Monday, September 8, 2008

What is a resume?

What is a resume and why is it so important?

A resume is a one- to two-page document summarizing your career objectives, professional experiences and achievements, and educational background. The heading of the resume should contain your name, address and contact information. The body of the resume should be broken into the following sections: career objective, profile/summary, professional experience, achievements, scholastics, and references. Your career objective should be brief, up to two sentences; it should give your potential employers an idea of how you wish to move forward in your professional life. A concise profile or a summary should discuss who you are and how your skills and experience best apply to the job you are interested in. The summary, as well as other parts of your resume, should not contain personal information that discloses ethnicity, sexual orientation, marital status, age, living situations, or any other personal information that is not directly related to your career. Personal profile/summary should only contain a few well-written sentences that convey what you can bring to the table in terms of the specific job. Use this section to attract the employer’s attention, but don’t go overboard in trying to be creative – stay professional. Your experience listing should include information on one to five jobs you’ve held, starting with your current or last job, and listing previous positions in chronological order.
The listing should include the date range of your employment, name of the companies or person(s) you have worked for, and the city and state where the place of employment is located (full address of employment is not necessary). List your title and your main responsibilities, with emphasis on duties that are applicable to the type of work you are seeking. Your education should include college, graduate and post-graduate work, as well as any courses or professional certifications that are relevant to your career development. Achievements, volunteer positions, publications and interests should only be listed if they apply to your professional work experience References should be listed if requested; best practices suggest not to list generic statements about references being available upon request as this is understood.

In the competitive, internet-driven world of job searches, your resume represents you to potential employers. It serves as your tool to attract attention, get the interview and/or get a job. A great resume will make you stand out from other candidates by showcasing your aptitudes. Think of your resume as your sales pitch – you need to sell yourself in the best possible way. Invest some time and research into developing your resume. You will want to make sure that your resume is error free – double check your grammar and spelling, make sure that all company and school names and cities are spelled properly. A resume containing errors, no matter how minimal, will give your potential employer an impression that you do not have attention to detail, that you don’t take time to double check your work, and that you are a poor communicator. Additionally, make sure that your resume is formatted well. Stick to basic fonts, like Arial and Times New Roman. Keep the font size and color standard; don’t use large fonts or multi-colors in your resume. Don’t go overboard with bold, italicized, or large-cap text. Keep your format consistent and make sure that the resume looks great when viewed online as well as when printed out. Keep your resume to one or two pages – any additional pages give an impression that you either don’t know how to concisely summarize your education and experience, or that you are listing unnecessary information for the sake of taking up space. If you’ve never written a resume before, reference books, Internet resources or seek assistance from a professional resume writing service. A well-written resume can make a difference between being stuck at your current job and getting an interview to land the job of your dreams.

Stephany

Copywriting tips

Copywriting Tips

Within this article today on copywriting tips, we'll look at how you can acquire more clients as well as improve your writing skills.

Improving these two skills will allow you to have a meteoric rise in the income that you bring in. Many copywriters are very strong in their profession but are not very good at procuring clients. If you are able to sell yourself to potential clients, you'll never find yourself short of work. The ability to sell yourself is what will set you apart from all the other freelance copywriters out there. You must make sure that you have a portfolio of your best work. Within this portfolio, you'll want to have a letter explaining your qualifications along with samples of your writing as well as testimonials from your previous jobs. If you are able to e-mail this to your potential clients, this will help set you apart. They can see the professional work you have done in the past as well as the client base that you currently work with. If you are able to reference Fortune 500 companies you have worked with, this will continue to improve your credibility. If you are just starting out in the copywriting field, delete the potential references and replace this with more work that you have done in the past. If you have worked for an advertising agency and are beginning to freelance, make sure to include some the work that you have done at the advertising agency.

Two possible ways that you can acquire clients are to post at different contracting websites such as elance.com or directfreelance.com. You can also research companies who you can potentially see if they need work. If you spend time reading the business section every day, cut out articles that might be within your particular field and keep them in a centralized location. This could be a potential source of leads for you depending upon how the companies are doing and if it is in a predicament where your skills may be needed

If you want to learn more about writing great copy, look into learning more about Dan Kennedy. He is one of the world's foremost experts on direct selling and reading through his book will give you some insights into how to write great copy. The book that you want to specifically pick up is called "The Ultimate Sales Letter." This book breaks down the Kennedy system of writing great copy. By taking the time to read through this, you'll be able to see what he has done to be so successful and he takes the time to look through different examples that you can see what works with in many of these advertisements.

Hopefully this article today on copywriting tips has proven to be beneficial to you. Stephen King was once quoted in Time magazine that writing is similar to working out. When you work out and lift weights, within a period of time, you'll find yourself becoming much stronger and more muscular. The same can be applied to copywriting. If you continue to develop your skills and write habitually every day, you'll find yourself becoming a better writer over the course of time. The key behind copywriting tips is that you must apply them.

Stephany

Copywriting as a job

Copywriting as a Job

Within this article today we will look at what copywriting as a job has to offer.

There is a great deal of benefits if you have copywriting as a job. The salary for a copy writer is much higher than the average wage in the United States. According to the magazine Advertising Age, the average salary for a copywriter in the United States is right around $60,000 when you include bonuses and that was for the year 2005. You can imagine that the income will be higher now, given that there has been inflation in the last two years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics comes up with a similar but slightly lower number, right around $57,000 for a copywriter.

Copywriting does have a great deal more flexibility than many jobs. You do not need to worry about keeping set hours usually because the focus is upon you writing good copy. This could allow you to live a full life in some ways because you can plan some events around the fact that you can make up more time in hours on certain days if something comes up. This is something that many jobs such as banks or restaurants are not able to do.

Copywriting as a job also offers a great workplace environment. Many copywriters work within an advertising agency, which can be a great place to work. You often have many other creative people and there you can bounce ideas off of one another and these people often have high energy which you can feed off of. This can be a great group of people to work with because you will often find that you are challenged due to the intelligence and creativity of this group of people. There are many different sizes of advertising agencies see you could decide to work for a smaller advertising agency if you like a close-knit group of people or you could work for a larger advertising agency if you want more competition. This could be structured according to how your mindset and makeup are. There is a great deal of flexibility within your workplace environment as demonstrated here.

Writing good copy can be very challenging so you will find that this job will never grow boring. If you work at an advertising agency, you often will have many different types of clients so the work that you do every day can change. This is good because you'll get a great variety of different things they would never get bored.

Copywriting as a job offers great benefits to you no matter how you look at it. You are able to make very good money, considering that the average wage is right around $60,000. If you are able to establish yourself as a master copywriter, you can obviously earn a great deal more money than the average salary. The workplace environment often will be crackling with creative energy and the flexibility that you will have from the job is more than most other jobs can offer.


Stephany