HubSpot is a marketing system and CRM built for the modern day content marketing professional. Like most cloud-based services they have their own app store (they call it an ecosystem) and Xero recently boasted about being one of a select group of 16 promoted by Hubspot. They didn’t fair so well though.
Continue reading 16 Apps to Customise Hubspot But Xero Gets the Worst Rating
Continue reading Why Collecting Your Client’s Email Address is So Powerful
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.
Continue reading Get Discovered on Google for FREE – and Increase Traffic 100%
EMPLOYEES IN GERMANY have the world’s shortest work week, according to SME Magazine. Their work week averages just 26 hours due to strict workplace relations laws that promote a healthy work-life balance.
Sweden is also known to have implemented a 6-hour workday, or 30-hour work week, following research which has found that countries with shorter working hours generally have higher disposable incomes, greater productivity, and a stronger economy as a result. How can you do this in Australia?
Continue reading Working Less to Earn More? Why Freelancing is So Darn Popular
THERE ARE ESTIMATED to be over 4 million Aussies working as freelancers. Of this, roughly 750,000 people work regular jobs but freelance on the side (which, needless to say, is a great way to break into freelancing while reducing your risk).
The number of freelancers in Australia has skyrocketed since the GFC, partly because of the overall reduction of the workforce; and partly because of the number of mature-aged workers staying in their jobs past the traditional retirement age.
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.
Continue reading Why Freelancers and Contractors are Good for Your Company
But when you look at some industries, like Bookkeeping, the numbers are massively swayed towards the female gender and one of the reasons is it can be the perfect business to run from home.
Continue reading How Aussie Mums are Starting their Own Businesses
THERE ARE UMPTEEN REASONS why starting a bookkeeping business is a great low-cost venture for people looking to take a step back from the corporate world, or even for those looking to do quite the opposite by working from home so they have the flexibility they need as parents to young children.
If you’re a subscriber of this blog, then you’ve read posts about National Bookkeeping, the company EzyLearn has partnered with to deliver training courses to people who become National Bookkeeping licensees.
However, I’m going to talk about it again because there are still too many talented people out there who don’t think they have what it takes to go into business for themselves. And I’m here to tell you, you do, and we’ll help you!
Continue reading When a Bookkeeper Isn’t Just a Bookkeeper
FOR MANY BUSINESSES sending quotes and estimates to prospects doesn’t accurately describe the work you’ll be providing them.
Sometimes it’s because you’ll be providing an ongoing service or solution to a business problem — property management, content marketing, bookkeeping — and other times it’s because your business will be competing with others in a public tender.
In these instances, you’ll need to send a proposal to potential clients to explain your value proposition and how you’ll solve their business problem. Rather than sending a proposal in a Word document that you can’t track, use a cloud-based document management platform.
Here are some popular Xero CRM Integrations.
Continue reading The Best Xero-Integrated Document Management Platforms
THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY IS undergoing substantial disruption. Only the real estate agents and agencies that decide to innovate will make it out the other side.
A big part of that means letting go of the traditional model and embracing a new, transparent real estate sales model, but many agents are still reluctant to change.
And that’s a mistake.
Although much of the disruption is coming from technology companies, such as REA Group and Domain Group in Australia, as well as the tech giants Facebook and Google, other established players, recognising that the timing is right, are entering the fray too.
Together, these businesses are changing the way real estate in this country and across the world is bought, sold and rented. If real estate agents aren’t proactive about this change, they’ll end up being reactive. And they’ll miss out.
One of the Case Studies in our Digital & Social Media Marketing Courses centres upon a McGrath agent based in Sydney’s Cammeray. This agent, Derek, comes to realise his own personal brand is as powerful with local residents as the McGrath brand because he is a hard-working agent and his vendors love him.
Via the virion Digital Agency we were able to help Derek create a website and social media campaign to further hone and build his brand as a property expert.
Take Jim’s Group, the franchise group known for mowing lawns and fixing broken antennas. Last week, they announced their intention to enter the real estate fray with a new, low-cost service for both agents and homeowners.
The division, which is being headed up by a Jim’s Group veteran and the former sales director of low-cost real estate service Hello Real Estate, will charge agents a flat $1,800 a month franchise fee.
Homeowners will also be able to suggest how much commission they’d like to pay the agent to sell their home. (It’s understood there’ll be a threshold for how low commissions will actually go.)
Jim’s agents will work remotely from their home offices — or their cars — as most Jim’s franchisees currently do, and they’ll have substantially lower overheads so they can provide the same service to homeowners as a traditional real estate agent, only for less.
As an existing and trusted franchise group in Australia, they won’t have to overcome the same barriers like name recognition and trust that new entrants to the market — your Purplebricks, say — did. (Of course, the Purplebricks service is also quantifiably different to the proposed Jim’s service.)
Agents who don’t think Jim’s will make a serious dent in the industry may be right. But that misses the point; the franchise model is about giving business owners a cushion between them and flying solo. Plenty of people work in franchises — real estate is the most franchised industry in this country — but not all of them do. There’s plenty of room for independent agents to take this idea and operate their own agency the same way — and keep their $1,800 franchise fee while they’re at it!
That brings us to the biggest source of disruption in the real estate industry: the proptech sector. In Australia, agents need to be cautious of
But they also need to be wary of any new entrant that puts an “Uber” spin on the sector. (Domain recently opened up its developer APIs to encourage tech startups to use their data to create disruptive new services.)
At the moment REA Group and Domain are focussed on moving closer to the transaction, but they’re also heavily investing in tech to ward off any disruption from tech titans Facebook and Google, which they consider the biggest threat to the real estate industry in this country, and the world. (eBay-owned Gumtree also shouldn’t be excluded from this conversation.)
Both real estate groups have acquired (or launched through partnerships) their own mortgage broking businesses — Domain’s Domain Loan Finder is a JV with online broker Lendi; REA Group acquired mortgage broker Smartline, and launched its own white label service in conjunction with NAB, called realestate.com.au Home Loans.
They each also own stakes in tradie sites Oneflare (Domain) and hipages (REA), connection services Compare & Connect (Domain) and Beevo (Domain), property data and mapping firm PriceFinder (Domain), real estate CRM MyDesktop (Domain) [read more about the best real estate agent CRM’s], and property inspection app Homepass (Domain); Domain will also launch insurance comparison service Domain Insure and real estate agent training and education program Domain Academy.
And REA Group is busy building robots and virtual assistants, which can respond to customer enquiry — requests for Section 32 documents, schedule inspections, and so on.
Neither Domain nor REA are likely to bite the hands that feed them by introducing a real estate agency service or cutting agents out of the picture entirely — this year, REA Group posted revenue of $633.5 million from its Australian operations, of which $538.2 million was derived from agents advertising on its site.
But by owning the real estate “ecosystem”, they make the role of the real estate agent much less vital — and ripe for a new service to come in (like a Jim’s Real Estate) and say, “hey we can do it better.” Before long, that’ll become the “traditional” real estate model, just as the classified websites that usurped newspaper classifieds are now considered the “traditional” model of buying and selling stuff online.
To stay ahead of disruption, agents need to educate themselves. Continuing professional development (CPD) is a mandatory part of staying licensed in every state or territory. Provided agents undertake recognised training and keep their CPD points up, they can study anything relevant to the business of real estate.
Digital marketing is a fundamental part of real estate. Agents who understand how to market themselves online to get new business and demonstrate transparency about how the process works will stay ahead of the curve. Derek Farmer used educational videos and blog posts to explain the buying and selling process, and share market news and analysis.
This makes a sales agent an indispensable source of knowledge and a trusted advisor to buyers and sellers throughout the process, which can’t be replicated by a robot, virtual assistant or app. Virion also helps agents create a digital market strategy for their business, and to fill up their website or social media pages with content that provides information to buyers and sellers they’re currently getting from … Domain and realestate.com.au!
Domain and REA are doing their darndest to keep people on their sites for longer. They’re sewing up the entire property buying and selling process with complementary services (insurances, connections, mortgages) and they’re pushing more and more into content (videos, journalism, content marketing); Domain is particularly innovative in the content space, thanks to its Fairfax roots.
As a result, buyers and sellers are coming to agents forearmed, and again, the role of the agent is diminished. But agents can stay in home buyers and sellers minds by creating their own property ecosystem: start a website, fill it with good quality content, use a CRM to manage your lists of buyers, sellers, tradespeople — who have become one of the most important players in the sales process — and pump messages out your database regularly.
Finally, look at introducing a different fee or commissions structure for certain types of property or across the board. This is where the industry is heading and fighting it will only leave you in the same position the newspaper industry was in with the advent of online classifieds; cable TV providers with the rise of VOD services; music labels with streaming services, and so on.
Visit the EzyLearn website to learn more about our continuing professional development (CPD) training courses. To create your own property ecosystem with a digital marketing strategy and content, visit Virion’s website for more information.
It’s Christmas time and we’ll be open every day (except the public holidays) which means you can make contact with questions or support during your course.
But best of all, we’re offering a fabulous special offer with a saving of over $300. Check out the quick video below which shows you how to get $663 dollars worth of training for just $296 — a saving of $337!
All you have to do is choose your courses at our Online Course Enrolment page and the discounts will be applied automatically.
With the New Year coming fast we find most of our students are looking to change careers and/or up-skill so as to feel confident with their computer skills in job interviews and the like, so our current special offers will train you up to be your best, cheaply. Here’s all you need to do:
If you don’t have the time right now, don’t worry, you’ve got 12 months to complete all these courses at your own pace — so just enrol now to get the current special offers.
It’s been a very busy year for new course creation and we’ve just launched two new courses that are all based on new online cloud-based services in bookkeeping and marketing/advertising. Read about them here:
Provide quotes on your tablet computer, convert them to invoices when you get the order and take photographs of your receipts for expenses — works on your smartphone too. These are the features of America’s most popular accounting software program that is now aggressively promoting itself to Australian small businesses.
And what do we think? We believe QuickBooks is good software — find out more about our Intuit QuickBooks Daily Transactions Course.
Tired of struggling to post consistently on Facebook and other social media sites? We’ve had a WordPress course for several years to teach you how to create your own website and blog, edit images, and optimise it for search engines (like Google). But if you’ve ever struggled with fleshing out a Facebook Page, or want to start promoting yourself or your business in social media, try our Digital Business and Social Media Marketing Courses.
We show you what you should include on a modern day website as well as including Facebook Page, Content Marketing and Facebook Advertising training (which we used to help Derek Farmer show up on Page 1 in Google for the competitive Cammeray Real Estate Agent search query).
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For those of us in small business, be it as a bookkeeper, real estate agent, sales rep, virtual assistant or the like, most of us are selling every day of our lives.
This means we get pretty good at it. We develop techniques that we can replicate and that become part of our daily lives.
The process of selling is really no longer about selling per se; it becomes about a systemised process of:
Continue reading Are You a Bookkeeper Who Needs More Clients? Want My Advice?
In a post I published about starting your own business, I said that all small business owners should have an understanding of traditional and digital marketing. You’ll be surprised how many don’t!
All businesses have a digital aspect to them these days so it’s vital that business owners and managers know how to manage the digital aspects of their business.
This starts by understanding some of the terms used and how websites, domain names, hosting and the Google search engine works. Continue reading FREE Digital Business Course
If you’ve read my recent blogs about the free WordPress training video for Youtube and real estate agents or Facebook Advertising for real estate agents you’d get the feeling I’ve been pretty submersed in the real estate industry! Well, you’re right and the good news is that if you’re a bookkeeper looking to start your own bookkeeping business this will help when I start sharing what I’ve learnt about the sales techniques used by real estate agents to sell property – it could help you sell your bookkeeping services.
For now I just want to share with you the news about our latest education guide on selling your property – it’s yours for free and has all the steps in the real estate sales process from the sales contract to settlement.
Now, just to be clear we’ve done a LOT of research to come up with this guide because we make it available to the real estate agents that use our Digital Marketing services over at virion. Real estate agents can use this guide as a giveaway as part of their “Call-to-action and Lead Capture“. In creating this Education Guide we interviewed:
Spring is the season that is most often touted as the best time to sell your property. Property buyers start coming out of their homes after the chilly winter to go and inspect properties at open houses and most people want a sale to be made before Christmas. If you’re one of these people looking to sell then this guide will explain why you need to start preparing now. Here’s what we’ve included in this guide, our table of contents:
Content marketing has been my marketing method of choice since 2008 after we spent a lot of money on Google Adwords and other advertising methods to try to attract students to our online training courses. I like content marketing because people (like you) get to know a bit more about us, you get to see the quality of our work and over time (after over 500 blog posts!) you get to see my commitment to EzyLearn and EzyLearn students. This is the type of commitment I believe real estate agents will need to make to stand out from the crowd and become more relevant in a digital age.
I’ve been fortunate to work with Derek Farmer (real estate agent in Sydney’s Lower North Shore) who understands the need for agents to change the way they come across. He spent tens of thousands of dollars to create a series of educational videos about each of the steps in the property selling process because he wants his vendors to understand each of the steps. He also realised that he was spending a lot of time explaining what goes on during the selling process and created the videos to share his experiences in these situations and inform vendors about how they can deal with their emotion and what decisions they can make when these situations arise.
If you’re a real estate agent and you want to re-brand our “Selling Your Property” Education guide please make contact with us via our Digital Agency (virion). Happy preparations!
Coming Up… The Facebook Page ChecklistFacebook is one of the tools that real estate agents are jumping onto as quickly as they can and there’s a good reason for it demographic targeting – they can promote their brand to every person who lives within 2km of their office or “sales patch”. Bookkeepers or any other businesses can also use this targeting for their marketing and we’re putting the finishing touches on our Facebook Page Checklist AND our first Facebook for Business Course – Setting Up Your Facebook Page.
We’ll be giving away the Checklist for free so make sure you subscribe to receive it via email.
Microsoft PowerPoint decks (yes, that is the word they use in the corporate world) enable you to get your knowledge, thoughts and ideas across to other people. Whether you’re showing off a new creation to one person, presenting a total solution to a small group of potential clients or teaching an entire audience, Microsoft PowerPoint forces you to put the information in a logical order.
Some people think PowerPoint presentations are the most boring way to present information, but the key is to not rely on the slides for telling the story, rather using PowerPoint slides as an aid and selling your pitch using your words, gestures and other props.
When you enrol into any course with EzyLearn you get access to ALL versions and ALL levels. That means that when we have a new version of the course go live (like we have in this announcement for PowerPoint version 2016!) existing students can access the course materials for no extra cost. New students also get to view and access all older training course resources too.
The latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint lets collaborators see what other collaborators are doing. If you are familiar with Google Docs you’ll know about this feature already – because it’s almost freaky to see exactly what someone else is working on and where in the document they are. The only drawback is that you’ll need to be using OneDrive or Office 365 SharePoint. OneDrive is Microsoft’s equivalent to Dropbox and Google Drive and most people I know are already using a file sharing system already, but like all software companies try to do they’re no doubt doing everything they can to get PowerPoint users onto OneDrive.
The main reason for this blog post is to announce that our Microsoft PowerPoint course is now being loaded with the latest versions of the software training videos and workbooks!
If you’re an existing student you’ll be thrilled to hear that we’ve completed the production of all training videos and training workbooks for Microsoft Word and they’ll be implemented into our Learning Management System shortly too! Microsoft Excel 2016 will then be created so our students will be able to access Microsoft Excel Beginners to Advanced training material on every version from 2000 until 2016!
Stay tuned for more announcements.
I HAD A GOOD, long think before writing this blog post. However, I’ve decided it’s OK to write this blog — because the blog should be about helping business people reach Page One in Google’s organic search results (that’s the FREE ones!)
You should see the number of emails I get each week from overseas companies in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and even the US and UK.
All of these emails are telling me the same thing: How they will get my company onto Page 1 in Google!
You might be thinking, “Yeah, so what? I already know how to do that!” or let me see your list of companies. Point is, there are lots of these self-professed experts around — and I’m probably no exception!
I last wrote about real estate agent, Derek Farmer, before Christmas when we had already created his new website. The aim of this was to help property owners find him when they’re ready to explore selling their property.
We’d already begun the process of creating relevant content but ramped it up in the last 6 weeks and the results were amazing as you can see from the chart!
The work we did to help Derek get onto Page 1 of Google WITHOUT spending a cent on advertising, involved all the tools we use at EzyLearn just to run our business. The thing with this is that we practise what we preach.
That’s the beauty of running an online business: You get pretty good at all the technical and content stuff, particularly when you have to compete with the marketing muscle of billion dollar organisations like MYOB and Sydney University!
Of course, Derek was a good real estate to begin with. He had a great existing reputation in Sydney’s Lower North Shore and over 170 property sales under his belt. Quality speaks volumes.
Derek had also spent a lot of time, considerable money and brainpower coming up with an educational series of videos. These helped his vendors (people selling their homes) and prospective customers better understand the various stages of the sales process.
This reflects the need for businesses to generate great quality content that people will find valuable — it’s something everyone needs do in the “Google information era” we all now live in.
See what Derek has done and learn more about Automated Response Marketing
Virion is the arm of the business that helped Derek achieve such tremendous online success.
If you want to see more of what we do with online and content marketing, along with case studies and success stories, subscribe to our Virion blog.
Whereas the EzyLearn blog is chiefly about what we teach, the virion blog covers more of what we do. I’d love to share the work we do with you. Who knows if you see something you like, you can even join us and get involved!
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In December, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, unveiled a new $1.1b Innovation Plan, developed to encourage more Aussies to start their own businesses, specifically ones in the areas of science and technology and which are, well, “innovative”. With the announcement coming just a few weeks before Christmas, it seemed perfectly timed to give Australia’s would-be entrepreneurs the holidays to think about their plans innovation plans for 2016.
But with all this talk about scientific and technological innovation, you could be forgiven for thinking that only Australia’s Next Google can take advantage of the many new initiatives introduced by the government. So let’s be clear: this is fantastic news for anyone thinking of starting their own business, whether they’re bookkeeping or content marketing businesses. Just the very act of starting a business is, itself, an act of innovation – because more businesses means more employment opportunities for more Australians.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, the climate at the moment is incredibly favourable toward anyone looking to start their own business, and these new measures just make it even more so. That’s because some of the big changes come in the form of changes to our bankruptcy laws, which have always been notoriously punitive, and have tended to discourage businesses to take risks or entrepreneurs to try again, if at first they did not succeed.
That’s going to change. From 2017, the bankruptcy period will be reduced from three years to one, and businesses will also be allowed to continue trading while insolvent, as long as the business appoints a restructuring advisor to work on a turnaround plan, a measure not dissimilar to one within America’s Chapter 11 laws.
One of the more exciting new measures to be announced, however, is one that will help more start-ups find funding from investors. To be introduced in 2016, the government will now provide a 20 percent tax offset worth up to $200,000 for investors in start-up businesses, plus a 10-year exemption from capital gains tax if they hold shares in the company for three years.
Together with the already announced tax breaks for small businesses; the raft of new technologies – particularly the recent union of PayPal and QuickBooks – that allow small businesses to work faster and smarter; and the increasing number of shared workspaces, like the NSW State Government’s Smart Work Hubs and the WOTSO Workspaces, which give small business owners and teleworkers the opportunity to work remotely among other like-minded entrepreneurs, you can make 2016 the year that you start your own small business.
Want to learn more about business valuations and preparing your business for sale? Information is included in our Small Business Finance Courses with in depth interviews with Tony Arena from BCI Business Brokers. Read about the Valuations and Raising Equity Funding Course.
If you’re subscribed to this blog, then you’re probably familiar with our latest partnership with the StartUp Academy, which aims to help people to start their own home-based business easily and successfully, through proven business opportunities and plenty of guidance for prosperity.
There are currently a number of business opportunities, across a range of different industries, that you can register your interest in at the StartUp Academy website. Each opportunity allows you the freedom to operate as an independent contractor from your home, regardless of where in Australia you are located.
If you’re interested in becoming an independent contractor in 2016, whether it’s with the StartUp Academy or with a business idea of your own, why not use the summer break to study up on what it takes to become a successful independent contractor by downloading our free guide off the StartUp Academy website, and make 2016 an innovative one!
