Now is the time to explore new startup opportunities
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As the end any year approaches, it’s easy to get caught up in the fun and frivolity of summer, by enjoying the few weeks of the holidays in the sun with friends and family. But it’s also a really great time to think about your career plans for the new year.
If you follow this blog regularly, then you may already be aware that EzyLearn has launched a new service called the StartUp Academy.
The goal of the StartUp Academy is to help people launch and operate their own home-based businesses, supported by our network of successful business owners and entrepreneurs. Continue reading New You, New Business Startup?
Our Team are teleworking independent contractors and they can help you do the same
In 2011, the then-Gillard Government introduced a teleworking initiative, established to encourage private sector employers to allow their employees to regularly work from home. The teleworking initiative was soon followed by Gillard’s own commitment in 2012 to have 12 percent of all Australian public servants teleworking by 2020. But the initiative also served another purpose: to promote the use of the national broadband network (NBN).
That was then. By 2013, the Gillard Government had been ousted, and the NBN has been through many different incarnations since it was first announced – it’s still moving forward, albeit as a significantly scaled back offering to what was originally proposed. Also ousted in 2013 was the Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), which oversaw the Government’s Teleworking initiative.
In place of the DBCDE, the Government formed the Department of Communications. It’s primary functions are the same as the DBCDE’s, with one exception: there’s no teleworking initiative, which has ostensibly gone the way of the clog (remember those?). For whatever reason, it now appears that the Federal Government isn’t very interested in encouraging Australian businesses to have their staff telework or to utilise teleworkers, who may be scattered across Australia.
Employed Teleworkers not Independent Contractors?
Could it be that the telework initiative stepped on the toes of various of state and territory level telework initiatives that involved funding, what the NSW Government has dubbed, Smart Work Hubs? Smart Work Hubs, like the one at Wyong on the NSW Central Coast, are essentially co-working spaces established to encourage employers to allow their staff to telework – from one of the government-funded smart hubs, of course.
This is an interesting move, but it relies on people who are already employed and already commuting to a major city centre or business district to utilise the smart hubs, which come at a cost to either the employee or their employer. The locations of the existing five pilot smart hubs in NSW are already located in major areas – Western City and the Central Coast; all areas with easy access to high speed internet services.
For more smarts to be rolled out in other regional areas – Newcastle is rumoured to be next – the existing ones need to prove they’re worth the investment, and that relies on numbers. A significant number of teleworkers, the emphasis here being on teleworkers and not the self-employed, need to be using the smart work hubs regularly enough for the NSW Government to rollout the next phase of smart work hubs.
But as I hinted before, this relies on people who already have access to high-speed internet services at their home and who are still within commuting distance to their place of work, to be willing to pay to telework regularly. Maybe the reason the Federal Government really scrapped its teleworking initiative had nothing to do with the NSW Government’s smart work hubs at all. Maybe it had more to do with it’s new-look NBN.
What the scaled back NBN really looks like
When the NBN was originally proposed, the original plan was to deploy high-speed-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband for most Australians, but that was soon ditched by the Abbott Government for being too expensive. The new-look NBN now consists of a mixed network that prioritises fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technology, which means that fibre optic cables are run to each internet node and the rest of the connection is completed through Telstra’s ageing copper wire network.
Under this NBN, the speed of your internet will vary on how far you live from the node. The further away you live, the slower it will be. But it’s okay, the Government has promised that the slowest NBN speeds could ever get to is 25 Megabits per second (Mbps), the same speed the US Federal Communications Commission defined as the absolute bare minimum to be able to call an internet connection broadband.
The other issue, of course, remains the copper wire network, which the Government now has to buy back off Telstra for $11bn (after the Howard Government sold it to Telstra a decade ago) when it discovered there was a lack of infrastructure in most regional areas of Australia that prevented many households from even connecting to the exchange, never mind the port – as well as some households in major cities.
So what now for teleworkers?
If you’re a teleworker and you live near a NSW Government smart work hub, use it. Certain hubs offer discounts to the NSW Government’s definition of a teleworker – someone who usually commutes to their workplace – while the self-employed can still reap the benefit of working from a smart hub, which are located near or offer child minding facilities, cafes, parking, and gyms.
If you were counting on the NBN to make it easier to work remotely or start your own business, don’t give up on it yet. The Government knows that the key to remaining competitive in the global marketplace is to have access to high-speed telecommunications networks, so the NBN is still, and will continue to be, a major priority.
If you’d like to start your own home-based business, but don’t know where to go for advice and support now that the Government has, seemingly, abandoned it’s teleworking initiative, visit the WorkFace website. WorkFace is an EzyLearn business partner made up of a network of teleworking professionals who have helped many EzyLearn graduates start their own home-based virtual assistant businesses.
Blogging is a Teleworking Task
The article you’re reading is part of the EzyLearn blog and this work can be done from anywhere in the world so it’s a popular outsourced task. If you want to explore blogging for your business or want to learn how it works so you can offer it as a service then discover our Blogging for Business Online Training Course.
Finding Income Opportunities for EzyLearn Students
We’ve had some exciting news in the last couple of weeks: EzyLearn students who are completing the MYOB Training Courses and WordPress Courses are starting to earn money because we’re helping them get customers AND improve their skills!
I’ve been working with the team at Workface and we’re assembling a training and mentoring program to help EzyLearn students start and operate a business from home. The best part of this, and something I am passionate about, is that we’re helping people from all over Australia become remote contractors (teleworkers, call it what you want) and work from anywhere via the Internet.
You may also recall that we’ve also launched the Startup Academy this year to provide formalised and structured training and mentoring support. It’s for you so if you are interested in starting a business and working from home we’ve teamed up with some products/service providers to give you a flying start and projects to start on right away.
Explore running your own business from home now
Imagine travelling this far to work for a client. Content Marketing can be done from anywhere
There are opportunities to provide office/admin support services, content marketing, business telephone systems and IT support and of course bookkeeping services and if you’d like to start a business in one of these areas then explore the business opportunities.
When you sign up and join our team you’ll gain exposure to many new online (cloud-based) software and services that enable us to:
collaborate,
share files,
work on project together,
set and manage goals and daily tasks,
turn to each other for support,
create and build your own online profile, and
many more skills that will enable you to work for yourself and generate your own income, no matter where you live.
Remember our goal is to help you start a business and work from home – NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE. Helen from Bright is our latest virtual assistant and she is doing some website design and content marketing for an infant massage business starting up in Sydney’s Northern Suburbs! I looked at a Google Map and discovered that she’d have at least 3 hours travel if she wanted to work in her nearest capital city!
Are you looking for someone to help you in your business?
We’re going to document our journey with these remote contractors and share with you some of the growth they go through as they grapple with the new frontier of internet working.
If you are a business looking for any of these services you can Find a Contractor through Workface and our team can get to work for you too.
[button link=”http://workface.com.au/services/find-contractor/”]Find a Contractor[/button]
MYOB Account Right Plus Has Inventory Management, But…
The premium MYOB product with the PLUS on the end of its name has always come with Inventory and Payroll. These have been the major services that justify the premium price that users have been willing to pay. Now Xero comes with it as standard! Is it another nail in MYOB’s coffin?
We’ve added a new team member, Sue from Yarra Junction in Victoria, and she has over 20 years experience performing bookkeeping and administration work for various clients as well as running her own business. Sue is writing a training guide that demonstrates how inventory (which was just announced this year at Xero) works. We’re using the same structure and information we use in our popular MYOB training course so you can see directly how the software programs are different from each other – apart from Xero being completely in the cloud so you can access it from any device anywhere.
The great thing about Sue…
Sue highlights yet again one of the great features about running an online business and working remotely in the cloud. Any business can work with staff or remote contractors from anywhere (in the world!). Sue is located over one hour’s drive from Melbourne and I’m sure the commute would be hell – it would cost her time and money in transport – yet because we operate on online environment our team are all over Australia! No more travel time, no more traffic, no more sitting in a carpark on the city roads in peak hour. Just a good internet connection and some competent computer skills and we’re off.
If you’re not sure by now, you’ll be happy to know that my focus has always been to help people learn how to use software. Why? So they can get the job they’re after or start their own business. If you like, you can watch a short video (sorry for not shaving for it!) where I talk about my Work at Home Seminar (or WAHSeminar) which is a program we’re constantly working on to help people operate a business or telework from their own home.
If you haven’t already read about it, read the blog I wrote about teleworking centres that are springing up all over regional areas of Australia. Make sure you ‘like’ this blog and share it with your friends on Facebook because the more we all encourage teleworking and the use of technology the more we’ll be able to take back dozens of lost hours each week in travel time (and cost).
All existing Xero course students receive this training
Like all EzyLearn courses, we offer all our training courses for one low price and include every training resource we create. This Xero training course content is the same – every student who has enrolled into the Xero course within the last 12 months will be able to access these new training resources when they’re published.
If you are a business looking to move across to Xero, feel free to write your questions or comments. If you are trying to find a way of working from home, please make contact. We’d love for you to share with us what you are going through. We can very probably help – and others can learn from it.
While brainstorming with Ray from the Startup Academy about the services bookkeeper charge and the rates they can earn we discovered that there is a huge variety of services that a bookkeeper can offer and as a result their rates differ. Continue reading How much should a local bookkeeper charge?
Here’s a carrot to start a new business and get instant tax deductions rather than deptreciation
In a recent post about subsidised childcare, I wrote about how the federal government has made it easier for families with one parent working at home to access subsidised childcare. In that post I also mentioned how much easier it is to start your own home-based business (for one, you’ve got all these marvelous training courses from EzyLearn to guide you on your way!) now than it was a few years ago.
But there’s some more good news for small business owners: the government also announced a raft of tax cuts and bonuses to the tune of $5.5b in this year’s federal budget, among them an unlimited number of tax deductions for buying cars, machinery or any other equipment valued under $20k each.
The government to inspire innovation
This is a huge increase to the previous amount small businesses were able to claim as tax deductions, which was a mere $1000 per item. Anything above that $1000 had to be depreciated via the decline in value process. Treasurer, Joe Hockey said the reason behind the tax breaks for small businesses was to encourage and inspire innovation in Australia, which has for years, suffered from a lull in home-grown innovation.
[quote]“This will be of enormous benefit to their bottom line and help businesses with their cash flow. It means innovation. It means jobs. It means more money to invest and grow your business,”[/quote] Mr Hockey told parliament in his budget speech.
For purchases over $20,000, they can also be claimed but will go into a pool to be depreciated; at 15 percent in the first income year and then 30 percent for each year after that.
But wait! There’s more: tax cuts and FBT allowances
Small businesses will also enjoy a tax cut of 2.5 percent for the 780,000 small companies with an annual turnover of fewer than $2 million, while sole traders will get a 5 percent tax cut, capped at $1,000.
Small businesses that give their employees more than one work-related portable electronic device (tablets and laptops, for example) will also be eligible for a fringe benefits tax (FBT) exemption from April 1st 2016. This could prove to be a big motivator for small businesses that would like to see more of their employees working remotely from home or while they’re out on the road.
If you’re already in business and you’ve been thinking about upgrading that PC or company car, if you do it before June 30 this year, you’ll be able to claim it as a tax deduction for this financial year. The same goes for those of you who may have been thinking about starting your own small business, be it a home-based one or otherwise – any of those capital purchases you may need to make to get your business off the ground can be immediately claimed as a tax deduction so long as they’re under $20k.
Oh, and Did I Mention The Bookkeeping Business Opportunity?
I hinted at the 30 day money back guarantee that we now offer for the Bookkeeeping Business Opportunity, but you’ll be thrilled to hear that we will shortly also be announcing the inclusion of all of our software training courses!
In the federal government budget for 2015/16 the changes included bonuses for small businesses and cuts to daycare subsidies for stay-at-home parents who still send their kids to daycare. The reforms will mean that for families with an income above $65,000 a year, they’ll no longer have access to childcare subsidies if one parent is not working. For families with an income under $65,000 a year, they’ll be limited to twelve hours of childcare a week, unless both parents are in work or study.
What this mean for mums who want to work from home
Well, the good news is that for families where both parents work, they’ll be able to access 24 hours of subsidised childcare each week. That’s regardless of where your employment is; if you’re employed and you’re paying taxes, then you’re entitled to access the childcare subsidy.
For mums (or dads) who need flexibility in their employment so they can still meet the kids at the school gate or take care of them when they’re sick, the reforms to childcare subsidies offer that flexibility.
We’ve written posts about the many benefits of working from home on the EzyLearn blog before, and it’s why our MYOB training courses became so popular. A lot of parents want the flexibility of working from home and decided that the best way to do it was to work for their husband or partner’s business doing the books.
There are now virtually no barriers to starting your own home-based business, regardless of the industry or profession you choose. Just take a look at the number of networking groups now on Meetup, where nearly every member is a home-based office worker or self-employed. And the government just made it a whole lot easier for families with one parent at home to start a home-based business and have the distraction-free time they need to get their work done, too.
If you’ve been thinking of starting your own home-based business or becoming an independent contractor, EzyLearn offers a number of training courses to give you the skills you need to get started, including a new course on content marketing, which is a huge growth area, requiring many skilled, Australian writers, and will be the subject of another blog post soon.
Outsourced Online Content Marketing and Bookkeeping
What is Content Marketing and Does it Work?
I recently wrote about content marketing and how we have used it for years to ensure our MYOB and Excel Courses appear in Google’s organic search results. I touched on the topic of “who is your audience”, why it’s important and how it may affect your writing style – in reality you just need to write like you are sending an email to a friend, don’t you think – but one of the most important things is to measure the results of your work.
We started using WordPress as our website development platform because it’s relatively easy to use, but mainly because millions of people use it around the world and there are LOT’s of great tools within the platform. These tools are called plugins and they enable any business owner to take control of their website and improve it bit by bit every week or month.
WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of content management systems (CMS) and enables all of the functionality that most people want to see in a professional website, including the capability of enabling a mobile friendly site (important with the new changes in Google for mobile optimised websites).
If you are starting a content marketing strategy I recommend you work at your website every week or two, writing great new content that is relevant to your customers and prospects.
The above chart demonstrates the success we had helping one company improve their organic rankings (in a pretty competitive market). All they did is kept adding relevant text and images to their website that helps website visitors find them and answer their questions.
Want To Learn How To Do This?
Can anyone do this? Yes they can. Like most things there is a formula to success and it takes constant work and regular improvement. I’ve teamed up with a content writer and a digital strategist (could you imagine seeing that job description even 15 years ago?!), to create a course designed to help you learn how to plan and execute a content marketing strategy.
Can a Bookkeeper Do Content Marketing?
I was speaking with Ray from the Startup Academy and we were talking about what makes a good bookkeeper. He mentioned a conversation he had with an experienced bookkeeper he knows who has been bookkeeping for quite a few years and she mentioned that her focus is changing, that she is now starting to spend time on all sorts of aspects of the finance and administration of the businesses she works for. Because of her knowledge and experience she is able to take over many of the other “operational and administration” aspects of her clients businesses and as a result she can:
Do more work for fewer clients (easier to manage, yet still spreads her risk between several clients)
Perform more varied tasks for her small business clients
Earn a higher rate of pay
Can a Bookkeeper Become a Small Business Manager?
Have you read about our relatively new initiative to help people start their own bookkeeping business? One of the training courses we include is the small business management course and we’ve included it because it helps you clearly define the operational aspects of your business plan. Things like
I read a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald (from Feb 27, 2015, by Alexandra Cain) where she talks about the number of bookkeepers there are in Australia (estimated to be 250,000) compared to the number of bookkeepers who are registered with the Tax Practitioners Board as How to become a Registered BAS Agent (12,000). Alexandra introduces the topic of what type of work bookkeepers do and it’s highly practical for them to venture into many other parts of the business.
Every Course To Be Included in National Bookkeeping Package
This is the news that I have been waiting to announce – that we will be including ALL of our courses and any future courses to people who join our new bookkeeping business opportunity, National Bookkeeping. New members will receive thousands of dollars worth of training courses in EVERY course we have so they’ll have knowledge (and access to a knowledge base) about
Marketing,
Website design, Blogging and Internet Marketing
Content marketing, plus using Microsoft Office Applications like,
Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc
We have courses on using help desk software like ZenDesk (that we use), Dropbox and stacks of other short online courses, PLUS we’ll be creating new ones during the year (and the next and the next) that National Bookkeeping Licensee will have access to.
If you are interested in exploring this opportunity further, feel free to go through the Bookkeeping Business Opportunity FAQ’s or make contact with us for more information.
They’re competing with Xero and we wrote about the fierce competition looming against MYOB in 2010 when Craig Winkler (the man who build MYOB into the success it become now being a significant shareholder in Xero).
What made bookkeeping exciting to so many more people?
Bookkeeping became exciting, in large part, because of the flexibility it offered busy people wanting more control over their working lives, and busy parents trying to juggle priorities.
We could create a content marketing strategy about how cloud accounting makes bookkeeping faster and easier for small business, while also making it possible for parents to work closer to home (or at the family home), performing bookkeeping tasks and avoiding traffic, congestion and time you never get back commuting.
I should also confess that, at the time, I didn’t realise how important AND time consuming content marketing would be. Every blog post takes at least an hour!
You may ask how what appears to be a relatively simple blog post can take that long? In reality, a well researched blog post, including topic research, finding images, finding the right page(s) to link to can take several hours and that’s what we’re going to share in our soon-to-be-launched Content Marketing Course & Services.
Why does it take so long to write a blog post?
Content Marketing is worth the effort and now is the time.
If it were the case of just writing some sentences, it wouldn’t take that long at all. But what’s the point of that?
I’m not going to insult people, particularly people who have proven that they take the time to read my blogs on a regular basis, with poor quality, rushed content.
Furthermore, everything I write relates to something else we do and it involves:
Referencing our own landing pages for the services we provide, and
Linking to relevant blogs that I’ve written.
Getting found: Optimising your blog posts for Google
I haven’t even mentioned the time and effort in optimising each and EVERY blog post for the keywords that are important to us. That involves:
Tags
Keyword density
Relevant landing pages
Keywords in headings
Images
Outsourcing blog writing to the Philippines, India or the Ukraine?
Tempting isn’t it? The thought that you can get someone to write a great blog post for your business for $2-3 per hour!
I mean in one day you could get all your writing done and then just schedule the blog posts to be published in something like your WordPress Blog over the next month or two. But it’s not that easy it is?
We are in an age where just stringing some words and sentences together isn’t going to get any one to pay much attention, particularly if there is a hint of broken English or disconnect with the topic. And anyway, if you’re going to write content you need to be an expert don’t you? Who wants to read some words that have just been sprayed onto a page because they have relevant keywords?
Content Marketing Strategy — who is the reader?
Like many tasks involved in small business, the most important part of the work is creating the Content Marketing Strategy; the plan for:
Topics that will interest your readers and potential customers
The keywords to be used in those articles (blogs)
The landing pages that will convert potential customers into customers
Some of these components have nothing to do with the intended reader, but if your content marketing is going to be effective you’ll have to have a clear description of your reader in your head — I like to give them a name, imagine how many children they have, where they live, why they’re using my products/services, who their friends are, how they are going to talk about our company etc.
A wise old business owner I use to speak with regularly kept asking me the question, “Who is your customer, Steve?” This relates to everything. It relates to content marketing, but it also relates to when our courses are available, how we combine several features into one offer, how we try to do more for that market, like find other ways for them to benefit by using our service, hence National Bookkeeping!
For most people it’s because they’re looking for bookkeeping work or want to start a bookkeeping business. Finding out as much as possible about why our students do our courses enables us to develop products (and write content about) what they need.
Join our Bookkeeping Directory TODAY
We partner with a bookkeeping directory which is aimed at helping people (our students primarily) find bookkeeping work or start a bookkeeping business. It’s also a great way for small businesses to find bookkeepers who are close to them.
Find out how you can promote your bookkeeping services to a much wider circle of people by engaging in content marketing.
Is MYOB Just Another Program In Your Control Panel?
I was cleaning up my computer this morning and went to my Microsoft Windows Control Panel to discover MYOB Accounting Software sitting in the program list. I was removing any programs that I may have installed to test or get to know with a goal of REMOVING all that I didn’t need, when I saw MYOB software in the list.
I didn’t see WordPress and I didn’t see Commonwealth Bank Internet Banking in the list and at that moment I felt a little sad, realising that if I changed computers that I would need to go through the program installation process with my accounting software AND that EVERY person who needed to access our bookkeeping software would have to go through the same process.
Cloud Software Doesn’t Need to be Installed On Your Computer
I’m used to going to websites, logging in to do my work and then logging out at the end. Yes, with some I have to change the password regularly and others there is 2 level authentication using a mobile phone number as well, but the great thing about these “cloud-based” services is that I don’t even need my own computer! I can log in using an iPad, laptop or even my smart phone.
With services like Google Apps, we can run our entire company “server” in the cloud and have experts make sure it is up and running all the time for the cost of less than $100 per month, compared to several thousand dollars to buy the hardware (and have the floor space, data, power and air conditioning) , thousands of dollars in software licences and then having to hire an expert IT service person to manage it all for thousands of dollars per year – particularly if something goes wrong.
I’ve always wondered why MYOB didn’t focus all of their efforts on building a fully featured accounting program for the cloud only and wrote about how it seems like MYOB is computer based accounting program with the functionality of Dropbox. Some people think it’s more secure or safe to keep your accounting information local, but I’m not convinced.
How does MYOB compare to Xero and Quickbooks Online
I recently wrote about Ken from Love My Home Theatre and why he loves Xero Accounting Software (not Zero) and also about how the new market for cloud accounting software is not only introducing new competitors like Xero, but also enabling MASSIVE competitors like QUICKBOOKS back into the Australian market for accounting software once again.
If you are a regular reader you’d also know that we’ve had Xero Training Courses for quite a while now and that our focus is to help people looking for bookkeeping work AND small business owners learn bookkeeping software to help them run their business more efficiently and be compliant with the ATO.
The most impressive features of Xero Accounting Software are:
Xero can be accessed from anywhere at any time
Xero can accommodate multiple users (accountant, bookkeeper, business owner) no matter where they are located (which is great for virtual assistants doing bookkeeping from their own home)
The best thing about cloud based software services (apart from having experts making sure it is always up and running) is that when new features are built they are available to you immediately. Xero recently announced the capability to create quotes and manage inventory which brings it even closer “feature wise” with MYOB and although I haven’t had a chance to see it in action, Margaret Carey (who contributed to our XERO vs MYOB feature comparison) notes that:
[quote]Any business that requires more than basic tracking will need to continue to look at the add on solutions such as Unleashed or Dear but it is a promising start.[/quote]
Xero is Definitely Becoming More Popular
Whether Xero has just done some great marketing this year, or that people genuinely want the benefits of a cloud-based accounting program, we are experiencing increased enrolments into our Xero Training Courses.
It could also be because all of our Xero courses are included for the one low price – we don’t sell them separately AND we include new content during a students membership period.
We use all of the major cloud-based accounting programs and I can say personally that I like what I have seen with Xero and Quickbooks Online. The fact that you don’t have to go through that labourious process of downloading, installing and registering your software (for each user) is a great bonus, but the fact that you can use these programs from any computer is even better.
Stay Tuned for QuickBooks Online Training Courses
This year will become a very interesting year as online accounting software companies fight for your business as well as loyalty from bookkeepers and accountants. I can reveal that we have started writing the content for our soon to be launched Quickbooks Training Courses! Jacci, our Register BAS Agent is working to replicate the small business accounting processes we use in our MYOB and Xero courses to teach students how to manage business accounts using Quickbooks Online.
Is there a wave of innovation in online accounting from Canada?
Would you like to hear about MORE innovation in accounting? Want to learn about a cloud-based accounting program that boasts more than twice as many users as Xero?
I was speaking with an insurance agent who is contributing to the risk management components of our Small Business Management course and he was telling me about this great accounting software that is completely free unless you use their merchant services and/or payroll. I haven’t confirmed any of these features of the software, but a quick visit to their website shows an interface that looks very much like Quickbooks Online with the navigation panel on the left of the screen.
My insurance agent friend Ruben is sharing information with us about how Workcover works for small business owners as well as public and product liability. He’ll also share with us how these relate to contractors who might work for you and go to perform work at a customers site.
If you decide you’d like to take a look at Wave Accounting or you are already a customer of this accounting program please share your opinions with us at our Facebook page.
Because it’s the beginning of the year we are receiving a lot of calls from students who are looking to do an MYOB Course so we are thrilled to confirm that we offer access to ALL of our MYOB Courses for one low price and 12 months course access.
You can follow our journey from operating training centres in Sydney’s Dee Why, to the decision to go 100% online at the About EzyLearn page on our website, but I’ll sum it up in 1 paragraph here:
We can guarantee consistent course content to every student, with MYOB Course content developed over 15 years in teaching people how to use MYOB and from some of the best MYOB Trainers in Australia. By creating our own MYOB courses and updating them we are able to focus on the content of our courses as well as the systems to support it online rather than paying for office rent, computers and software licences, trainers and advertising.
MYOB Course Options
The only decision you need to make is whether you want an MYOB certificate and 12 months or lifetime course access. Remember that unlike some MYOB course providers our students can move freely from one course to the next as they please and use the course as a resource while at their new job or operating their own bookkeeping business.
MYOB Videos, Training Workbooks and Knowledge Reviews
With a 100% focus on MYOB Course content we create every form of training material for MYOB accounting software: Videos, Workbooks (with step-by-step exercises) and Knowledge Reviews that test your skills. You can watch a video and try to replicate it with the free MYOB software or follow the exercises in the MYOB Trainingg Workbooks to perform tasks that bookkeepers perform every day in their working environment.
Money-back Guarantee
When we were the first training company to offer MYOB courses online in 2008 we offered the money-back guarantee because not everybody had great broadband Internet speeds, not everyone knew how to navigate around websites and online learning management systems and people where generally scared to use their credit card online. Now-a-days we find that the biggest reason some students find it a comfort is because many students are Mac users and are not sure that they would learn by using MYOB Course content created for the Windows versions of the MYOB software.
Why Thousands of Students Choose EzyLearn for MYOB EVERY Year
We use the Content Marketing approach to building our brand and product awareness and it takes a lot of effort to put the amount of detail we put on our website and in our blog posts. We do it because it shows an ongoing commitment to openness but also to leave no doubt as to exactly what we offer and how we support it. If you want to get to know more about us read some of our blog posts or watch some sample videos. If you are ready to enrol into an online MYOB course then enrol now online and start by 5pm next business day!
It’s that time of the year again when people are acting on their new years resolutions and embarking on training to improve their knowledge and skills. In 2011 we introduce a free MYOB online skills test that anyone can do to test their knowledge of MYOB software and it interesting to see that the average score has increased from 40% to 55% over the last 4 years!
What more interesting is that most attempts resulted in a fail score – 69% of students failed to pass. You can do the test several times if you want and if you get an answer wrong the skills test can show you the correct answer – it helps you learn.
We have a test like this at the end of each section of each course (ie. there are lots of them) and we focus on using them to help students consolidate what they’ve learnt as well as show them what the correct answer is. We see our knowledge reviews as a teaching aid rather than something to be scared of.
If you are interested in learning how to use MYOB to find bookkeeping work or start your own bookkeeping business look at what is included in our MYOB Courses (5 courses for the price of one) and start your journey on a new career or the flexibility of having your own bookkeeping business.
A client of ours showed me an email that came from Sensis and it looked a little sad. It showed how many times an ad appeared and how many people clicked for more information. The saddest part is that this Billion dollar company is now just another online directory. It’s another example of how a traditional business, that hires professional and persistent sales people to sell high cost packages is dying an accelerating death. The other large one I recall was Encyclopaedia Britannica – remember those door to door salesmen who made a good income selling these for your children’s benefit? OK, now I’m assuming you’re over 45 😐
Why Content Marketing
We decided many years ago to go down the blogging route because it makes sense. These days the correct term for blogging for business is “Content Marketing” and it’s great because it’s a way of:
Constantly informing readers,
Demonstrating an active business and website
Informing website visitors about changes in the business,
sharing stories about how people use our services and
Making general announcements.
How Bad is the Yellow Pages Directory Going?
Telstra recently offloaded their majority ownership in the Yellow Pages business they branded as Sensis and in the fine print on page 15 (2013 year) and page 18 (2014 year) you can see that the revenue for this business declined by 11.7% and 22% respectively.
I remember when most local tradies (plumbers, electricians, chippies, builders etc) would spend tens of thousands of dollars per year to keep their position in the large display ads. I even remember the days of the golden phone that Yellow Pages use to make available to business to PROVE just how many phone calls would be coming in the door as a result of advertising with them. If anyone remembers the golden phone offer I’d love hear from you on our Facebook page..
Where do you spend your marketing money?
The idea for this blog post came as a result of being forwarded an email, but it ties in nicely with our Small Business and Startup Course which is now available at a hugely discounted price! Read on to see how we changed our pricing structure.
In this course we have two subjects which cover marketing for small business and we have some great interviews with Michael Locke who shares information about the 4P’s. Sensis would represent an excellent case study of where the marketing function may not have been submersed in the strategy business decision making to stem this significant change in their business model.
The recent change we made to this course was to separate the business coaching and assessment options and make them available separately. In this way the Small Business and StartUp course is much like our MYOB course where you can work through everything at your own pace and request support if you need it.
If you are interested in doing a number of different courses as well as the Small Business Management course you might want to enrol at the Australian Small Business website where you can choose our software courses at a discounted price (when combined with the small business management course). This way you’ll be able to use WordPress for your content marketing, MYOB or Xero for your accounts and Excel for any spreadsheet work.
Traffic from Russia, Eastern Europe, Philipines and India?
We’ve been busy these last couple months in upgrading and optimising our websites, fine tuning our online marketing and studying our Google Analytics and came across a Russian based website that was sending a lot of traffic to several of our sites. After closely monitoring our website traffic, landing pages, bounce rates, time on site etc, we found a lot of in bound traffic from a Russian site called Darodar. It made me wonder why we’re all so scared of web traffic from the USSR. In fact it’s a reminder of the fact that labour is very cheap in some of these countries and some companies or individuals can go to great lengths to
The best thing to come from all this really is that by looking at our statistics regularly, updating all scripts and plugins and server side applications not only do we have an up-to-date website with security and protection against online risks, but we understand our website traffic in detail. This is helping us fine tune our website content constantly to provide our website visitors with what they are looking for.
I don’t normally write like this
I don’t normally like to write about all the technical details we have to go through as an online training course provider, but we’ve been assembling some marketing information about our new online business opportunities and realised this is exactly the type of information that we’ll be sharing with students who come along on our online marketing business opportunity.
As it turns out the type of traffic we were getting is called HTTP Referrer Spam or just Referrer Spam and hundreds of people are talking about it online already. Here’s a snipped of some of the sites we discovered. There is a lengthy conversation on an official WordPress Support Forum, and an article on a popular article site called Reddit.
The Best Answer
The best answer we found was this link that confirmed that this type of attack is not malicious to your website, is not a server side issue and won’t affect the ranking and traffic to your site. The biggest issue is that we spent all this time and even ended up going to the site in question (that’s one of their goals!!) and that it distorts our Google Analytics information.
We disable the Darodar Spambot and any traffic from this location. It’s not the best solution because we can’t do this for every website that performs this type of activity, but again, it gives us more clarity about what is happening with our website traffic.
Who cares?
If you want to get to know more about our online marketing contractor business opportunity go visit the StartUp Academy website for more information. I’ll be sending more information out shortly so stay tuned – including the services we are launching to help people start their own bookkeeping business..
This is where you can see the myMYOB login and the Live wording in the cloud
We were asked by one of our MYOB course students recently how you can manage user access to your MYOB accounting file and we did some looking around, spoke to our MYOB course creator and came up with the following useful information.
Click on Image to Enlarge – How MYOB AccountRight Live enables you to manage users
You can go to the MYOB website and click on my.MYOB to get to the details of your “participation” with MYOB AccountRight –
[quote]sorry, NERD ALERT! I happened to be reading the MYOB Terms of Service and “Participate” is the term that the MYOB legal team use to describe how companies use the MYOB AccountRight service -[/quote]
which enables you to choose your administrators as well as who you want to be able to access your file (like your bookkeeper or accountant). But you can also manage users from within the software. Note the out of place word here? – Software – Yes, when you launch the software and Open your Online data file, you can setup users and be much more prescriptive as to what they can access or not, but also which areas they have read only access as opposed to full access (read and write).
MYOB AccountRight User Access Managed in the Software
MYOB AccountRight Live Basics – Modifying User Access 2 – Role Based User Access
The silly part of this is we would expect cloud-based software to enable you to do everything in the cloud! If you look at the current MYOB model for their AccountRight Live product you still need to download the software to use it and you still need to update the company file if you update the software version!? We thought that this day had passed when the concept of cloud based accounting arrived.
Is it Designed to Help Current MYOB Users?
When I look at the way that MYOB AccountRight Live is managed at first it looks like it was built for people who are used to having a software program on their computer. Then when you see the capability to Open company data files that are stored “Online” you get the feeling that it would be just as easy to use Dropbox to store your datafile. The worst news comes when you expect the MYOB AccountRight Live software (that has a little cloud around the live) to work just like other cloud-based account programs like SAASU, QuickBooks Online and Xero you get dissappointed in having to install and use software on every computer you use – and I haven’t even tested to see if they have a program for the iPad.
MYOB AccountRight Live Software – Company file still needs upgrading
If you are the kind of person that loves storing a local version of your datafile (and take the risks of protecting your own computer against, viruses, crashes or other corruption) this might seem like a good feature. I bet we see this product evolve until the point where it is finally an all online accounting solution.
How to change User Access Rights using MYOB Account Right Live
Although you can make some rudimentary changes via my.myob.com the best way to add users and make specific choices about what they can see as well as what they can edit and see, you need to launch the software (make sure you’ve downloaded it of course) and then go to Setup, User Access.
We used a current version of AccountRight Live Basics to perform our tests and any new content we create and publish for our MYOB Training Courses are available to existing students – whether you are on a 12 month course access program or LIFETIME course access. Feel free to enquire with us if you have any questions about our online MYOB Training Courses, or enrol today, start by 5pm tomorrow and be comforted by a 30 day money back guarantee.
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I don’t normally like to write about all the technical details we have to go through as an online training course provider, but we’ve been assembling some marketing information about our new online business opportunities and realised this is exactly the type of information that we’ll be sharing with students who come along on our online marketing business opportunity.
