Desert Wave Enterprises
PO Box 2361
Alice Springs NT 0871
Australia. To email click here

Dear !*FIRST_NAME*!

Here is the latest edition of HRD Alert! to which you subscribed.

If you have trouble reading this or prefer to read an online copy, you'll find one here. You can load it into your browser, save and read or print and read off-line.

Welcome to another issue of HRD Alert!

By default, HRD Alert! has become a bimonthly publication instead of a monthly publication. It's because my life seems to be getting busier as I get older instead of less busy ... something had to give and it was my ezine. It's not that I feel you're unimportant, but I know your life won't be adversely effected if you hear from me less frequently.

What I thought I'd do, just to keep in touch, is send a short email alert around the end of the month between issues. Look for the first at end of September.

At present I'm setting up a Site Build It! site that will become a one-stop Human Resources Development Centre. It will take over from my existing Desert Wave Enterprises site and include access to online courses, articles about HR&D, links to jobs sites, and of course be home for my electronic books, including the Instant Expert Series. Watch for my launch in November.

Talking about e-books, I've been selling heaps of the Win a Government Job Series. I've mastered search engine pay-for-click advertising and have a click through rate that many people only dream about. Just in case you have an Internet site for your business but aren't getting any visitors, I've included an article about how you can make your site visible to the millions of potential customers out there in cyberspace. It's really a great medium if you leverage it correctly.

There's also an item about coaching and of course, a few sites to visit.

Until next issue, yours in HRD

Robin Henry
Principal Adviser/Publisher

Coaching to Improve Profit
One to one coaching is still a very effective method of on-job learning that can help firms increase their profit if used wisely. This item discusses coaching and what needs to be done to improve performance through coaching.

Making Your Business Site Visible
If you build it will they come? Probably not. With millions of Internet sites already available and others being added daily, how will anyone ever find your business site? This article makes several suggestions about how you can make your site more visible and ramp up your sales. After all, even training organisations need to be found if they are to earn business.

Worth a Look

There are three sites this week including a link to Dilbert.com where you can relieve your stress with a little humour.

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While on-job-training occurs in every workplace, often it is informal, unplanned and largely unrecognized for the important role it plays. How many times have you commenced a new job and been told, 'Here's our <fill in this space> manual. Read it, learn how to do the work and you'll be fine. If you have any trouble, ask Jim?' It's a common approach which often works despite the fact that it isn't perfect.

There's a better approach. That is to provide formal coaching by an experienced subject matter expert (SMT). Obviously those you assign to the coaching role need to be your best performers with exemplary practice, otherwise you risk teaching people sub-standard work practices.

Within your workplace you'll find people who perform at levels well above average; there will be others whose performance is barely enough for them to stay employed and of course, others in between. It's the former you need to appoint as coaches.

Coaching new employees creates a communication link between them and other staff. It makes the new staff feel 'cared' for and helps identify areas for future development or growth. If a healthy coaching atmosphere exists within an organisation, when a work problem arises, it is easier for supervisors to resolve because employees are conducive to being coached, and will more readily become involved in helping solve the problem.

Some of the key principle for effective coaching are:

• Involve employees in developing their work procedures (they have the knowledge and their ownership of the procedures aids commitment)
• Ask employees to evaluate their work performance and encourage them to recommend improvements (sometimes a suggestions box can be helpful)
• Establish preferred performance benchmarks and encourage all staff to meet the benchmarks; evaluate performance against the standard and provide feedback to individuals about their performance
• Allow sufficient time for staff to reach benchmarks
• Establish a schedule for periodic evaluation of work process review; reward suggestions that improve income or reduce costs
• Make sure new employees have a 'buddy' or coach who can help them when needed

Although most people think of coaching in terms of operational work, coaching has become more popular in senior management/executive level roles where people are more into the strategic work of organisations. This may involve arranging for a departmental manager who is running a department exceptionally well to coach a new departmental head. Agreement that coaching will benefit them is often difficult to get from executive managers. Some hold the idea that with 15 years of experience and a degree they don't need anyone suggesting how they might improve their department.

A useful approach here is to involve a few of these people in a 'trial' intended to determine whether it's a suitable and worthwhile activity for the organisation. At the end of the trial you will, hopefully, have several people who found it a useful adjunct to their career development; use them to promote the program to other executive managers.

Coaching has become a full time career for people who coach across a range of small businesses, personal fitness, sports, health and well-being, nutrition and diet, and there are no doubt other areas.

If your organisation hasn't got a formal coaching process at present, give some thought to at least trialling coaching. It may help your business move to new levels of profit.

Imagine how you could improve profit by coaching your sales staff to better relationship management skills, or your accounts team by ensuring discount periods aren't missed and debtors pay up on time. There's a thousand possible applications ... you just need to identify them and find your top performers to spread the message.

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If you have an Internet site for your business, you either want to inform people about your products or services, or you want to sell something online. But just having a site isn't a solution as you probably know. After all, how can prospective clients find your site when it's just one of millions.

One of the secrets is to make sure your site appears in the first 10 sites listed in a search engine result. But that's no easy task when everyone's trying to beat you.

This topic discusses two ways in which you can get visitors; pay-for-click (PFC) advertising and search engine optimisation. Let's look at PFC first by using an analogy.

Say I had a site that sold boat propellors and drive shafts (hey, a bit of a change from training and development). There is a couple of things I'd do. First, I'd go to Overture's Search Inventory where I'd enter a number of key words to do with drive shafts eg, cast propellors, brass propellors, propellors, boat propellors, propelors, metal propellors etc. What the Overture Search Inventory will tell me for each keyword I enter is how many people searched for that term during the last month (Demand).

Obviously, the term for which most people are searching is the one you want associated with your site ... and your PFC advertisement. I'd pick the top 10-15 keywords and I'd then open an account with Google Adwords here using those keywords. It's cheap and can be very effective.

The heading of your Google advert should also use the top keyword eg, 'Metal Propellors for Boats' and your advert links to your site. Now when someone enters 'metal propellors' in a search engine, your advert will most likely appear at the right hand side of the Google search engine results page. When someone clicks on it, you pay a small sum to Google and the click takes the interested person to your site where you have your opportunity to sell product to them. This way you are receiving targeted prospects ie, people who are interested in boat propellors.

The next thing to do is optimize your Internet site pages with the keywords you have identified in your Overture search. This is a more complex process, but essentially what you do is use the keywords throughout your site, in naming your site pages, your URL if possible, and then submit your site to the largest search engines.

A combination of both processes will eventually lead to sales from targeted prospects who are warm to buy, That's the sort of traffic we all need to grow our businesses. Look at this example of my Google Ads campaign for my ebook Writing Responses to Selection Criteria.

This is my monthly report for August. What it means is that of 12,450 people who viewed a page with my keywords 'selection criteria' on it, 767 people clicked on my Google Ad that took them to my site. The Click Through Rate of 6.12% is exceptionally high which means that my keyword selection is spot on. Each click cost me 11 cents or a monthly cost of $87.72. The average position of my advertisement on each page served (12,540) was 1.3 (which is first or second).

If 767 people visited my Win A Government Job site, you can imagine why my e-book sales have been fantastic. They were ALL people looking for something to do with 'selection criteria', which is exactly what my ebook is about. So my audience was targeted to my product and warm to buy. They weren't people looking for widgets or anything else.

When I place a small classified advert in a newspaper, it costs me $14 plus GST minimum and I often don't get ONE enquiry as a result. In comparison, Google serves my adverts 24/7 in any country or countries I choose and I get sales. Needless to say, I don't plae classified ads any more.

This is truly a winning formula and once you understand how it works, it's easy. If you are interested in learning how to improve your site's sales performance, you can learn all you need to know and more in Dr Ken Evoy's e-book Make Your Site Sell! which you can find at the bottom of the page here.

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National Training Information Service
The NTIS is a site administered by the Australian National Training Authority and has extensive details about training in Australia, specifically nationally accredited training. Visit ...

The Benchmarking Network
The Benchmarking Network, Inc. is an international resource for business process research and metrics. They lead studies with over 3,000 process leaders in over 25 countries. Interested in benchmarking, Visit ... here.

The Dilbert Zone (Humour)
A good site for some humour, you can view comics, pick up a screensaver, and otherwise engage in some desktop diversions when the going gets tough. Visit ...

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