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Help yourself to our free training resources! Here you’ll find lots of free tutorials, how-tos, advice and training tips on a wide range of business, management and IT training subjects. We’re continually adding great new stuff so make sure you follow us on twitter for regular updates.

How To Upload Wordpress via FTP with FileZilla

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Wordpress FTP with FileZilla Setting up FileZilla FTP If you’re going to attend our Wordpress Training course, we recommend that you download and familiarise yourself with FileZilla prior to attending. FileZilla is a free FTP client that we use on the course.

If you’re not attending the Wordpress course but need to know how to use an FTP client to manage the local and remote files in your website, this guide to setting up FTP using FileZilla will be a useful reference guide.

What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It’s the standard network protocol for transferring files over the internet. For a more detailed definition check out Wikipedia

For any website you build, you will keep a local copy on your own computer, and a remote copy on the internet – that is, the live version that people see when they visit your site.

An FTP client will allow you to copy your site files from your computer the the internet (and vice versa).

If you’re making a site with a tool like Dreamweaver you can build and test it on your Mac or PC locally, and then upload to the web via FTP when it’s ready. Dreamweaver actually has it’s own built in FTP client – you can learn more about this on our 2-day Dreamweaver Training course.

Using Wordpress is different. Once you’ve downloaded the latest version of Wordpress, uploaded it to your remote webspace and set it all up, you can add your content and make all the amendments directly to the live version of the site using Wordpress’ content management back-end. This lets you preview everything before it’s published. However, it’s still a good idea to make regular backups of the site via your FTP client in case something goes wrong!

Anyway – here’s how to download and set up FileZilla:

How to upload Wordpress via FTP with FileZilla

BEFORE YOU START:

Make sure your host supports PHP & MySQL – Wordpress uses a MySQL database
Have your FTP login details to hand

1. Download FileZilla Client at: http://filezilla-project.org/

Double-click The FileZilla icon in your downloads folder to install FileZilla

Click through the installation using the default settings.

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Posted by Colin Welch in Social Media on March 9th, 2010 | No Comments »

What makes a great salesperson?

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One of the questions I’m often asked is ‘What makes a great salesperson?’ Well, if you aim for the following top five attributes, you’ll soon be smashing your targets:

Confidence

Essential for a salesperson, confidence can be seen in all areas of selling. Whether it’s pitching, closing, objection handling, or even just picking up the phone in the first place, confidence is pretty much everything in sales. Think back and I’m sure you can remember the voice tone of someone who sounded confident on the phone, and someone who sounded unsure. Which one would you buy from?

Self-Motivation

The key is in the first part of the word – ‘self’. Most average salespeople rely on other things to motivate them – a ‘lucky’ sales call or email, their manager, sale competitions, a sunny day, a stroke of luck with a client. Top salespeople use their initiative and do whatever it takes to stay motivated.
Knowledge

I don’t just mean knowledge of your product or service, but also knowledge of your company, your industry, your business world, your clients, your competitors and your profession – in fact, everything associated with your role. If you want to appear to your clients as a professional, trusted advisor, then start acting and talking like you are one. Most salespeople never bother to learn the strengths and weaknesses of their competition, and then they complain when they aren’t very successful.

Conviction

Top salespeople have conviction – conviction in themselves, their profession, their product or service, their colleagues – pretty much in everything to do with their job. If you’re trying to convince people that what you have to offer is the best thing for them, you’ll have to convince yourself first.

Tenacity

Call it tenacity, persistence, or determination, it’s one of the best attitudes a salesperson can posses. Is everything always going to run smoothly? No. Are you always going to get objections? Yes. Are you going to get those day-to-day challenges that make it difficult to focus on the things you know you should be doing? Yes. Successful salespeople expect these hurdles but keep on going anyway.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Uncategorized on March 3rd, 2010 | No Comments »

How to Manage Social Media Activity

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Your Social Media Management Schedule

Ever feel a bit intimidated by the fast pace of social media and the sheer volume of it all? Our Social Media Training and SEO Training courses are a good starting place if you’re new to blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Wordpress and the like. But once you are up and running it’s still very easy to feel alarmed – but have no fear we have a solution!

It doesn’t matter how many tweets you make a day or how often you write a blog, as long as you plan your activity and break it down into simple stages. For those who struggle with this, consider our Time Management Training. A recent blog post listed the 50 most common social media mistakes and number one is “lack of planning” – planning your social media activity is crucial!

If you find yourself wondering “how do I manage my social media activity most efficiently?” then read on for our example schedule of what you can do throughout the day, once daily, weekly and monthly.

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Posted by Natasha in Social Media on March 3rd, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Social Media Guidelines

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Your Social Networking Policy – A Business Bible for Social Networking

Social networks are changing the way your business communicates, creating new ways to interact with existing or potential customers. These new platforms have created a new framework within which we communicate and build relationships. Therefore using Social Media in the right way is essential if you want to build the strongest and most successful relationships.

Only 29% of companies have a Social Media Policy, but everything your employees say about you online represents you as a company; if you haven’t already you should think about establishing a set of Social Media Guidelines for your business.

In this odd realm where the public and private blur, how do you present your business effectively? Of course if you want to become a Social Media Pro than our Social Media training course could be the choice for you. But if you’re eager to get started, read our straightforward guide to the rules which should always be born in mind…

The Gospel – Social Media Policy Basics

It doesn’t matter if it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or WordPress, if you engage with Social Media take care to follow these basic principles:

Don’t stray from what you know, and always offer a personal perspective.
Never be afraid to enter a debate with others, but do so politely and respectfully .
Take a moment before you click “post”; don’t delay in responding to others, just remember who you’re representing and to check before you post.
Post relevant comments, and never spam or go off-topic.

If you need to know how to set up your own blog, consider our Wordpress course. Once you’re ready to go, you’ll find social media is easier than you think; just read on for the top ten guidelines.

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Posted by Natasha in Social Media on February 16th, 2010 | 7 Comments »

Download Free Professional Twitter Background

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Would you like a good looking Twitter Background for your business? Would you like a Twitter Background that lets you show more information than the mini profile, like the URL of your website, Linkedin and Facebook details, maybe your Flickr account and your email and telephone number?

Well you can!

Download our free Twitter backgound template PSD file, fill in the blanks and you will have a twitter background just like ours @SBTtraining. Incidentally if you are just starting out using Social Networking for your business you would benefit from attending our Social Media Training course.

How to create your Free Twitter Background

If you are good with Photoshop you can fiddle with the colours by creating your own styles for the box and line at top. I have made them grey to go with most colour schemes. I think that patterned backgrounds can be quite distracting, so I chose black and white for ours. Desaturating and fading images can also work if your design is looking too garish. You can find ideas for your free Twitter background by looking for free desktop wallpaper.

To improve your Photoshop skills you could try our Photoshop training courses for beginners and advanced Photoshop users.

Download your free twitter background template here.

Download free twitter backgound

Open and unzip the PSD file called twitterbackground.zip
Find or create a backgound image and paste it into the layer called “put your backgound image here”
Find an image, portrait, logo or whatever you like and paste it into the layer called “Put an image or your logo here”
Fill in your contact details
Save as jpg around 75% quality
Log into Twitter
Click on Settings from the top menu
Click on Design from the submenu
Click on Change Background Image ( bottom left of page) and a browse for files dialog box will appear
Find and select your new twitter backgound jpg
Save

Once you have created your background don’t forget to mention it in our comments below with a link to your new Twitter page, you may even get a few followers as a result.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in Photoshop, Social Media on February 8th, 2010 | 2 Comments »

How to Create a Facebook Fan Page for your Business

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2009 was the year that businesses really started to wake up to the power of Social Media, and it’s potential to attract and engage customers.

With a staggering 400 million users, Facebook is one of the key places your business needs a presence – and for this you need to create a Facebook Fan Page!

Facebook don’t make it immediately obvious where to go to create a Business Fan Page when you log in, so we’ve put together this step-by-step guide.

What you do with your Fan Page once you’ve created it is just as important, and you can learn how to make the most of your new page on our Social Media training course.

OK – let’s get started:

How to Create a Business Fan Page on Facebook:

1. You will need to be logged in to your Facebook account in order to create a page. If you don’t already have a Facebook account you need to set one up. Just go to www.facebook.com and follow the instructions.

Tip: Once you’ve created your Fan Page you will automatically become the Administrator of it. If your personal Facebook account isn’t something you want your clients to see (e.g. drunken photos etc…!) then you might want to create a seperate profile on Facebook for business purposes!

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Posted by Colin Welch in Social Media on February 3rd, 2010 | 1 Comment »

What is Programme Management?

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How is Programme Management different form Project Management?

Whilst Project Management is about controlling a project, Programme Management is concerned with controlling a group of related projects. (If the projects are not related then this becomes portfolio management)

When a project is to large to manage as a single entity it needs to be split up into smaller more manageable projects, often with multiple project managers.

These smaller projects should all be designed to achieve a single long-term objective or benefit for the organisation. It is the Programme Managers role to make sure all projects run on target and achieve their objectives. Silicon Beach Training offer MSP training (Managing Successful Programmes) and Prince2 training courses.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in MSP Training on January 18th, 2010 | No Comments »

Making the Most of Social Media Marketing – Links

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Below you’ll find a comprehensive list of Social Media Tips, Guides, Plugins, Platforms, Analytics Tools, Apps and other great Social Media resources. This list is designed as a reference guide for delegates who have attended our Social Media training course – but it would be mean of us not to make it available to everyone. Enjoy…