With so many people flooding the market, competition is fierce; even for jobs that don’t pay well. Getting a job today will require a new way of thinking of things. It will require you to think like an entrepreneur.

Whether you realize it or not, you are an entrepreneur. Instead of selling candles or financial services, you are selling the knowledge and skills you have developed over the years to a business that needs them. And instead of doing contracted work for multiple clients like the average freelancer, you devote the bulk of your time serving only one client for several years.

While scary at first, this change in mindset is incredibly freeing. Why? Because it opens up avenues of opportunities that you may not have otherwise seen or pursued. Sure you can look for employment at another company in the same industry. But you can also change industries altogether simply by investing in a little education. You can even convert your knowledge and skills into a home based business, something I recommend highly.

Today I’m going to show you how to think like an entrepreneur and secure a job in this crazy economy.

The first step is to sit down and think about what you want to do. Do you want to continue doing the same work you have been doing or do you want to change careers? A New York Times article suggest that some industries are contracting to a much smaller size or are going away for good.

If you are in a growing or at least stable industry and you like what you are doing then sure go ahead and look for a job in the field. However if you are in a contracting or unstable industry, I highly recommend jumping ship.

If you’ve decided to change careers, you need to make sure the skills you have developed over the years will translate well to the career you have chosen. Start by writing down all the jobs you have held. Underneath the job title write down all the technical and administrative tasks you did while in that position. If you need to, pull out your job description for help. In addition to that, list any skills you have cultivated that had nothing to do with work. For instance, if you write on the side, add that. Do illustrations for fun? Add that to the list. Did volunteer work? Write it down.

Now this next step is going to require quite a bit of thought and maybe some help. From this list you want to extract the skills involved in completing those tasks. For instance, say you were a scientist for a pharmaceutical company and your job was to perform experiments that determined the safety of a particular medication. The skills you would need to complete this job function are the ability to manage a project (set up the experiment and see it through to conclusion), organization (tracking the results), data analysis (interpreting the results) and the ability to speak, write and present ideas (explaining the outcome of the experiment so that it is understandable to others).

While the job you did may be specific to the pharmaceutical industry, the skills you acquired are the ones that need to be in sync with the job you want. Don’t worry, though, if your skills don’t measure up, you can always go back to school or look for a position that straddles the gap between what you do now and what you want to do that will train you for that dream job.

The real challenge, however, is not developing the skills for a job that you want. If you put enough time and effort into it, you can learn how to do anything. The difficulty lies in convincing the hiring agent that you are the best candidate for the job. This is especially true if you are switching from one career to another and doubly true if you are stepping down in rank (i.e. going from an upper management position to a front line position). This brings us to an entrepreneur’s greatest challenge.

Selling.

That’s right. Even though the product in your business is you, you still have to sell yourself to prospective employers; especially now when supply (employees) is greater than demand (jobs). You have to convince the hiring agent that out of all the applicants he or she will be interviewing, you are the one they want to hire.

The secret to selling yourself to prospective employers is to stop thinking about yourself. It sounds crazy I know but Zig Ziglar once said “You can only get what you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.” While the hiring agent understands that you need a job in order to save your house, they really don’t care. Seriously. All they care about is:

Are you the person who is going to bring in the sales that will keep us in business?

Are you the person who will reduce our customer complaints?

Are you the person who is going to show up to work on time every day?

Are you the person who is going to help me solve my problem?

Employers are not just looking for people to fill a position. They are looking for people to help them get what they want whatever that may be. And you, being the savvy entrepreneur that you are, will convince them that yes, you are that person who is going to help them get what they want which will, in turn, ensure that you get what you want. A Job.

First do research on the position you are applying for. Read the job description. Tap people whom you know who are already doing the type of work you are applying for. Ask them what a typical day is like. You want to make sure that you can do the job and that it is something you want to do. Use the information you get to tailor your resume to the position you are applying for.

Your next step is find out all you can about the company. Read the company’s website. Do a search for them on the internet. Read their marketing material. Network with people who work for the company so you can get inside information about their policies and processes. If you can, try to visit the business and look around. What are the employees wearing? How do they interact with each other and the customer? Are they formal and straitlaced or are they laidback and casual?

This may seem a little excessive at first. However, you cannot effectively market yourself as the person who will help them get what they want if you do not know what they want in the first place. Your research should reveal where they are doing well and where they need help.

Now that you have all of this seemingly useless information about this company, here is the first of many places where you are going to use it to sell yourself as the solution to their problems. Extract from your findings at least ten ideas that will help the business operate better. They can be ideas for increasing sales, or providing better customer service or saving money. Ideally, these ideas should relate to the position you are applying for but any you come up with should be fine as long as they are good.

What you are about to do is offer the company a taste of your skills and knowledge. Just like those in-store demonstrations where employees offer you a piece of sausage in a cup in the hopes that you will buy a package, you are going to offer the company a taste of what they will be getting if they hire you.

The place where you offer these ideas is in the cover letter to your resume. Open the letter with a brief introduction of yourself. Then in a professional and courteous tone, list two or three of the ideas you have about how they can improve their company. Do your best to quantify the results the company will get should they implement your ideas.

Do not use high pressure sales tactics or close with something crazy like “Call today for more great ideas about how to improve your business” as this will turn them completely off. All you are trying to do is get your foot in the door and offering some tangible benefit up front will definitely have them picking up the phone and calling you.

In the next article, I will discuss how to win at the interview. In the meantime, don’t despair. Hope is in the air.

Corey is one of my Twitter buddies who serves as a constant source of inspiration to me though she doesn’t know it (That’s because I’m horrible and never leave comments on her blog. I know, I know). She owns a company called Minus The Pie and is currently developing three websites; Outstanding Writer, Diligent Design and Freelance Pirate. And she has a forth in the works. Seriously, where does she get the time?

Anyway, stop by and read the interview. Then when you are done, hang around and visit her website. I guarantee you’ll pick up some great tips that will help in your endeavors whatever they may be.

The Plot Café was updated fairly regularly throughout the month thanks, in part, to reprint article directories. I would love to be able to produce original content for the site but there just is not enough time in my day at this moment. I was able to score three interviews with three wonderful fiction writers which you can read here, here and here and I have another two lined up.

I finally overhauled BloggingShed and got an original template on there.

The New BloggingShed

I felt a little bit like a fraud claiming to be a web designer and yet using a blog template designed by someone else. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. This month I’m going to work on getting The Plot Café overhauled (since yes I am using a template for that as well).

I also helped a friend set up her website. So really, I created two templates last month.

A couple of my articles on Ezinearticles were reprinted on other websites so I got a few backlinks for The Plot Cafe.

Now for the bad stuff.

My earnings for January were a whopping $3.00 and some change and that was strictly through advertising. However, since I didn’t do a whole lot of marketing of either site that seems appropriate.

Productivity was far below what I wanted. I did not concentrate as much on my websites as I would have liked. My excuse is that I had bit of offline drama going on that made it impossible to concentrate but in the end all that is really an excuse. I need to discipline myself to push through whatever craziness is going on in my life so that I can achieve the results I want.

My goal for February is to blog at least two times per week on BloggingShed; ending the month with at least eight original articles. I want to produce one template and four articles for marketing purposes (give away free).

As far as income is concerned, I want to make at a minimum of $50 this month to cover the cost of web hosting. So having said that; BloggingShed now has ad space available. So if you are looking for low cost but fun place to advertise your products or services, check out the, oh so low, rates on BloggingShed. I also still have my WordPress templates for sale at the new economic bailout rate of $19. Learn more here.

So did you accomplish what you wanted to get done in January? What are your goals for this month?

Barack Obama is now, officially, the 44th president of the United States. I watched the inauguration and the overwhelming message was one of buckling down and doing all that needs to be done to get us back on the right track. President Obama didn’t mince words. He broke it down for everyone just how knee deep in trouble we are in but he didn’t leave us hanging in hopelessness. He reiterated over and over that we can get through these troublesome times because we are Americans. We’ve been through worse and have survived, we’ll get through this too. As the president says: “It’s time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and remake America.”

The best part of the inauguration was the ending prayer by the Reverend Lowry. By far he stole the show. Even though the Reverend is a Christian, he included everyone of every belief system in the prayer. He also bestowed us with some wonderful nuggets of wisdom such as “We must turn to each other not on each other,” highlighting Barack Obama’s stance that collaboration is the key to our survival. I want to see if there is a transcript of the prayer because there a few other things he said that I want to blog about.

My only fear is that our high expectations may cause us to become impatient. People seem to think that President Obama is some kind of messiah. He isn’t. He’s just a man who will do the best he can to get us out of this mess but he can’t do it alone. He has to depend on the willingness of others to help and sometimes those others have their own agenda and will choose to become roadblocks rather than facilitators. Sometimes the circumstances themselves will not be conducive to a positive outcome. These are not excuses for failure but rather a fact of life. We should have hope that Obama will be successful but we need to temper that with a good dose of reality.

All in all, I do hope that President Obama’s time in office is exceptional and purely for selfish reasons. Firstly I want him to kill the stereotypes about black people that have been prevalent in this country for far, far too long. I want his presidency to inspire my people to much better than we have been doing. There is no excuse for continuing in mediocrity.

Secondly, I want him to raise the bar when it comes to the office of the presidency. I want the expectations of our leader to be such that people like the last joker that held that office don’t stand a chance of getting in.

Anyway, that’s all I really have to say on the subject. Here’s to America 2.0. Now with extra United.

The first site is called BloggingShed. This site is going to be the one that brings in the majority of my income. BloggingShed is a blogger’s help site where I post tutorials for the various blogging software out there, talk about how to make money from blogging, how to market and promote your blog, discuss design and coding and make snarky comments about stuff I find on the internet.

I realize that there are tons of blogs about blogging already on the internet and that I’m pretty much trying to shout to the world at the bottom of the mountain but blogging is something that I feel I can make an honest go at. I already have a fair amount of knowledge about it and I am comfortable learning and writing about the topic. The challenge with this site is going to be in differentiating it from all the other blogging sites out there. I have a few ideas that I’m still toying around with.

The second site I will be working on is The Plot Café. This is a site for fiction writers that I have been working on for the past year. It started out as Openlore Fiction Writer’s Magazine but I changed the name because I had a completely different idea for Openlore that I will be developing at a later time.

The Plot Cafe is a website that caters to readers and writers of fiction. The site has book reviews, author interviews, writing prompts, videos and articles about writing and publishing. There is a ton of other stuff that I want to add to the site but as time is an issue at the moment (at least until I quit my day job), I have to keep the site at a sustainable level of management.

My plan with these two sites is to generate multiple streams of income through them both. The first stream is the obvious ad revenue. Right now I have Google Adsense running on both sites but as soon as I hit the $100 mark I’m going to take them off. I feel like they make the sites look amateurish. However I’ve already invested some time and effort with the program so I want to at least earn my first check before I shut it down. I plan to trade the Google Ads for Banner and Block ads where I’m able to exercise a little discretion as to who advertises on my website. I’ve also got a few affiliate links (Barnes and Noble, Gevalia Coffee) and will be adding a couple more.

The second stream of income I want to build is the sales of web and blog templates. I have two templates on sale already and am working on a third. I’m not really interested in getting into the custom design arena although I’m pretty sure I would be able to make a good amount of money in it. I’m really looking to build a business that will generate income whether I’m actively working on it or not and I can’t see that happening with me offering a custom design option.

My third income stream will come from ebooks that I will write and sell. Writing is my passion and this is where I want to spend the bulk of my time. I have a file folder of ideas for ebooks, so I imagine that this is going to be the biggest stream of income that I develop.

And last but not least, I want to offer online classes in both blogging and writing. I got this idea from a copywriting blog I read on a regular basis. It’s a lot easier than it sounds. The hardest part will be coming up with the curriculum and making sure students get what they paid for out of the class.

I have a lot of work to do, an overwhelming amount of work, which is why I’ve decided to move forward slowly. My Achilles Heel is that I have this tendency to try and rush things because I haven’t quite weaned myself off the teat of instant gratification. Even though it feels counterintuitive, I’ve given myself permission to go slow because in the end I’m pretty sure I’ll actually get a lot farther ahead.

I’m dividing the year up into quarterly goals. For the first quarter (Jan – Mar 2009) I’ll be focusing on generating content and drumming up traffic to the websites. I’m not really concerned about making money right now, although I won’t refuse it if I start earning some. Mostly I want to concentrate on building the sites’ reputations with good and useful content and generating buzz about them.

I realize this means that I’ll be working a job for at least another year but it will be well worth it when I can finally hand in my resignation and know that I will be just fine.

What about you? Are you working on building an online business? How are you planning on reaching the goals you have set for yourself for 2009?

I’d like to take a moment to wish all of my readers a Happy New Year. All three of you. Don’t fret. I have made it my goal, among other things, to add at least one more reader per month to this blog.

How about you? What goals will you work to achieve this year?

In case you need any help with your goal setting, here is an article that I wrote last year about How to Set Goals and Achieve Them. There is also this one, How to Break Bad Habits, that should be useful as well.

In an event that organizers hope will become a New Year’s tradition, New Yorkers and tourists were invited to bring bad memories from 2008 to Times Square on Sunday and feed them to an industrial-strength shredder.

“This is the perfect way to move on from a bad year, from a bad experience,” said Kathryn Bonn, of New York City, who shredded a printout of her boyfriend’s e-mail breaking up with her.

This is the second year the Times Square Alliance has sponsored the event which they hope will become an annual tradition. I hope it does too. In fact I hope it become a national event.

Every year we make resolutions to be better people. It is a well known fact, though, that by February many of us will have forgotten about our resolutions and another year will go by with us having failed to achieve our goal.

A lot of times our inability to move forward into the future is because we are still hanging on to things from our past. It’s like that story of the university professor who went to visit a famous Zen master. While having tea they talked about the practice of Zen. The Zen master poured tea into the professors cup and didn’t stop even when it was overflowing. Finally, the professor exclaimed, “That’s enough. No more will go in.” To which the Zen master replied, “Equally, you are like this cup of tea. How can I teach you anything more until you empty yourself?”

If you find yourself making the same New Year’s Resolutions you have made the past ten years but failed to achieve, chances are you need to take some time to empty your cup. This means taking a good look around and getting rid of the things that are holding you back. These things could be anything; People, memories and even just plain old crazy ideas.

For example, for the longest time I couldn’t settle on what I wanted to do with my life. I floated from job to job. I would research different industries. I would settle on one thing but then a few months later I would change my mind. Finally, through my journaling, I figured out what was holding me back from moving forward with my plans. I wanted to be successful in life but I was pursuing other people’s ideas of success rather than my own.

To me, success means being able to do what makes you happy. I would be perfectly content with writing fiction stories for the rest of my life even if it didn’t make me any money. But the prevailing idea these days is that success means copious amounts of wealth. So that’s what I pursued. But what I was doing didn’t make me happy and so I never put the effort in required to make lots of money from it. As a result I didn’t get any where.

So in order to move forward, I had to get rid of the idea that I had to pursue other people’s idea of success and instead define success for myself. Sure I’m taking the chance that I might end up on the street panhandling for that night’s dinner but as long as I’m able to write, I’ll be perfectly happy.

Today, take a moment to participate in the spirit of Good Riddance Day. Get rid of those things that will prevent you from moving forward to a better life in 2009. Shred it, burn it, bury it in the backyard. Do whatever it takes to free yourself from the past so you can have a successful future. Happy New Year!

In a few days another year will come to a close and new one will begin, bringing with it a new set of opportunities and challenges. As I look back over the past 33 years of my life, I see a lot of disappointment and failure. Yeah, I’ve had some success here and there but for the most part if someone were to give me a letter grade for my progress in life so far, I would get an E for Epic Failure.

*sigh*

The way I see it I have two options. I could get all Emo about this sad state of affairs, dye my hair purple and develop a nasty cutting habit OR I could actually stop whining about how bad things are and create a better life for myself. Although that whole purple hair thing sounds kind of cool, I’ve decided to go with option #2.

As such, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish in the New Year. My number one priority is that by the end of 2009 I want to be working from home. I’ve been working for other people since I was sixteen. I’m done with that insanity. Although I’ve worked for a few good companies during that time, I’ve found that the reward you get from having a job is always less than the effort you put in. And, as the current economic situation is proving, a job really does not provide any security or stability.

My second priority is to get a handle on my finances. I want to get out of debt and eventually buy a house. My problem is that I am a spender. I love to spend money. My whole philosophy about money is: ‘Why work this hard to get it if you’re not going to use it to get the things you want?’ However, often times I find myself buying things I really don’t want or even need. I just think I do. I suspect that I have some emotional baggage tied up with this bad habit so therapy sessions may be on the menu in 2009.

These two goals are really just vehicles for two success habits I want to develop in 2009 which are Focus and Self-Discipline. I realize that most of my problems come from my propensity to jump from idea to idea and, even worse, trying to multitask and work on way more ideas than I have time for. I also have this bad habit of allowing how I feel at that moment dictate what I do and that needs to stop.

Because you can’t really track the development of character traits in any tangible way, I had to put the goals in concrete terms that I could measure with charts and graphs that will show me just where I sit between Absolute Success and Epic Failure. So my specific goals for 2009 are:

1-Develop a home based business that consistently generates $577.00 per week (about $30,000 per year). When I hit this magic number then I KNOW I can quit my day job.

2- Pay off all of my debt. The only things I should have are my monthly expenses such as rent, food and utilities.

I’ve been working on goal #1 for the last year but because I lacked focus I haven’t gotten very far. But today I was able to sit down and create a plan for 2009 that I believe will help me achieve the goal. I’ll go into greater detail about it in another post. I can already tell the goal #2 is going to be the hardest of the two to achieve.

So that’s what I’ll be working on next year. What about you? What goals are you going to pursue in 2009?

I am sooooooo full. But before I keel over in a Tryptophan induced coma, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

Every year Thanksgiving gets overlooked as the retail stores rush us into the Christmas Season where we are expected to sell a few organs and buy Playstation 3s or HDTVs. Let us take a moment to truly reflect on and be thankful for all that life has given us.

I am grateful to have a great family as well as great friends and great readers. And as frustrating as it can be sometimes, I am grateful to live in a country where a person is able to achieve their dreams if they work hard and smart enough.

So now that you, too, are stuffed and fighting of a bad case of the naps, tell me what you are thankful for.

But then two things happened that snapped me out of that fantasy world that I had been living in for the past four elections; Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was added to the Republican Party ticket and the economy took a nosedive. That’s when I realized that our political leaders are anything but leaders and that the political process had deteriorated beyond all recognition.

It has become quite clear to me that we, as a nation, have fallen asleep at the wheel and as a result, we have been appropriately sideswiped. I can make a compelling case as to why we fell asleep. We are stressed out, over medicated, under educated and too busy. Most of all, we are afraid. We are afraid of losing the lives we have built for ourselves, however meager they may be.

The fact of the matter is these are really just excuses we tell ourselves to justify not being involved in the governmental process. We knew that there was something very wrong with this country but we chose to ignore it. We thought that to confront it would mean the loss of the things we hold dear. But through our inaction, we brought about the very thing we feared; the loss of our hopes and dreams. Our dream homes, our wonderful jobs, the loss of our children and spouses to war and the loss of the adventurous retirement we had been saving up for. We only have ourselves to blame.

The good thing is, dire though it may seem, it’s not too late. However we need to take action. Now. We must take back control of our government. Government officials are called public servants but they have been serving special interests for far, far too long. My favorite line in the movie V for Vendetta (A movie I highly recommend watching by the way) is when V tells the citizens of England that “People should not be afraid of their government. Government should be afraid of their people.” Meaning that control of the country should always be in the hands of the people and that government should be LISTENING to us not DICTATING to us.

This presidential election is only the start of the road that leads back to the principles this country were founded on. Congress in its entirety will need to be scrutinized and anyone who has been putting their own self-interests above the interests of the nation needs to be shown the door. We need to encourage and support the people in office (or who would run for office) who truly believe in honesty, fairness and integrity.

Eventually, this bi-party system we have will need to be replaced with something more effective and less divisive. Why is that we can go to a grocery store and select from 30 different types of cereal but when it comes to something as important as governing our country, we only have two parties to choose from? Seriously.

We owe it to ourselves, our nation and the world to demand higher standards for our leaders and ourselves. We can no longer afford to sleep walk through life. It’s time to wake up and take responsibility for our future. For as Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Do something. Vote.