing.

As an example, let’s assume that you are a materials handling manager for a defense contractor, seeking another position. In your line of work the buzz words are MRP, lean manufacturing, ISO 9000, and cost savings. Your writing efforts should reflect these buzz words to show your value to your current employer and any future employers. Your resume will go into more detail about how you accomplished these goals. The cover letter will simply point out to the hiring manager that you accomplished them. An example of this would be two bulleted paragraphs in the body of the letter that say….

• Experienced in quality assurance and quality control, MRP, ISO 9000, QS 9000, and Lean Manufacturing.

• Demonstrated results in saving significant money for employers through cost savings, inventory level reductions, and on-time supplier delivery.

The hiring manager, according to many surveys, devotes only about fifteen seconds to each resume and cover letter he or she reviews. With that in mind your writing skills need to be top notch to get this person to look at your resume. Your resume writing skills need to be just as good to get the reader to want to grant you an interview. In turn, your interviewing skills need to be excellent to get the hiring manager to offer you the position. This long, and hopefully positive chain of events begins with good cover letter writing skills and ends with job satisfaction and a nice paycheck.

Business Opportunity with Cutting Edge Stratagies and Technologies

A Marketing System was founded in 2004 to serve as a platform for a group of the top income earners in a Network Marketing Business to leverage their success by giving their trade secrets to EVERY member in their group. With close to over 100 years of collective network marketing experience between them, they created and refined a turn-key sales and marketing system that virtually anyone could have success using.

This newest and most powerful upgraded version has just sent the system skyrocketing in sales and memberships. New people with little or no experience in this industry are seeing almost immediate results from this newer system. People who have never been able to achieve success in the Network Marketing arena are now making money, many of them within their first or second week.

This newest system is a revolutionary Sales and Marketing Opportunity that essentially eliminates the individual marketer’s sales and marketing abilities as a variable for their success. The system generates leads, then filters and even qualifies them for you. Next, highly trained professional’s follow-up and close the sales in order to turn the prospects into customers. This eliminates any interaction between the System’s member and the customer until after the sale is made and the money is deposited into the individual members bank account!

This revolutionary way of marketing now levels the playing field in such a way as that new marketers are able to enjoy the same results as seasoned veterans. By removing the new marketer from the equation, he now can focus on building the business while “outsourcing” the most difficult variables which are the sales and marketing aspects of the business.

This System is the first fully “turn key” automated sales and marketing system ever created for Direct Sales Marketing and Home Based Business Opportunities. It eliminates the following aspects for the new marketer:

NO more personal selling, telling or explaining, EVER!
NO more buying leads or learning how to advertise (unless you choose), EVER!
NO more prospecting or dialing for dollars, EVER!
NO more struggling and frustration in getting started!
NO more long learning curves!
NO more wondering how are the successful marketers actually making their money!

Here is the BOTTOM LINE………………..

You can turn this system on and head out to the beach, go to the mall with the kids, or on a long overdue family vacation and your sales and marketing system will be busy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week generating, filtering and qualifying your leads. Highly trained sales professionals will be making all of your calls and closing all of your sales for you! They system is on Autopilot!

If you have been looking for a Home Based Sales and Marketing Opportunity that eliminates all of the boring, time consuming, and redundant things like selling and explaining, you have found it. This new revolutionary Marketing Opportunity is exactly what you have been looking for. Sound to good to be true? You will never know unless you take the time to look will you.

To your Success,

Dennis Hampton
Marketing Consultant / Manager
A Business Made Easy, LLC

PS. “There are 3 types of people in this world: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened. We all have a choice. You can decide which type of person you want to be.” -Mary Kay Ash

Business goes to Cyberspace

It is a well known axiom of doing business in any industry that those who do not stay in step with the times will be those companies that eventually die out. There is no place where that truism is more evident than in the way that companies in virtually every business sector are finding to integrate an internet marketing strategy with their traditional communications and to provide the public with an internet “presence” to supplement their public profiles in other venues.

Of course, the value of the internet for sales and promotions has been well known in the industries that service the youth markets and for the companies dealing with entertainment and the arts. Because the internet is in virtually every home and even now on hand held devices of every description, the access it gives to reach a target market are phenomenal.

This explosion of an entirely new marketing model has introduced the world of business to entirely new paradigms of marketing and new ways to achieve greater market penetration and sales. And so any business who has had to get out on cyberspace to keep up with the competition has already had to learn a whole new vocabulary that has grown up around the internet marketing phenomenon. Now terms like “Search Engine Optimization”, “Auto responders” and “Viral Marketing” become important and powerful tools to any business that wants to tap the power of the internet to increase sales.

The second wave of businesses that, perhaps reluctantly, ventured out into cyberspace were traditional retail business that you would not associate with cyberspace at all. This includes sport teams, restaurants and even retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Border’s Book Stores. In fact, the wave of change in how products and services are sold has been so rapid that entire market niches have been virtually revolutionalized by internet sales techniques. Book and music outlets have been virtually hard hit as a large percentage of their customers have abandoned the “brick and mortar” sales outlets entirely to use the more convenient tools of internet shopping.

This has made it tough on some retailers to keep up. For the “mom and pop” business, the change has been particularly devastating. Already small, home grown businesses were struggling to compete with the giant mega-stores like Wal-Mart to keep their loyal clientele coming back. Add to that the migration of customers to the internet and the need for change just to stay in business became even more urgent.

But even businesses who do not depend on marketing at all have seen the need to build and maintain a well functioning business web site so they will have a “face” in cyberspace. In the modern marketplace, the consumer will go to the internet first to find out about a company and it’s goods and services. This has turned traditional ways of connecting with existing and new customers upside down entirely.

The good news is that these rapid changes in how modern markets work have made the business world more diverse, more able to adjust to changing business dynamics and more open to the creative and innovative minds that have always been the real life blood of the business world. And, ironically, it is often the small business that is most capable of making rapid changes to its online presence and ways to doing things.

In that the internet is a phenomenally dynamic place, new ways of reaching our customers change almost annually. Where one year a simple web page may have been sufficient, soon we had to have chat rooms, MySpace pages and YouTube compatibility. Any business that sees these changes as chances to do something new and exciting with their business will be the companies that thrive in this modern world. And, as always, those who do not thrive with change will be destined to be made obsolete by it.