I must admit that I have written a lot about email marketing lately and it’s ever since Intuit bought MailChimp and our monthly bill went up and some of the features were stripped out.
I then heard about Aweber increasing their prices massively and thought there must be something at play in the world of email marketing software.
The most disappointing part about what MailChimp has done is that they’ve stripped back the ability to create more than 4 automations unless you upgrade to a higher plan.
Everything about MailChimp is screaming out MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY!
EzyLearn has been an online training company for Office Admin and Business Admin courses since the Internet appeared and geez I could tell you some stories about what I’ve seen.
Something frustrating is happening at the moment and it pits the developing countries again rich countries like Australia.
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Gina has 10 years experience in every aspect of operating and managing a tourist and caravan park in her home state of Tasmania and she loved the bookkeeping side of the work so much she wants to do it for other businesses.
She learnt how to use Xero and loves how it means she can do the work from anywhere – even Zeehan in Tasmania’s west.
Did you know that Google earns between $1.50 and $7.00 for EVERY click that you make on a paid ad for Bookkeeping Courses ads? Per Click.
But you can’t just keep clicking on ads because Google limits the number of clicks from the same person/computer/ip address device etc.
Did you also know that some companies can work the Google Ads system and have more than one sponsored ad on a Google Results page? Is it fair? Are they the best solution? Do they end up costing more money?
Intuit (the maker of QuickBooks, an online accounting software for small-businesses) has recently announced a new purchase that could see them breaking into the ERP world of business software. Mailchimp is now owned by Intuit!
Social media isn’t just for selfies and cat pictures anymore. A quick scroll through any popular social media platform will bring up posts from brands and companies promoting themselves and their products/services.
In their guide to digital marketing, Xero included a quote from a business owner who said the following about her approach to social media marketing:
“I don’t spend money on advertising. I create content aimed at helping my target customer and share it on Instagram or via podcasts. It attracts enough new clients to keep me busy.”
Olivia Park, Olivia Park Coaching
It begs the question: is shareable content the digital marketing that businesses should be focusing on? And not just content the business shares, but content that social media users will then share amongst themselves?
Scroll through the job ads on Seek for accounting and office admin jobs and you’ll see the usual skill requirements. MYOB skills, experience using xero and of course high level Microsoft Office and Excel spreadsheet skills.
I did a search before Christmas and one particular job ad stood out. A Sydney building company needed to fill a job for someone who recently left and it contained a list of digital marketing tasks in the job description!
These skills were a nice to have, not mandatory, but it confirmed something I knew was coming – digital marketing tasks performed by office admin staff!
I hope I didn’t sound rude, but if you’ve read these blog posts you’d know I love playing around with new technology but Telstra Online Essentials is a website builder tool that infuriates me!
I recently had an opportunity to help out Neville with his online marketing and that included exploring his current website on Telstra Online Essentials. We quickly got the EPP code for his domain name and transferred AWAY to Crazy Domains but they had some issues too!
“Google Ads” and “Facebook Boosted Posts” are really, really popular right now. BUT the costs of these are getting higher and higher as well. A lot of businesses are struggling to measure the return on investment (ROI), and many are now turning to something far more easily measurable – direct marketing.
Direct marketing use to mean sending addressed letters using a mail merge between Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel but these days it means email marketing.
While I was getting my hair cut the other day, I casually asked the hairdresser how her business was doing. Now this woman is a highly experienced and personable stylist who runs a modern and professional-looking salon with terrific co-workers.
Yet she lamented the fact that business was quiet and she was struggling to get new clients.
But what’s the point of that? The last thing you want to do in a busy, information-saturated world is waste people’s time. It’s an insult and you’ll put them off.
After all, these people have given up time in their busy days to read what you have to say. Don’t ruin this special relationship forever by churning out rushed, poor quality content or waffle.
MANY YEARS AGO I spent $100,000 in advertising in one year. But I didn’t make truckloads of money and became utterly exhausted with the sales process. Yet I still see companies using this approach today: Selling short courses for over-inflated prices to recoup the money they spend on advertising.
When I spent that exorbitant chunk of money on advertising, I then had to hire more people to sell the courses. I had to train these people about what was in the courses, and train the trainers and, well to cut a long story short, spend so much more on resources and overheads that I didn’t make a huge sum of money out of the whole venture at all.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]HE INTERNET HAS democratised many elements of starting your own small business, but, in particular, it has made marketing a small business a whole lot easier.
Another super easy thing to vastly help your business along is getting your own “branded email address”. What do we mean by a branded email address? Simply an email address that carries your branding in the domain name, for example: info@thenameofyourbusiness.com.au versus the far less professional: yourbusinessname@gmail.com.
These factors combined produced a bottleneck effect in the job market, which made it difficult for certain workers to advance their careers, while others, typically young graduates, struggled to gain a foothold in the job market at all.
Helping tradespeople, sole traders and contractors manage and keep clients
As a tradesperson or sole trader, don’t be one of the many who loses out on work opportunities because you’re not savvy online – for marketing and organisational purposes.
When I owned a compliance management company called EzyAccess, I worked with lots of different contractors who were located all over Australia. There was Frankie in customer service, located in the Gold Coast, Queensland; Gary, our product specialist located in Goulburn, New South Wales; and our computer guys, Linus and Rodger, each from Sydney; along with three other women located in Sydney — Dulcie, Michelle and Angela — responsible for admin and marketing respectively. of course, then there was me: travelling between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
Manage your time efficiently
To manage my team of remote contractors, I used Google G Suite (then called Google Apps for Work) — Google Calendar, in particular.
We used Google Calendar to schedule time for particular tasks each person was working on so everyone knew what everyone else was up to, and could easily schedule time to collaborate on certain projects that required help from other team members — Linus and Rodger, for instance, frequently collaborated on projects. We also used Google Calendar to schedule meetings (internal and external ones) and sales calls. (More specifically, we’ve given a case study of a hairdressing salon doing this in a previous blog post.)
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Set up your own Google G-Suite with our Digital and Social Media Online Course
If you need help setting up your Google G Suite account, and would like to learn how your business can become more productive and earn more money, we cover Google G Suite in ourDigital and Social Media training course. Visit our website for more information or to enrol.
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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…
