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How valuable are words?

It seems that Google has brought back the magic of words. Why? Because they can be indexed and used in search results.

Can you index an image or a video? You can, but you need to index them using words.

You can find almost anything on Google but you need to use words to do it. When you click on a paid Google Adwords advertisement its usually due to the words the advertiser used to catch your attention. If you want to improve your Google organic search ranking you need to use the right “key”words on your website, they call that Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO).

Keywords, SEO, marketing, Google Adwords, resumes

Can someone in the Phillipines, India or Eastern Europe Write Like You?

You might be aware of the value of words these days because you need this skill to be effective in marketing your business online. The role of the copywriter is often undervalued because you can now hire someone in the Phillipines, India or Eastern Europe to write the content of your website or blog for a couple dollars per hour, but would you? After testing out individuals, copy-writing services and other international contracting companies we realise that the quality of the words we use and the ability to relate to other Australians is something only another Australian can truly do effectively. With all the talk about workers in developing countries taking jobs away from Australian workers, we realise that it’s their knowledge of Australian lingo, Australian tastes and Australian attitudes that makes their writing style truly Australian – and that makes it valuable to other Australians.

Work at Home

There is a way of getting good quality words for your website or blog for a reasonable price and that is by using a Virtual Assistant (sometimes called a remote worker, home worker or a remote contractor). There are some great writers out there who choose to work from home and if you use the services of an organisation like Virtually Yours you’ll find top quality writers and remote contractors with many other skills that are part of an organisation designed to find good virtual assistants and promote them as well as provide them with tools to be effective small business owners.

While we are on the topic I want to share the success of Terry from Ramancorp. He operates a small wholesale business supplying a range of framing, hanging, display and packaging materials and he lists them all on his website. Because he has gone to the trouble of providing as much information as possible he uses some very niche words that attract customer looking for the exact product they need. As a result Terry is getting a good amount of NEW customers EVERY month without having to pay a cent in Google Adwords advertising.

Words are Valuable in Resumes, Website and LinkedIn

Words are just as valuable in your resume so the next time you think about what kind of job you are looking for, think about the words that the advertiser might use to attract the right candidate and make sure your resume has these words in it.

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Work at home managing customer’s WordPress websites? Introducing the WordPress Online Training Course!

WordPress is used as a Content Management System (CMS) for millions of small business websites around the world. WordPress is like the Microsoft Word for Websites and we have a course that will teach you how to use it as a blogger, article and news writer all the way up to a WordPress administrator. In fact at the end of this course you will learn enough to get your own website up and running as well as help others create and maintain their own website.

The best part of this course is that it entitles you to the EzyLearn LIFETIME membership feature, so when we update it with new content about marketing your website you can access the new information for no extra cost. For more information and to enrol, visit our WordPress course website.

What’s included in our WordPress Online Course (you can click these links if you are an existing student):

WordPress Pages and Posts

Administration Privileges and Settings

With Administrator priveleges you are now able to affect global aspects of your websites appearance. You can also arrange the website layout and user access permission.

Design options and Themes

Background colours, and header images are just the beginning. Learn to install free and premium themes and then customise them using widgets, plugins, custom menus and RSS newsfeeds

Website Hosting Control Panel – email

Your website hosting control panel provides you with stats about your website usage, but most importantly your email and other applications. Learn how to manage your email accounts and email access.

Blogs, Posts and RSS Feeds

We have all the training videos and they will be uploaded shortly (no extra cost for you to access). Syndication gives you the power to be many places at once. When you write a blog that article can be made to appear in your readers inbox, on other websites and of course at your blog.

Google have a range of tools to help you gain exposure on the world wide web and one of these tools is called Feedburner. This tool will enable you to have your own email list subscribers attached to your blog.

Can I make my own site?

Yes. We’ve thought of that too. When you enrol for the Online WordPress course, choose the option that provides you with a student website hosting account.

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Selling horse feed in the internet age

We’re in the internet age whether we like it or not. Our internet connection is as valuable to us now as our power supply and our telecommunications and it’s important to have a website if you are in business. In this post I want to introduce you to a small operation in King Island in Tasmania. A company that sells Kelp is learning how to play the internet game and best of all you can learn with them.

Kelli has a WordPress website hosted with 123ezy and we are building our WordPress and Webmaster Course around her growing internet presence. To start with we have created some elementary training videos about the navigation around the WordPress themes and what different parts of the website are called. We’re learning about themes, header images, menus and widget just to get started. As we progress we’ll be talking about Pages vs Posts, tags and categories, working with images, Search Engine Optimisation and much more.

We’ve included our Introduction to WordPress video below so if you are reading this on your phone, click on the heading to get to our Blog page where you can watch the full video.

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What does a webmaster look like? Could you be one?

Learn how to use Wordpress and social media training course

Learn how to use WordPress and social media training courseIf you mentioned the word Webmaster 5 years ago you would imagine someone slightly geeky, who drinks cola, has thick rimmed glasses and talks incessantly about the latest technology and gadgets. Things have changed. The technology used to create websites was the domain of nerds who enjoyed writing code and getting dirty with technology using programs like FrontPage, DreamWeaver, Flash etc, but now it’s the domain of staff members, marketing people and remote contractors (Virtual Assistants who work from home). Why has it changed?

The most significant aspects of website design are:

  • The template (or theme) that’s used including colour scheme, branding and navigation
  • The  images and copy (text) used to fill the site
  • Promoting and marketing the website

Modern day Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla and even older ones like Drupal make everything much easier and here’s why:

  • Thousands of designers create templates that you can purchase for $20 to $300
  • Once a template or theme is designed and setup the content management is the same (just like using Microsoft Word)
  • Writing articles, creating extra pages and adding to your navigation becomes as easy as selecting a check box and picking a category.

So is it really something that you could do?

wordpress themes included in Webmaster course
wordpress themes included in Webmaster course

Have you heard about WordPress, Google, Facebook and Twitter? Can you use your computer to access your email, do internet banking and accessing other online services? Have you heard about or used PayPal? If you have, then you are at least familiar with some of the tools used by a modern webmaster. Combining these new online marketing tools and WordPress CMS driven websites you can get busy and start creating.

The Internet, smart phones, cloud computing and VoIP are making the world a smaller place and allows people to work from home but still remain digitally connected. There has been a significant shift towards remote contracting (virtual assistants) and the concept of mums working from home is now commonplace.

If you want to come on the Webmaster journey with EzyLearn we have the WordPress course. It’s a step-by-step system of setting up, creating content and images, building the contents and then promoting your own business using all the tools we’ve mentioned in this blog post. Best of all you’ll have an internet guru educating and coaching you each step of the way until your website is complete so not only will you have your own website and tools to promote it, but you’ll have the skills to promote yourself to other businesses and help them with their website management.

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Recommend us for a reward

These days you can promote the fact you like something very quickly and easily. Twitter and Facebook accounts are free and almost everyone knows how to use them. Established blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger are also easy and free to setup but there are even simpler microblogging platforms like Posterous.

What’s so good about all this new technology that is available? It means you can sign up for affiliate accounts and start earning money from referring good quality website to people you know or are connected to. Here’s a link to a post we wrote earlier this year which explains a bit about how affiliate marketing works.

We are trialling a new affiliate service for our online MYOB course and the reward is $25 for a successful sale from your recommendation. Don’t worry the affiliate management system keeps track of your referrals. Here’s a link to the affiliate website.

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Google saves you 2-5 seconds with Instant Search

The innovator in searching through millions of web pages to find the most relevant yesterday introduced Google Instant, a way of providing you with results before you’ve even finished typing. In other words Google has a pretty good idea what most people want to find when they start typing and reveals the results as you type. Great for slow typers this new feature will give you relevant results right there on your screen.

We are pretty proud of our search engine placement for online MYOB course so please feel free to do a search using the new Google Instant and see our website appear on the first page of search results.

I tried using the search and it was fascinating watching the search results change so quickly. When I tried it a second time it just worked like the normal Search results. Go and visit the Google Instant Search page or read Google’s announcement on their blog to learn more.

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The right heading can bring people to you

The right heading on a flyer or a document will let you know immediately if that information on that page is “relevant” to you. It’s no different with a website. When you do a search in Google you decide in second which of the search results to go to depending on what they write in their title and description. Click the link in this blog post title to watch our video on Search Engine Optimisation.

EzyLearn offers the 123ezy website builder as part of a website hosting package and it makes it so simple to add (and change) words to the heading and description of each page within your website. Visit the 123ezy website for more information or take a look at a website that he been created using the SiteBuilder to see how it works.

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Three MYOB courses for $29 per month for 4 months

Full access to myobcourse.com.au for 12 months is now available at the reduced price of $116 (paid off over 4 months). This is made possible by the new Installment Payment feature available on PayPal and you don’t need to have a PayPal account, you can use your credit card (even though PayPal make this process a little confusing to find).

The pricing has changed because we realised that not everyone wants a certificate at the end of their course, they simply want the skills on how to use MYOB on a day to day basis. Rather than simply give every attendee of the MYOB course a certificate just because they paid their enrolment fee EzyLearn students perform a bank reconciliation (and all the entries to make that possible) and email their datafile for assessment. This process of handling the datafile is time consuming and requires an experienced user to assess whether the tasks were performed correctly.

Our new pricing and installment plan is designed to make our course more accessible to a wider range of potential students who might not have the means to pay for it all up front. Visit the website www.myobcourse.com.au/elearning and look for the enrolment links at the right side of the website.

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Using Google Adwords – Step 1 – choose a budget

The Google Adwords market is constantly changing depending on who is bidding for the keywords you want, how they are bidding and how much they have to spend. Keeping this in mind you will have to make some simple decisions before you can get started.

I sat down with a business owner today and she wanted to bid for every keyword she could think of, everything relating to her field of business, but the problem with that is that you are then competing with everyone else for a whole lot of words. We ended up choosing fewer words and decided to spend more to get people to our website using those keywords. If website visitors who come to your website from a Google Adwords advertisement and stay and explore your site Google will recognise your site as a good result for its searches and this will end up elevating your position in the “relevancy based” search results. That should be a significant goal, but I am now just digressing.

So, the business owner agreed that she was going to spend $1200 per month. The next step is to figure out which services she is going to promote and she gave me a list of 15 different services,which we then categorised into 4 main categories… Phew. We then looked at the relative weighting for each category of her business to decide how much they will receive of the $1200 per month and it came to a relatively simple 25% split each or $300 each category (division) per month. These were good figures because that comes down to $10 per day and that is how you can limit the amount of money you spend on Google Adwords…. by setting a daily limit.

The next step is a little more time consuming and involves choosing the right keywords and keyphrases to use for each category of the business. Once you’ve discovered this you choose how much you are willing to pay per click… hence the term Pay-Per-Click (or PPC) advertising (adwords.google.com). You may not get this part right the first time, but you will soon realise that you can pay for anything from 9c to over $20 per click to be on the first page. The more generic and popular the keyword the higher the price, the more words you combine together (keyphrase) the fewer people will be promoting it so the price will be lower. I’ll cover this in another blog post.

UPDATE:

Learn about alternatives like using relevant keywords in a blog for your business to make your website more valuable and ensure it becomes a trusted resource for customers.

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We’ll notify you when we create a new training video?

I’ve had a Feedburner account (part of Google) for a year and never really understood the benefit of it until now. When you set feedburner up you tell it the RSS feed address of your blog and it keep track of every new feed that you create (or article that I write). That is all good and well and FeedBurner has been working hard to keep track of all the articles and sales texts I have been writing but it never really did anything, until now.

You might notice a little “subscribe now” box at the bottom of every post? If you enter your email address, you’ll receive an email which contains the details of each new post that I write from this website. It is a great way to keep informed through your email about what is going on at EzyLearn. Now is especially a good time to subscribe because I am scheduled to start creating our Excel 2007 and MYOB Payroll training videos for our online courses very soon. I plan to upload each video to this site so that I can get your comments and feedback about the contents and exercises to learn the new skills.

Subscribe now and you’ll be kept in the loop. You might also want to follow us on twitter, this post is automatically added to Twitter as well 🙂

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Email Marketing made simple

Content Marketing for good local real estate agents

EzyLearn has just implemented an incredibly simple email marketing solution for it’s clients. This solution allows you to only pay for the emails that you send, while providing a professional subscription service and html templates for your mailouts.

This solution is part of the 123ezy suite of website services and it makes the whole internet marketing, social media and keeping in touch with clients much easier. Best of all you can measure the success of your campaigns.

The cost is only $49 to setup and then 2 cents per email you send. If you prepay for your emails it comes down to even less.

Interested businesses should contact support@123ezy.com, call Steve Slisar on 0413 007 481 or order your newsletter online.

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New online training course videos due shortly

I’ve just setup our Youtube channel and uploaded some existing videos so they are available for the world to see. My next goal is to create a blog post and link that blog post to the youtube video. This is the first attempt, wish me luck…

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Fantastic WordPress website template themes

You can download free WordPress templates, you can design them yourself using Artisteer or you can download them for $50-$150 each. I found someone who creates them, offers support and allows you to use any of the theme templates he has created for $19.95 per year. Even if you just use it to purchase one template you like, the offer made by this company is the way that dedicated and committed businesses should be working.

I started out just using free templates because I didn’t know what I was looking for and I didn’t know how to use WordPress properly, plus, I was using a different sitebuilder for most of my websites anyway. Then I looked at some of the professional WordPress templates available and didn’t like the idea of paying $75 for an excellent theme from Press75 because I figured I may not like it in 6 months, OR I wouldn’t be able to get all the features working properly. Instead I purchased Artisteer because I realised I could take any template and customise it completely! I was in complete control. In reality, I then spent a lot of time using Artisteer and realised that I didn’t want to design many of my own prefessional templates, I simply wanted to find one that was created by a professional and customise it for my own websites.

I had to find a business that creates professional looking WordPress template themes, would allow me to use a variety of themes they had created and all at a price that was impossible to refuse. I found Elegant Themes by Nick Roach and I’m amazed at how easy he has made it to use any of his themes and how little he charges. Visit his website to see the WordPress themes available: http://bit.ly/aCLCsg

Follow this blog to find out how I went to install and start using the features of the eVid theme…

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Getting social with your website

Social media seems to be on everyone’s lips today, especially if you work in the area of websites and internet marketing. The biggest names on the Internet at the moment: Google, Twitter and Facebook area all into it, but what does it mean for your business and it’s website?

I’ve just had the pleasure of spending several hours on a Sunday learning about TwitterFeed, an application that allows you to connect your blog (that’s what you are currently reading) to Twitter and Facebook accounts (and Pages for Facebook). This article is a test to see if it works. If it does, then a new tweet will be created at any nominated Twitter accounts and also on any nominated Facebook Pages.

If it does work the greatest benefit is that you don’t need to create all the Wall comments (facebook) and Tweets manually because TwitterFeed will do it. All you need to do is write the article.

8 hours later… Yep, it worked. A tweet at www.twitter.com/ezylearn was created with a link to the article and a post in our Facebook Page was also created. What does it mean? Simply that when you write and publish your blog post, announcements are automatically made on any Twitter profiles and Facebook pages you manage.

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Writing a blog post from your phone

You can truly understand the power of communications today when you can create a blog article from a cafe using your iPhone, wordpress and website design and have that article and related links appear on numerous websites.

We’ve just setup a new phone system using linksys (Cisco) phones and voip business telephone system which means we now use our broadband connection to make calls and can transfer calls no matter where we are, but better than that we pay $14.95 per month for a line and no longer receive TELSTRA bills. That’s a good feeling.

There is a cost for new ip handsets and some configuration to do, but Simon from yourITSupport does all of that effortlessly.

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New MYOB training video “email default preferences”

myob training course

Emailing invoices is commonplace today and the benefits are numerous: The arrive quicker, recipients can print them if they choose to or save them as a file and there is more certainty that they get delivered and not “lost in the mail” http://bit.ly/a6aDTG

You may be aware that the ability to email invoices from MYOB has been available for years and what an empowering experience that was, the first time we did it at EzyLearn. You may also know that there are default email subjects and messages for the quotes, orders, purchases and sales invoices that you create and send to your clients. We’ve created a new video to show you how to change and manage these default email message preferences.

The great feature about default messages is that they make your business look professional and show consistency while providing important information to your customers with each invoice.

We’ve included this video as part of our Day to Day course and it is available for no extra charge for existing students who’ve enrolled within the last 12 months.

Check it out. You can follow the link below (then use your student account login details to gain access to it), or browse through the contents of the Day to Day course and locate video number 502307!

Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/9kKK0B

Enjoy