The most interesting change in the employment market that I have noticed is the slow evolution from job seekers looking at job ads to employers searching for the best employees. Social media tools like Linkedin make this all possible.
Attracting the right people
If you are a business owner you have a website to attract customers. You combine great writing and interesting pictures to attract potential customers to your website and then contact details and an offer to ensure they make contact with you. LinkedIn is the same concept for individuals, you combine the right keywords and headings to attract people to your LinkedIn profile. Once people are attracted to your profile you can let them know that you are interested in a job, contracting work or other opportunities.
Find Bookkeeping work or customers
If you are completing our MYOB Training Courses you might want to consider joining LinkedIn if you are not already a member. If you are a member and want to get better results this concise ebook about LinkedIn has some excellent information that will help you get more results from your current LinkedIn profile.
I wrote last week about the importance of securing your website in-case you get hacked (it has happened to us several times so we have learnt from the mistakes!). I wrote about a free WordPress Plugin called BackWPup and now I have some WordPress training about how to update WordPress and install the backup plugin at the bottom of this blog post.
If you subscribe to this blog post and are reading this on email, click the heading to get to the online WordPress training video.
About WordPress
WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that enables you to make changes to your website and keep a blog. Both of these tasks make your website more relevant to Google and helps to increase your PageRank with the Google search algorithm.
Just like Windows, WordPress is regularly updated and kept current by the developers and there are thousands of plugins that can be installed to make your website more functional. The WordPress training video in this blog teaches you how to upgrade your WordPress website and install and activate a plugin.
WordPress Training and Free Templates
Our WordPress training course gives you all the tools to create and maintain your own website and it comes with lifetime student access so you can use it as a resource when you want to get more complicated with your online marketing strategy. With enough WordPress training and practice you can not only create and update your own website, but perform this work for other small businesses who need to get online.
Does that seem like a silly question? If you have a website that you have spent thousands of dollars creating and promoting, it would be quite a logical question.
WordPress is your new shop front
In my work running our online training courses I work with several different websites and different content creators each week. We create and modify existing written content, enrolment forms and training videos that demonstrate our popular MYOB training. I couldn’t even begin to count the total value in human hour terms.
The modern website for many businesses is like their shop front, it provides critical contact information plus information and examples of the services you provide or the products you sell. Have you thought about insuring it?
Hacking your WordPress website
I was speaking with a business owner in the construction industry last week to learn about his website woes. His website is built using WordPress, one of the most popular website design and blogging platforms in the world and like many popular things, WordPress site are prone to malicious attack. Their website was attacked by a hacker and hundreds of hours of design, writing, structure and marketing are now in jeopardy because of the attack.
Free WordPress Backup Plugin
Our online WordPress training course includes a section on a free WordPress backup plugin and this recent event highlights the importance of a backup strategy. The website plugin is called BackWPup (Back WordPress Up) and you can read all about it at the WordPress script site. 344,317 people have downloaded this plugin and it even allows you to create a backup to Dropbox.
While you are there, check out the thousands of other scripts that are also available for almost any conceivable tasks you would want to do at your website. You might start to feel empowered about even creating (even only with the words and pictures) your own website!
While we are on the topic of security, risk and insurance, you might want to check your website hosting service and learn exactly how and when they back your site up. It might not be as often as you think and it might be only the previous day.
As part of the research into our Continuing Professional Development (CPD) program for MYOB training course students we are exploring different webinar platforms and we thought you’d be interested to learn about it. For existing EzyLearn students it will mean free MYOB Bookkeeping webinars in the coming months.
We’re proud of our online MYOB training courses and thousands of students are too, but we’ve found that students are interested in lots of other skills relating to earning money for themselves as either an employee or a contractor. Things like using Word to write a resume, using WordPress to manage their own website, how to use online CRM (Customer Relationship Management) programs to keep track of all their contacts etc. We mentioned in a early blog post about our plans to provide more training resources for working mums and we’re getting closer to our final goal.
The purpose of a webinar is to deliver educational content similar to what you would experience with a seminar except that you save on time, travel, money, petrol and you can even watch the presentation at a later date. Our team has been in contact with accountants, career professionals, online service providers and a host of other industry professionals who will be providing information, training and tips and tricks at our webinars and I hope you can join us in this journey.
If you are an existing student and have some idea or suggestions of topics that you would like us to cover, this is your chance. Send your suggestions to sales@ezylearn.com.au and we’ll discover the most popular and work on a schedule for the rest of the year. If you are not a student yet, this is the time to enrol. Stay tuned for more updates shortly.
Have you ever tried to use Google Maps to get directions to your next appointment? I had a recent experience that made me realise why Google Maps makes you street smart.
Many years ago when we had street directories we could see exactly where we needed to go. We could choose our own path based on our knowledge of the roads and of traffic patterns. Now Google gives you suggestions, but I am not sure they are always the best suggestions.
I’ve been using Google Maps to find local training companies around Sydney as well as computer shops, employment agencies, job network agencies and other companies in the career and recruitment fields so that I can tell them about our MYOB Bookkeeping Training Courses and bring them on board as partners. I know that many of us take it for granted these days, but I am reminded of how powerful our mobile phones and internet searching has become! I wrote about this for local business marketing back in 2010 in my personal blog.
I’ve gone to Google Maps on my Android Smartphone and searched for computer shops and up comes a map with a whole bunch of dots and placemarks (like in the image). If you click the place mark you get information about that business and can then call them directly from this information! Google users can also write reviews about your business so watch this space.
Click on the image to see it enlarged on your screen…
You also have the ability to get directions and this is the part that I always find interesting. Having grown up in Sydney I know how to get around and often I am presented with driving suggestions that I don’t agree with. When I use my gut instincts I end up getting to the destination on time and without frustration and I wanted to share this with you because I think it demonstrates that technology is only here to make our lives easier. We still have to make the right decisions regarding the information that technology gives us.
In the end your own experience will tell you which way to go and there is no better feeling than using and trusting in your own instincts. Google Maps makes you street smart because your own local knowledge is often better than that of a machine and it’s always good to trust your own instincts.
PS. It’s interesting to see a photo for JB Hi-Fi that appears to be from someone’s bedroom…
One of the great benefits of being a work at home mum is being able to watch your kids grow up while you take some time out to do work. Since we operated computer software training centres in 1999 many of our students have been either working mums or mums returning to the workface after spending many years in babyland and for many it has been a difficult change.
We’ve always noticed that many mums look to enter the workforce in the bookkeeping field because the work is not time critical yet requires a good skill level that ends up paying well. The great news is that bookkeeping is moving further and further into the cloud so you can now literally do the books from your home.
We’re proud to say that we have a team of work at home mums keeping the engines running at EzyLearn Online. Our MYOB training courses are some of the most popular MYOB courses in Australia and we are able to provide them at their current prices because of the work-from-home mums that are part of our team.
Our business utilizes some state-of-the-art software as a service (SaaS) tools available today and we’re committed to helping all work-at-home mums learn the skills they need to ensure that they can have the work-life balance they are looking for. Our Work-at-home mums use VIRION business grade voip telephone services, HighRiseHQ online CRM, our online learning platform and our online student support system that manages queries from students.
Where you live has never been less important than now. As long as you have a good broadband internet connection and the skills to use cloud based applications you can earn a living while bringing up your children.
To those work at home mums reading this blog post we want you to know that we have some exciting announcements between now and the end of this year about the plethora of online software applications that enable you to earn a living from home while looking after your kids. If you haven’t subscribed yet, feel free to do so and receive updates as they are announced.
Stay tuned for announcements of new courses planned in the coming 6 months…
We help people earn money as independent contractors as well as employees with our WordPress Website Design and Blogging Course and as a result we learn about internet issues that face our students and customers. We recently heard about something that would interest most people with their own website.
A customer was waiting to receive an order and was shocked to hear that emails being sent to their email address were being blocked. This began a long journey of discovery and if you have a heart for technical mumbo jumbo read on. If you know someone with their own website and domain name pass this onto them because they may experience the same problem.
What’s your IP address?
It all comes down to IP Addresses. An IP address identifies you via your connection to the Internet it also helps browsers locate a website that they’re looking for. Did you ever wonder how police are able to confirm that a criminal was looking at a specific websites? Remember the Collar Bomb Hoax in Sydney?
The modem in your home or office that connects you to your ISP has an IP address. Sometimes this IP address is fixed and sometimes it is temporary (also called dynamic) and it’s very easy to find out what your IP address is, just go to http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and your IP Address will be displayed on the website. Yep, that’s right, every website you visit can keep track of your IP address, even the training site for our online MYOB, Excel and WordPress courses keeps a record of the IP address you log into from!
What’s the IP Address of your website?
Every website you visit is really just a number of website files stored on a “host” computer somewhere in the world and most host computers also host other websites (unless you spend a couple hundred dollars per month for a dedicated server). This means that if another website is sending a lot of spam or even if their hosting has been hacked and spam is being sent illegally then the reputation of your website may also be affected. The good news is that these issues are often identified quickly and can be rectified quickly as well, but they are still a pain in the #$&web!
What can cause the problem?
Click on the image to see a larger version
The problem that we recently experienced was caused by a blacklisting at Barracuda Central, but rather than telling us exactly what the problem was, we were given a list of potential causes. See if one of these has ever happened to you? What you might notice as very strange is that the problem could even have been caused by a local PC that is infected with a virus!
As you might imagine there are services available that claim to “protect” you from this type of thing happening again, but they charge a fee. We like the comment made at the WhatisMyIPAddress.com website:
WhatIsMyIPAddress.com does not run, manage, or have any direct relationship with any blacklist. We provide a single location to check the status of an IP address on 3rd party blacklists. WhatIsMyIPAddress.com does not recommend the usage of any specific blacklist and does not condone blacklists that require payment for removal. Our inclusion of such blacklists are for the purposes of completeness and should not be consider to be in support of that blacklist’s usage.
Do you want to read some more?
This is a great explanation of what a blacklist is and how they work, and if you want to read more about a company that wants to help you not get blacklisted read the about us at EmailReg.org.
You’ll be thrilled to hear that the problem was resolved. We asked to have the blacklisting removed, we signed up to EmailReg.org and did some tests, but we never found out exactly what caused the blacklisting and what we did to get of that blacklist….
I’ve recently attended some business building and networking events and have been fascinated at the number of people who speak about the importance good first impressions and having a professional website. What’s most amazing is that many of these people have a website that hasn’t changed in 2 years!
The most important thing about a website though is that it is often the first time potential customers get to know something about you and how you operate your business. Your warehouse and office are things that they may never see, plus, you can use your website to give them some important information that makes them buy from you straight away.
Our WordPress course contains all the training you need to setup a professional website and start adding and modifying the images and words when and as you please. Plus, we have cheap student hosting through 123ezy online services. If you are an MYOB student that wants to start their own business, this is the next course you should take.
We’ve been approached by many different Groupon type companies. There seems to be hundreds of these sites popping up every day and they are famous for offering you almost unbelievable discount coupons for almost anything but most commonly services like pedicures, restaurant and cafe meals etc. We’ve always ensured our prices are competitive and bookkeeping students receive good value for money, but our Training Partners have tried them and we’ll share their opinions with you.
For business owners (or merchants as we are called) group buying sites promote the possibility of receiving hundreds of sales of your product (so you better make sure you can service the demand) but what do they want in return. Here’s a classic scenario:
Normal Price: $200
Group Buying Price: $100
Saving to you: $100
Margin that goes to the Group Buying Site is typically 50% of the discounted price, ie. $50
This means that a merchant that would normally receive $200 for something, will now receive $50! Is it worth it? Then why not just sell it on special for $100 and spend some money advertising it? As you can see, we are pessimistic about the future of group buying sites. Our training partners workface.com.au offered a discount on their Microsoft Excel training courses only to receive a handful of sales.
And there are hundreds of these group buying sites. See if you can recognise some of these names: Cudo, Groupon, AlltheDeals, Spreets, Living Social, Grabone, BizzBuzz etc. At the beginning of 2011 a local Australian startup in the space was sold for $40M! If you have time read a review by Choice Magazine.
The main reason we don’t like the big group buying sites is because of some of the conditions imposed.
When you buy the discount voucher the group buying site earns the money. Some of the more selfish sites will then only pass this money to the merchant when the customer uses the voucher. In other words, if the customer doesn’t use the voucher within the “valid period” the merchant earns nothing and the customer loses the benefit!
By the way, I was at a software training function last week and a birdy told me that consumer protection laws might come into affect that provides protection for buyers of these discount vouchers – if you buy a $50 product then you can receive $50 off after the offer period has expired. Watch this space…
Without wanting to dive into the psyche of a new born mother I noticed a warming pattern in Ebay shipments. Although my teenage years weren’t filled with the educational perspective of The Rolling Stones’ lyrics, the benefits of small parcels from other Ebay devotees fulfils the mothers need for new and interesting things.
Moving away from our usual topics of computer software training, employment services and MYOB and Bookkeeping related blog posts I delve into the stupendous success of Ebay. Ebay users share an unequalled (in the eye of this writer) desire to be rated by their peers so that they can sell to other Ebay devotees. Small children’s garments are often mailed for the cost of the packaging and freight in the knowledge that they will benefit another fledgling family as merchants are rewarded by the invisible smiles of happiness of thousands of recipients in other suburbs every day.
If business owners can act in this way the future might be filled with more specialised businesses that do a better job and are prepared to be publicly rated.
Just like Carol the kindle user and Grandpa Jack, Ebay is evidence that technology is now like electricity – a normal part of our lives. Bring on the next wave.
I was speaking with Ross Miller, the blind rehab consultant who has helped hundreds of job seekers learn new computer skills, write better cover letters and resumes and improve their performance at job interviews, and he shared an interesting resume writing tip with me.
Many employers are now using technology as much as possible to help them find the right candidates for job vacancies. With the tremendous cost in time to find the most appropriate employee some companies are using OCR (optical character recognition) scanning to help them identify the best resumes for their advertised positions. This means that they are actively looking for selected keywords in the resume’s that are sent to them.
Once the domain of website designers and search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists the ability to use the most relevant words in your resume is becoming more and more important. It’s the same principle that is used to make websites more relevant to Google’s Search Engine results.
Taken from Monash University Whitepaper on loyalty
We wrote about the amazing success that Woolworths is having in the increased sale of products through their online shopping portal. Today we explore the concept of loyalty considering the loyalty war that is going on between the shopping majors Woolworths and Coles as well as ways of increasing your customers loyalty.
Imagine this scenario:
Jane is 53 years old and lives with her cat in a northern suburb of Melbourne. She works full time on the other side of town, so she prefers to drive rather than catch public transport. On the weekend Jane likes to do some gardening, and she is also fond of red wine. In fact, she drinks so much that it makes financial sense for her to buy her wine by the carton. Jane’s daughter lives a few kilometers away and has an 18-month-old girl. Jane likes to buy clothes and toys for her granddaughter, even though she has more than enough already.
There are some great discounts available for members of these loyalty programs but do you expose yourself and your complete spending profile to these huge companies. It becomes even more interesting as these companies enter more and more markets. From simple grocery shopping the retail majors are now into petrol and liquor and next it could most likely be pharmacy. With all this data about your shopping habits these companies will have an eerie amount of information about you.
This report reveals some very interesting information about how you can be profiled.
If there is one thing smaller businesses can take from this, it’s the value of having a database of your customers and the easiest database to use is your MYOB customer datafile or your email newsletter subscriber list. You can learn about these concepts in our online MYOB Training Courses and our WordPress course.
All the tools you need to create a newsletter that is emailed to subscribers is available to you for free, you just have to know how to use them. Section 5 of our online WordPress training course gives you the skills you need to get it started.
This website is built on the WordPress Content Management System using a professionally designed WordPress theme. We can change the look and feel of the website in a very short time by simply uploading and activating a different theme and (unless we made some complicated changes to the coding) we wouldn’t lose any of our pages or blog articles.
The best thing about the Tools we use for our EzyLearn Online Training blog newsletter is that we simply use WordPress to write and manage the blog posts and Google Feedburner to provide automated delivery to any subscribers. The best part is that it’s fully anti-SPAM compliant. Here’s an extract from our online WordPress training course.
Section 5: Blogs, Posts and RSS Feeds
Syndication gives you the power to be many places at once. When you write a blog that article can be made to appear in your readers inbox, on other websites and of course at your blog. Articles from our blog also appear at Twitter and our Facebook Page.
Google have a range of tools to help you gain exposure on the world wide web and one of these tools is called Feedburner. This tool will enable you to have your own email list subscribers attached to your blog.
Nareev Bhatt was one of Australia’s top bloggers back in 2009 and he and other top bloggers like Karen Cheng use a simple website with Google Feedburner to deliver their news to anyone who wants to read it. This course will show you how to have your own newsletter using your WordPress Blog and FeedBurner.
If you want to see what’s included in our online WordPress Training Course (with LIFETIME student access) visit the WordPress Course section of our website. Remember you can enrol today and start by 5pm tomorrow.
We recently wrote about WordPress plugins that are available for websites built using the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) that enables the website to be viewed better on a mobile phone and statistics provided by Google (which you can check out and dive into yourself) show that we are one of the world leaders in mobile phone adoption.
Interestingly just under 25% of Australian smartphone owners used the website browsing capabilities of their phone to perform job searches!
We made the decision to use WordPress for our website several years ago (and build a WordPress Training Course) because it is:
An open source solution
Used by millions of website owners around the world
Supported by plugin and themes developers
With the importance of Google searches to bring inquiries to your business and the adoption of Smartphones every business needs to have a website that:
If you have read our blog on your Smart Phone lately you might notice that it is reasonably easy to read on a smart phone. The images in this blog post show the difference between a WordPress website and a WordPress website that uses a free plugin that makes them easy to read on a smart phone, it’s called WP Touch.
We mentioned the great service from Google earlier this week that shows you what your website looks like on a mobile and how it’s also linked to the partnership that Google have with MYOB Atlas in Australia.
We mentioned also that WordPress is a free software program used by Millions of website owners around the world. We installed a simple free plugin to create a much better reading experience (see the image on the left).
Our online WordPress course with LIFETIME access shows you how to install Plugins to get much more functionality out of your WordPress website and blog system.
The best part of WordPress is that it is used by Millions of developers around the world, who are developing Plugins, themes and many other exciting tools to enable you to create great websites, cheaply.
There are many questions that we get asked each day and one of them is “Can I start the course tonight?” I’m writing this blog to let you know that we are all people at EzyLearn and if you have an urgent need we’ll try to help you.
Rowena called and asked this question today because another company that was advertising an MYOB online training course was experiencing difficulties with the person that manages their online system, they couldn’t even get her enrolled and started!
The good news is that there are several EzyLearn team members that can get you started and using our online training system and we manage the whole process ourselves.
Why is this important? and why do I blog about it? Because we promote “Enrol today and start by 5pm tomorrow”. We actually perform enrolments EVERY DAY and we only make the “5pm next business day” promise as a safety net if we get excessively busy.
We also say that “our online training courses are the best online training offer in Australia” and what this means is that we offer EzyLearn ANSWERS and the Student Community and Tutor Support because we are constantly adding content to our MYOB, Excel and WordPress courses. If you are one of our students and there is a topic you are experiencing that is not covered in our course content, we will commission the relevant expert to create a training guide and make it available to you!
Oh, and have a great Easter long weekend. Remember you can enrol today and start after Easter if you want.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
