If you know your academic writing and fancy some work editing student essays and theses, please visit our jobs page and apply:

http://www.betteredit.com/jobs.shtml

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager

For more details see:

Job Opening - Toronto Canada - University Campus Representative

BetterEdit is recruiting one university campus representative for each of these two cities. The jobs take 2-4 hours per week placing posters around different university campuses.

For further details click these links:

• Job Opening: Vancouver Campus Rep
• Job Opening: Honolulu Campus Rep

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager

It’s a nice and clean design that I had built for use on other blogs and I think it’s perfect for BetterEdit because the text is easy to read. Since a significant proportion of BetterEdit’s clientele are from non-English speaking backgrounds it’s important that this blog is clear and simple to navigate.

The design also features a new system backend which I am using to type this entry. This blog is now powered by the ever beautiful WordPress blog content management system, which is a breeze to use.

I hope to implement some systems here at the BetterEdit blog which will see more regular content produced focused on providing tools, resources and education for university students writing essays and theses. Our new admin officer Angela Vink will take over writing at this blog so you can look forward to hearing from her in the near future.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy the new blog design, I certainly am.

Regards,

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager

I was wondering if you could recommend some books that I could refer to in order to improve my writing skills. I am not good at punctuating sentences, and am in need of desperate help.

I decided to email one of our most helpful editors, Alexa Grunner, to see if she could offer a recommendation to answer this question. As expected Alexa was quick to respond with the following advice -

I use the following book which is written for overseas students. It’s not perfect, but it has great advice regarding essay and paragraph structure.

Oshima, A. & A. Hogue. (1999). Writing Academic English. (3rd Edition.)
New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Regarding punctuation, it has great charts and explanations on pp.245-254, which are easy to follow.

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit.com Manager

I was walking the downtown streets of Brisbane city today for the first time since getting back to Australia. I was heading down Adelaide St, passing the many bus shelters and I noticed the ads where moving. Yep they have installed sliding ads so each bus shelter rotates between two ads rather than just a static single ad. The movement tends to catch your eye too. Smart move advertising company but when did little Brisbane get so cosmo.

This one for all those Australian young entrepreneurs out there - Chris Khoo, one of the guys that manages YNOT in Brisbane (that’s Young Network Of enTrepreneurs) has moved the forums to their own domain at www.youngentrepreneur.com.au. Check it out for some good local Aussie business chat.

The Bnoopy Blog has been updated with an interesting article about The Long Tail Effect

I checked my email and about 60 emails came through during my Internet hiatus while flying the pacific ocean. I’ve trimmed the SPAM away but I’m not even starting to wade through the BetterEdit emails until I confer with Edward who looked after things while I was travelling. I’ll take back admin control and business life will continue from how I left it in Canada. You certainly have minimal boundaries managing an Internet business.

Now that I am back in Australia and with the University semester into the second month I have a lot of work ahead of me. It’s all very exciting stuff and I can’t wait to jump into it. Things have really picked up in the last few weeks as my efforts in Canada to spread the word about BetterEdit.com start to bring in results as the university semester come to an end in Toronto. I haven’t done the detailed statistics yet but I think my persistence poster advertising for a full semester has brought in at least 20 new clients and if at least 10 of them continue to use our service and tell friends then I can certainly call my trip a success business wise.

The business focus is on providing the best service we can which will promote healthy word of mouth. If you start with even just a small group of clients, for example say we have 10 regulars now in Toronto, and meet or exceed their expectations, by the same time next year we may have 30 new clients just from the original 10 spreading the goodwill. It’s not speedy growth but its healthy growth. I often tell myself this when I am struggling to negotiate for a job that is only worth say $25 to the business. It’s $25 today but potentially a lot more tomorrow and month after month if you can keep your quality at a high standard.

Added to that good news is that BetterEdit is making strong gains in Google placement and I’ve started to notice an increase in the amount of international clients that come through from search. Even better news is that BetterEdit is now positioned at 1st-3rd for all of our key search terms for Australian based searches using Google. We are in the lead position for university and academic editing services in Australia. Now we just need to make sure we stay there, continue to lead the market in proofreading and editing in Australia and continue to improve our overseas position.

Excuse me, I have to make two phone calls…

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Okay, I’m back.

What I just did was use SkypeOut to call a new client in the USA. It cost me about 20 cents to have two phone conversations for a total of about 10 minutes. One of the calls was to a cell phone at an airport. I’m sitting in my lounge at home at 4am in the morning and my client is in an airport in the USA waiting to board a plane. How cool is that. Later this morning I’ll call my grandma in Toronto using my laptop to let her know that I made it back to Brisbane okay. She will be sitting down to Friday night dinner and I will be just about to head out on a Saturday morning.

What’s even more exciting is that Skype has two new services in BETA testing that I’m eager to start using. One is SkypeIn, which allows a Skype user to have a ‘normal’ phone number which is purchased on a subscription basis. What happens is that anyone can call this number using any normal phone or cellphone and it will go to your Skype account which you answer using your computer. The person will only be charged as if they were calling locally for that country. If they are not in that country then they are charged a long distance fee exactly like they were calling internationally over a landline. Because of this you may buy numbers for each country you want to have a local number in.

The other service is Skype Voicemail which is included for free with SkypeIn or you can subscribe to it separately. This acts like a standard voicemail service for your Skype phone. It records messages for any SKYPE calls you miss, including Skype to Skype, or if someone was to call you using SkypeIn and you missed the call.

For our business this is how I would use the services - I subscribe to have a local number in the USA, Canada and Australia, our main markets. I can then list our new ‘normal’ SkypeIn phone numbers for customer queries in each of those countries. Any person that calls gets routed direct to my Skype account which, since I am always on my laptop means I could answer it wherever I am. If I miss the call it goes to my Skype Voicemail which I check and then use SkypeOut to return the call to any phone in the world. This potentially can replace our entire business phone needs, allow us to improve client support and all at extremely cheap rates.

Right now these services are in BETA and only available in a few countries but I am very, very, excited about their potential. Combine this with wireless Internet access and it’s truly a global, mobile business world.

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager

It’s unfortunate Australia and Canada are so far apart. I’d like to live in both countries and if it was simply a matter of flying between say New York and Toronto it would be much easier. But it’s a 20 hour flight to get from one end of the world to the other. Anyone that has ever visited Australia from pretty much anywhere in the northern hemisphere I’m sure can concur with my situation. It’s not a fun trip and you don’t want to be doing it more than a few times a year.

I’ll be making the most of my flying time by reading some of the books I have piling up. I’ll also spend a bit of time working on a resource for this blog. I’ve been getting some questions regarding running and/or buying an online business so I thought it would be useful to put together a step-by-step case study of what I did to get my business off the ground. I’ll be looking at all the tiny details with the hope that you can learn and emulate what I did right and avoid my mistakes.

I find tips and story like advice from other online businesses and entrepreneurs to be very helpful. Often what other people write about business spark the best ideas for your own business so I thought I might give some of the kudos back. I’m sure many of you out there plan, dream or currently operate an online business and may find some guidelines helpful from someone that is currently walking the Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Lastly tonight I’m going to send out a quick recommendation for a piece of software you may or may not have heard of. It’s called SKYPE and I think it is one of the most exciting services currently unfolding via the Internet. It’s a voice telephony over Internet software that is completely free for software to software and also has a very affordable (about 3c AUD/CAD per minute) for Internet to landline calls. I’ve been using it in Toronto to keep in touch with family and friends in Australia and I’ve even used the paid service to contact clients in Australia. For example I made a call to a client’s mobile phone (cell phone) in Sydney from my laptop which was using wireless Internet access from my home in Toronto. It cost me about 10c to sort out the query. I’ve talked for about an hour using the service and it’s cost me about $2 so far. I’ve talked for countless hours using the free service. It’s still a bit buggy at times when talking Australia to Canada but considering the distance more often than not it’s pretty damn good.

I expect this sort of service to eventually replace standard landlines and in the not too distance future we will be having video calls over Internet networks at prices so cheap it will be ridiculous. The best benefit - this technology can be rolled out in third world countries using satellite and wireless Internet access points. It’s an exciting time to be working on the Internet!

Yaro Starak

Statements like this are an example of a possible method that your competitors could be taking advantage of your PPC advertising budget.

I know of SEO companies who have scripts that will click on their clients competitors Adword ads until the competitors have hit their daily max spending limit. They do this to the ads above their clients ad, and once the competitors maximum spending budget is reached, Google removes the competitors ads, and the clients ad is at the top, and the program stops.

I myself use Google to bring in some traffic but I’ve never given too much thought to fraud since I hoped (perhaps naively) that Google and the other PPC providers kept on top of fraudsters. They say (that’s the word on the street, dawg) that Google has some fairly sound technology behind their programs which offer good protection.

The key thing is to be smart when using PPC. You need to be tracking your campaigns and monitoring results carefully. You should notice some indicators fairly quickly if you are a victim of fraud. You can’t just turn Google PPC on, throw some money at it and hope that you get more sales as a result. It takes time and maybe you should even consider hiring an expert or having a dedicated staff member manage your campaign, especially if you don’t know your CTs from your CT%.

If you can’t afford to hire specialists and don’t have the staff to do it for you, then do like most of us small business folk do, get educated so you can maintain your own campaign. A good place to start is the Google Adwords FAQ. You might also try third party sites such as Pay Per Click Universe.

Yaro Starak
BetterEdit Manager

It appears that Toronto is heading the same way as the city council has been slowly debating and now implementing new poster laws to restrict the amount and type of posters allowed. Currently the plan looks to be restricting postering to approximately 2% of the total telephone poles in Toronto. As you would expect there has been an uproar against the plans and a campaign was launched to fight the polices. Most of the complaints are about restricting freedom of speech and making it so only corporate business can afford to advertise (referring to billboards, buses and other outdoor advertising options).

I find this an interesting development because of my relationship and past contacts with some of the postering businesses in Toronto. If this law was passed and enforced fiercely I can see poster businesses really hurting.

Personally I do think something needs to be done to curb the somewhat ruthless and excessive postering going on in downtown Toronto but the current proposals do not seem adequate. You can read what some of the local GTA bloggers are saying too.