Philly Sprints Business Tips

Archive for November, 2010

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

Your goal in this is to get the attention of the hiring manager, just as it is with resume writing.  The method and format are a little different however.  Your resume will cover all, or most of your professional career, and will be from one to two pages.  Your cover letter will be a very brief page serving as an introduction to the resume.  Cover letter writing style must be direct, to the point, and able to grab the attention of the reader quickly, with a goal of making the reader want to read the attached resume.
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If you’ve been in business very long, you’ve likely heard it all! You know, the irate customer who is going to sue you over the nineteen dollar product that they claim is bogus; the one that’s going to “shut your business down” because they conjure up in their minds that you might have breeched your privacy policy, or the one that takes complete advantage of your money-back guaranty. My favorite has to be the one that calls and screams vulgarities into the phone for apparently no reason.

It doesn’t happen often, but if you’re going to be in business, you will run across some nut cases from time to time. Some can be diffused, some can’t. That’s just the way things go in business.

There are some simple techniques for dealing with irate customers without burning yourself an ulcer over them and without telling them you hope they get cancer and die!

Here are some tips you may find useful…

1. Don’t take it personal
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First, and as important to your success as anything you learn here, is clearly understanding how eBay users find things to spend their money on.

No matter what type of buyer they are, no matter where they come from, they all use the same tool to find auction ads;

“They use the search bar to type in general terms..!”

Very rarely do buyers check the “Search Title and Description” checkbox  and start browsing the more specific results. Heck; the checkbox isn’t even an option on the front page of eBay, you actually have to do an “Advanced Search” to even have that option. This just confirms the importance of your title keywords.

Some do browse categories rather than search, but we’re mainly concerned with general majorities here, not exceptions to the rule.

In case you’re unaware, this means that most searches are ONLY CHECKING YOUR TITLE, not the words in the description area of your ad!!!

Experience tells me that, since you now know this, you are actually way ahead of 70% of the other eBay sellers out there; and that’s a very conservative estimate..!

Now that you have a clear understanding of the importance of your title keywords, here’s a priority list for precisely picking the right ones for each of your ads:
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