Do not schedule any important meeting on the interview day

This is to be done to stop you from messing up either of the two, and to keep your mind uncluttered on the very day. An important meeting scheduled on the day of interview will engross a significant part of your thinking brain, which will distract you during the interview as well. You should, therefore, avoid scheduling anything important on the interview day.

Do not use office mail for communication

I know you follow this, but still I felt like telling you that never ever use the e-mail ID given by your company to schedule or fix a meeting. This could spell bad luck for your existing job, which I presume you do not want to lose, unless you get something solid on hand.

Negotiate as much as you can

The best part of searching for a new job when you already have one is the fact that you can bargain with the prospective employer from a position of strength. Unlike a fresher who needs a job then and there, you do not have that urgency as you already have a job. You should, therefore, try to get the job on your terms. This is very much possible.

Being already employed, you already know the tricks of an interview meeting, so I left them out of this article, and instead mentioned those that are relevant for you alone, and not for a fresher. You must put these tips in use.

We will take that discussion forward in this article, and we will talk here about 3 content-based contests that could help you skyrocket your blog’s readership.

2 content-heavy contests

Comment here contest

This is one of the best contests to host. The idea is quite simple. Ask your visitors to post a comment in the comment box to get a chance to win the prize. Also remind them that each comment will get one entry into a lucky draw, so they can enter more than one comment to get more than one entry. At this point, do not forget to tell them just one-line generic comments will either get filtered out by your spam filter, or will be weeded out by your staff. Remind them that the comment that will add to the discussion will only get accepted. Comment done just to get multiple entry and which does not take the discussion forward, even a bit, will automatically get disqualified.

Review me contest

This is another form of contest that you can run. Ask your readers to write a review for your website on their domain, in Facebook, or wherever they want, as long as it is written on the websites talking about topics like pornographic, abusive, racism, etc. make an e-mail ID, and ask them to send the URL to that mail ID. Promise the announcement of the result on your blog, and tell them that 3 best reviews will get the prize. To win the prize, it is important for them to include two links to your website in the review — one to the home page, and another to any other page. For deep lining, you can provide some options from your blog posts.

Guest post writing contest

The third form of content-heavy contest is guess post writing contest. Ask you readers to write guest posts for you. Announce that the best written guest post will get the prize, and the second and the third ranked guest post will also get prize. To motivate them to write a guest post, tell your visitors that each guest post will be published, and writer will get the byline for the guest post along with 2 links back to their website, Facebook page, twitter, etc.

Content-based contests are time consuming, so the prize should be good, otherwise people will not get motivated to spend time on your blog.

If you have not believed this so far then start believing in it, as nothing is truer then the above statement is. And it will become more evident when you will read the best-kept secret twitter tips for job search in this series.

Twitter, as we all know by now, is a 140-word marketing nuclear bomb. It is also referred as virtual water cooler where people talk about things that matters to them. Twitter is not just a micro-blogging tool, but it is a search engine in its own right that has the strength to overpower Google. Twitter can be used in many ways, but we will focus on using it as a job search tool. All the tips in this and subsequent posts are geared towards that only.

For a novice, twitter may look useless, but so did search engines in their initial days.

Easy-to-remember username

Username is your twitter name, and this is the first thing that a person finds about anyone on twitter. This is akin to the first part of your e-mail ID — everything before @, and you will not want your username to spoil the party. Hence, do not use your nickname or any other silly things in there. While saying that I did not mean to say that your nickname is silly, all I meant was that your username should look classy. Cheesy stuffs do not cut it. Your twitter name should also be easy to remember.

Real name for real people

Use your real first and last names in the designated space. Do not use any cool-but-idiotic-sounding words in place of the first and the last name. It will hurt your image, and create hindrance in getting a job. A person without real name does not sound like a person, at least not on the Internet.

Real picture

I know how badly you wanted to look like Brad Pitt, but the fact is you are not him then why to use his picture as your profile picture? Believe me it will not impress your employer, and most of all they will come to know it is not Brad Pitt who is applying for the job. Take my suggestion and pull that picture down, and instead use your own picture, preferably in business attire.

In the twitter profile, nothing but close-up of your own picture should be there.

Start fixing your profile now and when you are done send me your twitter URL. That’s all for today, will meet tomorrow with some more tips.

I am a big fan of the label feature. Currently, I am using around 125 labels and filter combination to short my mails. Labels in Gmail are such a lifesaver. It helps us organize our mails and keep the inbox tidy. You can use label along with filter option to create a rule to categorize the mails and even remove them from your inbox. I will tell you how you can use the labels.

Create a label and a filter rule

This is the very first thing to do. Let’s say you have created a label called Sweetheart, and in the filter you mention that any mail from your sweetheart’s mail ID (even more than one) should go directly to that label skipping inbox, or simply apply the label to the mails coming from her.

Color code your labels

Like me, you can also color code your labels. It makes it easy to visually scan through the kind of stuff is there. Like all my SEO newsletters have Orange code, online marketing ones has red code, and all my writing related newsletters has blue code. This has helped me visually scan through the labels.

Activate Hide read labels from Gmail lab

Click settings (you can find it near logout link in Gmail) followed by lab then scroll down to find “Hide read labels”. Enable this feature. This will help you keep the sidebar clutter free, and only labels with unread mails will be visible to you.

Using labels to search

You can also use labels as a shortcut to reach the mail you want. For this, you will need to enable “Go to label” feature from settings >> lab. (See pic for detail).

Hide Labels from subject

I personally do not like hiding labels from subjects, but not everyone shares the same view, therefore, Google has this feature to hide labels from subjects. To activate this, go to settings and then to lab, search for “Hide Labels from Subjects” and enable it (see pic). That is all you need to do, if you do not like seeing colorful labels beside subjects.

Rule 1: Length of a press release

A press release should not be longer than one A4 (8.5”X11”) size paper. Divide your press release into 4 to 5 small paragraphs.

Rule 2: Rules related to Quotations

Do not use more than two quotations in the press release. And do not start a press release with a quotation. Quotations should come not earlier than the third paragraph. Only use quotations that come from the person behind the news or from CEO of the company.

Rule 3: Company information

You must include “About the company” at the bottom of the press release.

Rule 4: Contact person

The contact details written at the bottom of the press release should be working. Do not put any phone number of e-mail id for the heck of it. Provide contact details of a person who is in charge of the media releases. This is important because you never know which journalist needs more info and hence end up contacting.

Rule 5: Proper place and date

Start a press release with giving a proper place and complete date.

Rule 6: Include ### sign

### marks the end of the press release, so you should not forget to add this.

I have provided a proper format of a press release in the previous article titled, structure of a press release. Do read it.

Securing Yahoo mail is somewhat manual process. You need to look for Https prefix before you feed your e-mail ID and password in the Yahoo form. If the page doesn’t have Http then you have opened a phishing site (or have been redirected to one). It means, someone out there is trying to trick you.

Along with this, you can also take the following steps to keep your Yahoo mail secure:

• Create your personalized Yahoo Sign in Seal. This let you create a custom login page using either text or image of your choice. But there is a limitation to this. The custom login page that you will create will be visible on only the system on which you will create it.
• If you use a browser that supports Greasemonkey scripts then install the HTTP-to-HTTPS redirector. Firefox, Opera, Chrome (recent build), and Flock supports Greasemonkey scripts.

This way you will make sure that you are always on the Https page of Yahoo. There is one more way to secure your Yahoo mail, and that is password time out feature of Yahoo. This will protect all your Yahoo accounts. Follow the steps given below to set your password timeout.

Step 1: Login to your Yahoo

Step 2: Go to My Account. You can find a link to my account at the top of the screen.

Step 3: You will be asked to enter the password again, after which you will be taken to account information page.

Step 4: Go to “Member Information” and click “Edit”.

Step 5: Click the drop-down with a label “Prompt for Password” and change the setting. 15 minutes is the shortest duration after which you will be prompted to enter the password again. Set the duration for 1 hour. This will ask for password after a set duration.