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“Vibe coding” is the term for describing what you want to an AI tool like Cursor or Claude Code and letting it write the software for you. It’s genuinely powerful, and it’s raising a real question in small business circles right now: if AI can write software this fast, do we even need to pay for Mailchimp or Aweber anymore?
We dug into this properly. Short version: yes to the plumbing, no to the platform.
There’s a lot of hype right now about AI “agents” that can just go off and do real work for you, log into your accounts, complete tasks, come back when it’s done.
We decided to actually test that claim properly, using our own sample WordPress site as a real-world task: log in, and draft a couple of blog posts.
It did not go the way the marketing suggests.
We recently went through Mailchimp’s SMS sign-up flow (it’s owned by Intuit these days) and hit a screen worth flagging for anyone doing digital and SMS marketing: a recommended 1,000 SMS credits for A$28.16 a month, with higher tiers running all the way up to 20,000 credits for around A$197.
It’s presented as a simple subscription choice, pick your tier, add your card, done.
But the detail that matters is easy to miss on that screen: these are recurring monthly subscription credits, and unused credits don’t roll over.
Most businesses would be thrilled with a 20% email open rate. We just looked at the stats on one of our automated welcome emails for our free payroll training sample, and the numbers stopped us in our tracks:
For context, the average email marketing open rate across most industries sits somewhere between 20% and 35%, and a “good” click-through rate is usually anywhere from 2% to 5%.
We didn’t just beat those numbers, we roughly tripled the open rate benchmark and blew past the click-through benchmark by a factor of ten or more.
So what’s actually going on here?
Meta has agreed to pay up to $US18 billion ($23.6 billion AUD) and roll out a new set of child-safety features across Facebook and Instagram, settling a landmark case brought by nearly every US state over claims the platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive to teenagers.
The deal came together right before Mark Zuckerberg was due to take the stand in a California courtroom, and it’s one of the largest consumer protection settlements in US history.
This is bad news for Meta but can your business benefit by understanding what users want to see on social media?
Temu has built its entire reputation on one promise: the same kind of thing you’d buy elsewhere, for a fraction of the price. And honestly?
Sometimes that promise is true. But “sometimes” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the only way to know if you’re getting a genuine bargain or a false economy is to actually dig into the listing properly, not just glance at the price tag.
We decided to put that to the test with a genuinely popular product: solar festoon lights for the backyard. We compared the Hoselink Warm White Solar Festoon Lights Starter Set, a well reviewed Australian favourite, against a similar looking listing from a Temu seller called SUN YEE.
We got an email this week from Revolut, the newer deposit-taking neobank operating in Australia, and it’s worth talking about, not because it’s unusual, but because it’s a textbook example of a marketing message that sounds harmless and is actually a pretty terrible financial idea for most people.
The pitch was simple: apply for a personal loan of up to $50,000, comparison rates from 6.99%, terms of 1 to 7 years, approved and deposited into your account “instantly.”
Every now and then a story comes along that’s a perfect, real-world case study for the exact thing we teach in our marketing and strategy courses. This week it’s milk.
A small family dairy just outside Sydney has gone viral, and we mean genuinely viral, hundreds of people queuing in freezing temperatures, some for over an hour, just for a bottle of unhomogenised Jersey milk.
If you’ve used Microsoft Publisher for flyers, newsletters, business cards or that one perfect letterhead template, we’ve got a bit of news for you: Microsoft is officially retiring Publisher on 13 October 2026.
After that date it’ll be pulled from Microsoft 365 subscriptions entirely, and while older standalone versions might keep limping along, they won’t get security updates or support.
We know a few of our students and clients still reach for Publisher out of habit, so we wanted to put together a quick “bye bye Publisher, hello again Word and PowerPoint” guide, because the good news is Microsoft has been quietly building most of Publisher’s best bits into the apps you’re probably already using every day.
We’ve been rolling out AI-assisted customer service across a few of our own websites lately, and it’s given us a pretty clear, real-world lesson: the AI isn’t the hard part. The knowledge behind it is.
Take two of our own sites as an example. On computertrainingonline.com.au, our AI chat agent handles pre-sales questions about our Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks and Microsoft Office courses with genuine confidence, it gives specific, accurate answers about course access, certificates, payment plans, support channels, and more. Over on natbooks.com.au, our National Bookkeeping site, the same kind of AI-assisted chat doesn’t have nearly as much to work with, and it shows.
Same underlying AI technology. Very different quality of answer. Here’s why.
The reason our computertrainingonline.com.au chat agent performs so well is our FAQ’s page, and we don’t say that lightly. It’s not a token “top 5 questions” page. It’s a genuinely thorough, 30-question resource covering everything from course duration and certificates, to payment plans, refund policy, support channels, CPD points, and even how insurers and rehab consultants can enrol clients.
That page didn’t happen by accident. It’s been built up and refined since 2011 by actually paying attention to the questions our students and prospective students ask, then writing clear, specific, honest answers to them.
When you feed an AI system that kind of detailed, well-organised, first-hand knowledge, it has something real to work with. It’s not guessing or generalising, it’s answering the way one of our own team would, because it’s essentially drawing on the same accumulated knowledge our support team has built over more than a decade.
This is a pattern we expect to see everywhere as more businesses experiment with AI chat agents: the AI is only ever as good as what you give it to work with.
A generic AI chatbot with no grounding in your actual business will happily make things up, or fall back on vague, unhelpful answers. But an AI system trained on a genuinely detailed FAQ, your policies, your course structures, your actual support history, starts to sound like it actually knows your business. Because, in a very real sense, it does.
This is exactly the kind of thing we’re exploring further on our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, where we go into more detail on how tools like Claude can be set up with custom knowledge, instructions and integrations so they genuinely reflect how a business works, rather than giving generic, one-size-fits-all answers.
If you’re a business owner thinking about adding AI to your customer service, sales or marketing, don’t start with the AI. Start with your knowledge base.
Sit down and write out, honestly and specifically, the questions your customers actually ask you, the ones your team answers over and over on email, phone and website chat, and answer them properly. That FAQ page, or knowledge base, or set of support documents, is what turns a generic AI chatbot into something that actually sounds like your business.
We did it the slow way over more than a decade on computertrainingonline.com.au, and it’s paying off now in a way we didn’t originally plan for.
Want to know more about how AI can be trained to work the way your business works? Read our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, or get in touch, we’re happy to talk through what we’ve learned.
If you’ve ever typed out almost the same reply to a customer for the third time in one morning, you already know the problem we’re solving today. It’s one of the most common questions we get asked by our office admin and customer service students: “How do I stop rewriting the same email over and over?”
The answer is Outlook email templates, and once you’ve set one up, you’ll wonder how you survived without it.
We talk to a lot of small business owners and office admin staff, and email templates come up constantly, usually right after someone has spent their lunch break rewriting a refund policy explanation for the fifth time that week.
Templates aren’t just a time-saver, though that’s reason enough. They also help you:
We covered a lot of this same ground, from setting expectations with customers to speeding up your response process, in our Online Customer Service Training Course article. Templates are really the practical, day-to-day version of that bigger customer service strategy.
To use it later: go to New Items > More Items > Choose Form, set the “Look In” dropdown to User Templates in File System, select your template, tweak the details for that customer, and send.
The newer versions of Outlook (and Outlook.com) use a slightly different system called My Templates:
Simple as that. No add-ons, no extra software, no line item that blows out your monthly budget.
If you’re not sure where to start, these are the ones we see used the most:
Keep each one written in plain English, keep the tone friendly rather than corporate, and always leave a gap where you can personalise the customer’s name and specific situation. Nobody likes a reply that clearly wasn’t written for them.
Email templates are just one small (very useful) corner of what Microsoft Outlook can do for office admin and customer service tasks, calendar management, contact and CRM tracking, and task lists are all in there too, and most people are only using a fraction of it.
If you want your whole team working faster and more consistently across the entire Microsoft Office suite, our Office Support & Administration using Microsoft Office course covers Outlook email and meeting management, contacts and CRM, and tasks, alongside practical Word and Excel skills your admin and customer service staff will use every single day.
Got a Microsoft Office, MYOB, Xero or QuickBooks question you’d like us to cover in a future post? Get in touch, we’re always keen to write about what our students actually want to know.
To increase leads, prospects, and customers for online bookkeeping courses in MYOB and Xero, your landing page should combine clear messaging, trust-building elements, and conversion-focused design.
Here’s a breakdown of what to include:
Example: “Master MYOB & Xero Bookkeeping — Get Certified and Boost Your Career or Business!”
It should instantly communicate the value of the course and who it’s for.
Example: “Learn practical bookkeeping skills using Australia’s most popular accounting tools — even if you’re starting from scratch.”
Use buttons like:
“Get Instant Access”
“Start Free Trial”
“Download Free Course Preview”
CTA should be repeated throughout the page.
Brief video (1–2 minutes) introducing the course, showing platform walk-throughs or testimonials.
Break down what students will learn and how it helps them (e.g. start a freelance business, get hired, manage small biz finances).
Use bullet points or icons to make it scannable:
âś… MYOB & Xero practical training
âś… Real-world bookkeeping scenarios
âś… Certificate of completion
âś… Lifetime access & updates
Include:
Student testimonials (video or text)
Logos of companies that hired graduates or where instructors worked
Star ratings from course platforms
Number of students enrolled (if impressive)
Offer a free resource to collect emails:
“Download our FREE MYOB vs Xero Comparison Guide”
“Try the first module for free”
“Free bookkeeping checklist for beginners”
List what’s included:
Modules
Quizzes & exercises
Templates
Support (e.g. Q&A, email help)
Certification details
Share the instructor’s experience, certifications, and real-world bookkeeping background.
Build trust by showing why you’re qualified to teach.
Use clear, simple pricing.
Highlight:
Payment plans
Discounts (limited-time offers)
Money-back guarantee
Address common objections like:
“Do I need accounting experience?”
“Is this accredited?”
“How long will it take?”
Show:
SSL secure checkout
Satisfaction guarantees
Accreditation or industry partnerships (if applicable)
Ensure the landing page looks great and is easy to navigate on mobile—many users will come from social media or email.
Offer a last-chance discount or lead magnet before they leave the page.
Is starting an online course and training business something you would consider?
See how we help people start their own online course business.
Training courses are designed for people who want to be taken on a learning journey that gives them practical skills to help them remember what they learn.
Before the Internet, a training course usually involved
If you got stuck you’d put your hand up and the trainer would come over, see what you’ve been doing and then correct you and explain what you did wrong.
Then you’d all have a tea break with coffee and Tim Tams and chat for 30 minutes (but it should have been a 15 minute break). Does that sound familiar?
Now it’s the same but different.
The biggest change we’ve noticed is how easy it is for anyone to create a training video. Some of these videos are of people speaking (talking head videos) and others are screen recordings using the software.
There are thousands of great bookkeepers and accountants and they can all create videos to explain how to use the software – and you can watch most of them for free online and particularly at Youtube.
The hardest part of creating a course is to design the learning journey that starts with basic skills and then gets gradually more complex, building on the basic skills you’ve just learnt.
With bookkeeping this normally means doing the full cycle of
But none of this normally goes to plan. If you’re a course designer you will know about some of the tricky things that can happen and build them into the learning journey. That’s what we’ve done with our courses.
If you can’t afford a premium short course which also includes:
then access to a video library is one of the cheapest ways you can learn. When you choose our training libraries you can have the confidence that the videos flow from one logical step to the next.
Click the Learn Express logo below to see the training video library options.
If you find you need support AND the training manual you can explore one of the tutoring packages.
Tutoring in how to use Xero and MYOB has always been popular for students who need the complete attention of a trainer. They’ve become more popular in the last few years because companies like Airtasker entice contractors onto their platform and then promote them – but have you ever used Airtasker?
We’ve heard from people who’ve used Airtasker for delivering things or other handy man tasks that haven’t gone that well. Many people have had a great experience but the problem with the Airtasker platform is that you never get any of the persons contact details until you choose one person and pay your money.
Even then, some Airtaskers will communicate with you solely through the Airtasker platform rather than give you their email address and mobile number.
With our tutors you know who you’re getting and they know their stuff.
Click on Trevor Turners ad below to see our tutors and tutoring packages.
Google now achieves billions of searches every single day, making it without doubt, the world’s leading search engine.
So, with the search market effectively cornered, and most of the planet seemingly online at any given time, businesses are only too aware that featuring in Google searches can be central to getting their brand in front of their target audience.
The real problem though, is that with high competition, many operators know just how difficult it can be to rank organically (that is for FREE). In many cases they also feel ill-equipped, under-skilled or lacking in know-how to effectively manage online marketing in-house.
The Online Customer Service Training Course is a training package filled with easy to understand information, real life case studies, and practical tasks designed to get you up to speed on all aspects of online customer service.
Once you finish this course, you will have all you need to get your business up and running, including a hands-on understanding of marketing and income boosting strategies.
One of the best parts is that you will have mentor support for a full six months. You can also work at your own pace, and save the training materials to refer back to whenever you need to.
While every bookkeeping job comes with its own set of unique tasks, clients seeking catch-up (or Rescue Bookkeeping) tend to bring with them a host of relatively predictable (if dynamic) issues that you can manage effectively if you are aware of them.
Recently we were contacted by the operator of a sole trader business – “Peter” (not his real name), seeking help with his bookkeeping backlog.
Many of the issues he identified are relatively standard in the rescue bookkeeping world. Becoming familiar with them will help you to effectively help your clients in the future.