Cloud 9 and the power of Google
Cloud 9 seaplanes are the only seaplane operation out of Main Beach at the Gold Coast – providing scenic flights, day trips and romantic picnics around the waterways of the Gold Coast. With such a unique product, a captive market and proximity to huge tourist numbers you’d think google rankings would be easy. Not quite!
One of the issues of operating in a crowded or competitive marketplace can be the challenged to manage google rankings and adwords placements in a cost effective way. Whilst the search traffic on seaplanes flights at the gold coast is reasonable – the real power of adwords comes when complementary searches and markets are evaluated. For example “Gold Coast Adventures” or “Day Trips at the Gold Coast”. By tailoring the keywords in both the site content and the adwords platform, Cloud 9 can rank in the top three in all their target markets.
By combining their advertising with weekly analytics reports and adjustments – not only are they always targeting where the current traffic is, but ensuring they see any emerging trends!
Gold Coast Seaplane Tours by Cloud 9
Elevate CRM and Pathways combine!
Later this month we are launching probably the biggest change to the school student placement sector in Australia since Pathways was launched in the mid nineties.
The environment for placement organisation is changing – LLEN’s and the like in Victoria are now purely placement opportunity makers (no actual paperwork production or individual student management is needed) and many organisations are clustering together to manage their employer information. Enter Elevate.
Elevate is our enterprise level web based CRM package, an we have been busy customising this platform for LLEN’s and industry partnership organisations so they can collaboratively manage their employers and the many types of opportunity they may have. This may include work placement, work experience, school based apprenticeships, school based traineeships and even mentoring programs. We treat each employer as a provider and they can offer any number of “opportunities”. As employer retention is a key of such a system, we’ve also implemented common sales pipeline methodology to ensure our users are employing best practice processes to manage their contacts.
Employers can log in and update their own profiles, teachers can log in as coordinators and view opportunities allocated to them, and master coordinators log in and manage the system centrally for all!
It’s the perfect web-based alternative to our normal Pathways Student Placement software which is used for brokers and coordinators that are completing the entire placement process (employers, student, opportunity, placement, reporting)
Win win 
Customer Interaction is Changing!
The way organisations interact with their existing clients and potential leads is changing rapidly.
For many of our clients, if a new lead presented itself a brochure “pack” would be mailed the same day, a followup call booked in and the pre-sales process would begin. Now the potential client often already has a large amount of information before they contact the vendor, much of it provided via the web. And that web site is one of the most important tools for the lead to pre-qualify you or learn about your products such that by the time you are contacted it’s often for pricing or more “specific” enquiries.
One of our clients, Performance Probiotics, have started a client education program via their web site that not only provides invaluable information to existing clients, but also educates POTENTIAL clients about their product and shows their mastery of the subject matter. Performance Probiotics target farmers mostly, and to make the education as easy as possible they filmed a series of short movies and published them on YouTube where their google search is improved and just about anybody can see their products and services.
Smart Business.
Tip of the Iceberg – Bulk Whey Protein from Maxum
Benjamin Cage 
Uncategorized 
Bulk Protein, Bulk Whey Protein, Cheap Whey Protein, Maxum Bulk Protein, Maxum Protein, Wholesale Whey ProteinOne of our favourite scenarios is where you have a ridiculously simple easy to use web site, that acts as the “pointy end of the stick” for a large organisation below. A great example of this is a client of ours named Maxum Foods. You may recall their name from the BRW Fast 100 which they came top of a few years ago.
One of their business divisions deals purely in Bulk Whey Protein and Isolates – Maxum Protein. Their web site belies the huge volume they process on a daily basis. A recent upgrade to the site has been designed to make it really easy for their customers to process bulk orders in a matter of minutes online – allowing Maxum to sell their bulk whey protein at an industry best price in Australia.
Like Original Sole, Maxum Protein use their web site to reinforce their competitive advantage in a way that allows low cost for customers, and instant gratification for existing clients needing re-orders.
Web business done right.
Google and SEO in Action with Original Sole
Benjamin Cage Uncategorized High Heel Protection, High Heel Protectors, No Slip Shoe Grips, Non-Slip Shoe Grips, stiletto protectors, Wedding high heels, Wedding shoe protectionIt’s always great to see a client using their web site to achieve business success. One great example is Original Sole, with their Non Slip Shoe Grips and High Heel Protector products.
They are utilising the classic “Click and Mortar” business plan which involves a strong online business model to support a strong distribution model through retail stores and wholesale outlets. There are few online businesses that survive alone on the web in a sustainable way. Original Sole is a great example of getting the mix of physical and virtual right, allowing them to sell truck loads of high heel protection and shoe grips around the world whilst keeping customer service high.
Check out their e-commerce site to see how sometimes executing well simplest ideas are often the most successful for small business owners!
Pathways Central – Region-wide Employer Management on the Web
Pathways Central is coming next month and is designed for clusters of schools that wish to share Employer information and opportunities from a central database. A standalone web product, Pathways Central allows stakeholders in a community to collect and maintain a central database of hosts that can be securely accessed by teachers, coordinators and administrators to ensure everybody is on the same page. Regions adopting Pathways Central are doing so to:
1) Ensure everybody has the latest contact information about employers in their area
2) Ensure that employers are not peppered with requests from multiple schools that are already on the system and are signed up.
3) Allow coordinators to record services against each Employer (not just placements!)
4) Allow easy exporting to the Activ8 Email Campaign Manager for bulk emails
5) Allow local coordinators to actually record tangible opportunities if required (ie. actual placements)
6) Potential to allow students to browse local opportunities via the web from this central database
7) Integration with our Pathways Work Experience software platform
Stay in tune for launch details soon!
Pathways Spring 2010 Update Now Available!
The 2010 Spring Update includes 134 detail changes and is the last big update to Pathways 9 before version 10 is released later this year. More than 80% of the changes are direct requests from clients – so keep them coming – we aim to please!
A few of the more obvious changes:
1) The Employer and Student Find functions now support “spaces” in names (much requested!) and have a larger “recent searches” facility to make it easy to jump between common records.
2) The Employer and Student List screens now show 30% more records on-screen to work better with the latest LCD screens that are usually 19″ or greater. The Placement Matrix/List has also been adjusted and columns reorganised to be a little more logical.
3) The Microsoft Office Security Settings that tripped up many clients with Office 2007/2010 are now automatic when you run the Spring 2010 update
4) Speed, speed and more speed. We’ve been shaving load times off wherever possible.
5) The briefcase now doesn’t ask you to confirm what you are doing every time you click, breath or even look at it
6) 43 report changes, modifications and additions – all based on clients requested (you know who you are
7) The Employer LIst now shows the total placements and opportunities for each employer.
Once again thanks to everybody that has forwarded their feature requests. Pathways is, at it’s core, based on the direct input of people at the coal face of student placement – so no matter how silly your request, let us know so we can consider it for the next update!
Not covered for support this year and need the update? Drop us an email to find out how to sign up!
Pathways 9 Now Supports Office 2010!
Microsoft’s latest Office Suite is a fantastic business suite that builds on the HUGE changes that were introduced in Office 2007 such as the “Ribbon” toolbar interface. One of the challenges for us has been to produce a version of Pathways that can operate on Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 with a single file. And now we can! For the last 12 weeks we have been massaging, testing, updating and tweaking Pathways 9.5 to ensure it runs on all three flavours of Microsoft office, to ensure your student placement software is up to the task no matter what platform you use.
If you are covered by a 2010 Support Contract, Drop Us An Email Here and we will send you the download and installation instructions. The new installer is quick to download, quick to install, and automatically sets up the Office security settings for you!
Pathways Support – Now Cheaper & Easier than Ever Before
The Pathways Support package has been our number 1 product for the last few years because it offers fantastic value! For $30 a month a Pathways user not only gains access to the helpdesk, with 15 years experience in the student placement and work experience software field, but also receives all their Pathways updates and upgrades at no cost! We also throw in a tele training session to give you some dedicated one on one time.
To ensure we can deliver support and updates in a single dollar for day package, we have to be super organised – this means we have a huge library of fact sheets and “how to” guides in PDF we can send within minutes, training videos, as well as quality control systems to make it very easy for us to send our updates that are easy to run AND support. This year we have shipped more than 2000 updates to users with less than 4% needing assistance with their update. We are aiming to 1% with our Spring 2010 update this week. Let’s see how we go!
Support operates on an annual renewal basis, but we also offer monthly payments via PayPal as well if you wish to use a credit card starting next year for organisations with staggered cashflow. We hope this makes it easy for just about anybody to take advantage of the helpdesk resource and the almost monthly updates and upgrades available based on your feedback.
When was your last tested backup? Honestly…..
With so many of our clients working in networked environments with data files on servers, often we can fall into the habit of not worrying about how our Pathways data file is being backed up. We assume the server backup is operating nightly (as it should….) and that in the event of an accidental record deletion or big boo-boo we can just roll back to last night……Well…..
in the last month we have had four clients in this situation! All had their data files on the server. All were very experienced operators. All needed to back up for different reasons (an accidental deletion, a crashed hard drive etc.). In all cases the tape backups their I.T. staff had set up were not working as intended, and were not monitored so when they stopped working they had no idea there was no current backup.
Sadly this is not uncommon. Almost one in two of our clients we surveyed had never done a test to see if their backup was valid (not just backing up, but that it could be restored) – which means in the event of a server failure, things were not very pretty!
The backup system in Pathways is REALLY simple. It takes a snapshot of your data file, zips it up, and saves it wherever you have specified. It also only takes 30 seconds. Why not make a daily Pathways backup part of your “last thing of the day” procedure so you are covered no matter what happens?
Recent Posts
- Cloud 9 and the power of Google
- Elevate CRM and Pathways combine!
- Customer Interaction is Changing!
- Tip of the Iceberg – Bulk Whey Protein from Maxum
- Google and SEO in Action with Original Sole
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