So You Want to Be a Job/Career Coach, Life Coach, or Executive Coach and Write Resumes with Business Letters in Your Online, Home-based Business

 

            Here’s how to start your personal service business. As a job or career coach, an executive coach, or a life coach, you will be presenting and classifying your client’s competencies, writing resumes, cover letters, and creating a wide variety of business correspondence including sales letters, news releases, and direct mail copy.  You will be planning events for your clients and their prospective employers. You’ll need to really work a room to find clients as well as niches or jobs for clients when networking at professional associations and trade shows. Most frequently, you’ll be asked to write, evaluate, and repackage resumes, cover letters, and other summaries of qualifications of your clients. Develop an icon, logo, and motto for your coaching clients.

            A resume is a summary of qualifications. A career coach helps clients find success by taking step-by-step detailed, concrete strategies that solve specific problems, get results, and reach a defined goal. A resume writing business online can be combined with a career coaching enterprise. The steps are outlined here for you to follow in chronological order to open and operate a resume-writing service business and also a career coaching enterprise, online from your home, mobile location, or office. You can telecommute online and still help people find direction by offering information, training, or consulting services.

            Here’s how to open an online business at home presenting and packaging your clients’ competencies. Make your living writing resumes, business letters, and being a job coach. Help clients obtain appoints for interviews that may eventually lead to finding work. Write and repackage resumes and all types of business correspondence—from cover letters and follow-ups to direct mail or trade show sales letters. Write news releases for employee newsletters about people in key positions. Be a job coach and consultant with employees and employers with a goal of matching people. Even help place public speakers with corporations hosting events such as conventions.

            You don’t have the packaging, postage, and handling expense of mailing the resumes or letters. Your client does the mailing of any letters you write online or on resume paper. Save every correspondence on disc for your files and turn over or email to your client a copy of your master disc or CD. Your client may return in the future for more copies or updates.

            All you do online at home is write resumes, business letters, and other business correspondence, repackage the material and save it on a disk and in your computer files. Then you email the finished writing as an attachment saved in Microsoft Word, Rich Text, or any other file format, to your client. To expand your resume and letter-writing business, consider training as a job coach and help your client make more connections, find niche markets, hidden resources, or emphasize certain skills.

            The client opens the document file, saves it on a disc, such as a CD, and keeps copies. The client prints out the files, and mails them to prospective employers or partners. You can also send copies of discs and paper-text copies of the resumes or letters to your client along with a CD, if requested. Always keep master copies. Your client may not be able to open a file sent as an attachment by email, may lose the files, or want another copy mailed by regular mail.

            This book contains step-by-step how-to techniques about how to open and operate a resume-writing and business letter writing enterprise, including sample letters and resumes as guides or templates. There is growing evidence that a well-written cover letter that introduces you and highlights your best abilities may be more of an attention-grabber than sending unsolicited resumes to organizations.  The book you're reading discusses the craft of well-written cover (and follow-up) letters as well as resumes. It also shows you ways to learn more about yourself in relation to a job so you can analyze your motives for wanting to be in the computer industry.

            This book is designed to help you write penetrating cover and follow-up letters to top resumes that won't be tossed in inactive files or thrown away as so many are. These tips will help you from going in the wrong direction. You need to stand out in a crowd of paperwork and get the kind of attention you want from employers.

            Don't spend too much time looking for a job in the same industry you left. Unusual jobs for computer personnel exist in other industries. Creative expression jobs in the computer industry exist as do computerized, technical jobs in the entertainment, biotech, or food industry, for example.

            In your search for a job, you'll meet many leads along the road. You'll meet vendors who valued your business when you were employed now getting contracts from the person who replaced you in your former job. These vendors may not return your calls or do lunch until you're back in business.

            Contact new groups for luncheons, such as a wide variety of professional associations, your local chamber of commerce and convention bureaus, event planners, and support groups. Your companions from the last place you worked or school alumni aren't going to lunch with you now, unless they're close friends.            

            Along the road you may find outplacement firms focusing on career counseling and redirection, not on finding a job for you. Perhaps your former employer hired them for psychological counseling to ease stress. Some employers use outplacement firms as preventative measures to lessen the chances of workplace trauma after termination or out of an employer's own guilt.

            Employment agencies you stop at along the road may represent the employer who paid them the fee, not you, unless you pay their fee. Their job market coverage may be narrow, with emphasis on finding many more lower-level jobs by cold-calling employers listed in the Yellow Pages, business directories, and classified ads in the daily newspaper.

            If you're a manager traveling this road, your chances of being hired in a new job as a manager are slimmer if you target employment agencies without realizing which agencies specialize in referring rank-and-file workers to employers with specific preferences.

            Temporary services may be helpful for shorter-term work if you're a contingency professional or are seeking temporary technical or clerical jobs. Use temporary services to tide you over, meet people, and earn survival money.

            There's always the chance you'll be picked for a staff job, especially in lower-level and clerical jobs. This is a good route for emergency work in the case of displaced homemakers seeking entry-level clerical, healthcare technician, word processing, and desktop publishing jobs. It's also a good road for technical writers and illustrators seeking to break into the computer industry through overflow work on a temporary basis.

            If you're an out-of-work executive, along the job search road, you'll see ads for executive search firms (for people who earned more than $25,000 or $30,000 annually) that say they know exactly what the employer wants. Sometimes the employer pays them to make a good match. Some head hunters ask you to pay a fee.

            Make sure you know what services your fee will buy. You may be paying them in advance for advice and packaging. You may not fit what their leads want. If you want to spend the money, go ahead. You might beat the odds.

            But why try to beat odds, when you can seek alternatives and ideas from software in your own computer? You may wish to brainstorm, or use brainstorming software such as IdeaFisher, published by IdeaFisher Systems, Inc., Irvine, California, to come up with alternatives and ideas. The software contains 700,000 associative connections and over 5,900 problem solving questions. I highly and objectively recommend it to make you think of all the possibilities you could put to work for you.

            Along the job hunter's road, you'll learn that the first step in sending any communication is to keep anger out. Protect your reputation.           

            To find a compassionate ear willing to listen to your troubles without amplifying the stress, join, volunteer, and focus your services in support groups designed for the unemployed person in your field. To locate job leads and meet more business associates, join professional organizations associated with the computer industry and call their recorded telephone job referral lines.

            Be prepared to take a year or more to find the type of work you want, assuming your goals are realistic. Focus on saving as much money as you can while you're out of work.

            If you want to find out how to break into the computer industry, you're better off joining a professional association of trainers of computer personnel than scrambling around people not in the information management industry.

            To get more information on data processing and information management training, for example, join a professional association such as TASC, Trainers' Association of Southern California. When you talk to the people who develop training in any area or industry, you get a finger on the pulse of the entire industry, even if you're not a trainer yourself. Trainers have a broad overview of the entire industry's needs from a perspective very different from personnel workers.

            Look for new directions and purposes for your skills. Don't overlook ‘intra-preneurial’ opportunities, or entrepreneurial roads into temporary, contingency professional work that may lead to your own business opportunity in a new technology.

            If you're listing new ideas, remember that the last 10 ideas are usually the best on any long list. Best of all, feel committed to anything new you try on your road to success. It's physically healthier to stay an optimist. At the end of this book, you'll be an optimist who knows how to combine excellence with common sense.

 

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Introduction

              Clients come to a career/job coach, an executive coach, or a life coach because they want to feel dignified. Colleges are turning out more graduates to compete for fewer positions. Fear of competition and scarcity of employment are driving clients to seek help writing, editing, or evaluating their resumes and business correspondence. 

            According to the U. S. Department of Labor, between 1994 and the year 2005, "the number of college graduates will outpace the number of available jobs by 20% each year." The number of older, laid-off workers returning to college is increasing as well as the number of younger college graduates--despite fewer people in their twenties in the population.

            Competition is increasing. It's important to target several closely-related fields for flexibility as well as specialty. People are seeking careers in high-growth areas such as healthcare. Job seekers are afraid of appearing stupid. Employers want more than logic.

                   Here’s how to be a job coach. Be inventive. Seek out cooperative programs where companies test out employees still in school by hiring them for a semester.

            Some of your clients will be older workers not in school. They’ll want you to create for them a telephone marathon to find them appointments for job interviews.

            As a job coach, you may plan events and even fundraisers. You’ll being calling alumni associations, asking alumni for job referrals instead of donations. If the companies can't offer jobs, they make look twice when you offer a client you have ‘branded’ with a powerful leader image.           

            Fundraisers for cultural and college alumni organizations know exactly how to ask for money from business owners. Fundraisers use persuasion techniques to sell "the teamwork attitude" as a benefit and ask for money in return. 

            In this book, you'll learn to use professional fundraising techniques to repackage your resume for the computer industry, (also known as the information industry). Your goal is to persuade employers to offer you an interview and ultimately, a job.          

            A career or ‘job’ coach is part of the information industry, known as an "enabling technology." To open an online, home-based business as a job coach, life coach, executive coach, spiritual coach or ‘mentor’ coach relies on the teamwork attitude.

            Clients will ask you to find better ways to harness their resume, cover letter, energy, knowledge, and experiences. As a coach, you’ll mentor clients to grow more interactive and user-friendly.     

            Look at your resumes, cover letters, interviews, and follow-up letters as windows of opportunity to free your client’s inner voice. A resume is a way of "clicking in."  It gives your clients permission to free their spontaneous self through work.

            A resume verifies that an individual is recognized, valued, and discovered. The act of writing resumes for clients and then evaluating those drafts plugs your client into his or her own inner energy. That one page also connects clients to employers. It's a mirror that reflects your client’s self-esteem.

             The latest way to market client’s resumes is electronically via the Internet and through international video-conferencing. Internet-based and satellite video conference systems now link U.S. job-search firms with those overseas.            

            Most people find jobs through friends, relatives, professional association members they know and worked with, and through former co-workers. Companies still obtain resumes by advertising, employee-referral incentives, college recruitment, tuition reimbursement, direct mail, Internet ads, and employment or outplacement agencies.

            Ironically, the last place an employer looks for a resume is to the individual who contacts the company without first being asked. Job coaches contact members of professional associations. Therefore, by contacting organizations to do volunteer work on the national professional and trade associations’ newsletters and speakers’ panels (for meetings and conventions), your client would have a better chance of being remembered when a job opens. Associations also are swamped by a rush of resumes from members. Your job as a career coach would be to help your clients stand out from the crowd in a positive manner.

            When all resumes begin to blur, employers finally hire the job applicant with the most enthusiasm, energy, and charisma.

            When employers ask for "a good closer" they're talking about enthusiasm for the company and the product or service. A great resume doesn't "close the sale." Your client’s pitch at the oral interview is the real closer. That one-line pitch summarizes advantage your client can offer the company.          

            Resumes measure how much people believe in themselves. As a job coach, how much do you believe in what you do? Can you be a ghostwriter when it comes to writing resumes and cover or follow-up letters for your client and then write sales letters, news releases, or brochures and flyers for your own business and corporate clients? Can you plan events so your client will be present when people with the power to hire your client are present at that event? Can you be a catalyst and bring people together? A job coach is a matchmaker and a publicist.

            Here’s how to open and operate an online or in-person job coach business that also includes writing resumes, cover letters, follow-up letters, and other business correspondence.

             Showcase the strength within your client. Finding a job interview for someone else is all about repackaging information in new ways. Now let's look at how to repackage your client’s competencies to achieve results. Before you open your doors or email as a job coach, first you need to write a business plan with a time budget as well as a money budget.

            Branding your client is a network activity. You need to be forward-thinking as a career coach, executive coach, life coach, spiritual coach, or image coach.

            You’re not only a ghostwriter, editor, critic, evaluator, event planner, resume writer, business letter editor, publicist, and strategy coach. You’re also a behind-the-scene advertising cross-media specialist with the ability to unify messages for the media and corporations. Most of all, you have to measure your results to show to employers. That’s how you find new clients. Your unemployed client may be “behind the curve.”

            The main benefit you’re offering clients is efficiency. You start by contacting network organizations—corporations cooperating to deliver services to their consumers. Remember the career coach motto: The big corporation learns from the small company. Teachers learn from student feedback. Retailers learn from consumer demand. Welcome to job coach training 101.

 

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                                                                      Chapter 1

How to Write Your Business Plan as a Home-Based Online Entrepreneur, Writer, and Information Re-packager

Develop an icon, logo, and motto for your coaching clients before you write any resumes or letters for them. Before you take on clients, you need a business plan for yourself and for them—a plan that includes a time budget and a money budget. Here is how you develop and write a business plan before your open your online home-based business as a job coach.

This plan helps to enable you to make an informed decision about which type of online writing and information repackaging business is right for you. You can combine resume writing with writing business correspondence, write grant proposals, or a wide variety of business and personal letters.

 The first step is to outline the product or service you may be interested in marketing. Ask yourself what need the service satisfies. Write down a physical description of the product; how and where are you going to create it? Can you describe it for potential customers? How and where are you going to run your business?

One of the most important elements of a business plan is assessment of the competition. By studying your competitors, you can discover how your product or service will represent an improvement over existing products and services. You can create variations that fill a community or national need.

Your idea may be something entirely new. Include in your plan the imaginative services you have created. For example, suppose you want to write pet eulogies and sell the poetry on framed plaques to pet cemeteries and pet owners. This is one way you could generate an innovative product on your word processor. If you have designed a product, such as mailing lists compiled at nine cents a name, and feel your low-cost service does the same job as a more expensive service, use this as your selling point.

Market Research

Your writing and information packaging online enterprise or home-based business plan should include the methods and the results of the research as well as sources of information used to determine whether or not a market exists for your product. You may use a good marketing-research software program in your computer, one that composes questionnaires and surveys and tabulates data and other information necessary to a marketing plan. Your program should be able to give you figures regarding the competition and the number of potential users for your product or service. Are there customers out there who need what you're selling? Is the field swamped with businesses doing the same thing?

Market research should back up your sales projections. After you have written a marketing research plan, create a marketing plan. Here you explain how your product is to be sold. Are you going to have a sales force working for you, or are you working at home alone, using your word processor and telephone? Will you have distributors working on commission or on salary putting your product in the stores? What kind of advertising and promotion program are you going to develop for your business? Have any clients given you orders in advance? These are all questions to consider and research carefully.

Staffing

Marketing plans need to include your background and that of anyone working with you, such as business partners or salespersons. Include here all the information that normally goes into the resumes of your key people and yourself. Particularly important is experience. You or key people in your business have been able to run projects and garner profits, for example, or have performed fund-raising or leadership for volunteer work. Generate on your word processor an organizational chart that graphically shows areas of responsibility. Indicate how each person relates to others in your business.

Financial Statements

Create profit-and-loss statements and cash flow projections for the next five years. Computer programs exist that can work up this information for you from data you supply. You will then be able to judge how much money you will need to run your business. This type of forecasting may prevent you from risking undercapitalization in the first or second year of your business.

These figures will also tell you when you can expect the business to break even and how profits will grow over a period of time. Software is available that can show you the potential growth of your business, based on three sets of sales assumptions: low, expected, and better-than-planned.

Check your computer printouts with your accountant or with a programmer with an accounting background for ways in which your program can be individualized or customized to your business. The business plan should be printed out on your computer using a word-processing program. You can package it in a loose-leaf binder.

A disclaimer on your first page should state that this is your business plan and not a brochure or a prospectus to sell stocks or other securities in your company. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires special treatment of prospectuses and imposes penalties on anyone distributing unregistered prospectuses in the mail.

If your business plan is going to be used to obtain financial backing, you should contact your backers in person. Include a table of contents in your business plan and divider tabs for the various sections.

 

Do You Really Need Bankers Lawyers Accountants, And Insurance Agents To Start A Business?

The person working alone, with only the investment in a personal computer, printer, telephone, and paper supplies, may not be able to afford professional services in the beginning. Software programs exist for bookkeeping. Computer-theft insurance costs are low. Bankers may help you start a pension plan even though they may not agree to loan you money yet.

A credit union may be able to help you with a small loan to buy equipment. The best way to locate experts is to find satisfied customers and ask them to recommend professionals who have done good work over a long period of time. You should be aware of the services you require for your individual needs. Comparison-shop until you find professionals hired by businesses similar to yours.

Do you need special services from an attorney? Are you planning to incorporate? It's very important to explore the tax and legal ramifications of starting your own business as well as your personal liability before you open your doors. Are you going to be the sole owner or a partner? Would you prefer to incorporate and have limited liability?

Ask your attorney questions such as these: What methods can I use to raise money? Can I issue stock? What's the best location for my business for tax purposes if I incorporate? What should I know about bankruptcy laws? Do I need agreements drawn up for financing? You can find a lawyer through The Martindale-Hubbell Legal Directory, which rates attorneys and describes their specialties. The Small Business Administration is a source of free information. It will also refer you to attorneys.

If you need an accountant, you should expect service that clears up your questions about how much money is coming in and going out. You will be asked to provide the figures needed for a balance sheet. The accountant's experience is financial. He or she cannot give you legal advice or advice on marketing or running your business, but you can expect assistance in preparing your business plan.

Profit-and-loss projections based on estimates of future revenues can be prepared by your computer using accounting software programs or can be prepared manually by an accountant for an hourly fee of $75 to $100. The accountant can set up your payroll, prepare your tax returns, and provide financial advice, but you have the option of purchasing software programs that also do payroll and prepare tax returns.

Software can't certify your statements were prepared by an accountant or give you financial advice regarding hiring salaried employees or independent contractors. Accountants can advise you on the best use of your money. Tax-preparation software or an accountant is also tax deductible, but you'll have a hard time deducting a $500 computer tax program this year if last year you spent $40 to have a tax-preparer do your tax return. You can ask the society in your state that certifies accountants to recommend one if you choose not to do your own accounting.

You will also need to know how to plan a budget. Your computer is capable of creating spread sheets--the process of organizing figures in columns so calculations can be made logically. Spread-sheeting on computers is useful for budgeting, but it can handle more tasks.

You may use electronic spread-sheet programs to determine the return on investments, including stocks, bonds, and real estate, or to monitor power consumption on home energy-management devices. A change in one area on a spread-sheet automatically triggers a recalculation of every related value. You can work up sales forecasts, long-range product plans, income tax, and home budgeting on spread sheets.

Other accounting functions may be performed on your computer. You can generate ledger reports, pay employees, and keep track of accounts receivable and payable as well as inventory. Data-base management is defined as keeping track of information; data-base management software can handle any task from the location of coins in a coin collection to the tracking of information in the personnel files of a corporation. A data-base program can act as your "accountant," track articles published in magazines, or chart inventories in warehouses.

Your banker can help you to increase your credibility as a borrower of money. A banker provides advice about obtaining loans and capitalization, establishing credit, starting checking accounts, preparing tax and financial reports if you don't have an accountant, and finding computerized banking services, automatic payroll services, and corporate cash management.

Insurance agents can sell you theft insurance for your computer and peripheral equipment and insure your software programs against damage or loss. Your insurance agent can counsel you about workman's compensation, social security, and state disability. He or she can help you prepare for your changing insurance needs in health insurance, employee benefits, and casualty insurance. Personal referrals are the best way to select an insurance agent.

Where to Get Free Business Advice and Low-Interest Loans

The Small Business Administration may be able to assist you in setting up your business. This organization offers management assistance, checklists, and free booklets. Management-assistance conferences are run frequently, and individual counseling programs are offered. The SCORE organization, made up of retired executives, can help with individual business advice and counseling sessions. You can find a local office by checking your telephone book under "United States Government: Small Business Administration." The headquarters is located at 1441 L Street NW, Washington, DC 20416.

In addition to offering advice, the Small Business Administration grants loans to retail businesses and service companies. SBA offers different loan programs with varying interest rates. Types of loans offered include direct loans, guaranty loans, and economic opportunity loans. Direct loans are based on a company's track record, a good business plan, rejection notices from two banks or finance firms, and the fact that your own money is invested in your business. The SBA usually loans up to four times what you already have invested in your business.

A guaranty loan comes from a commercial bank, but 90 percent of it is insured by the SBA Economic Opportunity Loans are loans to disadvantaged persons, who can borrow a maximum of $50,000 to be repaid within fifteen years with interest below what is charged by most banks. Due to a shortage of funds, there is great competition for these loans and may take several months to process.

The Office of Minority Business Enterprise of the U. S. Commerce Department assists small minority-owned businesses. This organization offers workshops on how to prepare a business package and other management or technical issues. Its headquarters is located at the U. S. Department of Commerce, Main Commerce Building, 14th and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20230.

The Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Commerce Department maintains a dozen EDA research centers to provide management and technical assistance to small businesses. You can obtain free help there in putting together loan packages or finding capital.

To find the center nearest you, contact the EDA regional offices in your state. You should also check with your state commerce departments and city chambers of commerce, which conduct free business seminars.

Publications

Publications are a good source of information. The “Standard Rate and Data Service” publishes the title, Business Publication Rates and Data. This monthly publication lists all industry periodicals by type of business.

Dun and Bradstreet issues business-credit publications; key business ratios; analyses of the cost of doing business for corporations, partnerships, or proprietorships; failure records; and accounts of the pitfalls in small-business administration. Write to Dun and Bradstreet, Department of Public Relations and Advertising, 99 Church Street, New York, NY 10007.

Also check out SAIC codes on the Internet. These codes are a guide to other businesses that may be hiring. Check their hiring processes and their expansion data to find out which direction they are growing. Expansion of similar businesses and the demography of their customers may help you focus your business plan on a target market or niche customer base/audience.

In the private sector venture-capital groups invest equity and become part owners in your business. Small Business Investment Companies are licensed by the Small Business Administration to invest money and provide management services.

Some of these venture-capital groups can be found through banks. The Small Business Investment Companies grant long-term loans, purchase debt securities, or combine equity and loan financing. One of these companies may purchase equity in your firm, but it will own part of your business. 

 

 

Sell Solutions to Problems

Steps to Marketing Your Business to the Digital Media as You Sell Reports Offering Solutions to Problems

1. In order to find out which trade journals are being published so you can sell your new business information to them, go to your Alta Vista search engine and type in "Standard Industrial Codes."

You'll find a list of Web sites full of databases of Standard Industrial Codes for industries of varying dates and locations. You want to begin searching your local area for Standard Industrial Codes (SICs) for the current year. Many of the codes on the Web are not yet current because they come from the databases of a variety of sources from different universities' databases to private research firms.

Use your Internet search engines. At the Lycos search engine, you'll come up with the Standard Industrial Classification Search where you can search the 1987 version SIC manual by keyword, to access descriptive key words. However, what happened in 1987 won't be relevant to the new media today.

For more current data, click onto the Standard Industrial Classifications at the U.S. Small Business Administration approved SIC codes put online by the Wilkins Group, Inc. Unfortunately, many of the SIC Codes on the Web received its 8(a) Certification from the Small Business Administration (SBA) in 1993. Look for databases online that have many years of the SBA's participation.

Still, online Web sites for SIC codes may not be in the location you want, or the company you're seeking may have less than 50 employees and will not be listed in the SIC Codes. You might want to try CSGSD SIC Codes. The CSGSD SIC Codes Standard Industrial Classification Codes (SIC Codes) is a small, online woman-owned corporation as classified by the Small Business Administration. It's on the Web and can be found by a Lycos or Yahoo research engine search. Rather than give you the Web site here, because it may change, it's more current to find its location by doing a Yahoo search.

I recommend using the Standard Industrial Classification Code Finder on the Web. I found it through a Yahoo search. You also can reach it at the University of Virginia gopher in their social science department. If you'd prefer a timely SIC update, try the private company databases such as Vivamus Concepts Inc. for SIC Index Standard Industrial Codes. Vivamus offers a "Numerical Order" for its SIC codes which is a common method of classifying businesses or industries by type.

You even can see the old 1987 Standard Industrial Classification Codes there. What's nice about Vivamus Concepts Inc. is their Alphabetical SIC Index, the Vivamus Concepts Inc. Alphabetical SIC Index Standard Industrial Codes in Alphabetical Order. I like looking up codes alphabetically as compared to other databases that list by numerical codes. Alphabetical codes are a common method of classifying businesses or industries by type. The alphabetical format follows the 1987 Standard.

Checkout the Major Divisions and Groups within the SIC Codes. Not only businesses of 50 or more employees are listed by their standard industrial classification codes on the Web. You can find the same information the old fashioned way at your public library. Librarians can be of tremendous help.

What if you don't want business classification codes for selling your writing to the new media because you write sports articles or books? If you write about athletes or sports, you might try the Athlete Agent; Codes and Standards, Division of; Commercial Coach Plan Approval (Dept. Housing & Com. Dev.); Exemption Permits (Industrial Relations); Factory Built Housing Plan Approval.

When you do a Yahoo search under "Standard Industrial Codes," what also comes up on the menu is the "Athlete Agent, Codes and Standards". So on the Web, you can find under the SIC menu, codes and standards for commercial coach plan approvals from the Department of Housing and Commercial Development. If you're writing for the athletic trade journals, it's a good source to search out on the Web to find publications for your writing.

In beginning a search to market writing for the new media, the first step is to find the Standard Industrial Code (Sic). For every industry there's a standard industrial code. You look up the SIC code number in the library. The code numbers tell you what companies have 50 or more employees.

You find the companies in your city or any other city that way. From then, you find out whether any of the companies in your specialty or niche writing focus has a publication or subscribes to a trade journal. If there is no trade journal and there's a business with more than 50 employees in it listed, here's your chance to start a digital trade journal or work with another person who might start one, with you doing the writing either at home or elsewhere.

Your first step would be to find all the new trade publications for the digital media and companies in the online media. Some have "house organs" which are employee newsletters. Many employee newsletter publications hire freelance or staff writers, whereas other house organs publish magazines for the digital media equipment and software user.

Library-located industrial publications and related volumes have always been in databases on disks since libraries became computerized. Look up the Standard Industrial Codes for each type of business in the new media. From the Standard Industrial Codes, you can find out whether each type of business listed has its own trade journal yet.

If the industry, occupation, or niche does not have its own trade journal, you can either create your own new media or print trade newsletter or journal, or find out which trade journals accept freelance articles by querying the editor. There are thousands of industrial codes for each business type listed, and within each type of business are the lists of trade journals.

Most of those trade journals and newsletters or other periodicals representing doing business will buy timely, up front material with sales and how-to tips and strategies. That's the first way most businesses learn about what the competition is doing in real time.

Job coaches are writers and also ghostwriters. Let your reader choose which solution they want to use as a marketing tool for their own new media business or interest. Write about the benefits and advantages of value to the readers. The editors of any new media publication have similar goals. They want articles or books that show the writer can define the problem. Then you solve the problem. Define the problem for which you'll solve the problem. Research all your niches. If you're a generalist who can't solve any type of problem in the new media, then find experts to interview who have solved current problems or who can offer quotes that solve problems for readers.

Stick with the niches. Every writer needs a tag name. It's like a tag line in a romance novel. "She said, with a sneer of disdain," (how she said it--the body language--is your tag line). In a nonfiction article or book chapter, your tag line identifies how you manage risk within your paragraph. You define the arrangements rather than the body language. The arrangements include equipment, supplies, and customized services that your expert discusses and solves problems within your article.

To market  media writing, position yourself as a job coach and writer specializing in a niche within a niche. For example, suppose you used to be a nurse, medical records clerk, physician, lawyer, or teacher who now wants to write full time for the new media. You position yourself as a writer of books and e-zines, or interactive media specializing in writing about computer problems that law offices, medical offices, or schools have. You interview consultants with expertise. What you're marketing about your niche is that you have a name and a tag that always will work for you as you gain experience writing about a very narrow niche--at least at first.

Your goal is to get finely honed experience marketing new media pieces about a small specialty i.e., how medical offices can use specialty software. The former medical records clerk or technician now can write for two dozen hospital and medical trade journals from emergency medical care to running the medical office in terms of economics, solely by specializing in interviewing computer consultants who focus on telling doctors how to solve their computer software and hardware problems in running their office or department.

Read magazines such as Home Office Computing. These specialty niche magazines and trade publications help you build your reputation, if you can write for them. To find people to interview, seek referrals from former clients of computer consultants. Market yourself as a speechwriter, and develop speeches for computer and new media consultants. Approach their colleagues and clients and offer to write their speeches too, for presentations or publication.

Query the new media publications of national associations and organizations where the clients of consultants join and attend trade shows and conferences. You attend also. Your market research as a writer would be to analyze press releases from companies about whom you want to write. When you interview people for the new media, it's a little different than when you interview for the print media.

Listen and question with the goal of turning opportunities into business. In the coaching media you compose your interview questions with the goal of:

1. Diagnosing problems--one question at a time.

2. Ask your interviewee how that person designed the solution. Most people who solve problems for a living focus on thinking rather than feeling and they use the logic to design the solution. Most people who solve relationship problems use feeling, but they don't design the solution, they solve it through placing a quality of worth on the solution, as in "Is it worth it?" Degrees or values of how much it's worth in terms of well being or feelings solve problems.

Ask the person you're interviewing how the work was delivered. In the new media, anyone you interview will try to debrief you after you finish the interview. Be aware of this. What helps most is to keep a profile of people you interview. They are your clients.

Return to your interviewee profile now and then to ask the people who talked to you and saw your article in print to tell you who else they know who might be interested in having their problems solved by a new interview with the same person or other colleagues that person recommend you interview.

To market your new media writing, ask questions. Don't talk. Ask the person you interview if the individual is aware of the many magazines (name them) who might be interested in articles about their business with new angles.

If you don't like your editor's contract, use your own contract documents. It may work with a few, new media publications that are beginning to startup. Keep a journal about the new media.

Use buzzwords.  Forget the early 1990s overuse of words such as ‘rocket-pack’ and ‘cyberspace.’ Editors are so tired of buzz words such as cyberspace, e-scribes, hypertext, hyperspace, new media, listen-up, and rocket scientists. How about using easily understood, solid, and standard buzz words such as "help desk?" Define your buzzwords in the first paragraph of your article, script, interactive introduction, or book chapter. Buzz words, like tag lines, define your writing and reveal the timeliness and freshness of your information.

If you’re trying to market your writing to a new media publication, it's better to show up in person at the editor's office, even if it's only to hand a query letter with a sample article to the receptionist. In the world of email where you must send your article across the globe, showing up in person at a publisher's business still works better than faxing, emailing, or snail mailing. If you're relatively nearby, show up in person dressed appropriately, and hand your material to a live person. Always hand in both a paper and a disk copy of what you write. Nobody likes to retype your material to disk.

 The job coach writer is hired for people skills and technical knowledge. You're paid for what problem you can solve, for how you can think. A problem to be solved for the writer is how to market information about the new media when you have a non-technical education, such as a broad liberal arts education with a degree in creative writing or fiction writing. To solve this problem, get the name of the editor who has the power to buy your writing or assign you something to write. Call the receptionist and ask for the mailing address. The (role not the person) or job of a receptionist is "sensing-judging" (SJ)--to get the right messages to the right people at the right time. The secretary's job (the role, not the person) is to screen you out from reaching the editor and bothering the person. It's a protective, guardian role.

The job of the editorial assistant is also to screen out the slush pile and protect the editor-in-chief from having to wade through the masses coming over the transom. Therefore, after you have the mailing address and have asked the receptionist for the correct spelling of the editor's name, ask to leave a message in the editor's voice mail. "When may I come in person to interview you for my feature on the new media?"

It's important to note that the term "secretary" or "receptionist" as a sensing judging type refers to the ROLE in the job, not to the personality of the person in the role or on the job. Any personality type can work as a secretary or receptionist. What is meant is that the role of receptionist is a sensing/judging role whose goal is to get the right message to the right party at the right time, and the role of the secretary is as guardian and protector of the boss and conservator of the employer's time. The screening out role played by the secretary is to allow his or her boss to make the most efficient use of time during the workday and to prioritize the boss's time and her/his own.

The best way to meet an editor in person is to interview that person for another publication or for a chapter in a book or pamphlet you're writing--even if you're self-publishing the pamphlet on the Internet on your own Web page. Every new media writer needs a personal Web page to feature articles and showcase editors of publications you want to write for as your goal. Interview new media book publishers for magazine articles online or in print.

Interview magazine publishers and editors-in-chief for books and pamphlets or trade newsletters. Interview a general magazine editor for an article you write for a niche specialty trade journal. Interview a trade journal editor for a chapter in a book or in a general readership magazine unrelated to the editor's publication. For example, the editor of a new media magazine on fixing widgets is 80 years old and working 60 hours a week. Interview that person for a magazine such as Modern Maturity on the joy of being in the new media at 80, "Life Begins Online at 80" for this editor who loves her work.

If you write about career or executive coaching, life coaching or spiritual coaching, your bread and butter is studying how human resources use technology. Write about turnover in the Internet Industry, or the problems ad agencies have of copywriters and Web designers working together and how they solved them.

You need insight, support, and specifics wrapped up by showing how a problem was solved. Your solution needs to show results along with insight, foresight, and hindsight—revealing the pitfalls to avoid.

 Most new media problems are universal, even when unique, individual, and practical. Get to the concrete through the universal and show the details. Read between the lines and give the big picture in the first paragraph and the trees rather than the forest in each descending paragraphs. Then sum up with applications to the digital, interactive, or new media fields with showing how the Internet, DVD camcorders, telephony, or other industrial applications fitted in to solve the problem.

***

Chapter 2

How to Pre-sell Your Resume-Writing or Information Repackaging Service

Check out the Web site called ResumeWriters.com at: http://www.resumewriters.com/. It’s the largest network of certified professional resume writers on the Internet, according to the company’s Web site. Combine being a job coach with writing resumes and business letters for your clients. There are thousands of business letters that clients are eager to see samples and templates showing them how to write these types of letters. Compile such letters you create and market them to your clients who need specific types of business writing. Again, writing letters and resumes can be combined with consulting—being a job coach online. The coaching part emphasizes analyzing skills and preferences with a goal of fitting the right person to the job that is the best fit for both your clients.

 Employers as well as job applicants are equally your clients. If you had to choose between employer and job applicant as your bread and butter, your most important client would be the job applicant. That’s the individual paying you for writing and coaching. You’re like a book doctor working on one person’s resume at a time.

When you first open an online home-based business of any type, it's important to get orders for your product before you open your business. This will help you get credit, a loan, or equipment. Graphics-design, resume-writing, and word-processing firms often can take some job orders before buying equipment and opening for business. It's important for publishers, writers, and coaches, to get clients in advance so that advertising contracts can be signed.

You pre-sell your service by doing thorough marketing research to find out how much of a need exists for your business in any given community. First, telephone a representative sample of potential customers and ask whether they would buy your product.

Calling about one hundred people for a small home-based business would give you a clear idea of the attitude toward your business. A mailing list of persons who might be interested in your product can be purchased or rented from a mailing list broker.

Mailing lists in specified categories such as senior citizens, teenagers, persons of a certain religion or ethnic origin, persons with incomes over $100,000 annually, and many other categories are for sale from list brokers. Know your prospective customer base and their buying preferences before you outline a business plan.

Next, a mailing-list survey of five thousand letters announcing your service could bring anywhere from a 5-percent to 15percent response in certain communities and as little as 1 percent in others. The rate of response depends upon your target audience and how deep the need is for your product.

If your business will be generating individualized diets by computer using the tremendous variety of software available for nutritionists, a good target audience would be the mailing list of support groups for persons with ailments such as diabetes, allergies, or hypertension, that demand special diets. You could pre-sell your service to physicians, clinics, diet centers, social clubs, hospitals, and health-food chains. The point is, before you open any type of business, the audience must first be gauged.

Other means of pre-selling your service are free classified ads in newsletters of business associations, religious organizations, and social clubs. Some community newspapers offer free personal classified ads. Use shopping newsletters, daily papers, and radio announcements.

Visibility

To gain visibility, send out a press release, a statement of your goals and objectives, to all the media announcing your forthcoming business. Along with visibility, you will have to earn credibility. To prove yourself, offer benefits and advantages.
Personalize your proving ground. How will you incorporate infomercials into your business plan, if you choose to use them in varying formats? Will you use the new media, print, or a combination of the World Wide Web, print, voice, and visuals?

Have a grand-opening party or raffle off a small prize, such as theater tickets, and print your message on entry ballots. Have people return coupons by mail, so you can obtain a head count of how many people might buy your product. Before you open your doors or invest deeply, recognize that the most important part of your business is your customer. Without market research, you'll have no way of knowing if you are filling a real need.

The Small Business Administration, the Better Business Bureau, chambers of commerce, convention and visitors’ bureau, and business associations for people in similar trades have directories and other business aids to help you pre-sell your service before you invest in applications software to run your business.

Magazines such as Entrepreneur and organizations like the American Entrepreneurs Association, 2311 Pontius Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90064, publish business manuals that can teach you to run a tremendous number of businesses, many of them home-based and utilizing your personal computer. Their very affordable manuals can save you a great deal of money because the AEA has already gathered information about running a particular business.

For example, computer their manual in print way back in 1983-84 on how to run a software search business predicted that your average net profit before taxes would have been back then $47,000 with a minimum cash investment of $12,000 with publications today predicting profit. Today, find out whether profit is growing or shrinking. That’s one way to practice helping clients solve problems when writing resumes or repackaging their work-style information. Back in the eighties, the manual also noted that the average cash investment would be $25,000 and the high net profit before taxes would be over $85,000. Their profit-potential analysis then also gave an above-average risk factor to opening a software search business.

What would the figures today be like on a similar software search business? Compare average of profit before taxes with your interest area of business with what figures were like ten to fifteen years ago. Will your business plan be for a low-tech or tech-oriented business, or low-tech using software to keep records? Or do you plan a business with use of very little technology? How will you keep your records and do cross-references? What risk factors will influence the writing of your business plan? Despite risk factors, however, your biggest concern initially will be where the money will come from and how it will flow into your business.

How Will Cash Flow Into Your Business?

One of the inevitable dilemmas of running a business is that your suppliers will ask you to pay your bills right away, but your customers usually take months to pay. Some won't pay at all. Checks may bounce. When they do, you should call the customer immediately. If nothing happens, turn the bad check over to a collection agency that specializes in collecting unpaid bills.

The correct cash-flow balance in a business requires that you have the money to pay your bills. You must be able to pay your bills before your customers pay you for your services to them. By doing a cash-flow analysis on your computer, you may be able to tell how much cash you will have on hand. Clients frequently may not pay you on time.

You may prepare a cash-flow sheet for the first three months of your business or do a month-by-month projection for the first year using a cash-flow software program on your computer. Your goal is to determine an actual cash balance. In this way you can see whether you have enough cash to pay off your bills and buy inventory for your business.

You'll need to have cash on hand to buy equipment and supplies and to pay utility bills. A cash-flow statement allows you to see whether you'll need a loan to cover expenses if months pass between the time you must pay for equipment purchased and the date money is due from the charge customers. This is called collections on receivables. The only way you will observe when and where to cut back on expenses is to look at your cash-flow sheet for any particular date. Your computer can generate these reports for any month.

The cash-flow statement is divided into sections that give the source, we, and schedule of cash. Label the first section "Cash Sources." Include here money brought into the business by sales, payments by charge customers, money earned on interest, and money derived from loans. The second section should be called "Cash Utilization." In this category list any inventory, equipment, or supplies you bought for the business. Include any loan payments and loan interest, salaries, and other payments that come out of your cash resources.

The third section can be called "Cash Barometer." List whether your business has been bringing in more or less money on certain days of the month. If the cash coming in is growing less, your computer calendar program should remind you that it's time to take drastic action to see whether you're mismanaging the business or are undercapitalized--the two greatest causes of business failure.

The Internet and your personal computer can help you to manage your time efficiently by the use of a good calendar program. Time management is the most important part of a good business plan because the market is always shifting

We live in a visually oriented society where initial judgments are made on the basis of how the written word appears in print, on the World Wide Web of the Internet, through extranets that reach out to consumers and other businesses, through intranets that reach employees within a single business, and through advertising on television and all the other visual or sound communication formats. That makes your person-to-person direct sales letter keyboarded from a word-processing software program the foremost instrument for selling yourself.

A business plan also tells the world that there's a gold mine in your personal computer's applications software that you can use to operate, measure, and market your business long before you open your doors. Before you write your business plan, track your potential customers' suggestions, needs, and requests. Use feedback.

A business plan also develops, manipulates, combines, or acts on any one or more businesses that most closely match your preferences and work styles to the needs of your audience. All businesses are in a way, show business. The right business plan won't lead you into danger. It works for you.

                                                                        ***

Market Research on the Internet 

So important is doing market research on the Internet, that financier George Soros more than a decade ago, announced plans to fund a new project for developing the Internet in Russia. The $1.5 million Internet plan at that time would link hospitals, museums, schools, and scientific institutes across Russia to the global computer network.

Elsewhere, market research on the Internet has become the ax that breaks ice on a frozen sea of commerce. Before you conduct business or start a company, you do market research. Eight of the nation's largest newspaper companies in the United States soon after the Internet became widely available to the public, began a venture, New Century Network to help newspapers get on the Internet. Goals focused on doing more marketing research, selling more advertising, and reaching more customers. The venture provided consulting assistance and software to newspapers that wished to start electronic services.

The Internet is now an extension of your newspaper and uploads ad rates, deadline schedules, advertising information, along with high-profile news and features. In the marketing research world, New Century Network aimed to help newspapers get advertising, track usage, and bill customers--the key economic incentives for distributing information electronically in the name of market research. The marketing research help is open to all newspapers.

The venture filled a leadership void in the industry, and that's the purpose of doing market research on the Internet-to fill leadership voids, whether by people, products, or services. For more information on New Century Network, research market research history at Cox Newspapers, Inc., or at Advance Publications, Inc., Gannett Co. Inc., Hearst Corp., Knight-Ridder Inc., Times Mirror Co., and the Washington Post Co.

Fax and audio services complement Internet access, but anyone doing market research wants reports fast by E-mail. The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has led to new thinking about how information providers can repackage and sell timely market research on the Internet in the form of made-to-order market reports, trade publications, international business newsletters and other publications, abstracts, articles, and numerical tables.

Phone books formerly put on CD have now expanded to the world-wide Web (WWW). On the Internet, there are only virtual storage space problems that formerly surrounded thick phone books and CD holders. NYNEX expanded its online Yellow Pages service to include any business in the United States with a listed phone number. At “The New Interactive Yellow Pages” at:  http://www.niyp.com , anyone can access its directory of 16.5+ million businesses that include description about the type of company, name, address, and telephone numbers. Advertising from businesses pays for the Internet-accessible directory. Weblinks to sites of listed companies also are offered.

Use Internet-based research to create market opportunities. At http:www.thenet.com/~CEMA/, you can find out how to identify customers or rank sales opportunities. Learn how to track marketing trends and forecast future trends. Find out how to use and trace distribution channels, or access CEMA's job hotline.

Market research on the Internet refers to a process rather than a product. The transformation of desktop publishing into multimedia centers on the information highway is another growing trend. In 1994, the government didn't even track multimedia as a job category. Today, venture capital funding is being directed to fledgling new media developers. More than a decade ago, a survey in the San Jose Mercury News reported millions of dollars of VC funding going to titles publishers such as Crystal Dynamics, Rocket Science Games, and Starpress Multimedia.

Marketing money is funneling into content companies. Publications such as The Red Herring, a Woodside, California-based financial magazine, are focusing on emerging technologies. More than a decade ago, Paul Dali, of Menlo Park's Nazem & Co. had been called the "godfather of the multimedia venture capital industry." Small developers pay contract workers for contributions to projects, but staff employees are few. In a typical Internet-based multimedia marketing company there's a writer and producer, a graphic designer, a programmer, and a production assistant to scan and process images that eventually go up on the Web or onto a CD or DVD.

 Look at market research from a decade in the past. Market research is used a lot by inventors. Visualize an inventor's dream come true. Research the marketing history of these types of inventions. They will help you to understand how marketing works and how marketing changes over the decades.

What if you, as an inventor or a sales representative in search of a product to market, or as a market researcher want made-to-order market reports? Look at the excellent Web site titled Thomson Business Intelligence at: http://www.profound.com. There's a business solutions market trends site directly on the Internet. Read the excellent, timely market research reports, news, business, and financially information by subscription to those with Web browsers.

If you're selling timeliness to competing companies, you can cash in on various newswire stories or start a marketing business of your own selling newswire stories or summarizing and abstracting breaking news stories on the timeliest wire services. I also recommend to journalists, News Release Wire, Broadcast Interview Source, Inc. 2233 Wisconsin Ave. N.W. Washington, DC 20007. The company’s Web site is at: newsreleasewire@yearbook.com.

Doing market research on the Internet becomes a viable home based business, should you care to open one, where you could offer market research reports, company profiles and articles, briefings of corporations or industries, nation's briefings. A small marketing business might offer only quotes electronically, not quotes for stocks, but historic quotes, or quotes of the leaders of business, or commercial quotes in general to executives who give many speeches and writers.

There's always a marketing angle if you look deep enough. You can open at home online an electronic clipping service that market researchers need to track for clients. Sell marketing reports online. Marketing reports are pricey because without the Internet, finding the most current marketing report on a hard-to-find company--when you want it--becomes complex. Until recently, consulting reports weren't online with the major database services such as DIALOG at http://www.dialog.com/. Trademark and patent searches had been on the database services for years. Your business can specialize in searching Thomson & Thomson files and Dun&Bradstreet's. You can search the same files with DIALOG.

You also can open an online home-based public relations service. Your enterprise can thrive on collecting news clippings because customer's frequently don't pay unless they see something in print about their business in the media. The AutoSearch and WorldSearch offers marketing researchers "a power search." Market research reports are on Researchline. Consulting reports at Companyline has corporate profiles. Digging deeper, you can access Disclosure and financial information. There are also Companyline, Brokerline, Newsline, Countryline, and Briefings, for market researchers who need a brief overview of a particular industry such as paper or convenience stores.

Off clients newswire stories in tabloid format as an additional service besides writing resumes and business letters or repackaging business information. Generate reports in PDF or other document format. It's interesting to note that if you choose to open your own business on the Internet specializing in providing articles to businesses, perhaps a collection of timely trade journal articles, the current rate for such articles from freelance businesses is around $20 to $40 per article and more than $4,000 for a full consulting report. You can specialize in providing medical or business reports for a variety of niche businesses or industrial specializations. Look at the array of trade and academic journals on every subject from DNA-driven genealogy to trade publications on digital imaging.

You can sell two pages of market intelligence as a freelancer on the Internet for $25 each. For example, you can buy two pages of market intelligence from Packaged Facts or Frost & Sullivan at a cost of under $50. So if you're searching the Internet for a business of your own, you might take inspiration from the marketing report and research firms online and startup your own pre-packaged marketing information businesses catering to trade journal readers or specific industries as your target audience. There's a lot of money to be made in writing and packaging consulting reports or articles related to marketing research for specific industries and companies.

Many marketing research firms are devoted to analyzing television shows for advertising agencies whose clients want feedback on their commercials between shows. A free shareware, movies-only version of TV Now's database at www.tvnet.com/TVNow/tvhow.html lets you select movies by director or actor in addition to the more usual "what's on" queries.

Market researchers are frequently involved in tracking what people watch, especially former customers of a business whose television watching preferences influence what they buy later. To start a marketing business that relates to this, try offering sneak previews of upcoming movie scripts by Gopher server. Use excerpts from scenes, like trailers do.

Marketing research and other shareware can be accessed at http://www.shareware.com/help-download.html or at http://www.shareware.com. Macintosh software can be downloaded at http://www.interlog.com/~qd/mac.html. IBM shareware software is at http://silver.ucs.indiana.edu/~nouyang/IBM.html, nicely organized into categories. You can post your own brochures in a Gopher server menu to build loyalty of customers. If your customers skate, maybe they also ski. So you can market all types of related gear.

Internet marketing is profitable when it comes to self-marketing or marketing one's visibility and credibility online. Market researchers whose clients sell or distribute household cleaning products will be pleased to know that home pages exist that share cleanup hints. Collected stain-removing tips useful to marketers are on the Internet at DuPont's home page, http://www.dupont.com/ including the mills that make the latest styles.

Shiadeh, at http://www.orientalrugs.com/, an oriental rug dealer in Ardmore, Pennsylvania offered a stain-removal table listing source and carpet fiber cleaning tips such as using mustard to clean acrylic fibers and beer to clean wool rugs. They also trained you to differentiate Mideast and Asian rugs. Crayola, Inc., at http://www.crayola.com/ marketed its products by showing you how to remove crayon scribbles from all types of surfaces by spraying with WD-40 lubricant followed by liquid detergent and using paper towels to pick up stains.

More cleanup hints for marketers trying to advertise their products and for anyone else are at http://www.ces.msstate.edu/pubs/is 1436.htm, the Mississippi State University Cooperative Extension, and at: <http://www.ag.uiuc.edu/~robsond/solutions/consumer/stain.html>, the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Services, and at the World Wide Quilting Page at http://www.ttsw.com/Quilt.html, with the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page containing stain removal information.

Marketing researchers often provide car rental information, supply banking information, answer fitness machine or bicycling questions, offer safety and security tips, or maintain Telnet sites for their representatives. They promote universities through home pages that feature pictures of campuses and tuition information, provide insurance information, and offer home-repair advice all in the name of obtaining consumer feedback.

Marketing information even extended to individuals protesting rate hikes. Another way market researchers can reach their audiences to track them and sell products could be through greeting cards on the Internet, particularly greeting cards that move other products or services. On-line cards for a variety of holidays, like online post cards, are excellent marketing tools as are corporate gift baskets.. 

Sell articles for a fee. Offer researchers advice or help business owners find answers to start-up questions. Let users search through ads for small businesses for sale across the United States with the weekly updates Help researchers identify businesses to do market research or purchase or investigate. For a fee, let users download the contact name and number that accompanies a listing. You can charge a dollar per search or whatever the market will bear favorably.

Look at publications such as American Demographics, Computerworld, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Small Business Management, Marketing News, Nation's Business, and Small Corporation Update. What other marketing publications will help you? Does your computer operating system have a search icon that lets you access every publication on DataTimes? Look at magazines such as Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune. You can access transcripts from ABC, NBC, and CBS broadcasts. Local newspapers are there and specific industry news sources such as Hazardous Waste News, and European Cosmetics Markets.

TRW Business Credit Reports are online there, and other financial information. Market researchers will like the Disclosure and Standard & Poor's profiles of corporations, investment house reports from the largest stockbrokerage firms, and investment strategies.

Today's RSS news feeds and MP3 audio file podcasts and icons monitor news wires and sources. Research information online such as that offered by DataTimes. Look for news media sources from Reuters or the Federal News Service. Offer market researcher's basic tools or industry profiles. Offer pre-packaged and executive reports in niche areas not covered by the larger market research services online. If someone already is doing stock searches, for example, find a niche where you can offer industry reports or business directories in another line not covered. What about niche groups surfing the Internet or people over age 70? Who reaches and researches children surfing the Internet?

Market researchers encourage parents to link the entire family to the Web in order to create a smart home within a smart community. Marketers who want to sell more tickets to live theater plays have Web pages. What about organizing groups of local artists online? Offer calendars, ticket information, membership services, press releases, education components, histories, behind-the scenes peeks, surveys, interviews, live chats with directors, crafts people, and cast are on the Internet, all designed to sell tickets to live actor theatrical plays. Theaters are putting costume design sketches, stage notes, and scripts online too, all to market their plays to more theater-goers. So find your niche.

Drama classes and patrons are tuning in to the home pages, and more ticket sales are the goal. Research online ethnic communities that want people outside it's neighborhoods to know about its ethnic food and music. It's a market researcher's dream to find all this unique feedback, customized and individualized on the Internet.

Super cyber cities that link to the future creating "the smart community" is the dream of market researchers. They'd like customers to be able to pay for tickets on the Internet, print out shopping lists at Internet-access consoles in supermarkets, or buy licenses at a convenience store that's linked to the Web. In a smart community, market researchers can obtain instant access to schools, government, medical facilities, consumers, and business all linked electronically to the Internet.

Market research on the Internet done from tele-centers and video-conferencing from desktop computers linked to the Internet make this possible now. National university in 1996 began using its video-conferencing facility for continuing education programs, so students a long drive or bus ride away wouldn't have to travel to class. It's up and running in Chula Vista, California, for now. The public schools in Chula Vista are wired for computers. Juarez-Lincoln Elementary School has its own home page on the Web, and soon all schools in the district will have their own home pages on the Web, too.

You can establish an Internet site connecting an area’s homes with schools for electronic mail, homework, and school news. Write to your city and ask the people with the authority to connect the entire community to find baby sitters or make reservations. All this "smart community" access makes marketing researcher easier for those in the profession of collecting information about marketing to "smart communities (well-connected electronically, marketers say)." Start a smart communities-type Web site in your local community.  To inspire ideas, look at the Web site of the World Foundation for Smart Communities at: http://www.smartcommunities.org/.

Contact your city’s local marketing association. The San Diego American Marketing Association is a local chapter of the American Marketing Association. See their Web site at: http://sandiego.marketingpower.com/. Is there an American Marketing Association Chapter in your city? Look at the job hotline. Network, and make contacts at meetings. The national association, American Marketing Association’s Web site is at http://www.ama.org/.

How many ways can marketing researchers create money-making opportunities from their Internet connections? Marketing researchers and communicators can make money on the Internet by sending updated price and product information to customers. Instead of creating a news group, create an income-generating feedback group where customers who use your product can exchange how-to tips and other useful information about the product.

Offer free technical support by E-mail. Provide tips by auto-response E-mail, including supplementary information such as timely articles and updates. Send reminders to regular customers. Gift marketers and florists could target birthdays and holidays. Dentists send post-cards when to come in for a checkup. Try E-mail, too. Track customized commercial activity on the Internet. Offer current reports and updates. Take online seminars in marketing.

Here's how to use market research on the Internet to increase profits for your business or to start a new business online, using everything the Internet offers. Create a different drummer newsletter. Share company stories with customers to strengthen relationships and include them in your company's family. Generate fan mail and testimonials by asking your customers what they like about your product or service. Use E-mail.

An electronic suggestion box can help you brainstorm new ideas for marketing or opening a business. Publish the E-mail addresses of executives so they can be reached for detailed feedback. Announce new products on the Internet and by individual E-mail. Publishers can reach readers with lists of new books. Offer technical information on the Internet by a series of auto-replay mailboxes. Use an E-mail address where people can write for more information about a product.

Market researchers like to do customer surveys by E-mail because it saves postage. Surveys are designed to get feedback for tracking customer responses to your product or service. It's a way of improving advertising at low cost.

If you offer direct service, it's cheaper. Too many lawyers try to market their business by spending days trying to figure out what potential clients need. Later, data is constantly re-entered. Save time by E-mailing your service directly. Distribute news releases. Anyone in the media loves the Internet.

Send electronic news releases to customers and the media. It's to the Internet what video news release was to television and radio in the eighties. Most journalists like to get news releases by E-mail to save storage space and paper recycling chores. E-mail targets your best prospects. Most high-level executives are hard to reach by phone or postal mail. Keep the queries brief.

If you're a financial marketer, send money-related information to lists of stockholders. They'd appreciated being updated about the company where their money is invested. You can offer a mailing list that automatically sends E-mail to stockholders with timely information. These are online home-based business suggestions if you want to expand your resume-writing business. Products need to be upgraded and recalled at various times. E-mail is the quickest way to reach a lot of customers at low cost. Mailing printed notices are expensive. The usual direct marketing mail is through news releases. An electronic mailing list of updated customer's addresses can be sold to manufacturers if you start this type of small marketing update business on the Internet.

For marketing promotion, an electronic fan club works well, but if you're marketing someone's book, subscribing to the author's mailing list works better. Ask universities whether the particular book would interest them. Provide subscribers to similar mailing lists, or your list site in case there's an interest in the author's (or your) books. Start a mailing list for readers of your own books. Ask subscribers to mailing lists related to authors and their works, whether they think the market in which you're interested--such as mystery novels-- is already saturated with that genre before you write or market a particular book.

Of the hundreds of ways to market a product or do market research on the Internet, the best way of marketing anything is to let customers share information using RSS content syndication or podcasting of MP3 audio files that any listener can download and save to play later.

 Marketers a decade ago sent annual reports by automail servers. In order to save money on an answering service, an automail server also was able to answer key questions about your fees and services. Today, a variety of servers are available to marketers, including the popular RSS news feeds at Web sites, syndication online, pod casts of MP3 audio files, streaming video, and various news feeds to which anyone online can subscribe. Stockholders shouldn't be the only ones interested in your annual report.

Journalists also use reports to create visibility in trade magazines and the daily news, for job applicants, and customers. Create a gopher server so users can download pictures of your product, resort, home, or business. Content also is syndicated by RSS feeds and in audio with MP3 audio files in podcasting from Web sites. You, too, can also stream video on the Internet or send it on a DVD or other disc format. It’s one more form of pushing the news at you and publicizing or promoting information to help people make choices—logical, visual, or emotional.

A decade ago, businesses on the Internet used to let users select groceries by Telnet. The groceries were selected and delivered. Other online businesses published pet care information, followed alumni for contributions, prepared tax returns, offered moving advice, provided antique information, recruited fitness club members, provided church information, critiqued resumes, posted restaurant menus, offered painting tips, provided home health care data, and offered a News Net of everything in trade journals all in the name of providing Web users with industry events.

Trade journals such as Modern Plastics, Commercial Mortgage Alert, and Medical devices Litigation Newsletter went online with NewsNet and its software, Baton. The online service monitored industry events by its NewsFlash feature for industrial and financial information. World-wide marketing research on patents is now at Questel Orbit Intellectual Property Group at: http://www.qpat.com/jsp/login.jsp.

MicroPatent is at http://www.micropat.com/, and Master-McNeil, Inc., product and naming service is at http://www.naming.com/naming.html. Many market researchers have opened a small home based business tracking scientific and technical or trade journals and delivering Internet information packages to consumers.

You get the information from journals, books, and proceedings or clinical trial publications and track the table of contents of many journals. One company, Research Direct Alert is online at http://www.isinet.com. Also checkout http://journals.at-home.com to find the tables of contents and abstracts of scientific and medical journals. These tracking businesses are useful tools for marketing researchers doing customized work for busy professionals and corporations.

Financial information for individual firms on the Internet is at http://www.tipnet.com. Federal news is at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/. Only by creating your own online group of marketing researchers and Internet searchers working together, can you establish a marketing research service that monitors and selects pertinent material from the news groups for your clients. Check your Internet server's own home page for marketing material.

The Burwell Directory of Information Brokers contains more than 1,500 names of marketing researchers and other information brokers. An information broker offers services of finding and packaging information for profit, often on the Internet or on other databases. A marketing researcher is concerned with consumer feedback and tracking sales online and by other means, such as telephone interviewing.

One of the first places market researchers hit online are the companies that offer online or CD-ROM databases of trademarks. If you need to search the trademarks to see if anyone else shares the same name of your product, a trademark search is required before you find you have infringed on someone else's trademark. Thomson & Thompson's home page at http://www.thomson.com/thomthom.html, lists regulations, groups, laws, government agencies, and any other pertinent information about trademarks.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is at http://www.uspto.gov. Learn from their pamphlets how the process works or find the libraries that have the trademark documents. At http://www.naming.com, find Master-McNeil, Berkeley, California, a creative and strategic naming services firm that offers on the Internet the complete international trademark class list.

Some marketing businesses on the Internet specialize in doing trademark searches. These service businesses make a living from searching files online. The Easy Online Trademark Research & Registration site is at http://law.net/sponsors/tm/.

DataStar is at http://www.rs.ch/www/rs/datastar.html. Also try ARIndustries at http://warrior.com/tmsearch. For Japanese trademark searches, try http://www.netaxs.com/~aengel/ista.html. ISTA's source is a Japanese CD-ROM.

For more trademark information, try http://www.uspto.gov/cgi-bin/goods-services.pl. It's an index of the Trademark acceptable Identification of Goods and Services Manual. Yahoo lists its own Guide to Trademark Information on the Internet at http://www.yahoo.com/Law/Intellectual_Property/Trademarks/.

If two products are similar and have similar names, there is more of a chance of trademark infringement than if two products are totally different, yet still have similar names. When doing market research on the Internet, success brings scrutiny.

If you know the business of the "intelligence broker" and the market researcher, you can combine the two skills profitably searching markets on the Internet for whatever niche you create and customize for your clients. Keeping track and studying queries that come into your E-mail also can be lucrative.

Marketing research directors could sample E-Mail queries. Feedback provided by tracking and answering E-mail inquiries informs you what voids need to be filled by your marketing research or your new business direction. Helping a potential customer online by answering E-mail inquiries encourages people to return later to buy. Valuing the individual's E-mail importance also lends credibility and visibility to your service.

If you receive an overwhelming number of E-mail queries, answer the most important ones first. When you can no longer answer individual inquires, put universal answers on a Web page like a "Dear Abby" column or a "How-To" tips page. Track responses. Start with RSS feeds and MP3 podcasting audio files on your Web site.

You may soon find yourself marketing a valuable news column and niche mailing list, or using E-mail to respond to someone else's direct marketing E-mail in your box. Internet users don't like uninvited direct response marketing mail, but they do want a Website to retrieve marketing information about the evaluation and prices of products and corporations. The most direct marketing research is desktop videoconferencing on the Internet combining desktop publishing with Web phones. Add to that multicasting through personal broadcasting networks on-line. When you start an online business at home, it can branch far beyond offering to write resumes and business letters for clients.

                                                                                    ***

Tracking Progress for a Living

If you want to sell information about your business or your business information, write in the publications that show other writers how to write as well as in the trade publications and books. Track progress in others and write about progress. Only don't sound like a publicity press release. Dig in deeper and ask why the good fortune happened. Track the steps the person took to reach a success story or other experience.

The new media wants writing that shows what programs exist, who participated and benefit by which aspect of it. Write about what people are doing in terms they can understand. Know your reader. Write for the professional in the trade journal and for the beginner in the general magazines and e-zines.

New media focuses on trade journals. In your query letter, give a bare bones solution to a problem the editor needs to have. Ask first to find out what problem has to be solved. Then find the expert to interview who solves the problem step by step. Write about that. Focus on what's most cost-efficient.

Let your reader choose which solution they want to use as a marketing tool for their own new media business or interest. Write about the benefits and advantages of value to the readers. The editors of any new media publication have similar goals. They want articles or books that show that the writer can define the problem and then solve the problem. Define the problem for which you'll solve the problem. Research all your niches. If you're a generalist who can't solve any type of problem in the new media, then find experts to interview who have solved current problems or who can offer quotes that solve problems for readers.

Stick with the niches. Every new media writer needs a tag name. It's like a tag line in a romance novel. "She said, with a sneer of disdain," (how she said it--the body language--is your tag line). In a nonfiction article or book chapter, your tag line identifies how you manage risk within your paragraph. You define the arrangements rather than the body language. The arrangements include equipment, supplies, and customized services that your expert discusses and solves problems within your article.

New media writing can be hypermedia or hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, game scripts, or drama, or nonfiction, trade journal, and training or general advice writing, as in investment newsletters online. The genres are unlimited. You can write about office systems and equipment or how people react behaviorally to computer information overload.

 To market new media writing, position yourself as a writer specializing in a niche within a niche. For example, suppose you used to be a nurse, medical records clerk, physician, lawyer, or teacher who now wants to write full time for the new media. You position yourself as a writer of books and e-zines, or interactive media specializing in writing about computer problems that law offices, medical offices, or schools have. You interview consultants with expertise. What you're marketing about your niche is that you have a name and a tag that always will work for you as you gain experience writing about a very narrow niche--at least at first.

Your goal is to get finely honed experience marketing new media pieces about a small specialty i.e., how medical offices can use specialty software. The former medical records clerk or technician now can write for two dozen hospital and medical trade journals from emergency medical care to running the medical office in terms of economics, solely by specializing in interviewing computer consultants who focus on telling doctors how to solve their computer software and hardware problems in running their office or department.

Read magazines such as Home Office Computing. These specialty niche magazines and trade publications help you build your reputation, if you can write for them. To find people to interview, seek referrals from former clients of computer consultants. Market yourself as a speechwriter, and develop speeches for computer and new media consultants. Approach their colleagues and clients and offer to write their speeches too, for presentations or publication.

Query the new media publications of national associations and organizations where the clients of consultants join and attend trade shows and conferences. You attend also. Your market research as a writer would be to analyze press releases from companies about whom you want to write. When you interview people for the new media, it's a little different than when you interview for the print media.

In the digital media, you listen and question with the goal of turning opportunities into business. In the new media you compose your interview questions with the goal of:

1. Diagnosing problems--one question at a time.

2. Ask your interviewee how that person designed the solution. Most people who solve problems for a living focus on thinking rather than feeling and they use the logic to design the solution. Most people who solve relationship problems use feeling, but they don't design the solution, they solve it through placing a quality of worth on the solution, as in "Is it worth it?" Degrees or values of how much it's worth in terms of well being or feelings solve problems.

Ask the person you're interviewing how the work was delivered. In the new media, anyone you interview will try to debrief you after you finish the interview. Be aware of this. What helps most is to keep a profile of people you interview. They are your clients.

Return to your interviewee profile now and then to ask the people who talked to you and saw your article in print to tell you who else they know who might be interested in having their problems solved by a new interview with the same person or other colleagues that person recommend you interview.

To market your new media writing, ask questions. Don't talk. Ask the person you interview if the individual is aware of the many magazines (name them) who might be interested in articles about their business with new angles.

If you don't like your editor's contract, use your own contract documents. It may work with a few, new media publications that are beginning to startup. Keep a journal about the new media.

Use buzzwords when writing for the new media. Only use NEW BUZZWORDS. Use "rocketpack" more often than "cyberspace." Editors are so tired of cyberspace. How about words such as "help desk?" Have your buzzwords in the first paragraph of your article, script, interactive introduction, or book chapter. Buzz words, like tag lines, define your writing and reveal the timeliness and freshness of your information.

If you’re trying to market your writing to a new media publication, it's better to show up in person at the editor's office, even if it's only to hand a query letter with a sample article to the receptionist. In the world of email where you must send your article across the globe, showing up in person at a publisher's business still works better than faxing, emailing, or snail mailing. If you're relatively nearby, show up in person dressed appropriately, and hand your material to a live person. Always hand in both a paper and a disk copy of what you write. Nobody likes to retype your material to disk.

The new media writer is hired for his or her technical knowledge. You're paid for what problem you can solve, for how you can think. A problem to be solved for the writer is how to market information about the new media when you have a non-technical education, such as a broad liberal arts education with a degree in creative writing or fiction writing.

To solve this problem, get the name of the editor who has the power to buy your writing or assign you something to write. Call the receptionist and ask for the mailing address. The (role not the person) or job of a receptionist is "sensing-judging" (SJ)--to get the right messages to the right people at the right time. The secretary's job (the role, not the person) is to screen you out from reaching the editor and bothering the person. It's a protective, guardian role.

The job of the editorial assistant is also to screen out the slush pile and protect the editor-in-chief from having to wade through the masses coming over the transom. Therefore, after you have the mailing address and have asked the receptionist for the correct spelling of the editor's name, ask to leave a message in the editor's voice mail. "When may I come in person to interview you for my feature on the new media?"

It's important to note that the term "administrative assistant" or "receptionist" refers to the role in the job, not to the personality of the individual in the role or on the job. Any personality preference can work as an administrative assistant, general office clerk, or receptionist. What is meant is that the role of receptionist is to get the right message to the right party at the right time, and the role of the administrative assistant (what used to be called an executive secretary two decades ago) is as guardian and protector of the boss and conservator of the employer's time.

An administrative assistant today might also be an event planning assistant or a personal assistant in a corporate setting and sometimes perform public relations work with the media in addition to more traditional duties as letter writer, appointment setter, and records or case history manager. The screening out role played by the secretary of two decades ago is today still focused on how to allow his or her boss to make the most efficient use of time during the workday and to prioritize the boss's time and her/his own.

The best way to meet an editor in person is to interview that person for another publication or for a chapter in a book or pamphlet you're writing--even if you're self-publishing the pamphlet on the Internet on your own Web page. Every new media writer needs a personal Web page to feature articles and showcase editors of publications you want to write for as your goal. Interview new media book publishers for magazine articles online or in print.

Interview magazine publishers and editors-in-chief for books and pamphlets or trade newsletters. Interview a general magazine editor for an article you write for a niche specialty trade journal. Interview a trade journal editor for a chapter in a book or in a general readership magazine unrelated to the editor's publication.

 For example, the editor of a new media magazine on fixing widgets is 80 years old and working 60 hours a week. Interview that person for a magazine such targeting people over age 50 on the joy of being in the digital media at 80, "Life Begins Online at 80" for this editor who loves her work.

 If you write about digital media human resources instead of technology, write about turnover in the Internet Industry, or the problems ad agencies have of copywriters and Web designers working together and how they solved them.

Digital media writing markets well when you offer insight, support, and specifics wrapped up by showing how a problem was solved. Most new media problems are universal, even when unique, individual, and practical.

Get to the concrete through the universal and show the details. Read between the lines and give the big picture in the first paragraph and the trees rather than the forest in each descending paragraphs. Then sum up with applications to the digital, interactive, or new media and how the Internet, CD-ROM, telephony, or other industrial application fitted in to solve the problem.

***

 

                                                                      Chapter 3

 

Combining Being a Job Coach with Writing Several Types of Resumes for Clients

                                                                             

      According to the Wall Street Journal, "Career management coaches... can identify missing skills or style difficulties and offer pragmatic tips..." Learning how to present your client’s competencies can lead to further training to become a job coach.

      When you have learned to be a job coach, you can combine job coaching with writing resumes, business letters, and help your client find work rather than simply help your client get appointments for job interviews. Contact the Coach Training Alliance at: http://www.coachtrainingalliance.com/. You can combine resume-writing services with helping others succeed as a career coach.  The function of a job or career coach is to help people reach a specific goal related to career issues.

According to the Coach Training Alliance Web site (at the time this book goes to press) the site reports that, “Within six months, you will be a Certified Coach with paying clients in a growing practice.” The Coach Training Alliance (CTA) is located at: 885 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80302 USA. Courses in career and other types of coaching are offered, including downloadable courseware and tele-courses, as well as courses in executive and corporate coaching.

                                    What Other Services Can You Add to Career Coaching?

         If you want to be a job or career coach, you’ll have to put your skills in context and see what new skills you’ll need to enhance the life experience skills you already have. Be aware of the various niches or specialties in coaching. These niches include the following and have room to expand personal services such as writing resumes, business letters, news releases, promotional material on your clients, public relations services, career-related ghostwriting, editing, screening, executive relocation services for career transfers, including families moving to new locations, retirement coaching, extreme telecommuting, and helping people classify skills to find new careers:

• Life Coaching
• Career Coaching
• Executive Coaching
• Personal Coaching
• Leadership Coaching
• Spiritual Coaching
• Mentor Coaching
• Relationship Coaching
• Corporate Coaching
• Support Group Coaching
• Facilitating
• Resume & Business Letter Writing Personal Service Business
• Event Planner

 

           Whatever specialty you choose to combine if you want to be both a career coach and run a resume and business letter-writing service, understand what coaching is. It’s a professional service that provides clients with foresight, insight and hindsight. You give your clients feedback and show them what pitfalls to avoid. You offer guidance as an outsider. Your life and business experience are used all the time along with your people skills.

You can be a coach online or face-to-face. If you’re introverted and people drain you, yet you love to offer information to people, run your business entirely online or by correspondence. If you’re an extrovert energized by constant contact with people face-to- face, you can be a mobile coach or have people visit you or run your business on the telephone.

    Sometimes clients you meet when you open a job-coaching business online also can be beneficial for obtaining clients for your business letter writing and resume writing services. It’s easiest to combine corporate and executive coaching with business letter writing services. And job or career coaching is more easily combined with operating a resume-writing service.

 

I. Employers Hire Your Clients to Increase their Corporation’s Advantages and Benefits        

            Each year in the United States 10 million employees are terminated from their jobs. Another 10 million workers leave voluntarily. Every five years the entire work force turns over. Twenty million job seekers annually wonder how to repackage their competencies. Resumes are viewed as safety nets. Is your resume easy to understand?

            Only three questions clarify goals in a resume:

1) Where have you been?

2) How long have you been there?

3) Where are you going?

            These are the same three goal-clarifying questions asked of travelers by every border crossing guard in the world. Writing a resume is similar to crossing a boundary. Moving forward challenges you to seek a better future.

            Employers hire you for reasons of their own. Many are concerned with the clarity of your goals.

 

List Your Client’s Benefits

            An employer looks for benefits such as familiar patterns in any resume that you write for your client. Look for patterns that are found in the company. The corporation or educational institution sees your resume as a predictor of the company's future. You're hired for very concrete, common sense reasons.

            You're hired to solve problems. You're hired because you're the least possible risk to the company. An employer invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in your salary, insurance, on-the-job training, perks, and other benefits during the time you're working for the firm.

            You're hired to increase profit and production and create new markets. You're hired because you made it your business to learn all you can about the company. You adopted the company and showed your enthusiasm concerning the company's goals.

            Small business entrepreneurs see your resume as a future spin-off of their plans for expansion. In contrast, an employer might look at a carelessly written resume and see self-rejection. Or an employer might only observe whether your skills fit the exact needs of the company at a given time. You're hired for your excellence.

 

Emphasize Your Client’s Key Benefits

             Everyone in the computer industry is hired to organize. Yet the most common complaint of personnel departments is that the resumes coming in aren't organized to emphasize the applicant's most beneficial abilities. 

            A resume aimed at the sales department of a computer company should look very different from one targeting a job as a training manager. A resume for a job as a graphic artist or corporate animator will emphasize different benefits than one that is addressed to the director of research and development. Combine job/career coaching with resume design. Plan a resume.

 

What Are Your Client’s Natural Abilities?

            Designing a resume around your client’s life purpose means emphasizing what your client does well and does easily or naturally. Before you begin to plan a resume, ask yourself the following five questions:

            1. What kind of mental or physical work would you do as a labor of love without ever being paid?

            2. What job would you choose if you knew you could not get fired for doing your best?

            3. What work activities offer you enough mental and physical challenges for life long growth?    

            4. Does your resume show how you spend your time and money doing what you love to do?

            5. When listing your successes, ask yourself: what was there about the situation that makes you consider it a success? Then express that on your resume. An employer wants to know why you consider your work successful.

 

Recognize Opportunities for Success

            If the activities your clients enjoy most can't go on your resume because they aren't related to your career, it indicates an opportunity you have finally recognized. Change your career. If you don't want to change your career, then change the job description and duties within the same career.

            For example, if you are a medical transcriber doing word processing on a computer all day and don't enjoy it, perhaps you would enjoy being a manufacturer's representative selling medical records software to hospitals as you travel. You might enjoy meeting new people and talking about the efficiency and benefits of software, instead of keyboarding data.

            If you would rather have a more recreational career, you might enjoy working as a computer camp counselor or owner/manager of a computer camp. Computer camps allow children or adults to learn about computers while vacationing in a recreational camp environment.

            Another avenue is that of the computer playroom designer or play shop consultant. Learn the creation of joy by participation in use of all the senses. You can become a playographer, a person who studies play behavior around the globe, or a designer of playgrounds for older adults or children.

            If your business is writing resumes, you still need to understand how to express creativity in practical ways by putting into words how your client applies imagination. Change the way you play at your work because it's very profitable to enjoy what you're doing. What goes into a resume reflects what your client enjoys doing most.

 

II. Understanding an Organization's Character & Nature

Each Organization Has Its Own Character

            If you are going to be a job coach and a resume and business letter writer, you need to understand the characters of organizations. Are you familiar with the character of the organization for which your client wants to work? 

            A job coach and a resume writer need to understand the characters of corporations reflect the characters of their owners and sometimes of key employees. People have different personality styles. Companies are made up of people with often conflicting personality preferences. These personality differences approach solutions to problems in very different ways, but the outcome may be similar when results are studied. Differences lie in the step-by-step solutions that outsiders can follow. Different people may have used different steps or paths  to arrive at the same result.

            Like people, companies have different personalities that reflect the attitudes and preferences of whoever is in charge. Comparing your personality type to the character of an organization before you apply there is known as taking the personality-centered approach to job hunting.

            By matching your personality type with the character of an organization, you can create optimum productivity in any situation where you have to work with others. When the work is satisfying, you will do your best.

            When the people for whom you work cause too many conflicts, you'll be more interested in looking elsewhere for better opportunities. Employers want your personality type and preferences to fit the character of the organization. Each employer has developed patterns and habits, and may look for these same patterns in your resume.

 

Why Organizations Act As They Do

            How do you find out a company's character? Why are companies so hard to change? Refer to the company's attitudes not the personal views of one interviewer. Ask an employer these two questions before mailing in your resume:

1) Where is the company going?

2) What is its mission or philosophy? (You want to know what the company is all about).

            There are only two ways the company will answer. Either it will describe itself as a benchmarking or as a visioning organization. For information on benchmarking, visioning and the character of organizations, read The Character of Organizations, by William Bridges, Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA 1992.

            These terms are fully discussed in his excellent book.  Now, let's briefly take a look at other definitions of companies emphasizing tradition and what’s worked before compared to companies emphasizing change and looking for something different.

 

Tradition-Seeking Companies

            The corporate world often uses the word benchmarking. The term has appeared in several books on organizational behavior to describe companies emulating what’s worked well before. Tradition-seeking organizations model themselves after other companies that make something very successfully as a way to determine how things ought to be made. Benchmarkers, or to use more familiar words to those not in the business world yet, tradition-seeking companies, emulate the best and most popular. An example is the company that tries to model itself after Intel today or IBM (a decade before the compatibles competed). The tradition-seeking corporation simply wants to model itself after the most successful company where everything worked right.

 

Intuitive Corporations

            Change-seeking companies are idea-focused. These companies have often been described as ‘visioning’ or change-seeking. These future-oriented companies enjoy looking into the future for new possibilities and new ways of doing things. These new ways must satisfy a great need.

            Visioning or change-oriented companies seek out new ideas, new ways to think, however wild, imaginative, creative, and fantastic as long as they work. The word ‘visioning’ is often used in technology to describe a kind of forward-looking, user-oriented, intuitive boss who enjoys hiring smart people with new or better ideas that can be turned into new products.            

            San Francisco is the official headquarters for the interactive multimedia industry, the ultimate in visioning. For further information on interactive communications, write to this group: San Francisco Multimedia Development, 2601 Mariposa St., San Francisco, CA 94110.

 

     Examples of visioning-type of ideas a variety of industries are presently developing into actual projects and business ventures include the following: 

 

·        Virtual reality equipment or desktop animation software for public entertainment and training surgeons, pilots, architects, designers, and soldiers.

·        Hypermedia and new media publications.

·        Robots for education and military security.

·        Artificial intelligence for financial database management and predicting growth stocks.

·        Software for fashion designers.

·        Video tape and computers in desktop animation.

·        Satellite linked cable, computers, and wireless phones.

·        Interactive CD for distance learning or entertainment.

·        Fiber optics to link multimedia information highways and libraries.

·        Electronic tracking.

·        Media laboratories.

·        Branching pathway fiction with alternate adventures.

·        Computer game icon agents.

·        Telecommunications, conferencing, and phone line-computer-satellite links.

·        Electronic universal information libraries.

·        University courses by computer-to-home linkups.

·        Software for fashion designers.

·        Camera and camcorder cell phones

·        Satellite linked cable, computers, and wireless phones.

·        Interactive multimedia compact disks for distance teaching or entertainment.