Posted on April 21, 2017April 18, 2017 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Google Calendar Lets Hairdressing Clients Schedule Appointments

Are you making the most of Google?

google calendar to set up appointments — ***Is your business suited to clients making online bookings? We have an online course that will teach you how to make the most of Google G-Suite and Google Calendar.***

JUST AS YOU CAN USE Google Calendar to create a staff roster, you can also set up and create Google Calendar appointment slots. This is a fabulous way for businesses like hair and beauty salons to let their clients make appointments online.

To enable your clients to schedule appointments using Google Calendar, you’ll need to have a G Suite account for work (or school). G Suite accounts can be a little tricky to set up, but we have courses to show you how, and the beauty is, they come with a boatload of useful tools for small businesses — such as Google Sheets, Docs and Forms.

Create appointment types as staff

Before clients can book appointment times, you’ll need to set up the appointment types. For hair and beauty salons, you may consider setting your staff as the appointment types or the types of appointments you offer — cut and blow dry, foils, etc — so clients can pick the staff member or the appointment type they’d like to make an appointment with.

Create booking button

Use the link Google provides for your appointment page to create an ‘online booking’ button in Facebook or in WordPress, so client can easily access your online booking system from your Facebook page and website.

Move all bookings online

Online bookings won’t eradicate the need to take phone bookings, so it’s really important that you move your entire booking system online.

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Our Google training courses show you how to setup your G Suite account, share calendars and more. Once you’ve setup your G Suite account, you’ll be able to create Appointment Slots and share your appointments page with clients. Visit our website for more information.

Are you in business as a bookkeeper, tradesperson, retailer, trainer or real estate agent and want to stand out from the crowd? We can teach you the online marketing techniques to help you do just this! Check out what’s included in our comprehensive Social Media and Digital Marketing online training courses. Find out more about the secrets behind LinkedIn and how you can find more work and more clients.

Posted on March 27, 2017March 23, 2017 by Steve Slisar

You Can Use PowerPoint to Create Online Induction Training

Create an Online Induction with PowerPoint

learn powerpoint online training course — **When you have to train contractors or new staff about your policies and procedures, an online induction is the most efficient – and effective – way to go.**

At EzyLearn we have a bit of a soft spot for PowerPoint. It’s the oft-overlooked program in Microsoft Office that is typically associated with slideshows and presentations, and often boring ones at that. But it can do so much more.

You can generate animations, videos, movies, advertising, web design embellishments and graphics using PowerPoint. It’s a great ally to the social media or design person in your organisation. This creative design program can also be used to conjure up the most eye-catching and modern pictorial slides to enhance any presentation and keep people absorbed.

But did you know PowerPoint can also be used to create an online training induction course? Induction training is imperative for any business that hires contractors to perform work for them, either onsite or elsewhere. Induction training is necessary that any contractor or employee understands your company’s policies and procedures, whether they’re going to be working at your premises or not.

Our PowerPoint Training Course takes you through how to create your own induction training course using PowerPoint, which you can then deliver to your staff and contractors using a learning management system, or we can deliver your induction training for you.

Simple inductions that work

The end goal of an induction course should be to have all your contractors complete it, and learn something from it. You need to strike a balance between an induction that includes every last bit of information about your business, how it functions, its policies and procedures, and one that only covers the bare essentials.

Use images to illustrate risks and scenarios, as opposed to describing them. This is easy when you’re using PowerPoint to create your induction training. And remember the PowerPoint golden rule: One idea per slide.

Authenticating students

After you’ve created your induction training course in PowerPoint, it’s vital that your contractors actually complete it. This is why it’s important to authenticate each contractor or student who takes your induction training course — it also helps if you include a short quiz at the end, so you can see whether they paid attention.

There are a couple of different ways you can authenticate students to ensure the correct person is taking the induction course (and not their mum or friend or partner, for example). We talk about the different authentication methods you can use on our website, but keep in mind that only inductions delivered to students via a learning management system can authenticate students.

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PowerPoint is, quite simply, fabulous.

Brush up on your PowerPoint skills, or learn how you can use PowerPoint to create your own Online Induction training courses, with our PowerPoint training courses. Read more about PowerPoint and how it can help you with your social media and design work.

Posted on March 26, 2017March 23, 2017 by Steve Slisar

Hiring Someone New? Why You Need to Personally Check their References

Why It Pays to Call the Switchboard When Doing a Reference Check

reference checking — **How do you really know the mobile numbers provided for references truly belong to who they say they are?**

I recently had a conversation with a colleague who said she’d never once been asked to produce a copy of her university degree or her transcripts, despite stating on her resume that she’d graduated with a high distinction average.

Gee, I thought, not once? Not a single recruiter or employer had ever requested a copy of her degree? I found this fact astonishing, particularly since more professions require, by law, certain qualifications — as BAS agents are, for example. So how people know my friend wasn’t fibbing in her credentials? Fact is, they didn’t.

Check, even if you use a recruiter

I wrote a blog some time ago about recruiting on LinkedIn and why it’s so important to check references for yourself. People often underestimate the importance of checking a person’s credentials, so long as they get a reference from their last employer. Often, though, most people only provide a mobile number for their references, so whether you’re speaking to the candidate’s former employer, a co-worker, or their mum is sometimes anyone’s guess.

I was reminded of how important reference-checking is again, when I was reading a couple of articles on Longreads, and I found myself utterly fascinated by two of the biggest cases of journalistic fraud ever committed (though I admit to having never heard of them before the weekend, despite one occurring more than 30 years ago).

Sometimes people don’t just lie on their resume

In the first instance, a journalist named Janet Cooke fabricated a story for The Washington Post about an 8-year-old heroin addict. She won a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1981, and then had to give it back when it came out that there was no such 8-year-old. In the second case, Jayson Blair, a journalist for The New York Times, was found to have fabricated or plagiarised 36 out of 73 stories written over a 6-month period, in what turned out to be the biggest scandal in the newspaper’s hundred-plus year history.

What I found most intriguing, though, was that neither Cooke nor Blair had been properly vetted before their employers hired them. In fact, it was Cooke’s falsified resume that was ultimately her undoing when, after receiving the highest honour in the field of writing, a former employer noticed something was amiss with her Pulitzer biography — her education and professional achievements had been grossly overstated. (Rather ironically it was Bob Woodward, of Woodward and Bernstein — the journalists who uncovered the Watergate Scandal — who signed off on hiring Cooke.)

The same would prove true for Blair, who, it turned out, never graduated from university, and had a murky work history with the Times’ sister publication, The Boston Globe, where his superiors had been less than impressed with his less-than-high standard of work.

(Of course, the equally interesting case of Australian author, Helen Demidenko, who won the Miles Franklin Award in the early 1990s, only to later be dubbed by the Sydney Morning Herald as a ‘literary hoax’ also springs to mind.)

Benders-of-truth almost always get caught

Plenty of people lie or embellish on their resumes, and while a good majority of them go unnoticed, others are caught out — sometimes very publicly, and often only after the organisation has been very publicly embarrassed, as in the case of Cooke and Blair.

My advice, then, is to always check the references of new hires meticulously. Rather than calling the mobile numbers or direct lines of the candidate’s references, call the main switchboard and ask to speak to that person’s manager or superior.

And always ensure to ask for a copy of any credentials, like university degrees. If you’re employing someone where, by law, they’re required to hold a certain qualification — as is the case for BAS agents, for instance — it’s imperative you can verify the person’s credentials.

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At EzyLearn we offer online training courses to help you up-skill and find employment. Choose from our range of cloud-based online accounting software courses, to business start up and management courses, to marketing and sales courses, or update and further your skills in a range of Microsoft Office programs (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) or social media and WordPress web design).

Posted on March 22, 2017March 25, 2020 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

There’s So Much Cool Stuff You Can Do With PowerPoint

PowerPoint: The Great Visual Aid to What You’re Saying

PowerPoint online training course — ***Save densely-worded slides for university lecture rooms: keep PowerPoint slides concise and use your presentation as a way of illustrating or highlighting what you’re saying.***

Many people don’t realise what an excellent design tool PowerPoint is. It can be used for a lot more than just creating slideshows and presentations and is a great marketing and design tool for all kinds of business functions.

Generally speaking, when using PowerPoint, you should feature only one idea to a slide. A PowerPoint presentation is not an essay. It shouldn’t be filled with verbose text (unless perhaps you’re in a university lecture). In fact, as you will learn in our updated PowerPoint Training Course, sometimes a PowerPoint slide shouldn’t contain any text at all, or at least, very little. Continue reading There’s So Much Cool Stuff You Can Do With PowerPoint

Posted on February 14, 2017March 25, 2020 by Steve Slisar

What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Facebook Advertising

Facebook – Great for Local Marketing

using facebook for bookkeeping marketing — *Facebook can be extremely useful for marketing to a local audience.*

In its decade of existence, Facebook has built up a wealth of data about its users, data that it likes to sell back to those who need it, in the form of targeted advertising. Facebook advertising, though similar in its approach, is very different to Google Ads in what it delivers.

Real estate agents discovered the value of Facebook advertising early, and have used a combination of images and videos to successfully deliver their marketing messages and sale pitches directly to their target market and in order to set their prices. Continue reading What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Facebook Advertising

Posted on February 7, 2017March 25, 2020 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Using Video and Images

Focusing on Education Rather than Sales

how bookkeepers can use video THE INTERNET HAS CHANGED the way businesses market their services to prospects, from a simple sales message to an educational one.

Real estate agents caught onto this shift in buyer trends early and started creating online content to cater to these buyers.

Visit the website of any real estate agent and you’ll find lots of images and videos educating potential buyers about their services, previous sales and the local area they represent.

Continue reading What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Using Video and Images

Posted on January 5, 2017January 6, 2017 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Announcement: Social Media Marketing Course

Social Media Marketing Course for 2017

Digital marketing is one of those fine arts that sometimes takes many attempts to get right and I’m guilty of that myself. I wrote a couple blogs recently about content marketing because I spend a lot of my time creating and modifying strategies, optimising and planning the content that my team creates for EzyLearn and other websites. However, I think many people are unfamiliar with what the term “content marketing” means — my mistake! I should have used the words that most small businesses associate with online and digital marketing: “SOCIAL MEDIA”!

Social Media Course — We Include EVERYTHING

So, now that I know social media is the keyword, I’m going to explain how every course we offer ties into your Facebook advertising and Facebook Page and why all of these aspects are important to you if you are going to spend more time and money building a strong online brand.

Content Marketing

No matter who you are or what you do you will need content and you will use that content to promote you and the services you provide. I have been using all of these tools to help convert EzyLearn into an “online only” training company in 2006 but I was able to explore how to provide these services to real estate agents when I managed the social media strategy for Derek Farmer, a real estate agent in Cammeray at the time. Here are the content options we had to play with:

Photographs and Images

Images are used in Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin and on your blog (if you have one). They are used to make a blog easier to read and in industries like real estate where good photography is important to get a high price and make a successful sale they are used to showcase the product being sold. I recently spoke to an asbestos removal company and photographs of what they do and how they do it are also an important part of their “content”.

We show you how to include images in blogs and even include fundamental image editing skills using GIMP (it’s very powerful and it’s free!)

Video Marketing

EzyLearn has several hundred videos as part of our online training courses and sometimes we use them to give prospective students examples of our training, explanations about how our special offers work or even videos of me explaining the EzyLearn journey since the late 1990’s! Real estate agents like Derek Farmer use video to help educate property sellers about the various aspects of the property selling process and what to look out for.

We show you how to get your video up to YouTube, or more professional services like Wistia and show you the analytics you can get about your video viewers and how to make a better video next time — it’s all about drop off rates. We also show you how to get a Call-To-Action within the video itself.

Blog Marketing

Blog marketing is my personal favourite because I love writing; you can really play with the keywords that Google loves so much and you can fill a website up with content that shows you are active.

We teach you how to create a website, create web pages AND blog posts, how to optimise them for the keywords you want to be discovered for and how to measure and understand the visitor analytics.

Facebook Pages, Timeline Posts, Advertising and Remarketing

This is the one that EVERYONE is interested in and for good reason; the demographic targeting is fantastic. Facebook is becoming increasingly important for real estate agents to promote themselves — indeed, Social Estate and BuddyBid are just two companies getting in early to earn a couple of hundred dollars a month for each real estate agent they take on board.

Note: This is something that any work at home mum (or dad) can do! You just need to understand how to generate new content or “republish” other interesting content on a Facebook Timeline and how to create a Facebook Ad. We cover all of this in our Social Media Marketing Course.

Facebook Pages

Our written guide and training course videos show you how to set up a Facebook Page for a local business (ideal for tradies, service providers like accountants or bookkeeper and of course real estate agents). By using a Facebook page you can assign the administration of that page to someone who simply schedules posts — that someone can be YOU.

Most people with a Facebook Page then need to make sure their Timeline is filled with content so that they pop up regularly in local news feeds.

Feeding Your Facebook Timeline

Most people think it’s important to create a Facebook post every day but that’s hard to do if you need to generate original content. Instead most people re-post other content that is relevant to the audience — this is often referred to as curated content (for instance, where you make a comment or affirm your belief in an article).

Real estate agents often simply refer to the plethora of real estate blogs available and here are some examples used by David Howe, an honest and diligent McGrath agent in Northbridge, Sydney, who asked our designer team to create a website for him:

http://www.smartpropertyinvestment.com.au/how-to-maximise-profit-without-it-costing-you-a-cent
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/lifestyle/food/sydney-taste/sydney-eat-street-10-things-to-try-in-crows-nest/news-story/
http://www.apimagazine.com.au/2016/11/debt-retirement-worries-high/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/too-real-estate
http://www.homestolove.com.au/how-to-design-the-perfect-laundry-4236
http://blog.templeandwebster.com.au/work-the-trend-the-new-natural/
http://www.afr.com/real-estate/residential/dont-want-to-move-want-a-reno-architecture-awards-show-how-to-do-it-20161104-gshwue
http://davidhowe.com.au/david-howe-real-estate-agent-northbridge/

This method of posting other people’s content is good enough to show that your Facebook Page is active. However, from an internet marketing perspective it tends to send people away from your Page and onto other websites where your competitors might advertise — especially if you report material by ratemyagent, openagent, realestate.com.au or domain!

In our social media marketing course we show you how to make a post like this and schedule them all in advance but also how to get your own unique content and how to link to content where none of your competitors are listed.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook ads are relatively simple to create so there is NO reason to get someone else to do them (particularly if they’re going to charge you the equivalent of 4 hours’ labour!). The key elements of a Facebook Ad are their structure: Campaigns, Adsets, then individual ads and once you get that right and understand how it works, creating a Facebook Ad can be done by someone in your office or who you trust (again, a work at home mum).

We show you the type of posts and ads that Derek Farmer paid to promote in his local area, why he chose to do it, how much he paid and what his viewer and reader statistics were. We’ll also show you how to advertise to your own client base in their Facebook Feeds and how to remarket to people who’ve been to your website or Facebook Page.

WordPress, Hosting, User Management etc

I believe that your own website is the best “landing page” for any marketing money spent because YOU OWN IT. The more traffic you direct to your own website and the more content you put there that is valuable to your customers and future potential customers the more valuable YOU and YOUR WEBSITE will become.

In our Social Media Marketing Course we include every aspect of how to manage your own website using the very popular WordPress Content Management System. This includes having multiple users be able to publish content. We also teach you how to optimise your blogs and pages for important keywords using tags and categories, how to use meta tags on your pages and even on images so everything gets indexed by Google and how to make your website look fantastic with professional themes (templates).

Lead Capture and Email Marketing

Having a call to action on your website or Facebook Page is critical to truly analyse it’s effectiveness and understand it’s success — what’s working and what needs to change. A very important part of that is to capture the email address of people who visit your site and most websites do that using a giveaway, free reports, white papers etc. Once you have a potential clients email address you effectively have permission from them to send them email messages.

We use a number of different email marketing solutions including Campaign Monitor and Aweber, and these are very similar to MailChimp, GetResponse, Constant Contact and a plethora of other email marketing solutions. We’ll show you how to use these systems to capture website visitor details and send them messages automatically.

Capturing, Analysing and Understanding visitor traffic

Google Analytics is the most popular website traffic analysing system and you can use it to measure the effectiveness of your website day-by-day, week-by-week and for specific date ranges.

We show you how to implement the code on your website, how to access the visitor traffic information on your PC and even your mobile phone and what elements to look for to understand what your website is doing.

Conclusion about Social Media Marketing Course

We do all of this using our own website examples as well as Derek Farmers website so you can see what real businesses do to succeed online. Whether you want to do all of this yourself, hire an experienced internet marketer or find a suitably qualified work at home mum (or dad) this course will give you an abundance of knowledge and strategies to manage what you do.

See what’s included in our Social Media Marketing Course and enrol today at a huge launch discount!

[button link=”http://ezylearnonline.com.au/courses/marketing-training-courses/digital-marketing-social-media-courses/” color=”orange”] Social Media Marketing Course Contents[/button]

Posted on December 20, 2016December 27, 2016 by Steve Slisar — 2 Comments

Video: Receive an Automatically Discounted Price for Online Course Enrolments!

Specials and Summer Training

It’s Christmas time and we’ll be open every day (except the public holidays) which means you can make contact with questions or support during your course.

But best of all, we’re offering a fabulous special offer with a saving of over $300. Check out the quick video below which shows you how to get $663 dollars worth of training for just $296 — a saving of $337!

All you have to do is choose your courses at our Online Course Enrolment page and the discounts will be applied automatically.

Get New Skills for A New Year!

With the New Year coming fast we find most of our students are looking to change careers and/or up-skill so as to feel confident with their computer skills in job interviews and the like, so our current special offers will train you up to be your best, cheaply. Here’s all you need to do:

Choose Microsoft Excel course (12 month’s access, all 9 courses and Certificate).
Scroll down to the discounted courses section to see the Xero Training Course available for $30 less.
Scroll down further to see the Microsoft Word Course (12 month’s access, all 9 courses and Certificate), which is normally $267 is now FREE
Tick the box next to “Yes, I have a discount voucher code” and enter 8881818 to receive a further $70 discount off the Microsoft Excel course!

If you don’t have the time right now, don’t worry, you’ve got 12 months to complete all these courses at your own pace — so just enrol now to get the current special offers.

Watch this video to see how to get the discounts

New Online Courses for the New Year

It’s been a very busy year for new course creation and we’ve just launched two new courses that are all based on new online cloud-based services in bookkeeping and marketing/advertising. Read about them here:

QuickBooks Online

Provide quotes on your tablet computer, convert them to invoices when you get the order and take photographs of your receipts for expenses — works on your smartphone too. These are the features of America’s most popular accounting software program that is now aggressively promoting itself to Australian small businesses.

And what do we think? We believe QuickBooks is good software — find out more about our Intuit QuickBooks Daily Transactions Course.

Our New Digital & Social Media Marketing Course

Tired of struggling to post consistently on Facebook and other social media sites? We’ve had a WordPress course for several years to teach you how to create your own website and blog, edit images, and optimise it for search engines (like Google). But if you’ve ever struggled with fleshing out a Facebook Page, or want to start promoting yourself or your business in social media, try our Digital Business and Social Media Marketing Courses.

We show you what you should include on a modern day website as well as including Facebook Page, Content Marketing and Facebook Advertising training (which we used to help Derek Farmer show up on Page 1 in Google for the competitive Cammeray Real Estate Agent search query).

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Most of all, from all of us here at EzyLearn, HAVE a FANTASTIC and SAFE Christmas — doing things you love!

Posted on December 13, 2016December 13, 2016 by Steve Slisar

Understanding Image and Photo Rights for Content Marketing

Knowing How to Make Your Blogs Puhretty, Like

blogging-content-marketing — *Blogging is the core component of content marketing.*

So you want to digitise your business? Until I’m blue in the face, I keep telling anyone in business that content marketing is one of the most important online Digital marketing activities for businesses in operation today — particularly those with a website. Successful content marketing is about creating original, high quality content that’s relevant to your “potential” customers. It also needs to be high quality in every way (relevancy is integral to quality) and this involves every aspect of the content you’re creating — copy, layout and design. This ain’t always easy!

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere on this blog before, but I stand by my geeky analogy that great content is like an equilateral triangle, in that all parts must be equal. Copy, layout and design are the three sides of your content, and if you prioritise one aspect over one of the others, your content will be unbalanced, just as your triangle would be.

Blogging: The Staple of Content Marketing

How best to content market to your audience? Well, I’d go so far as to say that you can’t have effective content marketing without maintaining a blog. Setting up a blog is actually pretty easy, especially if you use a content management system like WordPress for your website and blog. With WordPress the the layout is pretty much taken care of for you — just choose a theme and away you go.

Many businesses outsource copywriting to a contractor or freelancer, which in our view, is a wise move. Unless you’re a clear writer who can articulate your point accurately and economically (a good writer will know that I’m talking about word count), then you should outsource it. You also have to rather enjoy doing it and be fast at it — otherwise, despite your best intentions, little will ever get published.

A Word on Google Images

So, to design. In the case of blogging, you usually select an image to illustrate your blog posts, which brings us to the subject of this blog post: understanding image rights. Unless you intend to use your own photos and images that you’ve taken or created yourself (hands down, one of the best ways to drive search engine rankings and increase reader engagement, just sayin’) and therefore own the copyright to, then you need to understand image rights first.

As a general rule, never ever use Google Images to find an image for your blog. That’s not to say that Google Images isn’t a great starting off point if you’re creatively spent and in need of some inspiration. I frequently punch a few keywords or phrases into Google Images to see if the results turn up, and then go back to my image library, which categorises images in a more literal sense than Google Images does.

******** SPECIAL LAUNCH OFFER ********

UPDATE: WordPress Courses, Content Marketing Course, Social Media Marketing, Facebook Pages, Updating the Facebook Timeline, Facebook Advertising, Facebook Pixel and Remarketing, Google Analytics and our Digital Business Course are now ALL included in our Digital & Social Media Marketing Course! That’s 6 courses for a VERY LOW price. Check it out and see the prices on our Enrolment Page so you can get a solid start to your digital marketing in 2017.

We showcase what we did at EzyLearn in 2008 and what we did for Derek Farmer (Cammeray Real Estate Agent) in 2015 to get onto page 1 of Google and in front of his entire database every day on Facebook

******** OFFER PRICE IS FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY ********

This has a lot to do with indexing and keyword usage; put simply, think of Google Images as your own personal brainstorming team. Traditionally, brainstorming has always worked best when there was more one person, but if you’re on your lonesome, then this is where Google Images comes in handy.

You punch in a few key phrases or concepts and you can see how other people have illustrated their websites and blogs, based on those same phrases.

What makes the images from Google Images dicey is that, as a search engine, it’s not beholden to the laws of copyright usage and image licensing; it’s up to you to do your due diligence and find out what the terms of the image’s license are.

Image (Copy)Rights

Generally speaking, to use an image that you haven’t created, you must track down the creator and ask for permission to use it. Obviously, this would be a lengthy and arduous process if you had to do this for every image you found on the internet, so, thankfully, there are plenty of ways to find images where the copyright holder has already released the image with a license that allows specific uses.

Using an image in a way that isn’t allowed under the terms of its license is still considered copyright infringement, so make sure you’re certain you understand each image’s license before you use it on your blog or website.

Most online image libraries offer images with license terms that deal with:

Type of use: Commercial or non-commercial use, with the first being any use of an image to sell or promote a product, service, or idea.
Attribution: Credit may need to be given to the original creator of the image and required format (e.g. a link) specified.
Modification: The image may have to be used unchanged, or you may allowed to modify it and create new images or materials from it.
Number of uses: Some licenses may restrict the number of times an image can be used.

What license is offered depends entirely on the copyright holder or the creator. Some image libraries require the copyright holder to sign over certain rights of use to their images, while others don’t, which means you need to be vigilant by checking the terms of use for each image you use.

Of course, one way to avoid having to deal with image rights is to take your own pictures. As I said earlier, this not only gives your content its own personalised stamp of authenticity, but it also helps drive search engine rankings and reader engagement. This is very important in content marketing.

If you’re not able to take your own pictures, for whatever reason, then using an online image library is the best way to ensure that your content is not only looking great and will engage your customers, but that you’re also not contravening any copyright or licensing terms.

To learn more about content marketing, subscribe to our blog or register your interest in our forthcoming content marketing training course. If you’re a bookkeeper looking to start out on your own, or start a small business, find out more about our bookkeepers’ directory, where we do the content marketing for you to help you find work.

Posted on December 10, 2016May 12, 2023 by Steve Slisar

Are You a Bookkeeper Who Needs More Clients? Want My Advice?

If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB and Xero training courses could be a perfect complement to your bookkeeping business!

FINDING PROSPECTS AND converting them into clients involves selling and most of us hate doing it, but wait…

For those of us in small business, be it as a bookkeeper, real estate agent, sales rep, virtual assistant or the like, most of us are selling every day of our lives.

This means we get pretty good at it. We develop techniques that we can replicate and that become part of our daily lives.

The process of selling is really no longer about selling per se; it becomes about a systemised process of:

Posted on December 8, 2016February 9, 2023 by Steve Slisar

Breaking Bad Content Marketing: The Correct Way to Use PowerPoint

I’d like your opinion!

I was reviewing some of the content we’ve created this year and I was actually astounded at the number of blogs we’d written that mention content marketing. Even so, when I mention content marketing to many business people, they’re still not really sure what I’m talking about. So I asked Angela in our office to put something together — just for fun. Better still, I recorded an audio commentary to go with it; I hope you find it of use.

All the content marketing talk

Want a recap of all the times I’ve written about content marketing? I did a whole lot of posts about real estate agents and how important content marketing is for them. Here are some of the blog headlines in our content marketing category:

Maybe I’m a bit more passionate about content marketing than I even realised (which is saying something!) Watch the video below and let me know your thoughts.

Video presentation with annotations and a call to action

Want to know more?

If you’re interest in learning about the contents of our Content Marketing, Facebook and Social Media course which is currently being uploaded to our LMS read about it here and follow the links to pre register for alerts. When we release it we’d have a great offer for early students. 🙂

Thought you may like to know that we are going to reveal everything we did for Derek Farmer’s real estate site for property sales in Cammeray – even Facebook advertising and re-targeting to stay front of mind with his client database.

Posted on December 7, 2016November 26, 2019 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

The New Year’s Approaching: Think About New Content Marketing for Your Business

The Value of Content Marketing

the-value-of-online-content-marketing — *Finding it hard to get started in content marketing? Register for our upcoming course.*

The beginning of a new year, which is typically the quietest as people take a while to adjust to the work and school routine, is when a lot of business owners spend time setting goals for the year ahead.

Just as individuals set their own personal new year’s resolutions, many business owners use January to set some new year’s resolutions for their business’s marketing activities.

Here are the Digital Marketing tasks that staff can do to bring more inquiries and more sales:

Business blogging vs paid Google Ads or Facebook Ads
Email Newsletters
Optimising images and photographs for SEO

Continue reading The New Year’s Approaching: Think About New Content Marketing for Your Business

Posted on August 9, 2016December 6, 2016 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Release: Concreting Business Case Study for Xero Training Course

Case Study: Tradespeople Using Xero Cloud Accounting

Tradies across Australia are getting onto the cloud for their accounting and there’s a good reason for it — many busy people can use the system from remote locations to get their work done.

This means the estimator can use it to generate a quote at a site, the office administrator can convert quotes to orders and invoices and the remote contractor can sign in and do accounts receivable calls from their home office. This is good news! All major accounting programs now offer cloud access — MYOB, Xero and Intuit Quickbooks.

I wrote in the past about Rohan from Painters, Men in White; Ken the home theatre installer and Jason the kitchen appliance repairer. Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve released a case study in the Xero Daily Transactions course that relates to the building and construction industry — in particular a concreting business that quotes for the pouring of a 3 level apartment building. Sue, a contract bookkeeper from Yarra Junction helped me write this Case Study based on her experience in the building sector and in particular with concrete companies.

Bookkeepers Upskilling with EzyLearn

Sue is typical of the students who enrol with us to broaden their skills in cloud accounting — existing bookkeepers who want to upskill. She has a lot of experience in the day-to-day management and accounts for tradespeople and found that she could perform the bookkeeping from her own home at any time.

We’re Constantly Updating Online Course Content

While I’m blowing my trumpet I may as well add that this is an example of what we promote with our online courses — that during your student access period you’ll have access to ALL the courses you’ve enrolled into including updates and new content. This is particularly useful for MYOB and Excel Course students who enrol using the LIFETIME course access option.

Xero Course Student Testimonials

I haven’t posted any new pages with student testimonials to the website for a while (but they come in with every course) but today it must be trumpet-practising time for me because here I blow again! When Sue completed the course, she commented:

“I would recommend this learning site to others and I am thinking about studying Excel next with this learning centre“. She also commented: “Convenient in that I can do it from home at my own leisure. The price was very reasonable.“

While Sue was working with us we put her through our Microsoft Word and Excel courses at no cost and the main thing that really stands out to me is how much everyone benefits by doing a Microsoft Word course!

Use Microsoft Word to Create Xero Courses

Helen from Bright learnt how to use WordPress and got leads for website design work using our WordPress course — Helen from Bright is a registered BAS agent who did our WordPress course and got paid creating a website with out help!

Many students enquire about the Microsoft Excel courses because spreadsheets are complicated for people who don’t know how to use them. However, I never cease to be amazed at how many people confidently state, “I know how to use Word, that’s easy”.

Microsoft Word is used in so many aspects of a business yet too many people think that just because they can type they are good at Word. Things like:

are covered in our 203 to 205 courses (so they are considered beginners to intermediate Word skills) yet I am surprised at the number of people I meet who don’t truly understand how these work!

When we work with a new contractor, even as part of our National Bookkeeping Network, we ask new members to write up an education guide if a bookkeeping customer is looking for a certain task to be completed. We end up putting the bookkeeper through our Word course and they discover a whole new world of computer skills that enable them to do more office admin work for their employers or customers — particularly when it comes to long form documents like instruction guides, tenders and even eBooks which are becoming increasing used in online digital marketing.

Bookkeepers Can Be Great Web Designers!

As I’m sharing so many EzyLearn student stories, I’ll provide another example of a recent student, Helen from Bright in Victoria (check out where Bright is located in Google maps and you’ll see just how far away she is from the nearest capital city — again, the beauty of working from home using the internet!)

Helen is a Registered BAS Agent and has been for a long time. She performs all the bookkeeping tasks that many of our students aim to offer by being a BAS agent, but she is also interested in being a little more visually creative — at least part of the time — so she completed our WordPress Course and as a result we’ve introduced her to some clients. Since then she’s actually been paid for creating and editing websites! One website she created and continues to edit as required is for ANOTHER student, Sonia who completed our MYOB course years ago to help her with her husband’s business!

Sonia now spends a lot of her time teaching mums (AND dad’s) about baby massage and how they can use infant massage to build a bond with their new baby and help them relax when they are uncomfortable. With a nursing degree and a huge amount of experience with children, Sonia is able to help parents and babies alike create a special bond through touch, and ease new parents into the sometimes stressful experience of welcoming a new baby into their family.

PROMOTED: Corporate Training Licence

If you like the sound of all these courses you may like to take a look at our special bundled offers or even a corporate training licence for your staff or team members.

Referral Marketing is Something We Like

I hope I’ve managed to share with you how we genuinely like to support our students and clients in their journey. We welcome your feedback and love to hear directly how you’re progressing along the way, how we can improve what we do, and any other input you may have.

If you’re looking for a new job, we can advise you on our comprehensive courses with lots of content and examples and a fantastic price. If you’re looking to start a new business we can help you with our Business Startup Course. If you’re a small business in need of a good bookkeeper, writer or website designer — we can connect you.

Stay tuned for some new training content releases about Selling Your Property, Facebook Marketing and Intuit Quickbooks.

Posted on June 27, 2016February 6, 2018 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Is MYOB really a CRM and which CRMs are best for people in sales?

CRM = Customer Relationship Management

THE PURPOSE OF HAVING a CRM is so that when you call one of your clients or prospects, you know everything about them and can start a conversation based on what they’re looking for — their needs.

This might seem a little strange when you think about it because you could be out of date with your info (say you’ve entered old information on this particular client) but, casting this quibble aside, CRM’s are generally a terrific way to provide excellent customer service, on a consistent basis, and this is often the competitive edge that will you need to stay in business. (I’ve written a little comparison of real estate agent CRM’s but I wanted to add a couple other ones to the mix for good measure.)

Accounting Software and CRMs

In the early days, MYOB used every aspect of their software to sell itself to small business clients.

The fact that the software enabled business to keep contact details and search for past orders was a good reason to call the software a CRM.

However, times have moved on and even with powerful and well known CRM brands like Salesforce, there seems to be dozens of CRM providers to choose from, with prices ranging from $15 per month/ per seat to over $150! In fact if you head over to MYOB’s Add-On Centre you’ll find plenty of CRM’s that now integrate with their software.

We are now entering the integration phase of software development – which cloud-based services integrate with other services you’re using – and we wrote an article at the beginning of the year about a home appliances technician who uses accounting software integrations on his tablet to run an efficient and profitable little business.

Real Estate Agent CRM’s

One thing that has become apparent to our team lately (we’re working on social media marketing for real estate agents) is the difference in mindset between bookkeepers and real estate agents and if you think about it for a second it makes sense.

Bookkeepers are usually people who just want to get themselves into their work and sort out the financial and accounting details whereas real estate agents want to find big shiny things to sell and earn a commission based income.

It’s the classic back office versus front office personality style, the salesy and bold vs the unassuming and detailed office admin person.

The thing that real estate agents are looking for in a CRM are:

Quick and Easy contact detail collection (do it once and get all the data) – ideally at open homes
Automated categorisation of contact (Who’s keen and what are they looking for) – often defined by the type of property they enquire about
Constant messages pinging prospects with their brand (like weekly emails about their open homes this weekend)
Great reporting to see what works (so they can repeat it) – like how many emails sent, calls, open homes etc

The relationship with a real estate agent is often brief and very intense because property owners (vendors) will be speaking sometimes every day with their sales agent to see how the selling process is going. With property marketing campaigns in the capital cities like Sydney and Melbourne only lasting a couple weeks in some instances there is a massive amount of information to be collected yet the reporting needs to be simple.

My Preference for CRMs is Simple

Although I’ve had some exposure to Salesforce when I originally spoke to that company (many years ago and much has probably changed) they only offered yearly plans (but showed them as a low monthly fee) and the upfront cost was too high so I didn’t go down that path.

Instead I found some great nimble tech startups (at the time, now they’re quite a bit bigger) who offered software that did all the basics very well and offered normal cloud-based pricing ie. low monthly fees: Zoho CRM and HighRiseHQ

I found that these two programs did many useful things. They:

enabled me to integrate with our form collections (no need for double entry)
gave me the ability to very easily make comments every time I spoke with them
integrated with my email marketing software
enabled me to use tags to categorise and find contacts
offered a low monthly cost!

The Dark Horse in Real Estate CRM’s is CreataCRM

I had the pleasure of meeting Reece, the managing director of CreataCRM, at Cebit 2016 and was amazed I’d never heard of this company before.

When I took a look at their software I was blown away – here is an Australian based software developer who has worked with some of the top performing McGrath real estate agents to build a complete and thorough cloud-based CRM with all the integrations you could ask for, including:

MYOB AccountRight (live and even the old v19)
Xero
VoIP telephony
Email broadcasting
Workflow Automation

The most amazing part about their software is that it costs just $11 per user per month! Now that is a lot of software and a VERY low price. I’m thrilled to be able to share this information with you because here is a company with a great product that focus more on their product development and software features and less on making themselves look big and flashy.

If you have had any experiences with CRM’s I’d love to hear from you and add further depth to our conversation and study into CRM’s.

Posted on June 7, 2016February 9, 2023 by Steve Slisar — 3 Comments

Free Tip for real estate agents who want to use video in their social media with WordPress websites

Getting video into social media advertising and marketing is king for real estate agents

property marketing is important to sell your house in Sydney's lower north shore property market

You may recall a recent post about the exciting work we are doing with real estate agents around Australia to help them with their social media marketing as their industry goes through massive technological change.

Real estate agents are adopting Facebook pages, using Facebook advertising and creating their own websites to make them stand out from other agents but most importantly to show property sellers that they’re very experienced in the local property market and also great people to deal with. This stuff also applies to bookkeepers, accountants and most businesses where a good personal reputation is important!

Creating videos, serving videos and displaying videos

We spend much of our marketing efforts “writing” blogs to add value to you, the reader. We also optimise these pages so they can get discovered by people who use Google and other search engines to find information. Through our digital marketing agency, virion we’re doing this work for real estate agents AND bookkeepers so make sure to check these services out or contact us if you want to know more.

The thought of creating, uploading and then displaying videos on a website is very daunting to some people and usually it’s the inserting the video into a website as a blog or a page that is the part people aren’t sure about. So, I created a video for you! Yes, feel free to enjoy my calm, relaxing, yet very capable voice go through a process that our team go through dozens of times a week.

We have a course on WordPress and this video and other new videos will shortly be inserted into that course but the other aspects of performing this type of work involve these questions:

Where are you going to store the videos. We prefer Wistia because of their fantastic analytics but most people are familiar with Youtube and the fact that it’s free is a great benefit too.
How are you going to display it. We prefer to keep our content on our own websites but lots of real estate agents are happy to build up a following on many different social media platforms and Youtube is definitely one of them.

Enjoy the video below and make sure to Request a Quote if you are interested in having my team and I manage your online digital marketing using quality content.

Youtube videos into WordPress Blog pages

Also, stay tune for updates about our forthcoming Facebook for Business Courses.

Posted on April 8, 2016May 24, 2016 by Steve Slisar

Facebook Advertising and Impressions for Real Estate Agents

Facebook advertising and impressions of you

Has someone been telling you you must get onto social media? Are you a real estate agent with a Facebook page that is pushing people away? Are you spending hundreds of dollars per month and pushing your Facebook community away from what you do and to all the big companies!?

Target home owners in your suburb

This is why everyone loves social media isn’t it? The fact that you can almost perfectly target your marketing message to your ideal customer makes social media perfect, the only issue you have now is “Are they ready to buy”? Are they ready to use your services at that moment? What happens if they aren’t?

I interviewed Michael Griffiths when he ran his Internet marketing business for our business marketing course and he pointed out was that only about 3% of the people who come to your website are ready to transact, the rest of the visitors are exploring, learning and getting to know people (hopefully you are one of them) who they may use in the future. That’s why recommendations, testimonials, blogs and social media pages are important because they show prospective buyers that you are active, current and in tune and the messages you give out will almost help them define whether they like who you are.

Facebook may not work immediately

The dilemma for real estate agents is whether they should advertise using Google Adwords or with Facebook Advertising and the answer is really both, but for different reasons.

Google Adwords gets you in front of people who are searching for you or the services you provide
Facebook enables you to get in front of all of your potential market
Social media, blogs and newsletters help you remain front of mind

ReMarketing keeps your ad in front of prospects

Everyone is talking about remarketing and giving you to power to show your ad to your target audience no matter where your prospect goes online. The problem is that they may never need or want your services and you’re continuously paying for the ad to appear. The problem with some Facebook ads is that you pay for impressions – every time someone sees your ad – as opposed to PPC (every time someone clicks on your ad).

It’s better to offer your prospects a way to be reminded of you and you do that by getting people to like your page, follow you on twitter or LinkedIn and subscribe to your blog. Every time you create new and interesting content your prospects will see you and if they are no longer interested they’ll disconnect, unsubscribe, Unlike, Unfollow you.

Facebook is best for your past clients and potential advocates

The best way I believe to use Facebook advertising is to create a custom audience of all your past clients and make sure you show up when they are using Facebook. It builds the likelihood of them recommending you to their friends and it keeps you front of mind, particularly for real estate agents where the sales funnel can take several years sometimes for someone to use your services after getting to know you.

123ezy is a digital agency that creates real estate agent websites and helps them navigate the changing world of property marketing and building an online reputation based on all the hard work they have already done. EzyLearn creates courses to help students learn how to use office productivity, accounting and marketing programs to manage their business or work. We’re assembling a Facebook Advertising for Business Course and you can register for our free Facebook Advertising Course now.

Category: Website Design

What Bookkeepers Can Learn From Real Estate Agents: Using Video and Images

Focusing on Education Rather than Sales

Understanding Image and Photo Rights for Content Marketing

Knowing How to Make Your Blogs Puhretty, Like

Blogging: The Staple of Content Marketing

A Word on Google Images

Image (Copy)Rights

Are You a Bookkeeper Who Needs More Clients? Want My Advice?

FINDING PROSPECTS AND converting them into clients involves selling and most of us hate doing it, but wait…

Release: Concreting Business Case Study for Xero Training Course

Case Study: Tradespeople Using Xero Cloud Accounting

Bookkeepers Upskilling with EzyLearn

We’re Constantly Updating Online Course Content

Xero Course Student Testimonials

Use Microsoft Word to Create Xero Courses

Bookkeepers Can Be Great Web Designers!

PROMOTED: Corporate Training Licence

Referral Marketing is Something We Like

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