It goes with out saying these days that ensuring your customers operate the equipment they rent or hire from your company is a business critical issue.

Not just because it is morally and ethically the right thing to do, but also to ensure you are not subject to legal actions.

Customer safety is now a business critical issue

Hire and Rental companies regularly provide a range of equipment that requires some form of safety instruction.

There are a number of issues that hire and rental companies need to consider in their approach to OHS, not only to their customers but also their off site staff.

Such issues include:

Ensuring that safety instructions accompany each hire or rental and have an audit trail to demonstrate it;

Increasing the means by which customers can access hire or rental equipment safety data;

Ensuring off site staff, such as delivery drivers, assemblers, collectors and even inspectors have client site safety data briefs; and

Even the adhoc or routine scheduling of client site safety or maintenance inspections.

Addressing these issues is good business practise, part of mitigating your business risks. Such business practise is a combination of good staff training and awareness, good processes and a good hire or rental software system.

Safety Instructions issued to Clients.

HireEzy enables safety instructions to become an automated part of the picking and delivery process. Adding in a client signature for issued items, including the safety instructions aids in providing a demonstrable proof that such instructions were issued and received. A copy of the signed receipt that can then be attached to the client booking and hence client record, to maintain an historical record.

Increasing Means of Access.

Not all clients like reading safety instructions, particularly complex ones. Have you considered using demonstration videos? If so what about uploading such a video to YouTube or your own web site. If that sounds hard or you want to link such a process to your hire or rental management, then simply consider using HireEzy.

Off Site Safety Instructions.

Many client sites require some form of on-site safety compliance, particularly construction sites. To simplify the process of managing off site safety, simply link the client safety instructions to the booking and hence to the contractors or staff that are going to site. This requires in-built document management and workflow, which HireEzy has.

Client Site Safety or Maintenance Checks.

Such visits not only need to be scheduled they need to be set in the task list. Because HireEzy includes a task management system, these checks can be scheduled, often months in advance. This means that when planning for the week ahead, you can see not only your hire or rental related activities, you can also see any client site checks that need to be undertaken.

HireEzy certainly makes a big difference in improving your Hire and Rental Safety OHS management. However it must be supported by good staff training and staff compliance to processes.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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You tube is a greatly under utilized resource for hire and rental companies.

You Tube can be used for a variety of purposes such as:

Risk Reduction:

Reduce OHS and Public Liability Risk:

Upload safety instruction video’s for clientsand Contractors/ Staff on how to safely use hire equipment.  With HireEzy you can include the link to the safety instruction video with the client booking documentation.

Reduce Product Damages:

Assembly and Installation instructional video’s can be uploaded.  Often your supplier will have these, so it is simply a case of uploading the video.  Incredibly simple with HireEzy, as the instructional video for each specific item can be uploaded to you tube with one click.  

Reduce Customer Dissatisfaction:

 If a client can not assemble something, then generally they will blame you, before they blame themselves.  You need to make it easier to show customers how to erect or use things.  Showing through a video is far better than handing them a set of written instructions, it is just a fact of human nature.

Increase Revenue:

Youtube can be a very effective lead generation tool or sales reference site.

Examples

We have created a site on you tube which shows examples of how different companies are using You Tube to address each of these business requirements.  Click Here to Go to Our YouTube Channel

Remember HireEzy provides you with a powerful tool to integrate Web2.0 productivity tools like You Tube in to your hire and rental business processes.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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Why because they need to manage:

Equipment inventory, availability and maintenance

Staff talent and availability

Customers and prospects contact details, business inquiries and communications

Sites and location details and restrictions etc

The business financials and accounting

On top of this they need to market their business.  Increasingly most of this marketing is web, digital and/or social media based.

Problem Solved

Camera Equipment rental or camera equipment hire, depending on where in the English speaking world you come from now have a single business software solution to manage all of these requirements – HireEzy.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Cash flow is crucial to the success of every business, especially to hire businesses and rental management companies.

Delayed customer payments can tighten your company’s access to working capital, thereby restricting your capacity for growth. This is the most common discussion topic amongst our customers – payment deferrals by major accounts and long term hires.

We use Ezidebit to manage our cash flow and payments, it has worked brilliantly for us. (please note we have no financial relationship nor related business ownership with Ezidebit.)

Ezidebit provides you with tailored payment solutions to minimise these cash flow concerns and enable your business to grow and prosper into the future. Ezidebit offers a fully automatic collection solution, suitable for regular recurring fees, variable invoiced payments or payment plans.

We have found that with Ezidebit’s direct debit payment system we have gained not only gain greater control but a real reduction in outstanding payments. More importantly we no longer have the emotional and time drain spent in chasing payments.

Ezidebit can have your business set up and signing up customers within a day.

Their contact information is www.ezidebit.com.au , phone 1300 763 256 or email info@ezidebit.com.au

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

If you are, then it pays to look at other rental agreement contracts to see if you have all the necessary clauses and conditions etc.

One place to search for such examples is Docstoc , a great website with professional templates and documents.  For example here is one sample rental agreement contract we found.

Equipment Rental Agreement –

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Dr Tom McKaskill has just published a short article on where the business growth will come from?

Ok, I am an unashamed Dr Tom McKaskill fan!

His latest article looks at where the growth will come from?

He makes a really good point, that in a tight market such as now – companies are going to have to look at trying several initiatives to find the one that is sustainable.

Ok That’s Great But What Are Some Ideas For Business Initiatives?

One such initiative (s) should be to look at the opportunities offered by Social Media in the following business areas:

• Increasing Revenue;
• Cutting costs; and or
• Reducing Business Risk

A http://www.hireezy.com/index.php/1791/business-need-will-drive-creativity-in-2010-hire-rental-industry/recently published article looks at how each of these can be applied to businesses.

You can read more articles from Tom here or view some of short videos presentations on our EzySoft YouTube Channel.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Starting your own business, whether home based or otherwise, is a big step. Any new company, large or small, is going to take time to get off the ground and start generating any kind of substantial profits. Saying that is one thing, but if you’re one of the people embarking on the task, the obvious question is, “How do I survive while waiting to start making money?”

The fact is that unless you have a hefty amount of personal savings, which you are prepared to diminish, you are probably going to need some kind of alternative income source during this period. After all, any money you do make during the initial start up period may well need to be channelled straight back into the business in order to help it grow. The good news is that with some good advice and solid forward planning, surviving those first few months may end up being slightly less intimidating than first thought.

The first thing to do is take a good hard look at your current personal finances and be brutally honest with yourself about your needs over the first few months of your new business. Take account of everything, from rent or mortgage payments, food and other routine household expenses. Once you have had a good look at your personal spending needs, you will know how much money you require, on average, for the first year or so of your new endeavour. You have to be honest with yourself and not be unrealistic, either about how much money you will need to survive or the level of income you expect to take during those first few months.

The way to go about preparing a realistic estimate of your business profit prospects on start up is to assess the expected sales levels and how much you expect to be paying out in costs and expenses. Take a look at the difference between the two figures; if the expenses are greater than the sales figures, which they are most likely to be during the start up phase of your enterprise, you will have a good idea of how much money you will need to find from alternative sources. This will probably mean taking out loans or selling some personal assets.

Another way of surviving financially might be to continue working for your current employer until your new business takes off. Many new business proprietors take out bank loans to get them through those first few months, but before you take on such a debt you need to be certain of all the details.  Find out what would happen if you failed to make the necessary repayments and found yourself with a hefty overdraft.

Other options might be to simply find ways of reducing your business or personal costs, such as using public transport instead of your car or finding the lowest possible prices for goods that you buy. Running your new business from home if possible, rather than having to rent commercial premises would be a highly effective way of saving a considerable amount of money.

Starting up a new business can be relatively simple providing you plan ahead.

Naz Daud – CityLocal Directory

Copyright information: This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety, including live links to the following websites:

& this copyright statement must also be included.

Necessity is the mother of all invention!

A mantra my father drove in to my head when I was a growing up, not once but repeatedly.

Recently I was reminded of this little childhood memory when reading a recent article by Michael Roth (writes great articles) on Rental Industry Makes Positive Efforts in Midst of Recession .

Michael made the point that companies will be forced to innovate, given the slow recovery.  Innovate because they have to.

Great Point But Where To Start To Look For Innovation?

Keeping things basic, there are only three simple things you can ever do in a business:

1. Increase revenue
2. Cut Costs or
3. Reduce Risks

So What Are Some Ideas for Innovation?

Well look towards Social Media and Digital Marketing as a prospective source.  There is massive opportunity to be had for creative hire and rental companies in adopting Social Media and related digital marketing.

Why, because overall the industry has been incredibly slow to adopt it.

That’s great for innovators as it means there is massive untapped opportunities out there!

First - Increase Revenue

Social media marketing has been shown to be a great way of increasing sales leads if done properly.  A well planned and executed social media strategy ( it’s not hard at all) can really be effective in driving more traffic to your web site, hence your offer.

Articles
Why Social Media is a Natural Channel for Hire and Rental Companies

Second - Cutting Costs

Social media can be used to cut hire and rental operating costs.  For example cutting website development fees by having self web content management embedded in your rental software or hire software.  Not only does this cut operating costs it also can improve search engine rankings, through more frequent changes.

Articles
Options for Reducing Costs

Reducing Risk

Reducing business risks can be in part by considering the use of Social Media, for example using YouTube to show clients how to maintain, set up or dis-assemble equipment.

Articles:
How Hire and Rental Companies Can Use YouTube

Still Unsure?

We are offering Hire and Rental Companies a free advisory service to discuss how to use Social Media in their business.  No obligation etc. Why? Because we dont sell Social Media services – we simple offer our globally recognised skills in Social Media back to the industry.  See our press release for more details, click here.

What do we get out of it?

Well we believe that if you begin to use social media and digital marketing effectively, then you will appreciate the value of the integrated social media and digital marketing tools in our hire software and rental software.

For more information Email Us

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ArticleCoop | 7 Steps to Off Page SEO Techniques

7 Steps to Off Page SEO Techniques

By: Bill Wynne

Off page SEO Techniques are very important for any website, blog or otherwise that wants to harness the power of organic traffic from the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that includes a number of elements to insure a more favorable position for your website in search engine result pages like those of Google, Yahoo and Bing. The success of your online marketing is greatly enhanced when you can increase the ratio of your organic traffic to 80%. This traffic is free and very valuable.

There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page SEO techniques. We will only discus off page SEO techniques in this article. Off page SEO are the things you need to do to get a higher page rank (PR) and a good position in the search engines like Google for your website after you launch the website.

What are the off page SEO techniques? Off page SEO techniques are always connected to building your link popularity. Link popularity represents the number of back links or links back to your website from other websites that your website has. To check you website’s current link popularity, go to Link Popularity and use the free tool to check your website’s link popularity. The greater link popularity that your website possesses the higher your page rank (PR) will be. To build your link popularity you need to increase the number of websites that link back to your website.

There are a number of off page SEO techniques

1. Email site webmasters that are responsible for websites similar to yours in content and ask them for a link that you will reciprocate on. There are sites that have a page full of links and the links are not relevant to each other as far as content is concerned. Link Farms can damage the reputation of your website with Google instead of helping it. It is not advisable that you take the easy route and join in any link farms. Link schemes are not approved by Google and before you take what may appear to be an easy route for getting back links you should read information on Google’s site about illegitimate linking methods, this will assure you of more success with Google. One strategy used is to launch a lot of fraudulent sites to create lots of links to one site or more. Google has ways to track this and the sites involved could likely be blacklisted by Google.

2. Content – The best way to conduct your off page SEO techniques then is to insure that you have unique, highly informative content. When you have great content other webmasters will want to link to your site. If they just copy and paste your content on their website that is a violation of intellectual property copyright laws. Make people want to link to your website. This is the best of all off page SEO techniques to increase the number of websites linking to yours.

3. Article marketing – There are hundreds if not thousands of article directories on the Internet. You can submit articles to these sites and for every submission, you will be allotted a resource box in which you can introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours would go a long way in increasing your own page rank. Additionally, if you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are services detailed on my blog that you can use for monthly fees or software that is automated.

4. Forum marketing – There are online communities that are dedicated to the subject of your website. Find those forums, join them and become part of the community. You want to leave relevant valuable comments showing you are part of the community and not just spamming. You will be seen as a spammer just there to post a link and you could be banned from that forum. In the forum you will be able to have a signature box that will accompany every post or comment that you make in the forum. Your resource box allows you to have one or two links to your website. For every post you make, you will have a link to your website.

5. Craigslist – Craigslist is a well-known classifieds website with a PR7. A PR7 score is very high! Having a link on a website with a PR7 will give a boost to your website. To have a link on Craigslist go to the site, choose the category that is relevant to your website, post your advertisement with your link of course and see what happens. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads your ad. The object was to have a link to your website on Craigslist. Your ad will expire so you should have a way to remind yourself to post there when your ad expires to maintain a constant link there.

6. Look for partners who are willing to include your list in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at Webconfs

7. Triangular linking – Google does not like reciprocal linking but triangular linking is one way of getting around this limitation. Look for webmasters who will work with you on this one of the off page SEO techniques. Webmaster A posts a link to Webmaster B’s website. Webmaster B posts a link to Webmaster C’s website. Webmaster C posts a link to Webmaster A’s website. It is the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to determine this type of linking.

Author Resource: Find more related information on Article Marketing on Bill’s Blog. Since 99′ Bill Wynne has successfully used the Internet to effectively convey information for profit and not-for-profit. Recently, Bill created a blog to share his experiences in Internet Marketing. His blog offers free tools and articles like Off Page SEO Techniques

Article From ArticleCoop

Each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week in Thumbs Up is all about handy Windows apps, plus some interesting statistics about social media in the enterprise:

• Hey cool! This will be handy – New App Links SkyDrive to Windows Explorer http://bit.ly/ncuiT

If you haven’t heard of Windows SkyDrive, it’s basically a free online storage solution provided by Microsoft which gives you 25gb to store whatever you want on the internet so that you can access from anyway.  It’s not really pushed at the moment which is why not many people know about it, but that will certainly change once Office 2010 is released, as it is heavily focused on extending the Office experience beyond the desktop allowing people to create and save MS Office documents online using online browsing versions and store them in their SkyDrive using the Office Live plugin.  Personally, I’ve found it really handy and I use it alot.  What this application does (which was NOT created by Microsoft, by the way) is install your SkyDrive as another hard drive on your computer in the Explorer shell, so that you can simply copy and paste to it like any other hard drive – the online difference of course is that you are storing your stuff on Microsoft’s servers.  This is really great for backing up all of your critical information so that if your machine breaks down or is stolen, you can simply replace it and remap your SkyDrive to the machine using this application and voila – you have all your information back.  Highly recommended.

• Very interesting – Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise http://bit.ly/TBJt1

There is another article of similar theme that I tweeted as well this week, which you can read here – http://bit.ly/1P8llM – which also touches on how social networking usage is exploding in the business and enterprise workplaces.  The reason why?  It is a far more effective way of engaging your audience and getting your message across.  I am willing to bet my left kidney that Google will shell out somewhere in the vacinity of $2 billion to buy out Twitter and position it as it’s newest advertising medium, considering that many businesses are telling the same story as we are – Google Adwords is a WASTE OF MONEY.  Our company stopped using it earlier in the year and we now exclusively advertise our products and services through Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser extent) and the result has been a 700% increase in sales leads.  True story.  We are so happy with the results that we will never use Google Adwords ever again – which by the way supplies Google with 97% of their $16 billion a year in revenue.  You do the math – Google will have to radically adjust their business model or risk becoming irrelevant and having their revenue dry up big time.

• Good article – Stop Paying for Windows Security; Microsoft’s Security Tools Are Good Enough [Opinion] http://bit.ly/19flzZ

I’ve blogged about Microsoft Security Essentials before – if you haven’t yet heard of this program, it’s Microsoft’s version of a free anti-virus program – and since it’s release I have been surprised about the amount of articles likes these that are getting published which are complementary to Microsoft for this being a great release.  What I would add to the fact that it is a good enough security program is the fact that it DOESN”T ANNOY YOU.  I’ve been running it myself ever since it was released and not once ever has the program prompted me to interact with it in any way.  At first I was a little worried that perhaps the virus definitions weren’t up to date so on the odd occasion I opened it up to check – I was wrong, the program is updating itself almost daily and it isn’t doing anything annoying on the screen to indicate that it’s working in the background.  In my opinion, that is the ultimate security program, as I often forget that it is there.  I have been going through the process of uninstalling AVG and other virus programs on the computers that I come across and have been installing this instead, it truly is a nice, solid release and I’d recommend it to anybody.  If you’d like to try it yourself, you can download it for free at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials.

• Awesome app – Paint.NET Releases Big Update, Still a Killer Photoshop Alternative [Downloads] http://bit.ly/2Ok9bW

Photoshopping has pretty much become a verb now, on par with Googling a search of Tweeting a message and yet Photoshop is an extremely expensive piece of software that only business professionals can afford.  This application – Paint.NET – which has been around for a while, is a FREE program that gives you all the basics of image editing and some advanced options too.  I’ve been recommending this to people who are uploading graphics to their website and want to do some basic image manipulation themselves and this program will do it all for them for the nice price of nothing. I’d recommend this to anybody – it’s a Windows only release, but let’s face it, the majority of Mac users probably have Windows installed as well, or will need to install it soon.  Grab this and enjoy (and check out the article for more tips on how to use the program).

• Wow – Firefox Tops Vulnerability List (internetnews.com) http://bit.ly/3lqzXF

It surprises a fair few people that I talk to when I tell them that I’m a dedicated Internet Explorer user, but truth be told, Firefox is a great browser but still has a ways to go. Do you ever wonder why Google invested a whole pile of money into building their own browser even though they pony up the majority of the funds that Mozilla uses to operate whilst building free products like Firefox? It’s because sometimes in situations like these where the browser is such an important tool, it’s beneficial that it is being designed and built by people who spend all day working in computer security for a wide range of software products, not just one.  This article goes on to detail how Firefox is the most vulnerable browser to hack attempts and general exploits, even above Internet Explorer.  Something else that most people don’t know about Firefox is that it is a memory hog.  I’ve often looked at people’s computers who have Firefox open and 3 or four tabs open and Firefox is using around 180 – 200mb of RAM from the machine just to do that.  It’s pretty ridiculous.  My general advice is to stick with the browser that comes with the computer – IE on Windows or Safari on a Mac, as they are both acutely fine tuned for their respective environments.  What about Google Chrome you might say?  Well, you can always use that browser if you don’t mind the fact that it is butt ugly.

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About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au