Category: Services

Services provided by EzyLearn

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We Can Help You Deliver Your Company Training Material ONLINE

Now that’s going to be nasty … is your business complying with current WHS regulations?

When we moved our training materials online, we developed our own learning management system, a software application that administers our MYOB training course, small business management course and all of our other online training courses.

Deliver Your Company Training Material Online – Work Health and Safety

But an opportunity exists for small to medium-sized businesses to deliver their company training material online, using EzyLearn’s learning management system — this is particularly useful for work health and safety (WHS) training.

Now that Australia’s WHS laws have changed, there’s a renewed push for businesses to be vigilant when it comes to workplace safety. Harsher punishments for business owners found to be in breach of the WHS Act 2011 now includes fines of up to $3 million per organisation and $600,000 or 5 years imprisonment per person, per breach.

The changes follow a rash of litigation across the country, where companies have been prosecuted for not ensuring that contractors and sub-contractors working on their premises have been made aware of all the potential risks and hazards associated with carrying out work on their premises.

Under the Act, a business owner can be prosecuted based on what they can be reasonably expected to know in relation to work health and safety risks. This means that, if a contractor carrying out welding on the premises of a business is injured, the business owner can be prosecuted because it is reasonable to expect the business owner to know that carrying out welding near flammable gases is hazardous.

Contractor and Sub-Contractor Liability

The move to include contractors and sub-contractors carrying out work for, or on behalf of, a business is one of the key changes to the WHS Act 2011, which was introduced in January 2012, and replaces the previous OH&S Act 1991. This presents a number of potential areas of risk for business owners who retain the services of contractors, and even remote, home-based workers.

In a landmark ruling in 2011, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Queensland awarded a Telstra employee legal and medical costs after she slipped and fell down the stairs twice while working from her Brisbane home.

The tribunal’s ruling has effectively extended the employer’s liability beyond what they traditionally thought was reasonable, to include the unknowns of an employee’s home. As such, for small business owners employing or retaining the services of home-based workers, making certain you have the correct WHS procedures and training in place should be a priority.

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Using EzyLearn’s learning management system to deliver your company’s WHS training materials allows your staff, contractors or remote workers to access the content regardless of where they’re based, so you have peace of mind in knowing that they’ve been made properly aware of any risks or hazards relating to their work — and their workplace.

If you would like to know more about how EzyLearn’s learning management system works, contact us.

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Now YOU Can Start Your Own Online Training Business

If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB training courses to your clients could be the perfect complement to your business.
If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB training courses to your clients could be the perfect complement to your business.

We’ve mentioned before how we offer enrolment vouchers for our MYOB training courses, which we sell to training organisations and accountants. The idea is that accountants and other trainers can give their customers additional training without having to having to provide the materials and content themselves.

Are you a Bookkeeper? What about Becoming an Online Trainer Too?

But this also presents the opportunity for existing bookkeepers to extend their businesses into the area of online training. We’re looking to partner with existing bookkeepers who would like to provide online MYOB training courses, for which we’d provide the website, tailored to your business needs.

For bookkeepers, this allows you to extend your business beyond just bookkeeping, and use your knowledge and skills to train others in MYOB without having to provide the course content or the necessary infrastructure to facilitate an online training course to your students.

For EzyLearn, it gives us the opportunity to extend our reach and capture a larger pool of students we may not have previously been able to reach. It also fulfils our goal of helping bookkeepers start their own businesses and take control of their careers.

How Does It Work?

Sound interesting? This is how it would work: you register your interest in working with us, and we would have a conversation about your business goals. If both parties are happy to move forward, we’d provide you with a website, tailored to your needs, and sell you the initial stock — vouchers for EzyLearn’s famous MYOB training course, which you would then sell onto your clients.

The end result is a partnership where we provide the materials and infrastructure to operate a training business. What you do after that is entirely up to you. For instance, you might decide to bundle our online training course with one-on-one training, for which you’d charge extra for your time. The possibilities are endless!

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If you’re interested, please let us know what type of online training partnership you want so we can have a discussion about your goals and what’s on offer.

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Feel Threatened by a Newcomer in Your Workplace? Gain Knowledge, Instead!

The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.
The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.

As part of our MYOB Training Course, we’re constantly adding new content and helping our students win work and improve their employability. That’s why we always emphasise the importance of continuing to educate yourself — for the obvious skills advantages you bring to any company, but also for your own confidence.

For many people, it can be a little nerve racking when new blood enters the workplace and in today’s job market, it’s not at all uncommon to see a new face appear. Sometimes it’s in the form of a new employee there to share your workload and other times it’s because your organisation has employed someone to help restructure the business so they operate more efficiently.

The Many and Varied Threat

For many employees, this new face around the office can make them feel threatened — threatened about the future of their jobs and threatened by the prospect of the office dynamic changing. Fortunately, however, there’s an antidote for this rather common reaction to change: taking a course or continuing professional development.

The thing about feeling threatened is that it’s entirely to do with your confidence. You may feel like you’re not quite as educated or as skilled as this other person and as a result, you think your employer won’t need you any more. The truth is, your employer probably has no intention of letting you go, but nevertheless, the job market is changing and up-skilling to increase your knowledge base is invaluable — to you and your employer.

Confidence in Upskilling and Continuing Professional Development

Aside from the tangible knowledge and experience a highly-skilled employee brings to an organisation, they also bring with them confidence. The more secure you feel with your ability to do your job and do it well, the more confident you’ll feel as a result. For this reason, EzyLearn is a big believer in continuing professional development.

Our MYOB, and Microsoft Word and Excel training courses each come with lifetime access to the course content, so that you can review the course material and even access updated content, whenever you need it.

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A truly confident person would embrace the idea of working with someone new and potentially learning and sharing knowledge, rather than feeling threatened by them. But the key to achieving this confidence is being able to feel secure in your own knowledge base and that’s what EzyLearn’s Continuing Professional Development Program aims to provide bookkeepers with: knowledge.

So stop worrying, stop feeling threatened, and feel more confident in your skills and knowledge by taking one of our online courses today!

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Internet Marketing Scholarships Available for Mums in Chatswood

Digital Business Course - Google marketingPerhaps you’re a mum who’s available during school hours and want to start your own business? We might have the opportunity for you. Due to the success of our MYOB training courses and with requests from our students we are developing the Digital Business Course in conjunction with the Australian Small Business Centre.

[quote]We’re looking for talented mumpreneurs who want to learn some new skills while working with a live online training business.[/quote]

With the Small Business Management Course on our Learning System we’re keen to help mums create a business plan for their own business from our office right here in Chatswood. If you’re a reader from another part of Australia (or the world for that matter) you can still learn about our developments at this blog and at the Small Business Centre blog.

Michelle provides support for MYOB course students
Michelle provides support for our MYOB training course students

Michelle recently started on our training support team and we are looking for mums to help us with the development of the Digital Business Course and we are looking for mums who have excellent skills or motivation in:

  • Graphic Design
  • Business and Blog Writing
  • Website Design using WordPress
  • Social media
  • Online and Telephone based support
  • Bookkeeping
  • Marketing and Advertising
  • Google Online Marketing

If you would like to join us on a journey of learning and growth please enter your details at this form: http://www.australiansmallbusiness.com.au/services/business-service-provider/ (make sure you mention the EzyLearn blog post and we’ll receive all your information).

You’ll be interested to know that our Digital Business Course is designed around helping a printing business in Artarmon get a professional website using WordPress, but more importantly students will learn about:

  • Integrating social media,
  • Creating and optimising a blog (just like this one!),
  • Using YouTube
  • Using Google Analytics to measure your results
  • Getting the most from Google Adwords
  • Learn about Google authorship
  • Google Local Marketing

Students will also learn about a host of other Google services available to help businesses become more visible to their potential customers and step into the new age of online marketing. Students will learn about how to make a business “relevant” in Google searches.

The other aspect of our Digital Business Course is we want to educate mums how to perform the tasks that many businesses need to become visible online. In the same way that learning MYOB enables mums to work flexible hours from their own home, the Digital Business Course will provide an excellent structure to enable mums to work flexible hours while helping businesses get into the digital age.

Enter your details at this website for an opportunity to win a scholarship:  http://www.australiansmallbusiness.com.au/services/business-service-provider/

 

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Why Join the MYOB Job Seekers Student Community?

Mums study group for MYOB job seekersI recently welcomed Michelle, our newest team member who completed our MYOB training course and whom we found by writing a blog post as opposed to spending lots of money on Seek with no success at all.

[quote]I’m not stressing too much how bad our Seek experience was am I?[/quote]

Moving on, I want to share with you what we discovered are the reasons that students join a study community and more specifically a Study group for specialised programs like MYOB. The reasons are very similar to why some people prefer to do an trainer-led (or class-based) course at places like TAFE.

It’s important to remember the goal for the course and joining a study group and that is to find an MYOB job.

Here are the reasons:

Tips and Tricks using MYOB

You may be studying the same course content as other students, but you will interpret some things differently to others just based on your life and work experiences.

Help with your MYOB course

Just because you’re studying online and there is not a teacher standing at the front of the classroom, help and support is available.

Request more MYOB training

We understand that it can be hard to stay up-to-date with market demands—and costly, too. Software vendors are always changing their products, technologies are changing, and then there is the advent of new ones. But as an employee the more you know about changes to software and new technologies, the more valuable you are to an employer.

Get Inspiration from other MYOB students and our Tutors

At some point in our careers, we’ve all needed some form of mentorship or guidance to inspire us to keep going, to reach our goals and our dreams.

Get Recognition in front of their peers

An award ceremony—where you’re presented with your MYOB certificate is a significant and important part of the learning experience.

Find a Study Buddy

Don’t go it alone, get a study buddy. It make the learning experience much more social and human.

Compare yourself

We all do it at some point or another: we size each other up to see how we’re fairing by comparison.

Read more about our Revamped Student Community and come along and join us.

 

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Admin Assistant position filled and new MYOB job at Chatswood

Michelle provides support for MYOB course students
Michelle provides support for our MYOB training course students

Did you remember receiving that blog post about us looking for a person to work with us doing office admin in Chatswood? Michelle, one of our MYOB course students, completed her Business Service Provider profile and fit the bill so we brought her in for interviewing.

You might recall that we wrote about an MYOB course student who also created a website for her fathers business? It was Michelle!

Michelle is a hard working mother of two teenage children and she has worked hard to learn new skills, while managing her fathers business, building it’s website and lots of other great things.

Michelle is now part of our team and she’s learning a lot of new things about how we operate our business, how we promote ourselves online and also how we use online marketing tools like Google. Most importantly I’m introducing her because she’s available to help current students get through their course as part of our Student Community and Tutor Support program to helps them in their journey to find MYOB jobs.

But more than MYOB, Michelle is currently completing her Cert IV in Small Business Management with the aim of being able to help people start their own business or manage their existing business better.

Welcome aboard Michelle 🙂

We’re revamping our Student Community and Tutor Support service to specifically focus on skills to help students find MYOB jobs and learn small business management skills and Michelle will be available to help students.

MYOB jobs in Chatswood and Gold Coast.

I was so impressed with the result of our search that I’m reaching out again. We are looking for another admin assistant at our Chatswood office and also in the Gold Coast area so if you live in these areas make sure you complete the Business Service Provider and tell us a bit about yourself. We prefer to work with students who have completed our course and understand how we operate our business so you get the first chance!

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What’s New in MS Office 2013? Here’s a Quick List

Frequent updates and infrequent use of software like Excel can really leave you stumped - that's where Lifetime Membership comes in real handy!
Frequent updates and infrequent use of software like Excel can really leave you stumped – that’s where Lifetime Membership comes in real handy!

At EzyLearn we offer online training courses for MYOB — the #1 Cloud-accounting software — but did you know we also offer training in Microsoft Excel and Word?

Just as we do with our MYOB training courses, we also offer Lifetime access to our MS Excel and Word training courses, which means each time Microsoft releases a new version of MS Office, we update our course content so you’re always totally up to date with the latest versions of Word and Excel.

Keeping Excel in Your Memory

Let’s be straight up here; once you get the hang of Word you probably won’t need to refer back to our course content all that much. Excel, on the other hand, is a different ball game.

In many ways Excel is a lot like algebra or a foreign language: if you don’t use it often, you’ll forget it. Sure, you’ll remember bits — J’adore Dior! E = mc2! — but you’re likely to struggle through your day-to-day if it’s something you rely on heavily at work.

Because many people use accounting software like MYOB, their use of Excel is fairly infrequent. For instance, suddenly trying to create a PivotTable will probably leave most of us stumped! And let’s not forget that by the time most users have mastered how to create macros in their worksheets, Microsoft will have released a new version of MS Office and we’ll be back to square one again. This, in large part, is a key reason why we offer Lifetime access to our training courses— because we, just like you, also forget stuff.

New Features in New MS Word and Excel (in a Nutshell)

Now that Microsoft has released their highly anticipated MS Office 2013, it’s likely you won’t be able to find the ‘Paste Special’ button again, so we’re updating our course content to reflect the new changes.

Here’s a low-down on some of the new features in the new MS Word and Excel:

Word:

  • Open and edit PDF files in Word – finally! Gone are the days of having an additional piece of software installed on your PC to enable this.
  • Threaded review comments
  • Read mode with page turning
  • Alignment guides – hallelujah! Why have they never had this before!
  • Placeholder

Excel:

  • Quick analysis
  • Flash fill – we’ve always had this to an extent, but flash fill just got a whole lot more intelligent!
  • PowerView – for the real Excel pro, but still a welcome addition.
  • New PivotTable tools
  • Improved functionality when opening new Excel windows
  • Recommended PivotTables and charts
  • New chart controls
  • Get a link
  • Publish Excel data to social media – we don’t recommend using this often, because snore. But it’s still great if you want to quickly share your yoy sales results with your Twitter followers or Facebook friends.

So whether you’re using MS Office 2013, 2010 or prior, if you’ve forgotten how to do a VLOOKUP, it’s time you educated yourself in the mystery that is Excel — enrol in one of our Microsoft training courses today!

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ATO Tax Refunds – Get Your Tax Return in Early

Lodge your tax return early and you're bound to get a quick refund.
Lodge your tax return early and you’re bound to get a quick refund.

We’re always updating our course content to ensure our MYOB course reflect the market demands of bookkeepers in an ever-changing industry, and if you’re one of our MYOB lifetime students you have access to this content any time, every time.

And we use this blog to keep you up-to-date with industry news — like this news just in from the ATO:

A total of 1.7 million returns were received by the ATO between 1 July and 23 July 2013, and already refunds have been issued for some 40 percent of those returns—a whopping $1.68 billion refunded in less than 30 days. Continue reading ATO Tax Refunds – Get Your Tax Return in Early

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Be Happy: Start a Business and Work From Home

You may find that one of the key benefits of starting your own business is that your work actually makes you much happier.
You may find that one of the key benefits of starting your own business is that your work actually makes you much happier.

Are you toying with the idea of starting a virtual or home-based business? Well EzyLearn is your one-stop training-shop for everything you need to start a business — all via our Small Business Management training course, MYOB training courses, WordPress training courses and MS Office training courses.

But what are the real benefits of working from home? Continue reading Be Happy: Start a Business and Work From Home

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Payroll Advice: The Role of the Payroll Professional

There's a lot of aspects to payroll.
Sometimes the importance of payroll is underestimated.

When the national minimum wage increased this month, it got us thinking about the role the payroll professional plays in a business. Payroll is an important and often complex aspect of every business — and a topic we cover in our MYOB training course — but it’s often the most underestimated. So we decided to take a deeper look at the role of the payroll professional.

Payroll: There’s Quite a Lot to It

Even though payroll sounds easy enough — you just pay people their wages, right? — it’s actually not as simple as it sounds. As a payroll professional, you’re entirely responsible for understanding and interpreting the ever-changing regulations and legislation relating to payroll; as well as managing the demands of both the employer and employee.

And as such, payroll is not a simple task for the uninitiated; it requires a person with solid knowledge of PAYG and superannuation, as well as an understanding of Australian tax.

For instance, how do you ensure you’re making the correct contributions to an employee’s HECS or HELP debt? Or make sure super contributions are made correctly (and to the correct fund)? Are you certain your employees are being paid according to the correct modern award? Getting these things wrong is not just time-consuming to rectify, but can also incur fines to your company!

In a recent new book by Tracey Angwin called The Payroll Revolution (which has gone on to become an Australian best seller) Angwin discusses the responsibility of the payroll professional and offers practical and guided tips on Australian payroll.

Just some of the skills that Angwin suggests the payroll professional should possess are:

  • Strong people skills
  • AIS/payroll software experience (such as MYOB)
  • General email, word and excel skills
  • Strong understanding of superannuation and PAYG
  • Good knowledge of the Fairwork Act
  • Ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines
  • Strong mathematical skills
  • Strong problem solving skills.

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We cover the technical side of payroll in our MYOB training course; the Australian Payroll Association website can also give you more information on payroll practices. We also highly recommend The Payroll Revolution.

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Tax and BAS: How to Register with the Tax Practitioners Board

Bookkeepers Who Want to Provide BAS Services Need TPB Certification

start a bookkeeping business
Don’t stress: The TPB certification requirements may actually kick-start some people’s bookkeeping businesses.

Whether you are a bookkeeper who uses Xero or MYOB or one of the other accounting software packages that we offer training on, you are probably aware that Australian tax legislation has changed recently. As a result, providing BAS services to clients is not as simple as it once was. 

All bookkeepers who wish to provide a BAS service for a fee, must now hold a Certificate IV in Financial Services (Bookkeeping or Accounting) or higher to be eligible for registration.

What makes up a BAS service?

The BAS services page on the ATO website can provide you with information about the qualification requirements and the education requirements for BAS agents to become certified with the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) so you can offer tax and BAS services to clients.

Becoming certified with the TPB is a lot like getting your drivers license: you need to be able to demonstrate the relevant experience of at least 1400 hours, or 1000 hours if you’re already a member of a professional organisation — like the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers — which you can become a member of for free when you complete an applicable EzyLearn Training Course.

If you’re working under the supervision of another registered Tax or BAS agent, you cannot provide any Tax or BAS services to any clients you may pick up of your own. In other words, you must only provide tax or BAS services to clients known to your supervising Tax/BAS agent.

For some newcomers to the industry, this may seem daunting. But that’s just because conventional wisdom suggests that you must take on some form of permanent employment, working for a bookkeeper or accountant who is registered with the TPB and can supervise you while you gain the necessary skills to go out on your own.

But that’s not actually the case. While this is an option — and a good one if you’ve never worked as a bookkeeper before — it’s not the only one. You can still work with another registered Tax/BAS agent as a contractor, providing these services to the registered Tax/BAS agent’s clients until you’re eligible to go out on your own.

Kick start your own business

This is a great way to get a start on your own business — perhaps just offering non BAS services to start with — while you gain the skills to become registered to offer GST and BAS services. Contract bookkeeping jobs of this nature are actually easier to find that it may seem — often by striking up a working relationship with an accountant or another certified bookkeeper.

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Find out more information on how to register with the TPB so you can provide tax and BAS services. And remember: you can become a member of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers for free when you complete an applicable EzyLearn Training Course.

Online bookkeeping accounting training courses for CPD points

 

 

 

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What is the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com

Get the functionality of WordPress.COM at your very own site
Get the functionality of WordPress.COM at your very own site

Although we are best known around Australia for our Online MYOB Training Courses with lifetime access and all versions of MYOB AccountRight Plus many students enrol into our WordPress training course so that they can create and change their own website.

We received a call from a prospective student this week and he asked about whether we offer training on WordPress.com or WordPress.org so I thought we should take some time to explain the difference and why we offer the training we do.

WordPress is a system for creating and maintaining your online presence. Some people consider a Facebook page or a Linkedin profile to be an online presence and it is, but if you are a business owner you can create an online presence that you own and it’s based around your domain name. When you register a domain name you then point it to a website hosting account (they call this DNS Management) and this is where the difference between WordPress.COM and WordPress.ORG comes in. When you have your own domain name and website hosting you install the WordPress.ORG software on your own website and everything you put online is at your own domain. It helps to give your domain name more value.

[quote]WordPress.COM is a service were you can create an online profile at their website and it eliminates the need to buy a domain name and organise your own hosting, but it means you forego the goodwill value of owning your own domain name.[/quote]

Having said that, WordPress.COM functionality can now be built into the WordPress.ORG software you have on your own website using a service that WordPress call Jetpack. Jetpack enables dozens of extra features, including statistics about your website visitors, and connects your own website with the WordPress.COM service.

If there is one suggestion we have for small business owners who are looking for a website, go with a WordPress driven website because:

  1. Gives you the ability to easily change the content on each page when you want
  2. There are thousands of WordPress website designers who can help you if you need it
  3. You can incorporate social media and blogging very easily
  4. Social Media and Blogging will help increase your “relevance” in Google search results
  5. WordPress websites use themes that you can buy cheaply to create a professional website

Video PlayerWe’ve chatted with Paul from BYO Web and he will have some exciting information about WordPress website owners and the ability to easily add an e-commerce shopping cart to your website. Make sure you subscribe to receive future issues of our blog, and watch out for Paul’s exciting WordPress news.

By the way, if you want to get a free training video lesson about how WordPress websites are structured please check out this free WordPress Training video.

 

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MYOB Student Creates a Website for Dad’s Business Using WordPress.

ASBC-Crest-smaller-Certified ContractorYou might recall the blog post that I put out earlier this week advertising for an Admin Assistant for our Chatswood office. We had some fantastic responses and it confirmed my thoughts about promoting work opportunities to our own network as opposed to complete strangers on a website like SEEK.

You might be interested to read about our bad SEEK experiences at the Australian Small Business Blog! There’s also some interesting information about competition and business valuation that you might find interesting if you are planning to start your own business and want to understand the concept of value.

One of the most interesting experiences in my team building exercise so far is discovering people’s attitude to work. The best example I can think of is the story about one lady who completed our MYOB course so that she could help run her father’s business. In the short time she had to get up to speed, she was able to use her skills to not only help manage the finances of the business but she was able to improvise and adapt to each new situation that arose, including building a professional website for that business using WordPress and perform many other tasks outside of her area of expertise.

[quote]This is one of the key skills you need to run your own startup business. Improvisation.[/quote]

We are working on a Certification Program for the Australian Small Business Centre to credential contractors who make themselves available to help businesses manage their business from Day-to-Day. This program is designed to build a team of competent professionals who understand the principles of providing a good and competent service for a reasonable return. We are looking for contractors who want to work with local businesses and offer a win-win service.

If you want to start your own business or want help getting your existing business off the ground make sure you complete the Business Service Provider form and begin your journey on becoming a Certified Contractor.

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LinkedIn Profiles: What Not To Do

620_300_cropIf you are like me, or pretty much any other living, breathing person on the planet with access to the Internet, then you’ve probably Googled someone in the last 24 hours.

Actually, I Googled someone while writing this post; had a gander at their LinkedIn profile and then went about the rest of my business.

I’ve mentioned previously how a LinkedIn profile works in shaping a person’s opinion of you, but how do you ensure it’s shaping a person’s opinion of you in the right way?

Getting Mileage Out of Your LinkedIn Profile

If you’re a jobseeker and you need to overhaul your LinkedIn profile, then some things to avoid:

Lying: Lie on your resume à la ex-Yahoo CEO, Scott Thomson, and you’re running the gamut of being found out at some point; lie on your LinkedIn profile and you will definitely get found out (either by a colleague or former employer), but lie on your CV and not your LinkedIn profile: now you’re not only a liar, you’re also a stupid one!

It’s simple: don’t lie. Ever.

Too many recommendations: if a prospective employer is scoping you out — perhaps to verify some of the claims in your CV or interview — and you don’t have any recommendations it’s likely they’ll consider you a dud networker, or worse: a dud employee.

To remedy this, send out a few recommendation requests. But don’t overdo it (when you’re job hunting, for example) — a slew of recommendations all at once makes it obvious you’re job hunting, which your current employer may not think too highly of.

Your job description is vague: maybe you think it’s mysterious, but vague or ambiguous statements in your job description is just plain elusive, and it makes you seem as though you’ve something to hide. Like maybe you’re not as fabulous as you let on you are.

The statement “assisted with the grand opening of a new store” could mean anything. For all we know, you could have put out the plastic cups people were drinking their complementary bubbles from. Instead, write what you actually did. No matter how small the task was.

No photo: this isn’t a beauty contest, nor is it the correct medium to post a picture of yourself drinking from a seven-foot beer bong. But the option to upload a picture is there for a reason.

A picture tells a thousand words and like it or not, visuals are important. If they weren’t, we’d never have to go for an actual job interview.

Ambiguous keywords: choose your keywords wisely; avoid overused buzzwords like “proven track record” or “team-player”. They may sound impressive (to you) but they really aren’t.

Instead of saying you have a proven track record in sales, show people what that proven track record was — if you pitched and won a multi-million dollar account for your company, say that. This turns an empty statement into a quantifiable accomplishment.

We work with professional partners that help combine our online training courses with services that help you to improve your chances of employability, or hone their talents and skills for running a small business. If you’re new to LinkedIn, we’ve discussed in a previous post how you can use your LinkedIn profile as your resume to find work. If you are looking for opportunities to become an independent contractor and operate your own business from home see the business opportunities at Workface.

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Working from Home Doesn’t Have to Mean Working Alone

Lonely office man

We are constantly refreshing the content of our MYOB training course so that you are privy to all the latest information you need for becoming a bookkeeper, running your own bookkeeping business, or doing the books for the businesses of others.

Certainly, technology has reshaped the way most of us work, learn and interact with each other. Whether working from home or from an office, many of us spend the bulk of our time online, and for many, it’s not uncommon to feel increasingly disconnected from others, lonely, even. However, in this ever-increasing virtual world in which we live and work, there are ways to combat loneliness — things we’ve probably learned from our mother’s and grandmother’s: to mind our P’s and Q’s.

Everybody Emails

If you are thinking about working from home and running a bookkeeping business in 2013 (or you already do this), it goes without saying that things are substantially different to the way they were 20 years ago; different, even to just 10 years ago. Instead of seeing your clients often and chatting regularly on the phone, you email. On a daily basis, your Inbox fills with emails from clients — emails you rarely read in full, scanning instead for keywords or instructions that you mentally note down for later; the email is then closed. Rarely a response longer than “No problem”, “Done” or “Sure, will do” is sent back (something I’m guilty of myself!).

However, there was a time when a client would have phoned through their request or query, you’d have chatted, built a relationship, and some of the loneliness of working from home would have been assuaged. Today, we rarely indulge in such pleasantries — and we complain we’re lonely.

Building Relationships

But loneliness is so easily rectified, particularly in business. Instead of emailing a one-word email back, engage with your customers. Get to know them; ask them how they are, how business is travelling and, above all, thank them for continuing to do business with you. People like to feel appreciated; they like to feel that they’re not alone in the world.

At EzyLearn, we’re in the business of helping people build profitable businesses working from home. With all of our online training courses, we strive to ensure our online students don’t feel detached or lonely. We know that studying online can sometimes feel like you’re missing out on the student-teacher, student-student interaction, making your road to graduation a long and lonely one. It’s why we implemented the ZenDesk customer support system — to handle and respond to your queries quickly and efficiently — and why we’re also active on social media so you can connect with us quickly and easily, every time.

Next time you feel lonely when working or studying online or from home, perhaps consider whether technology has effectively placed a barricade between you and those around you. Are you likely to be regarded as a real person by your clients, or more a faceless, voiceless email that happens to bear your name? Use technology, instead, to connect (or reconnect) with people — and what better place to start than by saying, “Thank You”!

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The 7 Website Must Have’s

Website building should include 7 key elements
Website building should include 7 key elements

We made the decision to use WordPress for our website because it’s easy to use, inexpensive yet looks professional. It’s great for blogging and bringing visitors to your website and is also really flexible — with an abundance of features, layout options and plug-ins.

Yet, when it comes to websites, there are still thousands — yes, thousands — of business owners who don’t have one. These are people who still believe in phone books.

Phone Book Uses

Phone books are pretty handy things. They’re handy for fashioning into a makeshift monitor stand to prop up your laptop. They’re handy for wrapping glassware and crockery when you’re moving house. They’re pretty darn handy for killing really big spiders. And if you’ve got a stack of them collecting dust in your garage since, say, 1982, then why not build a fort? Surely that’s pretty handy for someone, somewhere — the kids, maybe?

Phone books are not particularly handy, however, for finding a telephone number or business listing in 2013. Why flick through some-seemingly million pages searching for something you could easily find with a click of your keyboard, a glide over your tablet device, or a quick chat with Siri?

Get a Website

If you’re a business owner and you don’t have a website, our strong advice is: get one! Today, when people are searching for a business, product or service they invariably Google it, so for anyone in business, a website is an essential online marketing tool.

Again, we highly recommend WordPress. Business owners can manage their own content, which gives you enormous flexibility and it comes with a host of attractive themes and options. We offer an online WordPress training course, designed to help you understand things like SEO, working with plugins (including mobile sites and RSS feeds) and much more.

The 7 Website Must Have’s

If you’re a business owner and you already have a website but it looks like a 90’s relic with loads of Clipart, an endless-scroll of 10-point, Times New Roman copy, punctuated periodically by headings that are underlined, in bold and capped off with 73 exclamation points, then it’s time for a makeover.

There are 7 things you must do when building or renovating your website:

1. Establish Goals: Like anything in business, you need to establish some goals for your website. Things like: Why will people visit my website? What information do I want to provide? What do I want people to do next? You need to answer these questions before you begin.

2. Don’t Forget to be Mobile: The Internet is literally in the palm of your hands; so don’t forget to consider a mobile strategy during the planning stage. You’ll need to consider the main reason people will be visiting your site — for information about your products and services, to purchase your products and services, or something else — and build that into your mobile site, make it the most prominent feature.

3. First Impressions: Your website is your brand, your personality, and your reputation all rolled into one. If your website resembles the shambolic mess we described above, that’s how people are likely to view you and your business: as a shambolic mess. Photos from online photo libraries, like iStockPhoto will give your website a professional finish, but don’t forget to add a bit of you into your website. Too many stock-standard images and you run the risk of seeming generic, uninspired, bland. And bland is boring.

4. Keep it Simple: Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many links, too many choices. This isn’t a Pick Your Own Adventure novel, it’s a website. Ensure your menu and links are intuitive and consistent. If you want to point people to the “contact us” page in your copy, use the same language that’s in your navigation menu — this will eliminate confusion.

5. Use a ‘Call-to-Action’: Your visitors are here for a reason; capitalise on that. Make sure it’s easy for them to find what they’re looking for — display contact details, proceed to checkout links, or your mailing list prominently — and encourage them to take the next step.

6. Less is More: The endless scroll of copy has got to go. It doesn’t matter how multifaceted or interesting your business is, people won’t read it. They don’t care. If you can’t whittle your business and services down to two or three (short) sentences, get someone else to — we recommend you use a professional copywriter.  

7. The Need for Speed: Load times are critical. If people can’t open your page within ten seconds — that includes mobile devices — they’ll try a website where they can. If you’re taking your own photos to include on your website, remember that huge files require huge download times. Make sure to reduce the image sizes to a few kilobytes rather than a few megabytes.

You can master the skills to build a fabulous website a lot sooner than you think! Check out the details of our WordPress Course Outline