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Navigating the EzyLearn Online Training Site

Come on a short journey to learn how to navigate the EzyLearn Online Training website. We’ll take you on a quick tour so you know what to expect as a student when you start your training with us. You’ll see one of the great benefits of joining and having at your disposal a learning resource for the rest of your working life.

Your student administration area enables you to quickly jump from course to course if you wish and the bread-crumb menu at the top gives you complete knowledge of which course you are in and gives you the ability to get back to your home page and course outline.

Take a look at our popular online Courses in MYOB Accounting, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and WordPress website design and blogging: http://ezylearnonline.com.au/courses/

Here’s the video on how to navigate our training website.

 

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How valuable are words?

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

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

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

Keywords, SEO, marketing, Google Adwords, resumes

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

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

Work at Home

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

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

Words are Valuable in Resumes, Website and LinkedIn

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

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

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

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

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

WordPress Pages and Posts

Administration Privileges and Settings

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

Design options and Themes

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

Website Hosting Control Panel – email

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

Blogs, Posts and RSS Feeds

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

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

Can I make my own site?

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

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Selling horse feed in the internet age

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

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

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

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Want to work at home for EzyLearn?

remote contractor and virtual assistant group

remote contractor and virtual assistant groupWe are building the Remote Contractor network of work from home contractors and at the same time, we are recruiting for online marketing consultants. You don’t have to be an expert though, simply go searching through Australian job forums, social networks (on Facebook) and comments on Twitter accounts where you think it would be good to mention EzyLearn’s online courses.

All you need to do is open up and Excel spreadsheet, and copy and paste the hyperlinks of website forums and social networks (like facebook groups) into each row of the spreadsheet.

We’ll go through the list you create and if it looks like a good list, and we pick you as an EzyLearn online marketer, we’ll pay you to inform the Australia jobseekers about our online courses. Simple.

Have any questions? Send an email to Richard at sales@ezylearn.com.au.

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

Learn how to use Wordpress and social media training course

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

The most significant aspects of website design are:

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

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

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

So is it really something that you could do?

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

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

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

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

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Recommend us for a reward

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

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

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

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How to create a new WordPress blog post

If you are receiving this as an email, click the title to watch our instructional video.

Today the hardest part of keeping your website up to date is not the technology about how to do it but the craft of writing the right words. The writers at HatchCreate understand the writing skills needed to make you look professional and bring traffic and sales to your website. They are versed with the use of the 123ezy website builder and the WordPress personal website publishing system.

We recently organised the hosting and creation of a simple website for the Australian Cartooning College and the video in this blog shows you how simple it is to create your own WordPress blog post.

It’s important to note the similarity between the term “blog post” and “news article”, or “update” because that’s all a blog post is. If you don’t consider yourself a blogger or that your business has a blog don’t worry these are just jargon used to make the art of writing articles sound modern and high tech. This article by Steve Slisar explains a bit more about WordPress and business blogs.

Many mums and dads working from home as remote contractors can earn a good living as a writer by performing the writing tasks to keep a company’s website or newsletter up to date. Once you learn how to manage blogs using WordPress you can promote yourself as a Website content manager. But remember, you need to be a good writer.

If you want to receive our blog post articles as an email when they’re published, enter your email address below.

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Google saves you 2-5 seconds with Instant Search

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

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

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

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What do you think? hmmm?

Social media is the craze these days. Web 2.0, interactive, personal and relevant are terms used to describe what you are looking for in your internet experience. We are interested in knowing what you think about our content and at the same time we want you to share your thoughts with others so we’re trialling a social commenting feature at the end of each post and we’d love to hear from you.

EzyLearn is trying a new service where you can comment on, recommend and share our training material with your network of friends or colleagues. You can see at the bottom of this post, under the Subscribe box, that you can log in using any choice of social networking services and make a comment about this or any other blog post.

Please let us know what you think about our blog posts, videos and training material.

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The right heading can bring people to you

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

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

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Using Google Adwords – Step 1 – choose a budget

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:

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

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

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

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

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

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Email Marketing made simple

Content Marketing for good local real estate agents

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

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

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

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

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New online training course videos due shortly

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

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Fantastic WordPress website template themes

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

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

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

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