Why should your business be compliant?

Posted by Steve on Jan 14, 2012 in Accounting and Admin

We know that a business is like a cash-flow generating, revenue earning engine. It’s a machine that needs to be maintained and steered (managed) so that it’s revenue is greater than it’s expenses. You could spent a lot of time studying strategic management to learn how best to steer your business forward but you’ll never know which decisions you need to make until you understand what you need to change and that’s when we look at what we have already done.

Getting reports from your database, enrolment system, memberships statistics, accounting system will give you a great insight of historical performance and this is vital if you want to forecast the future, but there is a final step to ensure that you have the real information. You need to be compliant.

Compliance means you have completed your paperwork, lodged it with your account and with the regulatory bodies like ASIC, ATO etc. Only then will you know exactly how much you have really made in profit and only then will you know if your plans have been successful.

Can you really forecast the future of your business?

Posted by Steve on Jan 7, 2012 in Accounting and Admin

Forecasting is a fascinating thing and many small business owners think it’s impossible. When I speak to some business owners they say it is hard because the cost of borrowing is increasing, banks aren’t lending as much, things are going bad in Europe, customers are not buying as much and I’m sure you could think of many other typical conversation topics.

The most fascinating aspect about forecasting is that it affects almost every part of our lives already. What’s the weather going to be like, how much is my super going to be worth, what about the value of my home. If the largest Australian public companies just kept doing what they are doing there are forecasts for economic growth, inflation and most other financial indicators.

The hardest part of forecasting is that you are setting yourself and your business some goals and targets and the higher the goal the more you have to stretch yourself and your team to achieve them. If you are stretching yourself beyond last years achievements you might start depending on your staff more, need to make a better commitment to your customers, package your products better or provide better customer service.

Every business is really a little cash-flow generating machine and if you plan to grow your machine you’ve got to know that your little machine can handle a heavier workload and higher speed while maintaining smooth operation. So set yourself a target and fine tune the money making engine to achieve it smoothly because everybody who has a stake in your engine wants to know what they can expect to see in the future. And, if the future looks bright and you can demonstrate why, then you might have others wanting to invest in it.

What you do defines you

Posted by Steve on Dec 21, 2011 in Human Resources, Website Tools

I recently wrote about the experiences we are having regarding the resume writing service of EzyLearn called ezyRESUME and how the combined skills of writing and using programs like Microsoft Word and WordPress CMS (Content Management System) for websites enables smart people to effectively and efficiently sell their services as employees as well as the services of companies. The next step in that process is about demonstrating your skills.

In our search for a new team member at EzyLearn we recently had two virtual assistants perform a task to demonstrate their advanced skills using Microsoft Excel and the outcomes were VERY different and demonstrate some simple steps that people can take to build long term relationships that benefit both parties.

Our first candidate wrote a long list of the skills they have in their resume and subsequent interview and ticked a big YES next to the desired skills we were looking for. The second candidate showed confidence in using the software and the willingness and desire to do additional learning if required to complete advanced tasks. The outcome of this exercise showed how important your intuition is in picking the right people. It also demonstrated that those people in direct contact with the potential team members also had far greater insight into the candidates personal qualities.

Candidate One was a young lady that responded quickly but provided results that any one could perform after reading a “Dumbies” book on Excel, she demanded payment immediately and when changes were requested showed a disdain to work together. Candidate Two had more experience working with people, created a much more sophisticated result with excellent productivity tools (with Macros and buttons) and most importantly demonstrated that she wanted to understand exactly what was required so that she could provide the most ideal results.

Not only did candidate two demonstrate excellent skills and willingness to personalise her results, but she showed an open and positive willingness to co-operate and provide a positive outcome. It imperative to be positive and willing at all times and no matter how well you write your resume or how well you know how to format it professionally in Word, your actions during and after the interview will largely determine your ongoing success.

Will good resume writing skills help you sell a business?

Posted by Steve on Dec 18, 2011 in Human Resources, Marketing, Website Tools

Whether or not a professional looking resume defines an employee, it is the first impression that any business owner has of the pool of available talent applying for work. It is the document that most employers use to see if job seekers have the rudimentary skills and personality traits to fulfill the job and fit into their current working environment.

Through my involvement with EzyLearn, I have had the opportunity to witness statistics about resumes of EzyLearn students and I’ve noticed that the most confident students already have a resume and usually have the skills to modify it as needed for each role they apply for over time. It led us to the important discovery that the ability to create and modify their own CV revealed which students have the skills to both write about their skills, experience and achievements as well as use Microsoft Word.

Another interesting fact that we are discovering every month is that writing a resume to display your skills and “sell” yourself into a job uses very similar skills to creating a website that sells a businesses services to it’s customers and increasingly more of this is happening online.

EzyLearn provides training courses in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook), MYOB Accounting and WordPress and has a close relationship with recruitment companies, employment agencies and other organisations which provide employment services to those seeking work and as part of this relationship, they have created a resume writing service which not only provides students with a resume, but an online training course in Microsoft Word, which gives students the ability to make changes as and when they need to their resume.

In a similar way, the Online WordPress training course is giving virtual assistants and small business owners the ability to create their own websites, make modifications as and when they are needed and most importantly create blogs and participate in the new online world of social media.

Good resume writing skills will definitely help you find and get the job you are looking for, but it is also the fundamental skills employed to talk about and promote the features of every small business in Australia and around the world.

Affiliate Programs & WordPress

Posted by Steve on May 10, 2011 in Marketing, Website Tools

I’ve recently had the thrill of communicating with lots of WordPress designers and developers from Australia and all over the world and it’s fascinating to see how different people approach the concept of website design. From the conversations I have with clients the usual goal is to get a website up and running with some basic content and make it look good. That usually involves some great graphics work, a nice logo and a small amount of “guiding” text which can be fleshed out by a professional copy writer later.

The most fascinating aspect of website design are all the people who want to build you a custom template. Just for you. Why do some web designers offer that? It seems they offer it to get the most hours out of you, quoting between 30-50 hour to complete the work. What work is that exactly? It’s creating a lovely piece of artwork with the look and feel of your website and then ripping that design into potentially hundreds of fragments of graphic (including rounded corners) that are used in different sections of the site. Phew… what a load of work that is! Much better to get an existing premium template from $30-$120 and customise it to be your own.

I’m a lover of theme clubs (WordPress templates are called Themes) that provide great looking themes that you can use over and over for different customers. They make the task easier for web designers and faster for customer to get their professional online presence. The best price/feature one that I have come across is Elegant themes.

My most recent experience however involves working with affiliate program and currently it’s WP affiliate manager which looks like it’s had a recent overhaul using a snazzy theme from WooThemes. It’s a little tricky to get setup and this is my first test to see how it works. This image below is my own affiliate link to EzyLearn’s online MYOB Training Course and if you click this link and enrol into the course as a result I will earn $30. Click away and help me build some stats.

Is SEO really just another part of the marketing function?

Posted by Steve on Feb 5, 2011 in Marketing

What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimisation but that doesn’t really give you a good description of what it involves. Some people think it also includes buying clicks with something like Google Adwords or Microsoft’s Bing ad networks but that’s called SEM (Search Engine Marketing). So what is SEO?

Other people tell me that it’s all about how you use keywords around your website; in the page name and description, in the keywords that you target for each page and the words you use in the writing on your actual web pages and if this is true, then it’s up to the person who either writes your articles and or edits your website. Perhaps the best description of SEO comes from Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google who created an educational video about search engine optimisation.

Once you know what SEO is the real question is how do you perform the tasks of an SEO consultant. If you watch Matt’s video you’ll see that one of the SEO aspects he talks about is how well connected your website is, who’s connecting to it and who are you connecting to and you start to get an idea of the bigger picture that SEO is really about marketing your brand, building a network of websites that are relevant to yours and willing to put links on their website to yours. Does this sound familiar? It’s about building relationships and then building links on websites to confirm the relationships.

I recently met with Kristin from Sassy SEO and she re-affirmed my realisation that “white hat” SEO is about building relationships and building communities of interested people who are willing to recommend and interact about topics they are interested in. The larger the community the more relevant it is to the topic and one of the most important tasks in small business marketing is to make contact with the influential bloggers and let them you exist, build a relationship and then build a link bridge.

There’s another whole topic about “grey hat” and “black hat” SEO but we’ll save that for another time. Sometimes it is better to have fewer good quality links rather than lots of temporary spam like links. Stay tuned for more about SEO.

Watch a video about Search Engine Optimisation by Google Employee Matt Cutts and read about the online marketing and SEO services offered by 123ezy websites.

Converting website traffic into sales

Posted by Steve on Dec 6, 2010 in Marketing, Website Tools

As the proprietor of an online training business it is important to understand and fine tune the design of your website and the way that website visitors interact with it. After studying several models for EzyLearn I opted for the freemium and money back guarantee model and it has worked exceptionally well for our online MYOB course. It is important to note that this model is important in the relatively new area of online education where website visitors are used to seeing lots of information for free so if they are going to pay for something, they want to make sure that it actually has value.

My goal with EzyLearn online computer training courses goes along these lines:

1. Encourage website visitors to interact (email us, blogging and blog responses, sample our product etc).
2. Act upon what they have experienced with you (upgrade or make the full purchase which is where you monetise)
3. Use the site to it’s fullest potential and as a resource (they keep coming back which is good for Google pagerank)
4. Recommend it to their friends and colleges (affiliate programs and social media is useful here)

This is an excellent article which reflects some of the best ways of converting your website visitors to customers and here are their main points:

1. Have a search box on every page of your site, especially the home page. Ideally, the search box should be in the same location across all of your pages so people know where it is when they need it.
2. Consider adding Autocomplete to your search box, which suggests possible terms when visitors start typing the first letters of a keyword.
3. Have clear and specific product and content titles in the search results. If titles are not accurate, visitors may not click on a result that is otherwise relevant, or they may click on it only to find that it doesn’t contain what they were looking for, which could lead them to abandon their search.
4. Incorporate images into search results. Showing images in results helps visitors find what they’re looking for faster and with fewer clicks.
5. Offer “add to cart/buy now” options directly from the site search results page. By allowing visitors to add products to shopping carts or to go to checkout directly from search results, they’re more likely to complete the purchase.
6. Show ratings and reviews in search results, and allow visitors to further refine or reorder their search results based on ratings.
7. Rely on user behaviour to improve the relevance of search results. Based on the data, you can move more popular products to the top of search results, making the results more relevant.

Are you an affiliate of mine?

Posted by Steve on Dec 4, 2010 in Marketing, Website Tools

Affiliate Marketing Screen shot for Elegant Themes

Affiliate Marketing is where you signup with a company to be able to recommend them and in return receive a commission if the recommendation ends up in a sale. This is done by you having a unique URL that identifies you to the company. Here is an example. Ezylearn is an affiliate for Elegant Themes, who make an excellent range of WordPress themes to quickly enable you to have a professional looking website, all you need to do is write the content. Our special affiliate link for Elegant Themes is http://www.elegantthemes.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=4090_0_1_7 and it’s the special “id” at the end of the URL that identifies EzyLearn.

Most affiliate links are not displayed in full but are either compressed (like this: http://bit.ly/aviJFf) using a special URL compressing site like www.bit.ly or simply included as a hyperlink like this. But no matter how they are used they are effective in bringing new visitors to a website.

The example used above (Elegant Themes) uses a self managed affiliate system that is running on their own web server called iDevAffiliate and it’s very powerful. It is ideal for technical people who know how to set this type of system up quite easily but most people prefer to have someone else manage the affiliate program for them. Companies like Commission Junction and Clixgalore are examples of companies who can help you manage your own affiliate program.

I setup an affiliate program for our online MYOB course earlier this year with ClixGalore and we managed to get a reasonable number of affiliates who wanted to promote our website in exchange for $30 commission. This commission figure represents quite a decent return considering the value of the sale. A fantastic aspect of affiliate marketing programs is that it establishes a win-win relationship whereby once a payment for the goods or services is confirmed a commission is paid. I also encourages a committed sales effort because the commission earned is usually only paid out once the total commission reaches a realistic value of say $100.

When you use a company like ClixGalore you pay all of your money to them and they take care of paying the affiliate as well as themselves from the statistics they gather. At EzyLearn we’ve discovered that they are not the easiest people to deal with and I’ll share more of my experiences with them over the next month or so. I’m happy to say that there are lots of alternatives from companies like zferral.com to open source scripts that are run from within a WordPress website like MagicAffiliate.

We’ll soon be relaunching the EzyLearn affiliate program so stay tuned for more info at this blog. Remember you can subscribe to this blog using the email field below or at the right of my website.

Fixed Price Website Design

Posted by Steve on Dec 2, 2010 in Marketing, Website Tools

Sometimes the creative input required to create a simple website is daunting for those not involved in sales and marketing. Questions like the once below can often stall a designing project before it’s even half way through:

• What should it look like?
• What are landing pages?
• What is the goal of the site?
• What should we write?
• Which pictures should we use

The problem is made worse if you as the business owner think you know better than the person you hire to do the job. Sure there are aspects of your business or work where you are the expert but a good website copy writer will get the correct information in the right place and present your business professionally. They act as the media for your business, interviewing you for the relevant information and putting that information in well written, purpose driven content.

Now if you agree with my opinion, you’ll realise the value of the fixed price website. Yvette from HatchCreate has the qualifications to present your business and the services you offer in writing on your website and she knows the process of interview, writing, and polishing. Yvette and her writers have made it possible for 123ezy websites to provide a fixed price for a complete website package and she can also provide the same services for a regular email or printed newsletter to your clients.

“Work with the willing” and you’ll look professional and get your results quickly. Try the 123ezy fixed price website order form to see how much a website will cost you.

Microsoft Office files shared in the cloud – easy access

Posted by Steve on Nov 25, 2010 in Accounting and Admin, News

In my involvement with virion the business voip people who provide cloud based telephony I have come into contact with a lot of new cloud based technology but this news release at the beginning of the week from Google really got my interest.

As a Google Apps user I love the fact that I can simply jump on any computer connected to the internet and handle my email. I can also quickly find customer information using our contact relationship management system (CRM) and check support tickets for important updates for customer. This news release from Google shows how everyone can get the benefits of their Microsoft Office software with the benefit of having them all in a central location available from any computer with Internet access.

This is a real benefit because most people still use Microsoft Office but want the benefit of accessing their files no matter where they are. Cloud based access is also becoming an easy alternative to backing your important information up.