Posted on June 29, 2012June 29, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Have you been blacklisted? Remember the fake collar bomb?

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?

Blacklisted IP Addresses - what can cause an IP address to be blacklisted — 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….

Posted on June 20, 2012June 24, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Is a website more important than your shop or warehouse?

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!

This is amazing because there are some very powerful and free website content management systems (CMS’s) like WordPress and Joomla and very inexpensive but professional templates (also called themes) where all you need to do is add hosting and a domain name and you have a website that you can change whenever you want. You can also easily update the news section of your website (usually called a blog these days).

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.

Posted on June 13, 2012June 13, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Should we offer MYOB Training Courses to group buying companies?

group-buying-sites-choice-review-discounted-MYOB-training-course — Image from Choice website

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…

As far as discount coupons, we make them available to you. Just tell us what you are looking for in a training course and you’ll automatically receive a discount coupon code for our MYOB, WordPress and Excel training courses.

Posted on June 6, 2012June 3, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 2 Comments

Is a machine reading your resume?

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.

Is there a difference between a resume and a CV? Read the Workface blog and receive regular tips from Jacci, Ross and Yvette for increasing your chances of getting that next job.

Posted on June 2, 2012June 3, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Do you give away privacy for 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.

Loyalty Whitepaper from Monash University

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.

Posted on May 26, 2012May 24, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Want to create your own email newsletter for free?

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.

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Get a WordPress mobile site because Google says 75% need it

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:

Looks Professional (using inexpensive WordPress themes)
Can be viewed easily on a smartphone
You can update yourself!

Check out the Google OurMobilePlanet website and get all sorts of interesting stats for yourself.

Posted on April 13, 2012April 11, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Every WordPress website can look great on a smart phone

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.

Posted on April 5, 2012April 10, 2012 by Steve Slisar

We’re real people, really!

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.

Posted on April 4, 2012April 2, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

How do you look to others?

There are some pretty interesting stats that should convince you that having a website that displays nicely on a smart phone is worthwhile.

2/3 smart phone owners use their phones back-light as a torch
2/5 people use their phone to avoid a social encounter
56% of smart phone owners use their phone to browse the web in bed at night

These are actually important facts to consider when you get your website designer to make modifications to your website and Google have created a fantastic online tool that helps you understand what we’re talking about. This tool also helps to answer some rudimentary questions that you should be able to answer about your website design strategy.

These are some interesting questions:

Can you read text without zooming or scrolling
Can you search the site
Is your address and phone number easily visible
Can you click to call?

See What your website looks like.

Oh, by the way, if you opt to get the full report about your website you will get re-directed to MYOB’s Atlas website and hosting solution (we were not actually presented with a report) 🙁

Posted on April 3, 2012April 2, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Accept credit cards with your iPhone, Android or iPad?

When we first started our computer training centre in Dee Why on Sydney’s Northern Beaches we used a Merchant Account from the National Australia bank and rented a credit card terminal. In this scenario there was a

setup fee,
initial deposit,
minimum term,
monthly fees and
transaction fees for every sale.

Plus, if you weren’t a good negotiator you would pay some ridiculous transaction fee on every sale.

Things have come a long way with the recent announcement in Australia by PayPal of their Paypal Here service that turns a smart phone into a credit card processing machine! It’s also very similar to the Square concept that has been available in the US for some time.

You now don’t need a merchant facility with a bank to receive credit card payments from customers. You can get a tiny device that attaches to your smart phone to accept credit card payments and you can just bump smart phones to transfer funds. If you are reading this blog post as an email, click on the heading to get to our blog site and watch the Paypal Video.

Paypal enables you to pay internationally by using a paypal account and that account can be attached to your bank account as well as your credit card so it may become your one payment method. We use Paypal as our payment gateway for course enrolments and as a result students can enrol from all over the world and companies can even pay with an eCheck!

With no setup or monthly fees your business could start accepting credit card payments using its own business paypal account and stay tuned for some new training material for bookkeepers using MYOB to perform bank reconciliations using a Paypal account.

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Steve Slisar

Your domain, your email

We are constantly amazed at the number of businesses that are enrolling their staff into our online MYOB training course that use a Yahoo or Hotmail email address.

From my experience in the last 15 years domain names have come down from $135 per annum when I used to buy them from Melbourne IT to just $25 per year from companies like NetRegistry. Hosting can also be very inexpensive for micro and small businesses.

When you enrol into the WordPress online training course you can:

Choose the micro business hosting option (through 123ezy) for only $100 pa and that enables you to setup your own email addresses as well as a WordPress website. Plus,
They’ll install the WordPress software and
We’ll provide you with a premium WordPress theme for no extra price!

Oh, and when you use WordPress you can have a mobile phone ready website in less time than you think by using a free plugin. This means that your website will look professional even on the small screens of iPhone, Android and other Smart Phones.

All you have to do is add the words and pictures and you can have your own professional website (and blogging system) and professional email address.

If you are interested in enrolling into our online WordPress training course with LIFETIME student access feel free to enrol here.

PS: You might be interested to know that the blog post you are reading is created using WordPress and distributed using Google’s Feedburner and we demonstrate how to do all of that in the course.

Posted on March 29, 2012April 18, 2018 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Did you know that WordPress is free Website Building software?

Many people think that creating a website is complicated and expensive but it’s not and here’s why. WordPress is an open source program which means that anyone is free to download and use the software (for building websites).

The only complicated parts of using WordPress to create your own professional website is installing it on your hosting and using the right combination of words and images to encourage people to call you, complete a form or order from you. Even getting a professional new logo for your business is now cheap and fast using crowdsourcing.

Our online training website where we deliver one of Australia’s most popular MYOB Online Training Courses is built using WordPress and we have a WordPress course that teaches you how to use the software.

The other piece of great news for small businesses that want a website is that you can choose from thousands of professionally designed “themes” that cost from zero, free and zilch to a modest amount like $50-$200.

For tricky parts including buying a domain name (use companies like NetRegistry or MelbourneIT) where you can buy a domain name for less than $20 pear year and hosting you can find from thousands of large and small providers.

NEW: We use and recommend Rose Hosting and SiteGround

The hardest job when you have a company website is that you should be adding to, editing and improving your website every week by creating new and relevant content that Google Search Engines collect and then share freely with people who are looking for you. That’s called Content Marketing!

Posted on March 15, 2012May 17, 2019 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Do you need more customers, more people, or more time?

I was going through our EzyLearn blog library of articles today. In doing so, I was reminded that we started blogging back in 2007.

This was one year after we closed our three Sydney-based computer training centres to focus solely on online training courses.

After reading some of the old posts, I again realised just how much work is involved in maintaining a blog!

The Necessity of Blogging

When I analyse the workload of the EzyLearn team members and the hours we spend creating step-by-step training workbooks, training videos, knowledge reviews and assessment tasks, I realise that it is all very necessary.

Back in 2007, blogging wasn’t new. In fact, many people had heard of it but most small businesses (or large ones) weren’t really doing it much.

We at EzyLearn wrote a workbook to teach people how to use WordPress and it highlights one of the most important parts of being a training organisation. This being, to study what is new and understand how it will affect businesses and employees that use technology into the future.

This blog you are reading right now is read by a lot of other people and it highlights:

Our commitment to keeping you informed
The range of skills our team has
The number of customers who come to us as a result of reading this blog

Why Blog?

Why am I talking about this? One of our most popular online courses is the MYOB Bookkeeping Course and a lot of people who complete this course want to start their own business.

These same people are keen to build their customer base enabling them to work their own hours, use their brains and earn a good living.

Having a website with built-in blogging functionality based on the WordPress Content Management System is a fantastic way to tell people what you know and drum up new customers. It enables you to keep in contact with people, keep giving them information with no strings attached, and remain top of mind.

Blogging and “content marketing” just takes a bit of time to learn and then keep up to date, but you’ll end up with more customers and won’t have to pay for Google Adwords! 🙂

Posted on February 16, 2012February 16, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

What do you want in a training course?

Sometimes we use the EzyLearn blog to learn more about what you are looking for in a training course, particularly if you have not done a course with us before. As a thank you for sharing your opinions with us you’ll receive a discount coupon for one of our courses and updates about special offers.

We’ve assembled a simple Course Needs Assessment to understand what you are looking for. With online training courses and support for MYOB bookkeeping software, WordPress website design and blogging software and Microsoft Office, we cover a wide range of topics.

Our courses are for:

Job seekers,
Those already in a job and
People seeking skills to operate their own business

Each category of student has slightly different needs and we want to make sure we are catering for your training needs.

Complete this brief questionnaire to join the “specials” list and receive a discount coupon code for one of our online courses.

Posted on February 15, 2012February 15, 2012 by Steve Slisar — 1 Comment

Is your WordPress website secure?

This is a general announcement to anyone with a WordPress website. We have a WordPress Webmasters course to help small business owners setup their own website or blog and also to help individuals learn about WordPress so that they can earn a living creating websites, blogging and participating in social media.

You may recall that this EzyLearn Blog was actually affected by a WordPress Malware attack back in mid November 2011. It’s a known fact that there are occasional vulnerabilities in all sorts of software and that includes online software (they call them scripts rather than programs), like WordPress.

The recent issue with WordPress was caused by the TimThumb.php script for inserting, cropping, editing images etc and rather than go into the details here are some links that you’ll find interesting.

Trend Micro wrote a blog about it
The WordPress Plugin Market now has Vulnerability Scanner that you can install onto your website to identify the risk and provides a resolution.
There is a website that you can use to scan any website to see if it contains malware or other risks.

Why are we writing this post? Because it highlights the importance of using a theme club or theme maker that constantly updates the themes they create.

We recommend ElegantThemes and Woothemes and they both wrote articles about the vulnerability when it was discovered and provided updated themes with the risk removed.

See the articles from ElegantThemes and WooThemes.

If you want to learn more about our WordPress online Training Course contents, pricing etc please visit our WordPress Course website: www.wordpresscourse.com.au.

Category: Website and Internet Marketing