I had a bad start to my week, what with “the authorities” on Monday, which got me down for a couple of days. Since then, I’ve been to see my own personal energy boost (my psychologist) and she’s given me hope that I may not be hopeless after all. Hope in a hopeless world – who sang that? Ah yes, the delicious Paul Young.

So I decided that I needed to treat the fact of unemployment as a problem needing to be solved. I put my best sales person hat on and got down to the task of selling the most important thing I’ve ever needed to sell – ME! Selling market research has given me a lot of useful stuff about how to sell, so let’s apply it to my own most precious asset.

I thought of a plan, researched my market, worked out who my “prospects” are, made a spreadsheet with 250 names and addresses of my newly formed “prospect” list. Wrote a letter, mail-merged it, printed it, then spent a whole day signing the letters and putting them in envelopes. Tomorrow (Saturday), I’m going to spend a couple of hours in the post office adding stamps before posting them. It was all a bit "creaky", especially the mail-merge bit, because (ashamed again to admit it) but I've had someone else who's done that for me for many years. Not only that, but this is the longest time I've spent in front of a PC for more than a year.

There is a “business wisdom” that a direct mail campaign (which is, in effect, what I’ve just done to sell myself) will generate about a 1% response rate so on that basis I should get 2-3 “jobs” from this mailshot. Of course, I can improve my odds with follow-up phone calls, which I will also do.

Calculating my costs (excluding the three and a half days of time and effort to set up the spreadsheet, do the letter and stuff the envelopes), three “hits” will deliver me with a “profit” equivalent to around 10 weeks of dole money so it’d be well worth it.

My fingers are crossed, as are all of the other extremities that I have that can perform this function…….watch this space for news of my latest sales campaign. Selling yourself is at least selling something you REALLY care about!