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?
There’s lots to do in preparation for starting a business and the summer holidays is a good time for the ground work.
DID YOU KNOW research shows that by taking just one short course on small business management, the chance a business will fail is reduced by as much as 50 percent.
This is because business mismanagement is the primary reason businesses fail; the other most common reason is because owner/s fail to implement appropriate credit management processes. In both cases, this failure has come about because the owners, directors, partners or managers lacked the appropriate management skills to make it a success.
Learn the basics in business
The Christmas holidays is a perfect time for taking the steps needed to start your small business. While everyone else has gone on holidays, you’ll be ready to take on your first client or customer by the time business really starts kicking off again at the end of January.
So let’s get to it: there’s work to be done. And this work generally requires some rudimentary knowledge of Australian tax law, copyright law, trademarks and patents.
You should also have knowledge of particular software applications, and digital marketing.
Other key areas of business you need to know
The key areas business owners should understand before starting a business include:
Ordinarily, to become skilled in each of those areas, a person would have to take, at least, five different training courses. But few people are ever likely to do this. Instead, they’d be more likely to cherry pick the areas they’re least familiar with, and fly blind with the others. Needless to say, that’s where people run into problems.
Take Advantage of our Christmas Savings!
We don’t want you to wing it or fly blind — our goal is to help small businesses succeed which is what we’ve been doing for nearly 20 years.
We cover what you need to set up a small business in our EzyStartUp Business Course, priced at just $297. This course covers each of the key areas mentioned above that a small business owner needs to be familiar with, in addition to the following:
Our Last Dasher Sale is also on now with special Christmas discounts on our online training courses in social media, and cloud accounting software (MYOB, Xero) and Excel, Word and WordPress.
Don’t Wait — Become the Head Honcho Today
Use your time off from work this summer to begin working on your new small business. All of our training courses are delivered online, and can be completed at your own pace, so you can complete them while you’re actually on holidays, or relaxing at home or at a cafe.
And since one of the best ways to start a new business is by operating it as a side project to your other job, if you get all the start up stuff out of the way while you’re on holidays, it’ll be ready to go by the time you back to work.
Using a dedicated lead generation service can be more useful than advertising but the quality of the leads may be questionable.
CHANGING YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY to include additional services will require an additional investment in marketing if you are to make this successful. In terms of simply paying money to advertise your additional services, as you’re probably already aware, advertising doesn’t always yield immediate results. Therefore you might consider spending money on a lead generation service.
Is your business suited to clients making online bookings? We have an online course that will teach you how to make the most of Google G-Suite and Google Calendar.
JUST AS YOU CAN USE Google Calendar to create a staff roster, you can also set up and create Google Calendar appointment slots. This is a fabulous way for businesses like hair and beauty salons to let their clients make appointments online.
To enable your clients to schedule appointments using Google Calendar, you’ll need to have a G Suite account for work (or school). G Suite accounts can be a little tricky to set up, but we have courses to show you how, and the beauty is, they come with a boatload of useful tools for small businesses — such as Google Sheets, Docs and Forms.
Create appointment types as staff
Before clients can book appointment times, you’ll need to set up the appointment types. For hair and beauty salons, you may consider setting your staff as the appointment types or the types of appointments you offer — cut and blow dry, foils, etc — so clients can pick the staff member or the appointment type they’d like to make an appointment with.
Create booking button
Use the link Google provides for your appointment page to create an ‘online booking’ button in Facebook or in WordPress, so client can easily access your online booking system from your Facebook page and website.
Move all bookings online
Online bookings won’t eradicate the need to take phone bookings, so it’s really important that you move your entire booking system online.
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Our Google training courses show you how to setup your G Suite account, share calendars and more. Once you’ve setup your G Suite account, you’ll be able to create Appointment Slots and share your appointments page with clients. Visit our website for more information.
Are you in business as a bookkeeper, tradesperson, retailer, trainer or real estate agent and want to stand out from the crowd? We can teach you the online marketing techniques to help you do just this! Check out what’s included in our comprehensive Social Media and Digital Marketing online training courses. Find out more about the secrets behind LinkedIn and how you can find more work and more clients.
When you have to train contractors or new staff about your policies and procedures, an online induction is the most efficient – and effective – way to go.
At EzyLearn we have a bit of a soft spot for PowerPoint. It’s the oft-overlooked program in Microsoft Office that is typically associated with slideshows and presentations, and often boring ones at that. But it can do so much more.
But did you know PowerPoint can also be used to create an online training induction course? Induction training is imperative for any business that hires contractors to perform work for them, either onsite or elsewhere. Induction training is necessary that any contractor or employee understands your company’s policies and procedures, whether they’re going to be working at your premises or not.
Our PowerPoint Training Course takes you through how to create your own induction training course using PowerPoint, which you can then deliver to your staff and contractors using a learning management system, or we can deliver your induction training for you.
Simple inductions that work
The end goal of an induction course should be to have all your contractors complete it, and learn something from it. You need to strike a balance between an induction that includes every last bit of information about your business, how it functions, its policies and procedures, and one that only covers the bare essentials.
Use images to illustrate risks and scenarios, as opposed to describing them. This is easy when you’re using PowerPoint to create your induction training. And remember the PowerPoint golden rule: One idea per slide.
Authenticating students
After you’ve created your induction training course in PowerPoint, it’s vital that your contractors actually complete it. This is why it’s important to authenticate each contractor or student who takes your induction training course — it also helps if you include a short quiz at the end, so you can see whether they paid attention.
There are a couple of different ways you can authenticate students to ensure the correct person is taking the induction course (and not their mum or friend or partner, for example). We talk about the different authentication methods you can use on our website, but keep in mind that only inductions delivered to students via a learning management system can authenticate students.
PowerPoint: The Great Visual Aid to What You’re Saying
Save densely-worded slides for university lecture rooms: keep PowerPoint slides concise and use your presentation as a way of illustrating or highlighting what you’re saying.
Many people don’t realise what an excellent design tool PowerPoint is. It can be used for a lot more than just creating slideshows and presentations and is a great marketing and design tool for all kinds of business functions.
Generally speaking, when using PowerPoint, you should feature only one idea to a slide. A PowerPoint presentation is not an essay. It shouldn’t be filled with verbose text (unless perhaps you’re in a university lecture). In fact, as you will learn in our updated PowerPoint Training Course, sometimes a PowerPoint slide shouldn’t contain any text at all, or at least, very little. Continue reading There’s So Much Cool Stuff You Can Do With PowerPoint
Wow – this PowerPoint presentation really is AMAAAZING!!
You know what PowerPoint is. It was installed on your computer when you bought Microsoft Office. You hate it. But have you thought that the reason you hate it is because a) you’ve never learned how to use it properly, and b) you associate it with boring corporate meetings and seminars?
Facebook can be extremely useful for marketing to a local audience.
In its decade of existence, Facebook has built up a wealth of data about its users, data that it likes to sell back to those who need it, in the form of targeted advertising. Facebook advertising, though similar in its approach, is very different to Google Ads in what it delivers.
THE INTERNET HAS CHANGED the way businesses market their services to prospects, from a simple sales message to an educational one.
Real estate agents caught onto this shift in buyer trends early and started creating online content to cater to these buyers.
Visit the website of any real estate agent and you’ll find lots of images and videos educating potential buyers about their services, previous sales and the local area they represent.
Never Fear: A “Sales” Pitch Can Really Just Be a Conversation
You actually don’t need to be ‘salesy’ at all; just find out how your services match another person’s needs.
After you’ve set the correct prices for your bookkeeping services, it’s time to perfect your sales pitch. It’s good to think about the way real estate agents sell a property to prospective buyers: Good sales agents don’t pitch to the buyer at all. Instead, they get to know the buyer and their needs.
If that happens to suit the property they’re selling, they tell them so. If it doesn’t they tell them that too. Often, they’ll mention another listing they have that might better suit the buyer.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Glean Relevant Info from the Property Industry
As a bookkeeper you can learn much from the humble, or not so humble, real estate agent!
As a bookkeeper, or someone thinking about becoming a bookkeeper, you may be surprised how much you can learn from real estate agents. For an example, take the way a real estate agent has to price a property for sale.
The key to selling a property quickly and efficiently, is setting the right price. A real estate agent who sets a price that’s too high for the market, isn’t doing her or his job properly. In such cases, the property will sit around for many weeks, or possibly even months, until the price is eventually reduced to one the market will bear, sometimes to well below market value.
Finding it hard to get started in content marketing? Register for our upcoming course.
The beginning of a new year, which is typically the quietest as people take a while to adjust to the work and school routine, is when a lot of business owners spend time setting goals for the year ahead.
Just as individuals set their own personal new year’s resolutions, many business owners use January to set some new year’s resolutions for their business’s marketing activities.
Here are the Digital Marketing tasks that staff can do to bring more inquiries and more sales:
Business blogging vs paid Google Ads or Facebook Ads
It doesn’t matter whether you have a specifically online business, or a gift shop, clothing store, cafe or other bricks and mortar business, as a business owner, we can help you understand the digital economy.
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!
We’ve come across a great new referral marketing website that will pay you a grand for referring a colleague.
We’ve published numerous posts about referral marketing, which is an invaluable and cost effective way of marketing your business. In particular, we talked about LinkedIn. This is something that I, Steve Slisar, CEO of EzyLearn, am a big believer in — and so is small business marketing guru, Michael Griffiths.
Show Me the Money: A thorough understanding of how to use Google can help you – and your business – earn more.
We’ve been writing about referral marketing a lot lately, and in a recent post about marketing action plans, we talked about why you should include referral marketing and/or networking as a marketing strategy in your marketing plan.
That may seem silly to some people, since networking doesn’t always translate to sales straight away, but we’ve discovered another reason why you should include it in your marketing plan: Google!Continue reading Is Google Your Sugar Daddy?
With a Marketing Action Plan, you’ll be able to isolate which marketing strategies are working best for your small business.
In the marketing module of our Small Business Management course, our students learn about marketing action plans, and throughout the course come to create their own marketing plan for their soon-to-be business.
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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…
So let’s get to it: there’s work to be done. And this work generally requires some rudimentary knowledge of Australian tax law, copyright law, trademarks and patents.
And as a gift to you, remember our 
THE INTERNET HAS CHANGED the way businesses market their services to prospects, from a simple sales message to an educational one. 
