Thank you Frankie, Yvette, Richard, Jacci, Ross, Amy, Luke, Iroshini, Warren and Allison. Also a big thanks to Simon, Scott, Amy J, Faisal, Jennifer, Nicholas and Mathew. You have made a real difference to EzyLearn this year and to our students and the hard work you’ve done will reward students for years to come.

This year has been one of our best years because we made a commitment to be the best online training company for

1. MYOB accounting software and bookkeeping
2. Microsoft Excel & Microsoft Word, and
3. WordPress website Content management system and blogging platform.

Other training companies spend their time and energy trying to provide hundreds of courses with the aim of trying to get anyone they can. We decided to focus on our core skills and give everything we could. We also tried to make our online training courses affordable and inclusive so you don’t have to worry about your availability or skill level.

Here are some highlights during the year:

Creating a WordPress blog post

Social media has gripped us all this year and if you are a business that didn’t know about websites, blogging, Facebook pages and Twitter you were considered lost. We’ve used WordPress to create our own websites for years and this year we introduced the WordPress Training Course.

You might find it interesting that we were writing blog posts about WordPress back in 2007 and even earlier, but this year we expanded our content significantly and included Google Analytics, Feedburner and other skills in it.

LIFETIME student membership

In January 2011 we introduced lifetime access to our online MYOB Training Course. This gave students access to all courses (Setup, Day-to-Day, Bank Reconciliation, Payroll Introduction) and it also provided them with a safety net and a resource when they are in the workplace. Rather than say thank you and goodbye once our students have completed their online course we welcome students to come back as often as they need.

A significant benefit to this offer is that students get access to all new content that has been created for the course or updated content for the existing material. An excellent example of this is our online Microsoft Excel course. We have training material since 1999 on Excel version 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010 and as we create new content for Office 365, existing students will have access to the new material for no extra charge.

Welcoming Entrepreneurs as Business Partners

Our Business Partner program has enabled other dedicated professionals to use and promote our training material as part of their own business activities. This has enabled us to focus on the delivery of training materials and management of a learning platform while other business owners earn money by their promotional and sales activities.

We are 100% dedicated to this program going into 2012 so if you are interested please ensure you make contact with us.

Testing your MYOB knowledge and skills

Online training is still relatively new for many prospective students so we introduce the concept of knowledge reviews and skills tests to demonstrate how they are a learning tool as well as a testing tool.

We created a significant volume of new tests and quizzes as part of our online training courses this year and as a demonstration of their efficacy we introduced a free public MYOB skills test to see how much you knew about MYOB. It was also a great way for students to discover a new way of learning something online.

Partnering with Bookkeeping Industry groups

A significant number of our online training students complete their training to perform bookkeeping tasks as an employee or as an independent contractor. To demonstrate our commitment to “would-be” MYOB Bookkeepers and provide you with reputable accredited MYOB courses we became an accredited training provider of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers. EzyLearn is also a member of the Australian Institute of Training and Development, the Australian Web Industry Association and the International Coaching Federation.

We join these associations to support the online training and coaching industries, demonstrate our commitment to professional industry ready courses and keep abreast of all new training techniques and technology.

More than just an online training course

Support is an important aspect of online learning and it is also a source of significant costs for organisations like EzyLearn. In balancing the costs of maintaining our current team members will the benefits of some rudimentary customisation of our courses we introduced EzyLearn Q&A. With a separate Q&A service for Microsoft Excel, WordPress and MYOB.

We’ve subsequently called this service EzyLearn ANSWERS. It’s a way of providing new training materials based on questions from our students. Students ask questions relating to their needs and our software specialists create a short answer to lead students to a solution. We use this service to increase the breadth of topics covered in our courses.

More team members to serve your needs

This year we added 8 new team members to help create new training content, manage our online learning site, answer questions and provide support. Most importantly it has helped us significantly reduce the time it takes between when you complete your course and when you receive your certificate.

You’ll meet more of these team members during 2012 and we hope to bring more people into EzyLearn to support your learning needs.

Faster loading videos and better online learning tools

We listened to the feedback from our students to improve as much as possible and to complement the addition of new team members we significant upgraded our video hosting capacity to ensure faster and easier viewing and navigation of our online training video tutorials.

This technology update enabled students with new devices like iPads and other Apple products to view our training videos and participate in mobile elearning regardless of their chosen devices.

Training for office administration for small businesses

This year we formed a partnership with virion business grade VoIP to provide online training tools for their installation partners. As part of this project we included some new training materials to help office admin staff not only configure their new VoIP telephone systems, but we also provided spreadsheets for them to use as part of their phone bill analysis reports for customers to demonstrate how much money they could saving using Voice over IP.

We started looking at VoIP solutions for our own business in 2008 when we tried out the features of MyNetFone. In our constant search for better technology and support people we discovered the VoIP solution dedicated to small businesses, virion.

In 2012 we will strengthen this relationship by providing more in-depth training videos and tutorials. Our commitment to online training is focused on providing students with the tools they need to be efficient and productive in small business across Australia as well as provide these small businesses with the tools they need to operate great businesses.

Conclusion

If you think we have made a lot of improvements in 2011, just wait until you see what we have planned for 2012. We will:

• create more training content for our MYOB course and WordPress /  Webmasters course
• implement more services to help support your online learning
• help you find more customers (for small business owners using your website and Google adwords, Analytics and SEO)
• provide more tools to help you find a job (for job seekers by helping you write better resumes, perform better at interviews and be more confident in your work)

Thanks again for reading and following our progress we want to demonstrate your successes in our 2012 blogs posts.

All the best from the EzyLearn Team.

Sincerely,

Steve Slisar

Can you index an image or a video. You can, but you need to index them using words. You can find almost anything on Google but you need to use words to do it. When you click on a paid Google Adwords advertisement its usually due to the words the advertiser used to catch your attention. If you want to improve your Google organic search ranking you need to use the right “key”words on your website, they call that Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO).

You might be aware of the value of words these days because you need this skill to be effective in marketing your business online. The role of the copywriter is often undervalued because you can hire someone in the Phillipines, India or Eastern Europe to write the content of your website or blog for a couple dollars per hour, but would you? After testing out individuals, copy-writing services and other international contracting companies we realise that the quality of the words we use and the ability to relate to other Australians is something only another Australian can truly do effectively. With all the talk about workers in developing countries taking jobs away from Australian workers, we realise that it’s their knowledge of Australian lingo, Australian tastes and Australian attitudes that makes their writing style truly Australian – and that makes it valuable to other Australians.

There is a way of getting good quality words for your website or blog for a reasonable price and that is by using a Virtual Assistant (sometimes called a remote worker, home worker or a remote contractor). There are some great writers out there who choose to work from home and if you use the services of an organisation like Virtually Yours you’ll find top quality writers and remote contractors with many other skills that are part of an organisation designed to find good virtual assistants and promote them as well as provide them with tools to be effective small business owners.

While we are on the topic I want to share the success of Terry from Ramancorp. He operates a small wholesale business supplying a range of framing, hanging, display and packaging materials and he lists them all on his website. Because he has gone to the trouble of providing as much information as possible he uses some very niche words that attract customer looking for the exact product they need. As a result Terry is getting a good amount of NEW customers EVERY month without having to pay a cent in Google Adwords advertising.

Words are just as valuable in your resume so the next time you think about what kind of job you are looking for, think about the words that the advertiser might use to attract the right candidate and make sure your resume has these words in it.

The best part of this course is that it entitles you to the EzyLearn LIFETIME membership feature, so when we update it with new content about marketing your website you can access the new information for no extra cost. For more information and to enrol, visit our WordPress course website.

What’s included in our WordPress Online Course (you can click these links if you are an existing student):

• Video 1: The WordPress Website Introduction Resource
• Video 2: Pages and Posts Resource
• Video 3: Administration Dashboard Resource
• Video 4: Page Information Resource
• Video 5: Modifying Pages Resource
• Video 6: Structuring Pages Resource
• Video 7: Page Order Resource
• Video 8: Hyperlinks Resource
• Video 9: Inserting Paypal Button code Resource
• Video 10: Insert and Manage Images Resource
• Video 11: Post Categories Resource
• Video 12: Post tags Resource

Administration Privileges and Settings

• 902-1 WordPress – Understanding Administrator priveleges Resource
• 902-2 WordPress – General Settings including Page titles Resource
• 902-3 WordPress – Writing and Reading Settings – including Home page formatting Resource
• 902-4 WordPress – Writing and Reading Settings – Setting Home and Blog Pages Resource
• 902-5 WordPress – Reading Settings – Number of Posts and RSS Feed intro Resource
• 902-6 WordPress – Permalinks, page names and Search Engine Optimisation Resource
• 902-7 WordPress – Managing Users, modifying roles and creating new users Resource
• 902-8 WordPress – Deleting Users and allocating links and posts Resource
• 902-9 WordPress – Introduction to Plugins – download WPtouch for iPads and iPhones Resource
• 902-10 WordPress – Working with Premium Plugins like GravityForms Resource

Design options and Themes

• 903-1 WordPress Design – Changing the layout completely with different Themes Resource
• 903-2 WordPress Design – Finding the best theme and downloading it Resource
• 903-3 WordPress Design – Installing and activating a theme Resource
• 903-4 WordPress Design – Theme appearance options are specific to the theme Resource
• 903-5 WordPress Design – Background and Header appearance for default WordPress theme Resource
• 903-6 WordPress Design – Uploading your own background image Resource
• 903-7 WordPress Design – Working with widgets and the sidebar Resource
• 903-8 WordPress Design – Widgets in more detail – tag cloud, text, meta Resource
• 903-9 WordPress Design – Create alternate menus and apply them to your theme Resource
• 903-10 WordPress Design – Customising menus with external links and categories Resource
• 903-11 WordPress Design – Advanced Theme Appearance Options Resource
• 903-12 WordPress Design – Different Widgets for different Themes Resource
• 903-13 WordPress Design – Widgets and RSS newsfeeds Resource

Website Hosting Control Panel – email

• 60X 1 Website Hosting – Control Panel Resource
• 60X 2 Website Hosting – Create an Email Account Resource
• 60X 3 Website Hosting – Setting up the Email Account on your computer Resource
• 60X 4 Website Hosting – Using your email address with webmail Resource
• 60X 5 Website Hosting – Email Catch-all, Forwarder and AutoResponders Resource
• 60X 6 Website Hosting – Website Statistics and logs Resource

Blogs, Posts and RSS Feeds

Kelli has a WordPress website hosted with 123ezy and we are building our WordPress and Webmaster Course around her growing internet presence. To start with we have created some elementary training videos about the navigation around the WordPress themes and what different parts of the website are called. We’re learning about themes, header images, menus and widget just to get started. As we progress we’ll be talking about Pages vs Posts, tags and categories, working with images, Search Engine Optimisation and much more.

We’ve included our Introduction to WordPress video below so if you are reading this on your phone, click on the heading to get to our Blog page where you can watch the full video.

The most significant aspects of website design are:

• The template (or theme) that’s used including colour scheme, branding and navigation
• The  images and copy (text) used to fill the site
• Promoting and marketing the website

Modern day Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla and even older ones like Drupal make everything much easier and here’s why:

• Thousands of designers create templates that you can purchase for $20 to $300
• Once a template or theme is designed and setup the content management is the same (just like using Microsoft Word)
• Writing articles, creating extra pages and adding to your navigation becomes as easy as selecting a check box and picking a category.

So is it really something that you could do?

wordpress themes included in Webmaster course

Have you heard about WordPress, Google, Facebook and Twitter? Can you use your computer to access your email, do internet banking and accessing other online services? Have you heard about or used PayPal? If you have, then you are at least familiar with some of the tools used by a modern webmaster. Combining these new online marketing tools and WordPress CMS driven websites you can get busy and start creating.

The Internet, smart phones, cloud computing and VoIP are making the world a smaller place and allows people to work from home but still remain digitally connected. There has been a significant shift towards remote contracting (virtual assistants) and the concept of mums working from home is now commonplace.

If you want to come on the Webmaster journey with EzyLearn we have the WebMasters course. It’s a step-by-step system of setting up, creating content and images, building the contents and then promoting your own business using all the tools we’ve mentioned in this blog post. Best of all you’ll have an internet guru educating and coaching you each step of the way until your website is complete so not only will you have your own website and tools to promote it, but you’ll have the skills to promote yourself to other businesses and help them with their website management.

What’s so good about all this new technology that is available? It means you can sign up for affiliate accounts and start earning money from referring good quality website to people you know or are connected to. Here’s a link to a post we wrote earlier this year which explains a bit about how affiliate marketing works.

We are trialling a new affiliate service for our online MYOB course and the reward is $25 for a successful sale from your recommendation. Don’t worry the affiliate management system keeps track of your referrals. Here’s a link to the affiliate website.

We are pretty proud of our search engine placement for online MYOB course so please feel free to do a search using the new Google Instant and see our website appear on the first page of search results.

I tried using the search and it was fascinating watching the search results change so quickly. When I tried it a second time it just worked like the normal Search results. Go and visit the Google Instant Search page or read Google’s announcement on their blog to learn more.

EzyLearn offers the 123ezy website builder as part of a website hosting package and it makes it so simple to add (and change) words to the heading and description of each page within your website. Visit the 123ezy website for more information or take a look at a website that he been created using the SiteBuilder to see how it works.