Podcast: Play in new window
The year is in full swing already. We had 25 business owners turn up on Wednesday night for the local marketing Meetup – we might end up being the biggest business group on the peninsular this year – a interesting goal to shoot for.
In this weeks video you can find out how to get Photoshop for free + more. I didn’t include it this video but Facebook has announced a very large play for the online search market. Standby for news on that – you can do a lot when you have 1 Billion active users!
00:30 – Free Photoshop Download
01:24 – Growing Redcliffe Business training group – are you a part of it?
01:50 – Amazon book publishing was topic of the group training – thanks to our guest speaker, local hair dresser guru Anthony.
02:33 – Renovating business systems – allowing for scale
03:15 – Renovating WordPress websites
04:00 – You really need to be able to access your emails from your phone
04:49 – Upcoming interview – leveraging a virtual assistant in your business.
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G’day, it’s Mick and welcome to another Redcliffe Marketing news update.
In this video, we are going to talk about how you can get Photoshop for free, some local training that is happening around Redcliffe – again that you can access for free, we are going to look at renovating your business and how WordPress fits in with website renovations, how to get more out of your smart phone and a heads up on an interview that I have got coming up next week.
Photoshop for Free
A great tip this week from Barb, who is a member of the social media meet-up group here at Redcliffe. The software publisher Adobe is now giving away older versions of their software for free and that means Photoshop.
Photoshop is the industry standard for graphics programs. If you’ve got any kind of flyers or headers or graphical needs in your business, then head over to redcliffemarketinglabs.com.au/freephotoshop and that’ll take you to a download link where you will be able to download not only Photoshop, but a whole heap of other programs from Adobe.
Now this is an older version, version CS2, but it will do pretty much everything you need to do as a business owner. Unfortunately, if you’re on a Mac, if you’ve got a new Apple computer, the versions there won’t work for you. For everyone else, check that out and get a great business software program for free.
Redcliffe Marketing MeetUp Group
On Wednesday night, we had 25 people turn up at the Redcliffe Coast Guard training rooms for the latest Redcliffe Small Business Web Marketing Group. Anthony from AnthonyPresotto.com.au talked about publishing on the Amazon bookstore. He has five books published there already and working on more.
Anthony is a local hairdresser and he’s using those five books on Amazon to drive traffic to his website and also build his authority and expert status. He took us through the process of how to get a book up on Amazon and some tips on marketing the book once its there. He then fielded about half an hour of questions from the group. It was obviously something that a lot of people are interested in and I think you’ll see quite a few local Redcliffe business owners getting books up on Amazon soon and becoming published authors. That is pretty exciting.
If YOU want to get involved with the training that happens in the group and learn things such as publishing on Amazon then we have a lot of things coming up. Next month is all about Outsourcing. We’ve got podcasting, Facebook, Twitter + more coming up at these training groups. Head over to redcliffesocialmedia.com and join the group. It’s free.
Do your business systems or website need renovation?
As you can see behind me, we are in the middle of renovations and there are some really great analogies there for what we do. When we work with businesses, it really is like renovating.
The business already has a basic structure in place. It’s operating, but what we often do is go in and strip back a lot of the systems they are using, whether it’s the email or their website or how they’re handling the customer database. We strip that back, put the right systems in place so that we give them the right tools, the right apps, and the right training to put that back together again.
This means we are building onto an already solid business, putting the right infrastructure in place and then we tidy all that up and basically, render back over the top and produce a system that the business owner can use and their staff can use that’s going to allow them to scale. That’s quite a good segue for the background that you can see here for today’s video.
The same thing holds for websites and this is why we recommend the WordPress website platform so strongly. It is the fact that the basics of the website, so the structures, the beams of your website, won’t have to change every time you want to update your website.
All you’re going to need to do if you want a completely different look on your website, you just change the front interface without having to go back and actually completely reengineer your website and redo all your content and images from scratch. All the frame and all the basics of the websites are the same and it is very much like pulling off the walls, putting new plaster, new rendering up and then you’ve got almost a brand new looking website.
You have built on the solid structure that was already in place. That’s why we recommend using WordPress as your website platform.
Make sure you are leveraging your smartphone for business
A few people that we are working with are not able to access all their different email addresses on their smart phones (iPhones or the Android platform).
Smart phones are such a huge enabler for you and your business. If you are in that situation and you’re not actually using it to its full capability, you are not getting all your emails through to the device, then that’s something you really need to look at because your money just going to waste.
Your smartphone is something that you carry with you all the time wherever you are. If you can access all your email accounts from the phone it is going to save you time at the end of the day when you’re back in the office.
Put that on your to-do list if you can – that your phone is set to access all your email addresses. If you need help and if you know you’re not getting the most out of your phone then keep an eye out for some upcoming events and dates that we’ll list. I am going to run some training, particularly iPhone training, here at Redcliffe in the first half of the year.
Virtual Assistant Interview in editing
In editing at the moment is an interview I did this week with Sharyn Munro. Sharon is a local virtual assistant and a part of the Redcliffe meetup group covered above. In the interview we chatted about how you as a business owner can actually take on board either full-time or part-time a virtual assistant who’s going to help you get more things done in your business, get through that to-do list, and possibly offload some of the jobs that you are not really good at or those things that you really don’t like doing, whether it’s invoicing or book work.
Virtual assistants can pretty much do anything someone in the office will do, but they do it from home and they do it remotely. We are going to cover some of the pitfalls and a lot of the advantages, a lot of the how-to’s on how you can get started with a Virtual Assistant in the interview.
That should be out next week. Either check back here, subscribe on iTunes or jump on our mailing list, and I’ll send you an email when that interview is ready to go.
Thanks for listening this week and we’ll catch up again soon. I’m Mick from Redcliffe Marketing Labs.