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Marketing Tips for Accountants and CPAs

By the way, this video was produced by ClientSource, the marketing division of CPA Site Solutions. If you already have a first class CPA website but you need help marketing it give ClientSource a good look!

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admin | January 14, 2012 | no comments

Lots of Accounting firms have websites to advertise their expertise. As an owner of a CPA practice you know how challenging it is to build strong website content and increase its number of visitors. It can be a challenge to become well known on the web because it’s full of firms that market CPA services.

CPAs can take a variety steps to raise the number of visitors to their website. Many of these steps can actually increase the loyalty to their business as a whole. One option is to utilize the power of YouTube. YouTube video advertising is a very effective way to market CPA websites. Video clips that are strategically used to promote financial services have plenty of advantages over other marketing efforts. A quality marketing video takes time, thought and preparation. However, it can effectively generate interest in potential clients.

There are many people who need the assistance of a CPA. Most of those people search for CPA services on the Internet search engines. When people search online they typically need help solving a problem. This often means that they are looking for a professional service.

It makes perfect sense why videos are so effective for marketing the best CPA websites. Now it can’t be just any video, the focus needs to be on creating videos that discuss frequently asked accounting questions. There is no need to hire an actor. Simply have a lead accountant do the videos. Remember to focus on making the video simple to understand, professional and welcoming. People who view the videos will likely spend more time on your company’s website, develop a level of trust with your company based on your informative videos, and will very likely become a future client.

YouTube video marketing on CPA websites focuses on building credibility. It does this by demonstrating the knowledge of the CPA firm firsthand in a relatable manner. Accounting can be a confusing field. Many people find it hard to grasp what an accountant actually does or how an accountant can help them with their finances. Relatable, yet professional video clips can build trust more effectively than other marketing collateral.

An advantage of YouTube advertising is that you will reach people who actually want to find accounting information with your video clips.The Internet is a very effective medium to reach your target market. In fact the chances of reaching your target is considerably higher than with television or print ads.

One big advantage with video is the visual you are providing people when making a CPA website. The human face will naturally allow people to relate to your business. Think about it, would you rather read about accounting or view an accountant explain it in an easy to understand manner in a short video? That connection will allow people to remember your business the next time they need accounting services.

Even better is that YouTube video marketing is affordable and is often free. The only resources you need are a video camera and a spokesperson. Although it is affordable or in many cases free, you still need to carefully plan and film the videos. Take your time and produce videos that will represent your company well. Give the project some thought and consider what people would find helpful.

It is an excellent opportunity to show off the experience and knowledge of your CPA firm. Be sure to link all of your videos to your CPA website. The financial industry tends to be intimidating to many people. YouTube video marketing is a great way to promote a company in a friendly, personable and helpful way. The Internet is growing in importance as a promotional medium. As consumers and businesses catch up with technology, the full potential of video marketing is beginning to be recognized. However, there are still very few businesses out there who are using it effectively. The Internet is becoming more and more significant. The practices who attain a firm foothold today are the people who will thrive in the future. CPA firms have to concentrate their resources on realizing the wide-ranging potential of the net. Video marketing is one of the better means to interest the masses on the web.

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admin | January 14, 2012 | no comments

If you’ve ever roamed the Internet to check out other accountants’ websites, you understand that a high quality website is critical. It telegraphs the values of your accounting business.  An awkward or sloppy look will project the wrong impression to potential clients looking for responsible financial advice.

Like any consumer business, accounting requires a steady flow of new customers, plus loyal clientele. To achieve that, your optimal tool is an intelligent, thoughtful website that clients find helpful over and over.

Good inbound marketing for accounting websites is dignified but never dull. If you’re supplying valuable content to your clients with online articles and targeted emails, you will attract clients- and keep them because they appreciate your responsible guidance.

Good accounting websites consistently convey the latest developments in the profession. So show that you’re looking towards the future. As Charlie Sheen says, “I’m more interested in what I can do next than what I did last.”

Don’t shine your light under a bushel. Let less confident firms hide their expertise.

Keep abreast of the latest tips to aid your clients, and load them onto your website. Along with your valuable information should be an easy financial calculator tool for the client to see how much money can be saved with the suggestion he or she just read.

Your neatly presented knowledge will enhance your reputation. “You’re either in my corner, or you’re with the trolls,” said Charlie Sheen. Show clients you’re in their corner, and you’ll get their loyalty in return.

Make your website friendly and easy to interact with. Having the email addresses of all the specialists in your firm clearly printed will encourage contact and build trust.

Offering free consultations to your new clients is a wonderful way to start a relationship. Your client will know that you will be an ally who has the his or her best interests at heart.

Have you considered a blog? Blogs can build community among your consumer base and demonstrate your knowledge in a very positive way.

The best part of doing inbound marketing through well-designed websites for accountants is that such marketing is not only more economical than traditional public advertising, but it’s also more effective.  These days there is backlash against the traditional marketing “hard-sell.” But inbound marketing, involving communication only with individuals who hit your accounting website due to their own drive, takes only a gentle assurance that the person has come to the right place to find the most expert accountants in town – those who rightly announce, “I try to be known more for my work than for anything else” (Charlie Sheen).

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admin | December 15, 2011 | no comments

Retailers can offer great deals and unusual merchandise to get repeat customers, but accounting firms and accountants must be a bit more strategic to keep their clients coming back. Offering highly skilled payroll services, elegantly designed accountant websites, and flawless tax filings make a great impression – but a competitor down the street is entirely capable of achieving this same basic level of professionalism. CPA’s need an edge to make sure their clients come back year after year.

Here are several tips for how to retain clients.

Increase Convenience for Clients with Accountant Websites and More

It can be hard to give a personal touch in accounting because finance tends to be a sterile topic. Try the following actions to give your firm more of a human face:

  • Establish an online presence. Successful accountant websites provide helpful tax tips and financial information for clients, as well as time-saving features like a client portal or a credit card processing service.
  • For clients who use Facebook and Twitter, set up social media accounts so you can easily answer questions in real time.
  • Use the good old-fashioned phone to check up on clients, making sure they don’t have any lingering questions after tax day.
  • Keep small personal notes on each client. Ask about their children, their career, or their success in school next time you see them; it gives you instant likability.

Be Realistic, But Deliver Superior Service

Be very careful not to promise the world to your clients. For instance, they should know that if they turn in their tax materials within a week of tax day, you likely won’t be able to complete their return on time.

Of course, don’t become complacent; work hard to deliver the best possible service in each case. And if a client does turn in her documents on the 13th and you ARE able to get her return done on time, make sure she understands you’ve gone above and beyond for her.

Another way to exceed client expectations is with accountant websites. Having a fully loaded website with online payroll services, QuickBooks training and support, and a client portal is definitely a huge advantage to your clients. The increased efficiency and convenience of online tools make a great impression.

Maintain the Highest Degree of Honesty

Unfortunately, many people automatically assume those who deal with financial matters are dishonest. Since the deck may already be stacked against you, you must work that much harder to provide honest services.

To combat this, never stretch the truth and always provide bad news in a gentle, straightforward manner.

It also helps to express your trustworthiness in other ways. Being courteous, considerate, and always following through on your promises are other ways you can convey your honesty. The little things really do add up.

Return Client Calls Right Away

Firms that are difficult to contact end up losing business. When clients are worried about money, waiting hours or days for a return phone call provides ample time for increased fears.

Make it a priority to get back to clients, no matter how seemingly insignificant their question. Follow up by phone or email as soon as you can, even if it’s just to report that you’ll be in touch with more information later.

Be Yourself

Believe it or not, accountants can have personalities, too; in fact, it’s encouraged! So if you like to tell jokes, then tell jokes. If you’re shy, don’t pretend to be gregarious. Of course you won’t be a perfect fit for each and every client, but that shouldn’t be your goal. When you try too hard to be likable to everyone who comes through your door, you end up being unlikable to most.

Learning how to retain clients is important for anyone in the service industry, and CPAs are no exception. The more you use accountant websites, social media platforms, and your own trustworthiness to keep your clients satisfied with your services, the easier it will be to keep folks on your client list. If you put your energy toward satisfying the clientele that create the best money, then you’ll be able to let up on procuring additional clients, or even cease altogether.

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admin | December 9, 2011 | no comments

For any company, leads are tremendously important.

This is especially true for CPA’s. Beyond simply looking for leads via effective CPA websites or responding to prospect inquiry and sales contact, leads must be grouped and nurtured so that they can be reused and recycled for further business practices.

Developing new accounting customers is an important goal. However, lead nurturing also makes sure you don’t let opportunities from the business landscape slip by. In today’s economy, you can’t let an ideal business relationship slip away. You want to be thorough when expanding your business. The practice of lead nurturing makes sure you take advantage of all new opportunities.

While lead nurturing may seem tiresome or redundant, it is absolutely essential to advertise to potential clients. As a CPA, lead nurturing is an essential business practice. Below are several of the reasons why.

1) 77% of prospects are made up of nurtured leads
It is not wise to leave your leads unnurtured. It creates a large risk of lost business. You can substantially grow your accounting business by keeping track of your lead touches. You can also exponentially expand your professional network as well.

2) Leads tend to regularly change their mind over time
It is a good strategy to give your leads room to evaluate your firm’s services. Asking for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ right away is risky. Your leads need time to consider the possibilities. They need time to choose what is best for their particular situation. Continued touches mean that your accounting firm stays at the front of their mind.

3) The process of nurturing leads is quite simple
After initial contact with leads from accountant website traffic, easy follow-up calls and adding your leads to a mailing list is an almost effortless way to grow your business. Light touches that are well timed show discretion and concern for your leads, and do not add substantially to you or your staff’s workload.

4) Lead nurturing elicits trust in clients
Show your leads you care. This makes them more likely to engage with your accountant firm. Ultimately, the human side to accounting converts leads into customers, whereas the business side can make you seem distant, cold, and unapproachable.

5) Lead nurturing shows your firm is thorough
Following up with your leads shows your firm is consistent, even in the nascent stages of your business practices. These will eventually turn into quality leads. With lead nurturing, your goal is to convert them into a client. In order to do this you need to win them over.

6) Nurturing your leads helps you understand them better
In learning which parts of the accounting website lead nurturing processes bear the most favorable results, you will be able to empathize with your clients and to ultimately serve them better through the life of your business relationship.

7) Nurturing leads alters the competitive landscape
Simple, light touches for your leads beyond initial contact set you apart from the competition, particularly in front of those who do not practice lead nurturing.

8) Lead nurturing helps you decrease repetition
It is very counterproductive to further touch leads who have turned down your services. To continue to contact them makes them feel like they are being harassed, be sure not to touch them further. Categorizing leads which turned down your organization altogether prevents repetition and prevents the development of a bad reputation amongst leads who have not made up their minds.

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admin | December 9, 2011 | no comments

Busy season is just a stone’s throw away- but there’s no need to worry. A few simple techniques will help your firm get through tax season with less stress and improved efficiency…

Many CPAs have mixed feelings about the crazy months leading up to April 15. No one wants to opt out of the influx of money that’s part of the deal, which funds their firm for the rest of the year. But on the flip side, a good many simply fall apart during these months, forgetting about their accountant websites and other marketing channels and letting everyone suffer physically and emotionally.

Check out how shrewd accountants maximize the profits of busy season while minimizing the stress:

1. They Don’t Skimp on Their Accountant Websites

During busy season, time is money. Taking precious time to file paper returns and fix broken printers slows accountants down – and ultimately equals less revenue.

Keeping the office simple is the name of the game, which is why well-prepared accountants use expertly designed accountant websites to increase efficiency. Consider the following, all of which help firms work smarter:

  • Secure file exchange
  • Electronic tax prep forms
  • PayPal or another credit card processing program
  • Automated newsletter
  • Frequently asked questions page
  • Map and driving directions

2. They Take Time NOW to Get Organized

One of the greatest contributors to stress is a disorganized work space. Especially in a business like accounting, piles of papers and files quickly get out of control, spilling all over the floor and teetering on the edges of crowded desks. And what happens when a client calls and the CPA can’t find their information easily? Even when they’re confident they can locate any piece of paper quickly, they’re foolish to take a chance with client data.

The most successful firms take time before busy season to prepare for the onslaught of work. These CPAs arrange files, update their accountant websites, and clean out inboxes. They also set aside an area for projects that can wait until after busy season.

Once work starts coming in, it helps to spend a couple minutes at the end of every day to tidy up the office. Folks who do this report feeling empowered and well-prepared for the next day.

3. They Let Go of Dead Weight

It’s part of the package to have some clients who just make life miserable for the whole staff. These difficult folks might take issue with every single fee, leave nasty comments on firms’ accountant websites, or just come across as highly unpleasant and antisocial.

It may be hard to do, but it’s okay to fire obnoxious clients, and smart CPAs terminate these relationships. The time accountants waste dealing with these troublemakers is better spent working with the clients who are easy and problem free.

4. They Search Out the Brightest Interns

Historically, accountants have been the biggest administrators. They answer e-mails, handle returns, manage their accountant websites, field phone and website inquiries, and other tedious tasks. But this work doesn’t make money, and it’s not hard – so why not hire an assistant or two for these pesky duties?

Busy season is the perfect time to hire interns. Interns are typically eager to gain some accounting experience, and they don’t usually cost much. Both accountants and interns benefit – and busy season can become much more manageable.

5. They Aren’t Married to the Job

During busy season, many accountants work 10, 12, 14 hours a day – or more. But not all of them. The most successful CPAs set boundaries for themselves.

Follow their lead. Decide in advance each day what time you’re going to leave the office, and stick to it. Getting enough rest and taking a break each evening only makes the next day that much more productive.

And remember to tell your clients that you can’t work miracles. They should know that they MUST hand in their materials by a particular date or you’ll be filing for an extension on their behalf. End of story. Don’t let a client’s procrastination be the cause of a panicked rush on April 14th.

This year, try out some of these tips – and most important of all, make your health and well-being a priority. On a regular basis – at least one day a week – put aside all thoughts of taxes, numbers, and difficult clients. Indulge in a movie or play, enjoy a bubble bath, or go out with your buddies. When you do, you – and your business – will find much success in the accounting world for many years to come!

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admin | December 2, 2011 | no comments

If You Know Where To Look!

As a rule accounting companies have little alternative but to turn to website templates to get their business a website. Custom websites are ludicrously expensive. Painfully few small to medium sized practices can actually be expected to design a website from scratch. You need code monkeys, design professionals, copy writers… you can expect to pay a pretty big pile of cash and wait months for a custom accounting site. A template, complete with hundreds of pages of free reports, custom newsletters, interactive calculators and more, will usually cost about $50 a month.

Seems like a no brainer, doesn’t it? But there is actually one good reason that companies that could afford custom sites would often get them despite the outrageous cost.

Website templates have been around for years and they’ve always been an inexpensive and effective alternatives to expensive custom sites, but they’ve traditionally had problems getting good rankings in search engines like Google and Bing.

It’s a pretty common to trade off power for simplicity when designing software for “end users”. Template providers, however, in making their content management systems easy to use, often glossed over or ignored features that would make their templates more appealing to the search engines.

As the web has become more competitive some of these template providers have shifted gears, successfully overcoming these limitations without substantially increasing the complexity of their content management tools. Many others have not. This makes some templates vastly superior to others when it comes to SEO, or “search engine optimization”.

Here are three things to look for in accounting website templates to be sure that the website can be properly optimized to the search engines.

  • Duplicate Content: Let’s look at the “duplicate content” first as all template driven sites will have this problem. When you first get them even the best accounting website templates will have hundreds of pages of “standard” content. Google can identify this, and they don’t have much respect for sites composed entirely of “duplicate content”. Customizable pages can overcome duplicate content issues. Make sure your template provider allows you to modify and add pages freely to your site. Nobody expects you to modify all 600 pages on a typical accounting website template, but it will make a huge difference if you personalize as few a five or ten pages.
  • “Nerfed” Meta Tags: Another common problem with templates is “universal meta tags”. On most accounting website templates there is only one setting for meta tags like page titles, page descriptions, and keywords that affect all the pages on the site simultaneously. If you want to succeed in the search engines make sure the meta tags on your website can be changed separately on every page of your site.
  • Lots of I-framed Pages: I saved this last issue for the end of the article because, quite frankly, it can be hard to identify. You may even want to retain a website professional to help you get the answers here. Many website templates make extensive use of IFrames, or inline frames; to apply content to web pages. Unfortunately, while I-frames are often obvious to even casual observers, they can easily be obfuscated in such a way that it becomes impossible to tell if a page is exploiting them at all unless you know how to read the source code. Template providers like I-Frames for a lot of reasons, but their primary advantage is that using them makes it very easy to keep site content updated and make changes to hundreds of websites at once. Unfortunately search engines don’t much care for sites that use them. Search engines will see pages with inline content as basically blank. They can see the content, but they won’t consider your website the source of it. They may index the “inline” content, but they won’t credit it to your domain which is a long way of saying “iFrame pages are worth exactly nothing”. Make sure the content on your web pages isn’t being driven by iFrames.

When shopping around for accounting website templates it can be easy to be dazzled by pretty pictures and flashing animations. Before buying anything, though, take the time to look under the hood. You’ll need to dig a little to find out whether or not an accounting website template is SEO friendly or not. An SEO friendly site with a lazy owner may not be taking advantage of a template providers search features. For example it will often appear that a site has universal meta tag settings, when in fact the owner just hasn’t bothered to change the title of any of his pages.

To be sure about a template’s suitability for SEO call each provider separately and ask about these features. If any one of these SEO features hasn’t been specifically addressed the template cannot be properly optimized. This may be adequate for some businesses in less than competitive towns and villages, but make certain you factor it in when evaluating the cost benefit. An accounting website template that can never be optimized for the search engines could be a huge liability to your company in the future if your market changes.

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admin | November 14, 2011 | no comments

A high-quality video can be  a cool asset on a website. It can help to overcome people’s natural fear of strangers and promote your business by giving them a chance to check you out before you ever meet with or speak with a prospect.

In decades past , ye olde video cameras were huge. They weighed like fifteen pounds, and they were so cranky about environmental factors like lighting, wind, and humidity that they literally required a team of experts to produce a decent video. This made them way to pricey for many businesses.

Well, times have changed. Modern video cameras are a lot smaller and cost much less, so it is possible to create excellent videos without a professional team.  Numerous video distribution websites also provide opportunities for everyone to share their videos.

With the rise in popularity of video sites like YouTube, it is very easy to make a video and post it online. Just make sure that videos you post add to your website.  What you don’t want is for them to overpower or take over your online presence.

Really? A website video?
A well produced video is a powerful addition to a website, but not all websites for accountants need to have video on them. It is very easy for a video to overpower the static text on your website.  As such, you should be cautious in creating a strategy for your video that appeals to prospects, and also offers something valuable to your current customers In the competitive landscape, videos offer a great advantage.  Creating a solid marketing identity online is boosted greatly by a high-quality video.

Marketing Websites for Accountants:
A website video is an excellent way to visually introduce your firm, which can be quite effective when combined with the static text on your website. Using an introductory video can really make otherwise ordinary websites for accountants look professional and cutting-edge. A video can present your firm and is a chance to provide important details about your services.  This gives you a chance to present your firm as an expert in the subject matter of accounting. A website video also gives you a chance to appeal to a broader audience beyond your immediate community.  The personal touch of seeing the people involved with your firm is not lost in the process.

Adding Value for Current Clients:
In addition to promoting your business, videos also provide an opportunity to offer something of value to your current clients, who then act as your brand champion to help you attract new business. One common method is tutorials that show customers (and potential customers) how your services work. This could conceivably be anything between a how-to video on preparing tax organizers to effectively present to accountants to how to ready a mileage log for her work vehicle. These types of videos on your site can be a solid asset to your firm as they provide both around-the clock support to your customers, and promotion for your business.

In part 2 we’ll discuss using a professional to help you produce a video. While new technologies have simplified video production, don’t run out and try to DIY a video until you read Part 2.

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admin | November 14, 2011 | no comments

Let’s discuss some things you can do to help better your website’s internet profile throughout the design stage.

Your CPA website design can be perfect and still be a total failure.

For it to make wealth the proper prospective clients need to be able to locate your site in the right moment, and the most dependable way to do that is to win a first-rate position on the search engine results pages.

Meta Tags: Your Page Title

Meta tags are a vital ingredient of the CPA website design operation, and the single most pertinent meta tag is called the page’s “Title”.

Don’t try to take over the internet with unreasonably long title tags. You can make a title tag as long as you want but after 70 characters or so the search engines are going to ignore them. As a CPA firm you’re going to want your title tag to include your market and some primary keyword. You’ll want it to look something like this:

MyTown, ST Accounting: Practice Name

In this example, of course, “ST” is the abbreviation for your state.

A firm name isn’t usually a strong enough brand for people to just type in, so insisting on putting the firm name first is usually a foolish vanity. Very few accounting firms have the same kind of brand recognition as “McRib” or the kind of search frequency that “Jenifer Lopez” might have.

It’s also something of a waste to use your title on words that nobody else is competing for.

For most firms ther name just isn’t on anybodies keyword hot list. If you only get 70 characters to describe your page do you really want to spend them on your firm name? Unless there are 10 other firms with exactly the same name it’s pretty likely you’ll be able to get on the first page for that search term without any trouble.

Stick to your town, your state, and a primary keyword like “CPA”.

Meta Description Tag

The “Page Description” is also a meta tag, and it’s rather like the red-headed stepchild to the “Page Title”. Google doesn’t use it to rank sites anymore so a lot of CPA website designs ignore it, and this is a mistake because Gooogle actually displays this tag as part of it’s search results. This makes a good page description an important factor in converting an impression into a click-through.

Again… Google isn’t going to let you go nuts on your description. There’s a 150 character limit so make it short and sweet but, like a headline, enticing enough to get people to want to read more.

Use Google Analytics

Tracking software allows you to monitor the activities of visitors to your site and Google analytics is not only free, it’s the best tracking program you can get.

It will tell you how many visitors you got, how long they stayed, which pages they visited, and much… much more. Google Analytics also has the ability to show you what keyword phrases people used to find pages of your site.

This product has so many advantages that I would make it mandatory for you to have if you are looking to improve the position or ranking of your site in the search engines. All you need to do to make it work is add a strip of code to the bottom of each page.

Google Analytics offers a lot of market research factors that most site owners never use, but as an accountant you’ll very likely see some value in it. For example, you can use IP addresses to get a pretty good idea what nearby towns your visitors are coming from. The product can even help you decide where you might need advertise more or ease off.

Not sold? It’s much easier to add this system to your CPA website during the design process so PLEASE take the time to find out a little more.

Content is King

OK, this is probably the least original thing I’ve ever said. The reason it’s such a tired cliche is because it’s still true, and it probably always will be.

Good meta tags won’t help you unless the tags on each page are actually relevant to the content on their respective pages. The search engine robots have become very sophisticated and can easily compare a pages tags to it’s visible text and make sure they match.

Google is hip to all the dirty tricks that spammers used to rely on like cramming the page with keywords, using tiny text, writing hidden text on the same colored background, etc, so don’t even waste your time.

You need to take the time to write some good, high quality content that will demonstrate to Google that the page is truly relevant to the title by using your title tag keywords in the text.

Don’t go too crazy. Google can also recognize “keyword stuffing” and will discount the page if it has too many keywords in it. The best way to optimize the page is to NOT worry too much about optimize the page. Shoot for about a 1% keyword density, so if your page is 500 words try to use each keyword in your title about 5 times.

The search engines won’t just count your keywords. They also consider the placement of your keywords on the page. Keywords used in the introductory and/or closing paragraphs look particularly prominent to search engines. They also look at keywords in highlighted fonts like boldface and italics. They even consider the relevance of other pages on the site that link to the one they’re ranking.

Every Journey Begins with a Single Step

Once your accounting website design is published you still have some more work to do. You’ll actually want to do some “off-site” SEO by hustling up as many incoming links as you can, and you’ll want to improve your ranking on Google Places by claiming your business and getting your clients and associates to provide your company lots of good reviews.

All we’re trying to do with this post is guide you to the right path. If you’ll pay attention to these basic CPA website design rules from the beginning you’ll be appropriately positioned to stand out in the forefront of this brand new, extremely competitive marketplace.

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admin | October 26, 2011 | no comments

WordPress blog pages provide each user with impressive options in regards to the design template they can choose along with further functionality inside their blog in the form of plugins. These plugins are designed, maintained, and endorsed by the WordPress community and could add  increased layers of functionality and form to the blog.

What are they?

Anyone with WordPress blogs for their accountant websites can add plugins, and there are a multitude of uses and benefits to installing them; both for yourself and for your readers. The plugin could do something as simple as adding a Google Search option to your site or something as advanced as backing up your WordPress directory automatically on a scheduled basis, ensuring you are covered in case of disaster. People use them often because they add a lot of fun, interesting and useful features that would otherwise require a lot of code writing.

Where are they?

There are several places you can go to find plugins. One of them is within the admin panel of your blog. Your admin panel has a menu item called Plugins.  To install one, simply click install! There is also a WordPress page that is devoted to listing plugin options.  You can search for all different types to narrow down what you’re looking for, and you can also view the most popular plugins.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Downloading plugins from here requires an extra step.  You’ll need to locate the downloaded file, then unzip it before you can upload it to your WordPress blog.

Both options are fairly easy and the only potential difference would lie with the security settings of the server that is hosting your blog.

Now what?

Once you have found the plugin you would like to use, and if you installed it via the WordPress interface, you will need to activate it under the Plugin menu item.

If you downloaded the plugin to your computer, you will have to unzip it and then upload it to the wp-content/plugins folder. Once you upload the plugin folder to the above directory, you need to go to your plugin menu and activate it.

Some plugins will work immediately, others require that you add code to your template. Additionally, some others require different adjustments aside from coding that need to be completed before the plugin will work. You’ll know which method you’ll need to follow after you activate the plugin, and if you have any questions about what needs to be done, you can always check the plugin authors’ site which will be available from a link within the Plugins menu.

How do I know it’s working?

Don’t forget to confirm that your plugin is working properly. You can sometimes test your plugin right from the plugin settings menu.  Otherwise, simply go to your blog page and test it from there.

Once you have verified the plugin is working, you’re all set and you can continue to install and activate any other plugins you would like!

Of course, there is always the possibility that your plugin won’t work right away.  If this happens, double check that you didn’t miss any steps, and you may need to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress for some plugins to work. You should also review the instructions on the plugin authors’ site.

Are there highly suggested plugins?

There are a lot of people that will tout the utility of certain plugins and of course if you have a specific goal in mind for your blog, there are plugins you will want to run, but everything is subjective. You should install what you feel is right for your blog.

A few I tend to use are W3 Total Cache, HeadSpace: WordPress SEO Made Simple and Gravity forms. These serve a specific purpose for all of my blogs that I hope to make highly relevant, easily searchable and search engine friendly, and I’ve had the best luck with this “basic” package.

I think it’s also very important to back up my blog, just in case.  For that, I use WP-DBManager, which can even email my WordPress database to me on a daily basis.

I’m also not alone in hoping that a lot of my readers will comment on my blogs, so I also choose to use tools that help prevent and block spam comments.

Finally, do you need Plugins?

HECK NO!

Just because WordPress and numerous creators supply us with hundreds of plugin options doesn’t mean you need to use any of them.  WordPress works just fine without them.

Plugins are given to you to heighten your blog’s current tools, however if you’re content with your blog the way it is, then you can completely bypass the plugins. For people who need extra functionality from a blog or for users who lack the time to build, the plugins afforded to the WordPress society are a wonderful energy saving tool.

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admin | October 26, 2011 | no comments
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