To fully understand this trick you need to put yourself in the shoes of the guy who has the job of reading all the cvs that are sent to a company. Imagine for a moment the process he may go through: Cvs arrive, quick glance of the covering letter, quick skim of the first page, and maybe, just maybe, he will read a little further.

This is actually quite optimistic, in many cases your CV will not actually get opened, and if it does, at best you may get a quick skim of 5-10 seconds.

So there are clearly two factors at work that we need to be awesome at:

1) Ensure that our CV gets opened

2) Ensure that our CV gets read

How do we do this?

Simple, we make it unlike all the other CVs he has ever read.

I like to call this process “peacocking”, you see, when a Peacock is looking for a mate, it knows that it must stand out and get noticed above all the other Peacocks, so it spreads out it’s feathers and shows off amazing colours.

You will need to learn from nature, and use this same technique with your CV.

So how can you Peacock your CV?

The first thing you can do is use a coloured envelope, or even better, use a coloured, padded envelope. Anything that can make it stand out.

Another insider trick is to create what is known as chunky-mail, this means putting an object into the envelope, thus making the person want to open it.

For instance, you may include a dice that you have stuck to your covering letter.

You then need to use this object to link into your message, so you could start your covering letter with:

“Dear sir/madam,

I am aware that finding the right employee can be a gamble, and so I am writing to let you know that I have stacked the odds in your favour. I have studied hard and am well on the way to mastering xxxxxxxx and I posess the attitude to ensure success.

In fact, if you roll the dice that I attached, you will notice that it rolls a 6 every time, like I said, I like to stack the odds in my favour, and I feel you should do the same by considering me for the position of xxxxxxxxx”

How cool is that?

Do you not think that this would get you noticed above the others?

Of course it would, I bet they would even go around the office showing everyone your CV. You would be famous before they even met you.

Another tip is to ensure that your CV stands out from the crowd as well. Plain old CVs are so boring, so below are some example CV designs that can spice up your CV:

Peacock Your CV

When There’s Too Much Work

Delegate. A lower-level employee might be flattered that you trusted him or her enough to do some of your work.
Hire a virtual assistant. If your time is worth more than $10 an hour, then a VA is a viable option. They can do everything from answering emails, doing spreadhsheets and market research.You can get one for anything from $6 ph.

Avoid needless perfectionism. A good friend once told me that good enough is good enough. It is very true.

When the Work Is Too Hard

Ask. Nobody likes to ask for help… we are often too proud and too stubborn, but in reality, what is the worst that can happen?

Trade tasks with a coworker. We all have strengths and weaknesses, so get used to swapping tasks, it could transform your working life.

When There’s Too Much Stress

Be in the moment. If you think about all the work ahead of you, you may well start to panic. So stay in the moment and remember, the only way to eat an entire elephant is one small bite at a time.

Maintain perspective. In the larger scheme of things, how important is it really? Is the world going to end? Are people going to die? If not, you will be fine.

Take a walk. A three-minute stroll outside can revitalize you. So go for it!

There we go, your ultimate guide to coping with your job.

Now get back to work

Back To Basics Business Lesson – Biting Off More Than You Can Chew

Biting off more than you can chew is a rookie mistake, but today I saw one of the UK’s leading mobile phone retailers making this error.

Here is what happened…

I was walking through town to get my lunch, and I passed a phone retailer that had a big sign outside with a man stood next to it in a suit… the sign was offering mobile broadband, but what really caught my eye was the fact that it was a non-contract based mobile broadband deal.

So I went inside and there were two members of staff and two customers…

But here is where the trouble started… both staff were dealing with the same customer.

This in itself is a rookie mistake… and despite me waiting more than 5 minutes, nobody even acknowledged me (rookie mistake #3).

So I went for lunch and returned 30 mins later. Again, the guy was stood next to the sign outside the shop (this was a mistake, as the sign was self explanitory, and when I asked him about the deal he pointed me inside towards the staff.

So again, I went in, and again, both staff were dealing with just one of the handful of customers.

I cheekily asked one of the staff if they worked here… to which she replied “yes, I am just a bit busy at the moment with this customer”, to which I replied, “Is your collegue also busy with the same customer?”, she replied “yes”.

I moved the cheekometer up a level by proclaiming that “it must be a very serious issue to need two staff”.

I got nothing more than a blank stare… the sort of empty look that gave me a glimpse of just why it may require two people to do one person’s job.

Anyway, back to the business lesson…

Don’t bite off more than you can chew, and certainly don’t spread your resources too thinly.

This retailer got greedy, and whilst I respect their initiatives, they couldn’t back it up.

Afterall, why was some guy stood outside holding a sign, when they were understaffed inside?

Why were two members of staff dealing with every customer?

And why drive more traffic into the store if the staff are not able to cope with it?

This is like paying for $2,000 of traffic, only to find that your checkout system doesn’t work, so you can’t take any orders.

I am not going to name and shame the retailer, it would afterall be pointless, as no doubt it would require two members of their team to read this blog post

Today they lost a customer, and I could have been a very lucrative customer as well.

Remember, don’t take on more than you can cope with.

Dean

Look at any sports person, entrepreneur, athlete etc, and you will see that at some point, they had a situation or decision that was very scary, but they did it anyway. This is what makes them special, and this is the key to succeeding in life and business.

It is easier said than done, trust me, but next time you are in a situation that makes you fearful, just do it anyway.

* The 1 million friends are all at least partially relevant to your niche.

How To Make Your Elevator Speech Stand Out

Terri Sjodin, founder and principal of Sjodin Communications, a public speaking and sales training company, goes over the six components of a successful three-minute elevator speech.

1 – Worry About Failure

Even the best entrepreneurs experience failure. In fact, the best entrepreneurs see failure as a positive, something from which we can learn. However, if you want to get a crappy job, then simply let that first failure affect you. Give up when you experience failure, and under no circumstances adapt a never say die attitude.

Don’t give up, treat it as a long term project, and keep your chin up.

2 – Don’t Create a System

If you want to find a job, then you will need some form of system to manage yourself and your job hunting process properly. Perhaps aim to apply to one job per day, store all contact details in a seperate file, follow-up 72 hours after each interview request etc…

If you wander aimlessly from one opportunity to the next, you will soon get distracted and confused.

3 – Be Unrealistic About Your Value

If you are 18, I don’t care how good you think you are, there is a good chance that you still have a LOT to learn, and that learning process is going to be costly for your employer. So yes, by all means value yourself highly, but also be realistic, if you think you are a 7 figure earner by 18 or 19, then you are only going to cause delusions.

4 – Expect The Job Finding Process to be Quick and Easy

So many youngsters think that they will stroll into a good job in 24 hours. The truth of the matter is that it can take weeks, months and occasionally even years to find a job. So prepare a three month plan, execute it, and be patient.

5 – Underestimate Face-to-face Interviews

It doesn’t matter what it says on your CV, if the employer meets you and thinks you are a complete fool, you will not be hired. Anyone can lie on their CV, but a face-to-face meeting reveals the truth. Aim to secure actual interviews as often as possible, avoid phone interviews, and prepare yourself be answering test questions.

6 – Expect to Need Top Qualifications

There are certain jobs where certain qualifications are vital. But many employers now know that experience will almost always beat qualifications. Remember, you can read about driving a car for 10 years, but as soon as you get in the car, you will stall the engine the first time. So don’t go into the process with the attitude that only the most qualified candidates will get hired.

7 – Focus on yourself

Every good sales person and copywriter knows that the worst mistake you can make is to focus on yourself. If you go into an interview and only talk about yourself, you will not be fired. Focus on what you can do for the company, tell them how you can be of benefit, how you can improve sales, etc…

Ok, so now you have all the techniques to ensure you never get a job. But don’t worry, you are an entrepreneur, so hopefully you will never need a proper job anyway

Hi there. Do you fancy meeting for a chat and a beer with author of this blog (Dean Hunt) & my superstar, highly successful business partner Barry Dunlop? If so, SIGNUP HERE

“No?“

How rude!

Well what if I told you that world famous business superstar Eban Pagen would be there?

“Perhaps..”

Ok, well what if the biggest name in Marketing: Yanik Silver was going to be there?

“Yes, count me in!“

I thought so. But unfortunately, this fantasy scenario is not possible. I mean, how on earth am I expected to arrange that?

It is Impossible!!!

Well, to be honest, such events do happen, but they are always done behind closed doors, they are invite only for the elite entrepreneurs, hugely expensive, and closely guarded.

In fact, both myself and the superstar biz partner (Barry Dunlop) have been part of a group called ‘Yanik Silver’s Millionaire Mastermind Group’ for some time. But this is an elite group and it is done behind closed doors. No cameras, no video allowed, the waiting list is longer than the great wall of China, and all members have to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

This doesn’t seem fair does it?

In such an environment it only leads to one thing: The rich get richer, the successful get more successful, and the big names get even bigger.

It reminds me of Hollywood: Once an actor becomes rich and famous, people start giving them stuff for free. But when they are a struggling actor, they get treated like trash.

It is crazy! David Beckham gets given cars all the time, yet he earns over $1 million every single week, why on earth does he need to be given stuff for free?

Well the same thing happens in the world of business: the biggest names all connect with each other, and they share their best techniques ONLY with other big name gurus.

But what about the other 99.999999% of website and business owners?

Where does this leave the non-gurus?

They are left fending for the scraps of good information that are often hidden under the piles of utter crap that this industry can spew out on a regular basis.

No wonder such a high percentage of web business owners LOSE money on a monthly basis.

Yanik Silver spotted this problem a few years ago, and he created a public event called: ‘Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar’. It is essentially an event where the experts share their best secrets, and it is the only major event of its type that is not sealed off from the none-gurus.

• You don’t need to be making 7 or 8 figures per year for an invite,
• You don’t need to be an Internet celebrity,
• You don’t need to have written a New York best seller,
• And you don’t need to own a blog with 6 billion feed subscribers.

Yanik asked us earlier in the year to do a public event with him, we declined. But persistence has paid off, and for the first, and perhaps the last time ever, we have agreed to share the tips and secrets of how we have become the most successful buzz marketers on the planet, and how we get literally millions of unique visitors to our sites for FREE.

Here are the juicy details

:

We will be presenting our ‘From LAME to FAME in 11 Buzz-tastic Steps‘ presentation LIVE at the ‘Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar 4′ from March 28th to March 3oth.

This really is the ONLY opportunity where you can learn from myself, Barry, Yanik, Eban Pagen and more…

That’s right, the impossible fantasy scenario I discussed earlier, has just become a reality.

Check out a tiny sample of who will be there (please do not share this information):

Oh, and check out these two mystery expert speakers:

Mr X number 1 is clearly a young guy… I wonder who that could be?!?

Mr X number two is a little older… but let’s look at a further clue that is taken from the Underground Website:
Many of my Underground® events have featured a “Mr. X”… Someone SO Underground that they simply refuse to allow their identity to be made public. And the same thing is going to happen for Underground® 4.
But this time, there will be two major changes. First, instead of having only ONE Mr. X… there’ll be two. Actually, they’re business partners, which means: You’re gonna get double value for you money.

Here is the big news:

We can exclusively announce that Dean Hunt and Barry Dunlop are going to be speaking at this event. Are we Mr X 1 & 2? Well, we will be speaking at the event as guest-expert speakers, but to be honest, there may be more than two mystery speakers, we would be shot if we revealed the details.

So I will ask you the question one final time: Do you fancy meeting for a chat and a beer later in March with myself (Dean Hunt) & my superstar business partner Barry Dunlop?

The offer is suddenly a lot more tempting isn’t it?!?

If you want to see the biggest names in the industry reveal their secrets and techniques, then simply signup here: Underground Seminar Signup and book your place. As expected, there are not many seats left. So please, please be quick.

See you there, and don’t forget about the beer.

Dean Hunt & Barry Dunlop

PS: Seriously, it is the action takers that succeed in life. Don’t bookmark this page whilst you go and watch YouTube videos or check your inbox, Signup now

Let’s face it. In our society, if a child decides they want to be ‘rich’, people will look at them a bit strange. A lot of people don’t think being rich is an admirable goal.

When we are growing up, we constantly hear people say things like “money doesn’t buy happiness.” Statements like that just make no sense to me. So being poor makes you happy?

I grew up with a different mindset. From reading books, I learnt that to be rich you had to help as many people as possible. To acquire great wealth, you had to be generous.

By creating a business you are solving people’s problems.
By investing in real estate you are giving people housing.

Being rich doesn’t shape a person. A person that is rich and greedy will be poor and greedy as well. If you’re poor and unhappy, you will be unhappy when you’re rich.

The moral of the story is not to let other people’s beliefs shape your own. It’s your life, do what you want with it.

His reasons are so good that we thought they deserved a post of their own, so Mike, let us know your website URL so we can credit you properly.

From Super Mike:

* When you work 3x as hard for your dead-end cubicle job employer to meet HIS deadline, he reaps the benefit. But for yourself, you can work 3x as hard and reap the benefit yourself. In fact, as a freelancer, this should be one of the first things you do in your first few months. You’ll be surprised to find out how easy it is to make your last salary in the first 6 months of work or less. It’s amazing how much an employer can skim off the top of your back, making you believe that it is so hard to give you a promotion because there “just isn’t any budget for it this year”. Yeah, right. Meanwhile, the boss purchases another yacht, drives a fancy SUV, gets an expensive golf club membership, travels only with first-class accommodations, and gives his kids a fully paid ride through college.

* If as a web developer, then you get to stick with the language and tools you like to use, not whatever your employer wants you to use.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, when the boss wants you to hand you an impossible project and a ridiculous deadline, you often have to take it or suffer a bad performance review. As a freelancer, you get to deny those projects and even get a chance to negotiate a better rate or a deadline that you think you can meet.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, if you get a lame manager or lame HR rep. that cannot do their jobs properly, you have to suffer and take it. As a freelancer, you do not have this and you often can drop a belligerent client like a rock and have another client the next morning.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, if your boss wants you to work with a lame file server, lame computer, lame web development server, or lame database server, you have to sit there and take it. Not so as a freelancer.

* Occasionally on the Internet, but definitely not rarely, there are people on the Internet who have tiny little $75 computer tasks that might take them all day and cost them a lot more cash. As a freelancer, you can take these little tasks and knock them out in 15 minutes (and if not, then you can get better at this over time until you do). That’s $300 an hour — about the same as most lawyers make.

* At a dead-end day job, your boss’s client base usually was grabbed the old-fashioned way with cheesy sales guys on golf courses, telemarketer calls, or flights all over the place. But as a freelancer, clients see your listing on a board or an inexpensive ad, or read your blog, and send you requests in your inbox. It’s far more efficient and has far less overhead.

* Your appearance, race, gender, physical health issues, and many other factors are not important to your freelance clients, but they can be debilitating items in a regular day job that may cause you to lose a promotion, get you fired, prevent you from getting clients, or prevent you from even getting that job.

* In a dead-end cubicle job employee, when you get excited about the fantastic income opportunities about the next big thing on the Internet, such as a new programming language or a new technology platform — you often cannot jump on these opportunities and must watch it on the sidelines while others capitalize on these moments. But as a freelancer, you can read a few books, read some website content on the topics, run some tests, and jump right in within a week on these new platforms.

* When you have an illness or a death in the family, you can often negotiate better pauses in work schedules with your clients than you can when you work for a dead-end cubicle job employer.

* When you work in a dead-end cubicle job, your employer often brags to potential clients about your talents as if they are HIS. If he misses mentioning a talent to his client, he could potentially lose the deal and you never had a say in the matter. So you are limited. However, as a freelancer, you get to pitch your talents to your clients as best you can and more directly, and reap the benefit. Also, in that dead-end cubicle job, your employer used your talents to lure in new business, skims most of the cash off the top for the guys in the Executive Wing, and then tell you they don’t have a budget to promote you. As a freelancer, you don’t have to sit there and take that.

* Just as you said, clients are out there 24×7×365. You can literally wake up at 3am in any timezone, put out a cheap Internet ad for your services, and get a potential client email within two hours, if not more clients than that.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, when you are running late, you have to risk life and limb to drive faster to work, often forgetting things that are so far back at home that you cannot retrieve them. As a freelancer, when your client expects you at 9am for a conference call, you literally get up at 9am, flip on the laptop, and you’re ready for business — no rush, no fuss.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, you waste a lot of expensive fuel getting to and from work, and for many people it’s often as much as one hour to get there and back. As a freelancer with a business online, about the only time you worry about fuel is when you want to head to the beach!

* As a freelancer, you can take vacations any time you want, and as often as you want. You may have a client deliverable you’re still working on, but at least you can work on it easily while on vacation without having to have a physical presence in someone’s office. For many people in dead-end cubicle jobs, they get hounded on their mobile phones and pagers while they’re trying to enjoy their vacations. As a freelancer, you don’t have to have any of this.

* Getting sunlight, fresh air, or communing with nature is important for us as humans. Many cubicle day jobs don’t give you enough of this. As a freelancer, you can get as much of this as you want, relaxing with a laptop.

* There are many online businesses that, once you get started in them, can often work in autopilot without much attendance to them, earning you cash while you do something else. You can’t get that in a dead-end cubicle job in most cases.