I have a number of friends who are unemployed, and I’m often sharing various suggestions with them.  I thought it’d be useful to them (and others) to summarize those ideas in one place.

However, I’m not going to show you how to find job openings.  You can use LinkedIn, Monster, HotJobs, Craigslist or any number of other services.  I’m simply going to show you some things that might increase your chances of landing an interview once you’ve found a job that you want to chase.  After that, you’re on your own!

LinkedIn

Studies show that 50-80% of employers use LinkedIn at some point in the hiring process.  Here are some specific things that you should look at:

Profile: At the very least, make sure you have an account with a completed profile (photo, work history, etc).

Status Updates: It’s important to post regular status updates so you can show employers what you’re interested in.  For example, some of my recent updates show my family life, social media news, information about the iPad, Twitter usability and things of that nature.

Use the second level: If you find an opening at a company you like, search for that company on LinkedIn.  If you have a decent sized network, there’s a good chance that someone in your “Second Level” works there.  For example, none of my connections work at Home Depot.  However, by searching for “Home Depot” I find that I have over 100 second level connections.  I can find the one that’s closest to the position I’m interested in, then find out who our common connection is, as seen on the right.  By doing this, I can have Roger connect me to Jim, and now I’m talking to someone inside the organization before I even earn an interview!

Recommendations: LinkedIn has a very cool “recommendations” system.  Ask some of your previous employers/employees/clients to write recommendations for you, which will help to enhance your profile.  Be sure to return the favor for them.

Control Your Search Results

I don’t have exact numbers, but we all know that many potential employers are going to Google you.  What will they find?  If you can take control of your search results, you can determine exactly what they’ll find.

The one catch is that you need to have a fairly unique name.  If your name is Jim Smith, it’s going to be difficult to dominate the search results for that phrase.  For many of us, though, you can easily take control.  Use my name for example (Mickey Mellen).  I have complete control over the first five results for my name, and solid control over 9 of the 10.

How is that done?  The simple way is to have active profiles on a variety of different social networking sites.  If you have active accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, those should rise to the top rather quickly.  How do you keep them active?  Read the next section to find out…

Ping.fm

I dicussed Ping.fm a few months ago, and the information there is still relevant.  Use it to post to a variety of services, and those services will slowly rise higher in the search results for your name.  This gives you a great way to have control over a large chunk of the vanity searches for your name, and will show potential employers the kinds of things that you’re interested in (keeping up with industry news, etc).

Once you have things set up, using Ping.fm at least a few times a week; maybe even a few times each day.

Create a custom URL on Facebook

Just a quick tip here — go to facebook.com/username and choose a short address for your profile.  This will help your Facebook profile rank slightly higher for your name, and give you an address you can use on your business card, resume, or anywhere that you think is applicable.

In my case, I changed from a horrible address like “facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789″ to simply “facebook.com/mickmel“.

Use the same profile picture everywhere

As you get more involved in these various services, it helps if you can brand yourself a little bit.  By using the same photo on every site, people are more likely to recognize you.  Once I found a picture I was happy with, I spent a few minutes and created a variety of sizes of it.  Some of them include:

• 584×876 — Tall image, simply resized to a decent size
• 584×584 — Square version
• 133×200 — Smaller version of the tall image
• 90×90 — Small and square
• 75×75 — Smaller and square

I put those in my Dropbox folder, so I always have them with me.  Whenever I register on a new site, I can grab the size/aspect that works best for that site and keep rolling.

Don’t be stupid

This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyhow.  Once you control all of the top listings for your name, don’t do anything stupid on your account.  Don’t bad-mouth anyone, post inappropriate photos, etc.  The level of sharing is up to you (some people share personal items, others don’t mention their family), but keep it clean and respectful.

Get a  better email address

When I was reviewing applications for my job at Mt. Bethel, I couldn’t help but take notice of their email address.  If someone submitted a resume with an @aol.com address, I started to feel a bit worse about them.  It didn’t affect who we ultimately chose to bring in, but it gave them kind of a bad first impression.

Lifehacker had an article a while back on this kind of topic.  While it likely won’t make or break you, every little thing you do can help.  Personally, I’d recommend either Gmail or a self-branded address (bob@smith.com), but there are a lot of good options out there.

A few other tools

If you’re a Twitter user, the folks at TweetDeck have a new product out called JobDeck.  It’s essentially TweetDeck with TwitterJobSearch tied into it.  Nothing fancy, but could be of value.

If you need help with your resume, CeeVee could be helpful.  There are a lot of online resume sites, but this one seems to have some good stuff going.  If you prefer a different one, please let us know in the comments.

Any other advice for those that are job-hunting?  Share your tips in the comments.

Unemployed? Some tips for job hunting online. is a post from: MickMel

While I’m a huge fan of the “inbox zero” concept, I always felt I had it easy.  I certainly get a lot of email, but I read about people that get hundreds of emails every day and figured it was easier for me because I only get around 50.  Or so I thought…

I decided it’d be a good idea to actually run some stats to see how much email I go through each day.  Gmail keeps things grouped in “conversations”, which is incredibly useful but makes it hard to count individual messages.  So, I installed Thunderbird (free email client, somewhat like Outlook) and had it pull in all of my gmail messages.  Once in there, I was able to sort and count them much more easily.

Since I first joined Gmail in 2004, I’ve kept (archived) a total of  80,112 emails and sent a total of 19,659. Beyond that, there’s no telling how many I’ve deleted.

This has been a pretty typical week, so here are my averages for the past few days:

• 268 messages received
  • 98 messages archived. These are ones I respond to, or otherwise need to keep for the future.  Many could probably be deleted, but you get a ton of space with Gmail and archiving is just a single click.
  • 170 messages deleted. Most of these are legitimate (social notifications, newsletters, etc), but I see no reason to keep them.  I try hard to unsubscribe when it’s applicable.
• 29 messages sent by me. I would have thought I sent more.  I guess not.
• 450-500 messages land in spam. Gmail spam filtering is very solid, and only a few each week slip through, so this number doesn’t really mean much.

I guess the point of this post is to show how effective an inbox zero approach can be.  I receive more than 250 emails per day, but it doesn’t feel like nearly that much.

So how about you?  How much do you get every day? Can you keep it at zero (at least part of the time)?

How much email do you deal with each day? is a post from: MickMel

This is the eighth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

I’m finding one of the keys to being productive is to be able to take advantage of the small breaks of time during the day.  If you found yourself with 5 extra minutes, could you use them?  How about an extra 60 seconds?

Those small breaks of time can add up to quite a bit over the course of a day.  I have two main suggestions:

• Be able to do a lot from your phone.
• Keep things open on your computer.

:: Be able to accomplish a lot from your phone

I discussed this a bit in part one of the series (“get control of your email“), but it’s worth mentioning again; a good phone is worth far more than the initial expense.  During the day, many of your small breaks of time are found when you’re away from home.  Some examples:

• Waiting for your child after school/dance/sports
• Waiting to see the dentist/doctor
• Waiting for food to arrive at a meal
• Waiting in line for tickets/check-out

I’m sure you can think of many others, but that’s a start.  When I have extra time in one of those cases, I do one of the following on my phone:

• Process some email.  I don’t usually convert any into tasks (I leave that for when I get home), but I can read, respond, archive, delete, etc.
• Catch up on Google Reader.  I can knock some reading off my list, and “star” items for later if I need to read them more in-depth or write about them.
• Read some Tweets or catch up on Facebook.  You can access Twitter and Facebook from almost any phone.  If those are important to you, then this gives you a chance to catch up.

Right now the iPhone is still your best bet, but some of the Android phones (like Verizon’s “Droid”) are catching up really quick.  Ultimately, any decent smartphone will do the job for you.

:: Keep things open on your computer

If you find yourself with a spare minute or two, you don’t want to waste a chunk of that time opening programs, logging in, etc.  If possible, leave those programs open all the time.  When you find a spare minute, your tools are right at your fingertips and you can get things done.

The problem with this is that leaving too much stuff open can slow down your computer and cause other issues.  I wrote a long post about this back in January, but here are some tips:

• Leave it on. Don’t shut down every night.  Reboot once or twice a week to keep Windows fresh, though.
• Use a fast browser. I use Google Chrome 90% of the time, and Firefox for most of the rest.  They use less memory and run much faster than Internet Explorer.
• Clean up your computer. There are a lot of small (free!) things you can do to speed up your computer.  Here’s tips for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Mac.
• Buy more memory. RAM is dirt cheap, simple to install and will make a huge difference.  At this point, you should have at least 2 gigs in your computer.  If not, go get more.  Not sure what you need?  Go to crucial.com and use the “scan my system” tool.  They’ll tell you exactly what you have, offer some choices, and they’ll sell it at a fair price.  I use them quite a bit.
• Get a new computer. This is last on the list for a reason, but it’s worth mentioning.  If your computer is more than a few years old, you can get a new one that is much faster for $500 (or less).  It’s something to consider.

If you find yourself with a bit more time and you’re caught up on email/reader/etc, Chris Brogan has a list of things to do if you have an extra half hour.  It’s got some good tips to try to keep you ahead of the game.

What else do you do to take advantage of those small breaks of time?

This is the eighth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 8 – Take advantage of the small breaks of time is a post from: MickMel

This is the first in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Email is becoming an overwhelming problem for a lot of people.  Many clients I visit have thousands of emails in their inbox, and getting a grip on it seems completely hopeless.  There are two things that you can do to help tame your inbox: Change your methods and change your tools.

:: Change your methods

We’ll start with how to change your methods.  Many of you may be tied into specific tools (email at work, for example), but anyone can tweak their methods.

The biggest thing you can do is treat your inbox the way it was intended — for INcoming messages.  Don’t store them there.  Let them come in, deal with them, and move on.  So how do you do that?

Stop “checking” your email – “process” it instead.  When you read an email, do something with it immediately.  A popular list of what can be done to any message is:

• Delete/Archive: So many messages can just be trashed.  Be liberal with the delete button.
• Do: If the email can be dealt with quickly, do it.  I get an email every morning with a report from another site I manage. I open it up, grab the data I need, toss it in the spreadsheet, then get rid of the message.  Takes about 30 seconds.  Another example is when clients send me FTP info for a site I’ll be working on in a few weeks.  I grab the info, store it in that client’s file and then move on.
• Delegate: If a message needs to be processed by someone else, get it off your plate and onto theirs.
• Respond: If someone sends me an email that is missing a key piece of information, I reply with a request for the info and move on. By the same note, many emails just need a simple response — “where do you want to have dinner?”, “how do I access Analytics?”, etc.  Answer the question, get rid of the email, and move on.
• Defer: This is a tricky one for a lot of folks.  If you get an email that you need to deal with, but you don’t have time for it right now, what do you do?  If you’re like most folks, you leave it in your inbox.  Since our goal is to keep the inbox clean, you need to get it out of there.  If it’s a file you’ll need later, save it (see my “Organize Your Files” post).  If it’s a big task you need to do, then add it to your do-do list (see my “Organize your tasks” post).

Please note that when I say to remove it from your inbox, I don’t necessarily mean to delete it.  Gmail has a killer “archive” feature, and Outlook allows you to create folders to store them in (but don’t use too many).  Use those features to keep your inbox clean, but with a copy of the email safely tucked away in case you ever need it again.

Merlin Mann covers “Inbox Zero” in this excellent video from a few years back.  It’s quite long (nearly an hour), but rather entertaining and very informative.  If you haven’t watched it before, I highly recommend it:

:: Change your tools

If you are stuck in Outlook in a work environment, I feel for you.    Some of these tips can still be applied, though. If you have the ability to change things up, though, here’s what I’d recommend:

• Combine your accounts into a single system. This doesn’t need to be a single address, but it needs to be a single program from which to access it.  Most systems support this (Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, etc), so figure out how it’s done and make it happen.
• Switch to web-based mail, probably Gmail. Here’s why:
  • You’re not tied to a particular computer. All of your email is available on any computer.
  • It’s all backed up. If your computer crashes, you lose zero email.
  • It’s all synced. I talk to people that check their email through the web (or on their phone), but then it still pulls it into Outlook when they get home.  This means they have to deal with every message twice.  Do you really want to double your email workload?
  • Your computer will probably run faster. Outlook is a huge resource hog, and being able to simply open one extra website in a lightweight browser (like Firefox or Chrome) will be far easier on your system.
• Make sure you can access it from your phone. Being able to deal with email on the road is huge.  I can’t do everything from my phone, but I can delete, delegate and respond pretty easily.  If I get 25 emails while I’m out, it’s nice to come home and only have four sitting in my inbox.
  • You can’t afford an email capable phone? You can’t afford not to.  Let’s assume that having email access on your phone would save you 30 minutes/day.  Figure out what your time is worth per hour, then multiply by 180 (hours saved per year).  If you’re worth $20/hour, then a phone with email will save $3600 worth of your time each year.  And $99 is too much to spend?

If you switch to Gmail (or if you use it already), be sure to spend some time looking at the options they have in the “Labs” section.  I personally think “Send & Archive” is the best thing ever created, but there are plenty of others that may help as well.

Matt Cutts (a well-known Google employee) created a few videos that are worth watching if you use Gmail: Gmail Power Tips and his favorite items in Gmail Labs.

What other email tips do you have?

This is the first in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 1 – Get Control of Your Email is a post from: MickMel

Over the past few years, I’ve tried a lot of different tools to help myself stay organized.  Some worked, and some didn’t, but each one helped me get my life a bit more organized.

At this point, I’ve got a solid system worked out for dealing with all of the electronic cruft that shows up in my life, and over the next two weeks I’ll share those tools and techniques with you.  I’ll cover ways to get your inbox under control, be able to access any of your files from anywhere, keep your to-do list tidy, never fear a computer crash again and much more.

There are many tools out there to help you, but the problem now is finding the right ones.  Not only will I help you find the best tools, but I’ll show you how best to use them and how to make them work together.  Even better, almost every tool I showcase is free.

I started on Monday, December 7 and I covered one aspect of your life each weekday for two weeks.  Here’s what’s we talked about:

• Monday, Dec 7 – Get control of your email
• Tuesday, Dec 8 – Keep up with the sites you care about
• Wednesday, Dec 9 – Manage your calendar
• Thursday, Dec 10 – Organize your files
• Friday, Dec 11 – Organize your photos
• Monday, Dec 14 – Streamline your lifestream
• Tuesday, Dec 15 – Organize your tasks
• Wednesday, Dec 16 – Take advantage of the small breaks of time
• Thursday, Dec 17 – Get control of your finances
• Friday, Dec 18 – Capture everything else

Make sure you stay in the loop to get everything out of this series. You can subscribe to the RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, or just have the posts automatically sent to your email address.

10 days to organize your digital life is a post from: MickMel

Our recent trip to Disney World was great — we had a blast!  However, a few things struck me as very technologically inferior and I thought I’d share them here.

First, though, I’ll touch on what they did right. The card they give you when you check-in is amazing.  This single card allows you to:

• Open the gates to get into your resort.
• Open your room door.
• Access the parks.
• Charge food to your meal plan.
• Charge food/gifts to your room.

If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you probably have some idea how difficult it can be to combine systems.  They’ve managed to combine hundreds of different systems to all talk together and work with a single card.  It works very well and is quite impressive.

Now for the bad…

It’s really not that bad, but these things bugged me:

• No Wifi: Our resort (“Port Orleans: Riverside”) was very nice, but didn’t have wifi. Really?  No wifi in 2009? They had “high speed internet” available, but it was via ethernet.  The port was “conveniently located” on the opposite side of the room from the table, and they wanted $9.95/day for it.  Awful.  Fortunately, AT&T had excellent 3G coverage there and I did well with my wireless card and Cradlepoint.
• No GPS buses: With all of the Google Earth work I do (site, blog), I’m constantly seeing new apps and mashups that show live bus locations for various cities.  Given the complex network of bus routes around Disney, I was sure they’d have something.  Nada.  The buses themselves worked well enough, but we often waited 15-30 minutes for a bus that was going to the correct destination.  Having a way to check on that bus ahead of time would have been very useful.
• IE6 recommended: Disney’s “PhotoPass” card is the one thing that’s not tied to your main Disney card.  I’d expect they’ll fix that before too long.  In the meantime, it’s a separate card you need to carry around and hand to Disney photographers.  They take your picture, then you can log into the PhotoPass site to view them later in the day.  It’s really a pretty nice system.  However, if you try to access the site using Google Chrome, they kindly suggest you use Internet Explorer 6 (among others).  It also recommends “Windows 98, 2000 or XP”.  I guess Vista and 7 are out of the question, huh?  The site works fine in most browsers, aside from being a bit slow.  I just thought the warning message was pretty funny.

All in all, it was a fun trip.  I don’t expect the GPS-enabled buses to roll out anytime soon, but I sure hope they have wifi next time…

Disney’s technology was surprisingly lacking is a post from: MickMel

A few weeks ago, Google introduced a new feature that allows you to set your Gmail account to always use SSL, not just when you’re logging in.

Like most folks, I didn’t think much of it.  However, a new vulnerability has been discovered that can hijack your account if you’re not using full-time SSL.

While this situation is making Gmail look bad, Google is really looking pretty good.  This specific hack is Gmail-only, but a similar hack could be built for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.  The big difference is that Gmail offers full-time SSL, while the others don’t.

To turn this feature on in Gmail, simply go to [settings], then choose “Always use https” at the bottom of the page (be sure to  [Save Changes]).  It’s quite simple.

The tool to execute this hack will be released in two weeks, though others may be working on it already.  I’d suggest you make that small change to your Gmail settings right now.

Turn on full-time SSL in your Gmail account is a post from: MickMel