Encourage Referrals by "Sticking Around"

Encourage referrals and repeat business by making your business card a permanent fixture. You can purchase magnetic backs for business cards as well as Rolodex® tabs that adhere to the bottom of your business card. Look for both products at your local office superstore (Office Max, Staples, Office Depot).

Mail clients a magnetic-backed business card with your thank-you note after their final appointment -- or send it with their documents.

VistaPrint offers excellent, inexpensive business card printing -- including custom magnetic business cards (in quantities in as little as 10 pieces!). Use the link provided, or click on the VistaPrint ad on this blog. (VistaPrint is one of our affiliate partners, and we receive a commission on orders received through our link. Your purchases help support this blog and our bimonthly newsletter! Thanks!)

New Affiliate Program: LiveJobCoach.com Webinars

If you're a resume writer who doesn't offer job search coaching, you may be interested in the webinar series offered by Stewart, Cooper & Coon, Inc., through their LiveJobCoach.com website.

Fred Coon, LEA, JCTC, CRW, says that the company is offering a 20% referral fee to any resume writer who sends clients to LiveJobCoach.com who purchases one of the three Webinar Series programs. Call Fred at 602-385-3000 x 200 for details.

Teleseminar with "Best Branding Expert on the Planet"

Branding is a huge topic -- not just for resume writers who are looking for more business, but for our clients, who are trying to differentiate themselves from their competition and land the interview.

Kathy Sweeney, of Resume Writers Resource, has lined up a world-renowned branding expert, Rob Frankel, to present a teleseminar at 3 p.m. EST today, "The 10 Worst Mistakes That Are Killing Your Brand."

• Identify the 10 most common mistakes you're committing right now, which result in killing your brand on a daily basis.
• Discover 10 solutions to correct the situation, which will allow you to fix the problem immediately.
• Answer your questions on specific branding problems with your own company.

Frankel is author of the book, "The Revenge of Brand X: How to Build a Big Time Brand -- On the Web or Anywhere Else," and CEO of Frankel & Anderson. He has been featured on NBC Nightly News, ABC-TV, CNBC, FOX News, and National Public Radio. He has also been featured in numerous print publications, including Newsweek, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times.

The 90-minute teleseminar is just $25. To sign up for this teleseminar and/or check out the Resume Writers Resource course offerings, click here. Even if you're not able to attend the live session, you can still pre-register and receive the audio recording and materials after the session concludes.

Writing Resume Updates

Another resume writer and I got to talking about resume updates yesterday. She mentioned that there was a thread on the NRWA E-List about some resume writers not wanting to do updates for clients, preferring instead to focus on developing resumes from scratch. Since I'm very behind on my e-mails, I don't know if the thread she's referring to is a recent one or not, but I've seen this discussion online before.

There are certain resume writers out there that just don't do updates for the resumes they write. I can certainly understand. Updates can be a pain in the butt. They don't pay as well as new projects, and a lot of times -- especially for older projects -- you can spend more time revising what you did the first time around than simply adding in a new position or two (perhaps that's the perfectionist in me).

But providing resume updates as a service can pay off -- even if it's not from the money you make on the update itself. I find that I get the most referrals from clients who come back from updates. I've had two examples of that just this week.

Most service providers consider the "lifetime value" of a customer when deciding how much to spend on marketing their services. If you only work with a client one time over his/her lifetime, you're missing out. I have a few clients that I've worked with for over 10 years ... some of whom have referred more than a dozen other clients. I'm going to be doing an update/retarget for one of them later this week in fact.

I've had several posts in the past about "retention marketing" -- that is, keep-in-touch marketing designed to spur repeat business from existing clients. If things are slow for you right now with new clients, now would be a great time to reach out to your client base and see if there's interest in updating their resume. I'm putting an e-mail script into the May/June 2008 issue of the Resume Writers' Digest newsletter that will help you do just that.