Finding work can be tough especially given recent events with the economy. Depending on where you live the old fashioned way of submitting a resume and cover letter doesn’t always work. Employers get dozens if not hundreds, if you don’t have the specific skills or your resume isn’t flashy enough it’ll be lost in a sea of carbon copy resumes.

With social media sites exploding companies are paying more attention to online activity to find suitable employees. One place they look in particular is Twitter. Twitter is great because it opens up access to people you might normally not have contact with and pitch directly to them such as CEO’s, hiring managers, recruiters, and even top level executives and celebrities to name a few. Here’s a list of 6 things you can do to use Twitter for your job search.


1. Brand yourself professionally

This means your Twitter account should be set up in a professional manner, this means no topless girl on a Corvette for your background picture. Your Twitter handle should include some combination of your name and profession and make it as easy to remember as possible.

2. Link to your resume

Have your cover letter and resume accessible in your bio. If you don’t have a website or blog you can use a site called VisualCV.com to create an online resume complete with videos, images, and charts to highlight your skills and knowledge.

3. Before you can follow you should tweet

Before you start following others you should post a few tweets. Don’t post junk about what you had for dinner. Instead tweet about an article, an idea, or share links that are of a professional interest to your targeted followers.

4. Build your network

Once you have some interesting posts and a great profile it’s time to start networking. Use tools such as Twitter search to find people. Remember to grow your network slowly to avoid looking like a spammer. Also keep an eye out for recruiters and companies who post tweets. Before you follow though always make sure to check out their bio and check around to see if their legit.

5. Give until it hurts

While there’s nothing wrong with self promotion too much can be a bad thing. Promote others links by re-tweeting (giving them full credit of course). This is another way you can increase your followers and friends as well.

6. Be active

Like any social media site you get what you put into it. The more active you are the better the results. You should focus on sending out something useful every day. Read other tweets and join in the conversation, and even tweet that you’re looking for a job. The more attention you can bring on yourself the better the results.

Just because you created a page on Facebook doesn’t mean it’s going to start magically bringing people to your site. In order for it to be effective you have to promote your page like you would your website. Here is a list of a few things you can do to get your page noticed.

1. One of the first things you should do is create widgets using Facebook’s social plugins, that you can display on your site or other blogs or web pages you have.

2. Link your Facebook page in your profile. To me this just makes sense, if you have a profile on Facebook and a page why not have a link connecting them.

3. Add your fan page URL to your email signature.

4. Create a welcome video for your fan page. Having a welcome video is a great way to get across what your site is about, plus provide a means of telling visitors what you would like them to do, such as like your page, or visit your site.

5. Upload your videos to your fan page and embed them on your site. When you upload a video from Facebook it will have a white watermark in the upper left hand corner. Clicking on it provides a link back to the original video on your fan page. If a visitor is currently logged into Facebook when they view your video there will be a like button displayed instead.

6. Facebook Ads, compared to Google Adsense, Facebook ads are much cheaper (about half the cost from my experience) and can reach thousands of Facebook users a day. Facebook ads also display a like button and displays the pics of friends and others who have also liked this ad helping to give it social proof. Off topic Google plus 1 will also have a similar feature for its Adsense advertisements once it comes out.

7. Link to Twitter. Why post a link, video, or picture on Facebook only to have to login to Twitter separately and repeat the process? By linking your accounts you save time by automatically publishing your Facebook content on Twitter providing a direct link to your fan page.

8. Use the @ tag on other walls and fan pages. Remember when doing this not to go overboard and spam, otherwise your going to defeat the purpose of doing this and hurt your site not help it.

I recently received an email from Infolinks a contextual affiliate advertiser. It seems they want to expand their service and get more blogs and websites using their service. Now I have no problem with this and have found their services pretty good overall. However how they want to expand is by getting you to spam comments for them.

They’ve created a superhero character called InfolinksO who randomly goes to popular blogs and websites, talks about the site and mentions how they can make money from Info links (though videos not literally visiting their sites), again I have no problem with that part.

However on their website they want you to also visit these sites and drop a comment that they should join Infolinks. They also want you to message them on Twitter and other social networking sites and convince them to join. Now I don’t know about you but when I get spam I delete it. 90 percent of the time it’s junk about Viagra, online gambling, or porn. The other 10 seems to be junk sites, malware, made for Adsense sites, or people who think that by posting a comment that talks only about their site they’ll get tonnes of links.

While they do say that the more who join their service means more money for those who use their advertising is probably true, this is a poor way of going about it. Not to mention it brings no benefits to the average site owner and could probably hurt their own sites due to looking like a spam site.

I’m not saying not to use their site; I’m still going to keep using it. I’m just a little disappointed in them.

Recently Google announced a new service called Google Plus 1. A new button that Google plans to rival against Facebook’s Like button. Plus 1 works in much the same manner as a like button in that it is a way to help determine a site’s popularity and relevancy to visitors. It will also be applied to Adsense ads as well, again similar to how Facebook uses it’s like button.

As of now it’s still in the experimental stage and probably won’t be fully available to add to your site for a few months. You can however can visit Google Experimental and sign up to start using it.

How does Google plus 1 work?

How Google plus 1 will work will be pretty much like this. A user will log onto their Google account and like Facebooks like button “plus one” the sites they like. The difference will be that these plus 1 buttons will appear beside the link when you search on Google .These 1s will also be shared with your immediate contacts, and friends and be displayed for everyone online to see who is logged into Google.

Google also plans on having a plus 1 button similar to a Facebook like button available to put on your website or blog. According to Google if someone does a 1 on a web page it’ll show up to others who find that page in search results. Again pretty much identical to all the other buttons available to rate a sites popularity and relevance.

The other thing Google plus 1 intends to do is include this on Google Adsense ads. Users will be able to 1 ads they recommend just as they would a favourite website. The goal being for more socially targeted ads (basically ads you’ll be more likely to click on rather then an advertisement for bean paste). Once this goes into effect all Adsense ads will have these buttons attached to them, advertisers won’t be able to turn them off. Also click on the plus 1 button won’t count as a paid ad click, so in theory you could click your own 1 buttons and not be penalized by Adsense for doing so. And advertisers will be able to see stats about what ads are getting more 1’s.

Right now it’s hard to say how this new application will affect a websites search engine ranking and placement on Google, or how advertisers will react to having essentially a like button added to their advertisements. Not to mention those who use black hat seo to cheat the system to get better ranking, only time will tell.

This is a program I found when looking at creating a new banner for this websites homepage. It’s a completely free site, you don’t even have to become a member and it lets you create unlimited banners or blog buttons for your website. There are also no annoying third party advertisements on there like a lot of the free downloadable widgets or other things available for your blog or website. Below is a quick video I made showing you how to create a banner on this site. Check it out and let me know what you think.


If you want to create your own banners, here's the link to the site. http://www.bannerfans.com/banner_maker.php?bnew=1&pses=da60a8ff

Want to create a website but strapped for cash? Here is a list of 4 websites builders that are totally free.

1. Google Sites

I’ve tried to use this one in the past and they do offer a decent service. But if you’re a first time website creator this program could leave you swearing at your computer for the first little while until you figure out how it works. Once you figure it out though you can quickly build an attractive looking website.

2. Weebly

I’ve used Weebly extensively in the past and found it very simple to use. Free sites can be created of any size you want, though the program tends to slow down once the site starts to get fairly large. Adding text, pictures, and video is very simple with it’s drag and drop feature. The only real bad part about this site is that the designs you can choose from are rather limited.

3. Wix

Wix allows you to create your website in flash instead of the standard html that most website providers work in.

4. Jimbo

Jimbo offers a simple straight forward website provider that’s easy to use especially if you’re new to creating websites.

Given the recent earthquake activity in New Zealand and Japan I thought I’d share this interesting download for your computer. What this does is display a view of the world and all the recent earthquake activity over the last 7 days. (It updates the information each day) The information is provided by the USGS, so the information isn’t 100 percent accurate but it does offer a great overview of what’s going on in the world in terms of earthquake activity.

I should also mention that when your looking at the map you’ll notice a tonne of earthquake activity, this is normal. This is not (as far as I know anyway) a sign of the end times, or aliens or the government making secret bases or testing stuff underground. This is normal seismic activity.

If you want to download this program simply copy and paste the link below, it’s a free download and it’s safe.


http://download.cnet.com/Earthquake-3D/3000-2054_4-10395116.html


Some other links you might find interesting

Japan seismic agency

http://www.gsi.go.jp/cais/topic110315.2-index-e.html

US seismographs

http://folkworm.ceri.memphis.edu/heli_bb_nsn/

Want to make your website viewable from a mobile device such as a Blackberry or Iphone? If you do and you want to get traffic from mobile devices check out this video which shows you how to create a mobile version of your site in just a couple minutes. The site is called Mobify Me http://mobify.me/, it’s totally free and extremely easy to use.

If you’ve never used Ezine articles I’ve found it to be one of the best sources for article traffic. I tend to get a steady flow of targeted traffic from that site. If your thinking of using or haven’t used their site in awhile to post articles they’ve recently made some new changes which their calling quality improvement. Basically this makes the whole process of getting articles approved harder and longer.

Here are the new changes

1. Word Count

Before articles could be 250 words as a minimum. Now it’s 400

2. Longer approval time

Editors had up to 7 business days to approve or decline your articles, that’s now been bumped up to 14 business days.

3. Basic Plus Membership Level

You were previously allotted 25 article submissions in this membership level if you did not meet the Platinum membership requirements at the end of your first 10 article submissions. How it works now is that they’ve dropped it to 10 and if those 10 aren’t up to their standards your account is shut down.

4. Dead links

Now after 2 weeks your link has not been fixed, it will be unlinked.

5. WP Plugin and API

Articles submitted by these tools will no longer be accepted.

Drop a comment below and let me know what you think of these changes.

Hey everyone hope you enjoy my site. If you’ve visited this site before You’ve probably noticed some of the new changes I’ve been making here. I decided it was time to upgrade the site and change the layout and color scheme. I’m doing this to hopefully speed up the time it takes to add new content on here. And hopefully clear up some problems that I’ve had with the old layout.