1. Keep it Simple To make your business proposals, sales letters, and promotional copy more reader-friendly, you must organize your ideas in a simple, logical format. While you don’t have to outline every point you want to make, you should spend a few minutes jotting down your ideas and planning most effective order to present them. Some people like mind maps, and others prefer lists. Whatever format, or lack thereof, you choose for your pre-writing, make sure it is effective and easy to use. Once you have your ideas down, you can start organizing them. You’ll want to open your piece by capturing your readers’ attention. Answer their question, “What is this about?” If you’re introducing prospects to a new product, then tell them. And if you’re changing a company policy, get to point right away. Focus on your readers’ perspective and avoid long narrative beginnings, otherwise you risk losing their interest. Then use middle or body of your piece to identify your main points. Depending on purpose of your piece, order your points by priority or chronologically. Finally, end your piece on a positive note.

2. Stop Thinking So Much Taking your time and planning every word won’t actually improve your writing. In fact, quickening your pace has a number of benefits, especially in first draft. First, writing fast captures your natural voice and personality in every sentence. That means your words will sound like you, which is important in making your messages effective. Speeding it up will also help alleviate your fears of making mistakes. If you continuously second guess your sentence structures, word choices, and grammar, you’ll never finish your first paragraph. And that’s what editing and revising are for anyways. That’s right. Get used to idea of a first draft. Every writer knows importance of going back over their work to eliminate errors and revise their words. And with business writing, you risk losing credibility and professionalism if you make mistakes. Essentially, if you want your readers to understand message you’ve put on paper, you must make sure you can understand it yourself. Even best, most experienced writers know that editing phase is crucial to creating decent work.

Avoiding identity theft with outdated technologies can make even most passive jobseeker cringe with fear. Technology isn’t only cause, however. Companies that once monitored employees for stealing and padding timecards are now charged with observing personal information of clients from their own employees. Add international outsourcing to mix, and we have potential mix for disaster.

What does all this have to do with your job-search? Conducting a job search using Internet has definitely transformed how jobseekers contact hiring companies. The availability of copying and pasting a text version resume into a form at a company’s website has laid foundation for an easier and more convenient process. No longer does a jobseeker need to spend hours with traditional method of printing and mailing his resume to countless recipients.

With Internet’s convenience, a breeding ground for scam artists continues to grow each year as well. Identity thefts have increased to an overwhelming 10 million cases per year, and many of them are result of phishing — not surprisingly, employment industry is under attack as well.

Phishing is an attempt to extract personal information through what appears to be authentic emails. If you are job searching, an email from a seemingly interested recruiter, for example, may not raise a red flag with you. You may think that contact person and company listed are legitimate, yet looks can be deceiving. Knowing what to look for and how to spot fraud (or potential areas for abuse) can be best deterrent to ensuring you have a safe experience while conducting your job search.

First, be leery of out-of-the-blue employment inquiries. Scammers and spammers follow same patterns. Mass emails are sent to an enormous list of recipients. Not everyone on “hit list” is searching for a new job; however, only a small number of people need to be convinced, or tricked into believing, email is authentic in order for scam to be deemed successful. Ask yourself a series of questions: Did you send your resume to this company? Visit company’s website (type web address into your browser, avoid clicking link in email); upon further examination, are they reputable? How did they hear about you? Call company if necessary. Always proceed with caution when you receive a cold-contact email from someone.