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A well written CV will increase your chances of being selected for a job interview.

In the current employment market it is imperative to create a CV that would stand out from the rest. A personal profile that would convince the employer that it will be beneficial to meet with you.

Start off your CV with basic information, including your name and your contact details. Make sure that you provide more than one method of contacting you, like mobile number and email address. This will ensure that you do not miss out on any opportunities.

In some cases depending on which industry you specialise in and also the country you reside in, you may also need to put down things like your age, gender and nationality. This is a practice that is swiftly falling out of favor, but it is still occasionally used.

Always remember that all of your information should be up to date.

Just below your contact details, write down something about your career ambitions and goals. It is recommended to keep this part of your CV down to three brief lines.

Following your career objective, write about your academic background and qualifications. Start with your most recent studies and make sure that you write down the name of the institute as well as the dates of course taken.

Work experience should be listed down, starting with the most recent or current role. Make sure that you include the title of the job you held, whether it was full time or part time and how long your employment lasted. List your duties and the responsibilities, using bullets if possible.

Finally, remember to make sure that you have contact information for your previous employers.

When you are looking to register your CV on the leading job boards and CV databases, keep in mind that they often make use of in-house software to complete their searches, based on specific key words. It is therefore imperative that you also include any skills, training, software knowledge and achievements.

The challenge of getting more clients is something that every consultant should take very seriously indeed. It would be unwise for any independent consultant to think that this is something that can be left until later.

But there can hardly be a short answer even for a starting point. Ask the internet search engine Google for “Independent Consultants” and it lists 232,000,000 websites. Both Yahoo and Alta Vista list 133,000,000 sites when asked the same question. It is inescapable that many of all these millions, if not most, will have settled for different approaches to the “how-do-I-get-my-clients?” question.

Some elements of some solutions will suit some peoples’ circumstances and intentions (and geographical location); some quite-different elements of quite-different solutions will be the right way to go for others. (But it does have to be said that many good business plans are likely to have many things in common.)

Illustrative of how things can be different will be even the basic matter of where you live - or intend to live. If you have it in mind to become a business consultant of some kind and you live in, or within easy reach of, a busy, modern, major commercial centre, it is likely that you will have a big, well-stocked river to fish in and can formulate a client-acquisition plan accordingly.

If all your experience and enthusiasm lead you towards a consultancy in office layout, and you live in a remote area of the countryside with no commercial offices in sight, then you perhaps need to adopt a very different approach. You might also consider adding ‘moving home’ to your business-plan. After all, you are perhaps looking at a completely new future for yourself and your family.

“How many clients will I need?” is another question that has to be asked. And the matter of whether you want them to be long-term, low-turn-over clients, or to have a regularly-changing turn-over of the people you work with is another.

Most experienced independent consultants, of whatever kind, will tend towards the view that you need five or six, seven or eight clients on your books at any one time, if that is possible. Then if you lose a client (for whatever reason - they can go out of business, or can have a boardroom revolution) you can hope you still will have enough fee income from “the rest” to enable you to keep paying your bills and not have sleepless nights.

So why not have 10, 15 or 20 clients? Many consultants do (coaches for example) - but basically it depends on the nature of the consultancy business in question. As the client-consultant relationship grows, it is likely that the client will ask for more work to be done and the consultant’s workload can grow as a result. Every client will expect to be treated as your number one priority and while having a full schedule of paying clients may be a nice-to-have, when it turns into a situation where your own personal bandwidth is exceeded, you could find yourself in a tight situation.

Working very long hours can be almost the least of your problems. It is likely to be a conflict of priorities that become the nightmare to resolve. Two top-tier clients wanting you to be with them over the same weekend. It does happen!

If your advertising budget is ten million dollars per month, only five hundred dollars per year, waste that money if your ads are not powerful enough. What makes the ad powerful? A good combination of creativity and content. Your ads must be sufficiently distinctive in the design and copy to attract the attention of a potential buyer (of creativity), and they need to give buyers a reason to act quickly (the content).

Countless types of media expose people to so much advertising messages everyday - some of it really subtle that people dont even know they are absorbing the hidden messages - developing advertising for your business operation is a real challenge. However, your task is not impossible - it just requires some serious thoughts and considerations, more serious than, say, Internet Marketing pop-ups or clear soda.

Consumers constantly center and see bad advertising that is unclear in its intended message, confusing in its actual content, and with poor production process. On the other hand, many types of media expose them to several truly great advertising that has memorable graphics, amazing copy delivered in a creative, concise manner, and new, fresh creative hooks.

The great news is that you do not need a huge ad budget to amend effective ads. Truly excellent advertising campaigns are crafted each day, and most of it on limited budget. Sadly, in most cases, the people doing the poor advertising are expending the most money. You do not have to create the next catchy advertising slogan, like Just grab it! to get potential consumers to use your service, buy your product, or come to your shop. You just have to show a bit more ingenuity than the other competitors and create a compelling message so consumers choose you over other competitors.

Whatever the budget, vision or hearing, you can make a good advertising campaign. You must listen and understand as much as possible about your market segment - that is marketing speak for people like you most want to attract customers. You must also understand their competitors - particularly advertising - which can effectively differentiate their own. You need to find creative hooks and how to integrate their advertising messages, whether to make commercials, Internet banners, radio spots and outdoor ads, or ads in magazines or newspapers.

Also do not forget the incredible options that offer Internet marketing, Internet marketing can offer your company and its advertising strategy for a new age, it is cheaper, faster and more effective in ‘results orientation.