We’ve just experience a cyber attack and what do you think caused it? An out of date plugin for our WordPress Blog.
It’s a terrifying feeling knowing that your website visitors see a huge alarming warning asking them to go no further or risk being compromised. Luckily we have a Google Webmaster Tools account that provides some information about the potential cause. When we removed the offending plugin, we were able to use Google Webmaster Tools to get Google to go and re-visit our site and confirm that there is nothing wrong with it.
It’s a lesson in only using plugins and themes that you want to use and removing the rest. We used our blogging site to get to know some great new WordPress tools but now we’re keeping it clean and lean!
If you are a website owner and you haven’t signed up to Google Webmaster Tools, do yourself a favour and get to know it. If you want to learn about using WordPress to create your own website or blog site come and visit our Online WordPress Training Course website.
FREEBIE: We thought we’d share this demonstration video with you because it is very handy when working with images for your website.
GIMP is an open source image editing program that gives you very powerful functionality for editing images. Get to know a little about this program and you won’t need to struggle with Paint or pay for Adobe professional image editing software. This video is one of the free videos in our online WordPress training course.
You’ll want to use this when you want your logo to appear in a WordPress website. There’s nothing quite so unprofessional as a logo with a white rectangle background behind it.
Enjoy. If you receive this information via email and cannot see the video, click on the title to read this at our blog site.
NEWS FLASH: Yet another 11 training videos have been added to our WordPress Training Course!
Only recently we announced the addition of 23 new training videos for our online WordPress training course and that is only shortly after the launch of our exciting new website design and blogging course. Why are we populating this course so vigorously? Because we are working with 3-4 students who are building their live sites right now using the content of our course, everytime they come across a stumbling block, we solve it and create more content for our online course. LIFETIME student membership means that you get access to all these new training videos at no extra charge EVER.
This time we’ve focused on teach you how to work with images to get a really professional looking website using a featured slider. We’ve provided great sources online for royalty free images, show you how to get images in just the right size for your website AND get the featured slider working with our recommended premium themes.
Here the video list and if you are an existing student you can simply click on the link, login and get straight to the new learning resources:
NEWS FLASH: If you are an existing WordPressCourse.com.au student you’ll be thrilled to hear that we have created and made available 23 new videos about becoming an expert in WordPress. These new videos are available to you at no extra charge and they are part of our growing range of WordPress, Google and Social Media topics that are coming shortly.
The topics we have covered in this videos includes:
Blogs, Posts and RSS Feeds
File Management and File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Website Statistics and Google Analytics
Backing up your website
Features of Elegant Themes Premium Themes
Social media and commenting
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.
This video from Channel 10 in 2009 explains how three popular bloggers make a lot of money by working from home.
Read more about our WordPress Training Course and join in to take advantage of our current prices and LIFETIME student access
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).
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.
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):
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If 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
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
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.
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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…
901-11-01 WordPress and Images – Installing and navigating GIMP Image manipulation software
