Please call us... (800) 896–4500

Login »

Marketing Tips for Accountants and CPAs

Tools To Aid You in Selling Your Accounting Services on Twitter

Have you been hearing a lot about Twitter of late? I know I’ve been discussing it a constantly.  Twitter is the internet marketing industry’s newborn golden child. It can be a convincing lead source and if you can muster a sufficient number of retweets for your links joining the Twitter village can effectively impact your website’s search engine presence! Marketing in this fashion can help any business. Anyone who needs new clients will find a lot of them on Twitter, but service pros like Accountants will find joining the “Twitosphere” particularly beneficial.  You’ll find a lot of prospects, clients, and colleagues using Twitter. If you’re not familiar with this new social marketing tool you’re falling behind. Take some time to learn about it. There is a good article about it here.

Twitter is not without it’s downside. The number of tweets you’ll be seeing will quickly become overwhelming. If you’re already marketing to all the “tweeple” out there you are no doubt dealing with these challenges. There’s a lot of noise on Twitter and picking through it for tweets and finding references worth engaging can be a surprising amount of work.

Let me offer you a little bit of free advice. Don’t be the guy making noise. Keep your posts relevant. When you make a post it will appear on your friends pages, and they really don’t want you cluttering up their page with a half dozen useless posts a day. If you leave lots of gratuitous messages people will stop following you.

This deluge of data can be managed. There are a number of applications that have been developed to help you navigate this new environment.

There are two ways to access Twitter. Most people just log in through the Twitter website. Obviously you should assume this is how most of your followers are viewing your posts. Consider this the main method of accessing the service. It’s certainly not the only way, though. There are also a variety of third party programs for use with your desktop, notebook, or mobile device. Not only do these present a more stylish interface, they often have tools that make your journey more orderly. We’ll explore a few of these.

TweetDeck
One is TweetDeck, originally from the creators of Seesmic Desktop (an earlier incarnation of the same application). With this program, you can log in to and manage multiple accounts, organized in columns, of which the default includes all friends, mentions, and direct messages.

More recently, TweetDeck has grown to support FourSquare and Facebook, as well as providing Twitter’s trending topics. You can even access hash tag searches quickly and easily. Best of all, the program is free.

Tweetie and Twitterific

For more simplistic interfaces, programs like Tweetie and Twitterific are good bets. Both can be run without a license, but it’s not really freeware. If you don’t pay you will have to deal with pop-up ads. Both programs allow you to access mentions and direct messages.

TwitWipe

One challenge with Twitter is the how cumbersome it is to delete tweets. Under normal circumstances, the only way to do this is by logging in and deleting the tweets by hand. It’s easy enough to delete a few tweets at a time, but sooner or later you’re going to want to delete all your previous tweets. When that time comes you could have thousands of tweets piled up. Deleting that many tweets just isn’t practical.

Fortunately, there’s a freeware application that will make this easier and more cost effective for you. It’s a web based utility rather than an installed application. Using this tool you can quickly and easily delete as many tweets as you may need to delete in a single operation. You can get it free at it’s website: twitwipe.com.

A Couple Quick Warnings: First, Twitwipe doesn’t allow you selectively delete tweets. It’s going to erase EVERYTHING. As far as I know, there isn’t any way to pick and choose between your tweets. Also, be warned. The website looks like t was built by an angry teenager rather than a professional coder. The guy is crude and has absolutely no talent for marketing. The very first thing you’re going to see is the F-Bomb in great, big, boldface letters when you visit the site. He cusses like a sailor all over the site. The product itself, however, works exactly as advertised.

Get Organized and then Get Started

These apps make it easier to dive into Twitter without getting overwhelmed. Twitter is a vast approachable community. Last time I checked it was boasting more than 75 million users around the world.

Can you truthfully afford not to take advantage of it?

About the Author
Brian O’Connell is the CEO and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s leading businesses oriented exclusively to CPASites. His company presently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and tax preparation firms.

Brian O'Connell | January 10, 2011 | no comments
Tags: , , , , ,

CPA Bloggers: Essential Strategies for Luring In New Readers

Writing a blog is easy and fun, but without readers your blog will not help you market your firm. Building a sound following, though, is a ton of work. There aren’t any cheats. It takes months, perhaps years, to solidify your reputation as a blogger. Much has been written about the need to offer interesting and continually updated content for your blog to be successful but there’s much more you need to do to get your business blog off the ground.

So how do you draw subscribers to your accounting blog?

1. Make your blog part of the way you communicate.

Your employees are a built in audience, and your blog makes a great place to post staff birthdays, meetings, after hours get-togethers, and other daily updates. Your clients can also make great readers. Use your blog to keep them appraised on tax law changes and other news that directly affects them. Don’t be shy. If you have a client that can benefit from your post send them an email and ask them to leave you a comment.

2. Don’t make visitors dig through your website for your blog.

Website users are accustomed to getting what the want when they want it, and if you don’t make it easy for them they leave. Most won’t take more than a few seconds to find your blog on your home page. Display the link prominently on your accounting website . Put it on the navigation menu where it can be seen without making them open or roll over anything. Add a nice banner link to your home page.

3. Display your website address everywhere!

The more places you post your web address the easier it will be for potential readers to find your blog. Business cards, stationary, email signatures, yellow pages and other ads are all natural places to post your URL. Also, post your URL on any blogs or forums that you participate in. When posting your URL online ask yourself whether it’s more appropriate to link directly to your blog rather than to the top level of your domain. Visitors looking for your blog won’t want to navigate through your home page.

4. Share and share alike.

Bloggers are a tight-knit, cooperative community. If you help them out, they’ll help you out. Doing this will get your name out there on other blogs in the industry and help gain exposure for your content. As a rule you’ll get a link back to your website or blog for your trouble. This is not just a great way to drive visitors to your site, the search engines also look at these links as adding authority to your domain.

Conversely, you can return the favor by inviting guest bloggers of your own. Help others help you!

5. Use your networking skills.

Putting yourself out there in online communities is a must. Joining a LinkedIn group or a more traditional forum are two ways you can do this. Don’t just promote your website. Put a link in your profile, sure, and site your blog when the opportunity arises, but it’s more important to engage the group according to their needs and interests rather than your own.

6. Mention your influences.

Use social communities to talk to your clients, prospects, and contacts; especially other bloggers.

Your contacts will very likely see and appreciate these "plugs". Most online networking sites like twitter and Facebook have tracking services that will allow your friends to get an alert when you mention them. This will get you noticed. If you help them get noticed it’s much more likely they’ll take the time to get you noticed.

7. Contests draw a lot of traffic.

It’s a fact – people love to win things. The prize doesn’t need to be exrtraordinary; it can be as simple as sharing your blog link or posting the most comments. If you want to get even more comments you could offer something even more valuable. A free tax prep might seem like one obvious choice.

Contests can also be used as a good way to cross sell your off season services. Offering a free compilation and review for a local business owner, for example, can kill two birds with one stone. It will often bring that client into the monthly fold, and it can be used to create a new blog post that highlights the value added by exploiting financial statements.

8. Keep it dynamic.

Eventually every blogger gets stuck in a rut. Once you succumb to a formula it can be hard to get past it. Don’t succumb to the doldrums! By the time you feel yourself starting to drift into limbo it’s a pretty safe bet it’s already happened. Mix up the content on your blog so your readers remain surprised and interested in coming back for me. One nice addition to your repertoire is video, and when you upload the finished piece to YouTube you draw in additional readers who might not have found you otherwise.

If you employ these tactics you’ll have a much better chance of cultivating a real following. As always, keep your content novel and keep reaching out. As long as you’re engaged, your readers will be, too.

Brian O'Connell | December 16, 2010 | no comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

Your Accounting Website: How to Use Google Instant to Increase Online Presence

Google has added a brand new search instrument called "Google Instant". Google is the most significant search engine on the planet and when it modifies the way it works the rumbling it causes is heard globally. Google toolbar users will find it familiar. It’s a basic keyword suggestion tool. To the everyday observer "Google Instant" really does not look like much. Google now shows likely searches based on the poularity of previous similar searches, and displays outputs in real time immediately. When you understand how it works, you can use it to find the best keywords for your services.

There’s nothing new about keyword suggestions. Google instant, however, has made these suggestions much more important. Casual users didn’t usually use keyword suggestions, probably because of the subtleties of using the keyboard to select the ones you wanted. No such subtleties are needed to use Google Instant.

I’m sure you’re wondering how this will affect you. It means that "New York Accountants" is a better keyword than "New York Accountant" because the plural version comes up as a result in Google Instant and the singular version does not.

If you can get a good ranking in a better keyword your listing will get more exposure and your accounting website will get more visits.

How It Works

With Google Instant, a searcher might be looking for a "Boston Accountant" and Google Instant will display a search results page as you type. The City name is too generic to matter, and none of the suggested keywords will be relevant to you, but look what happens as you type "a-c-c-o-u"… and soon a relevant keyword appears among the suggestions! Most users are going to stop typing here and use their down arrow to select the search term they want… "Boston Accountants". Naturally this is a search term you want to market to!

What Does This Mean for SEO?

There’s a concern in the SEO marketing community that this could negatively impact how SEO works for long-tailed keywords, phrases containing three or more words. What impact will this have on YOUR SEO? Well, if you’re a small or medium sized accounting firm you might be pleased.

The first step in the SEO process is identifying your relevant keywords. Google instant makes this process easy. As you type, the keywords Google has found to be used most often show up in gray in the search box.

The guessing game and hours spent pouring over traffic stats to identify your primary keywords are no longer necessary. Google Instant will tell you exactly what keywords and phrases are most likely to be searched.

Keyword Basics Still Count

There are some basic rules in selecting key phrases for your accounting website that still apply. The basic keywords you need to implement into your website should consist of the services you provide and your location. This will give you a base to work with. After you have a list of base keywords, expand it by making some more specific terms that potential clients might type in. For example, someone could look for "Tampa FL Strategic Business Planning."

You’ve Got the Keywords – Now What?

Make sure to use your base keywords a couple of times on your home page and other important pages. The home page should have keywords for your primary service and your location. Scatter keywords around the rest of the site as well, and optimize different pages to different, but related, key phrases. The more you customize your site the more relevant it will appear. Make sure your service pages are optimized to your location.

By following these steps, your page’s SEO score will increase. Try to optimize as many pages as you can to as many different key phrases as you can.

Work on your website continuously. Search engines prefer dynamic sites to static ones. SEO is a duty I liken to mowing the lawn; it’s a an activity that’s never actually over. It’s a process rather than a destination.

Fortunately, Google Instant makes the journey much less difficult.

Brian O'Connell | December 14, 2010 | no comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

Marketing Your Accounting Firm: Don’t Neglect Traditional Sales Secrets

With the US economy showing a few early convulsive signs of recuperation the forces of economic competition have, for the most part, culled the weak and the sick, but countless CPAs are still clambering to stay in the fight. It might be time to bluntly evaluate your marketing model and and ask yourself a fundamental question: What steps are you taking to improve your business?

While the CPA sites I spend so much time talking about offer an enormous edge for your practice, if you really want to be successful in today’s sluggish business environment you need to do more. You also need to look back to time-honored marketing practices. To succeed you need to be more than a good accountant. You need to be willing to put time and effort into sales.

During a recession, you need to dig deeper and try to fully discover the markets for your business. Take the time to answer some important questions.

*  What are the client’s real needs?
*  What approaches do they respond best to?
*  What are you looking for in your clients?

Gale Crosley, accounting business growth consultant, states, "The key competency to winning business is knowing how to discover and build value at the client level."

So how do you do this? You have to ask the right questions in a one-on-one, during which Crosley says to look for the "contextual clues" to understand the client’s needs.

Remarkably simple questions can be very informative. Try asking them how long they’ve been in business or what their goals are. Does the organization provide adequate resources? Get personal by asking how their job could be easier and what their top areas of focus are.

The key to success isn’t the questions, it’s the answers. Most people are eager to talk about their businesses. All you need to do is get them started. Train yourself to really listen for clues that will tell you what the client really needs from an accountant. If you’re long term goal is to keep the client don’t fall into the trap of looking for chances to increase your billable hours. Look for ways that you can really help the client run his business more smoothly.

There’s a term for people who can do this well. We call them rainmakers.

Most firms have at least one good rainmaker. Some are fortunate enough to have a great one. Take the time to watch these people in action!

You’ll be amazed how much these people can learn by gently shaping simple small talk. A great rainmaker can gather personal details that can lead to bigger opportunities down the line and a bigger bottom line for the company.

Even if you struggle with the process you can still profit by trying to learn it. Take what you learn from these meetings and try applying it to your own clients. Try to get into your clients head. Learn what drives the decisions they make.

By understanding what the great rainmakers do, you’ll be able to step beyond the "idle social chitchat," work past what might seem like "random acts of networking," and gain the ability to figure out the reasons behind how a client makes a decision.

When you figure out the "how," you’ll be able to insert solutions into a conversation and gain the confidence of your client.

Taking the time to do this will give you new tools for getting through the recession.

What exactly do you need to do, then, to keep your business strong? It’s simple really. Learn how to pursue your customers socially. Really listen for signals about the customer’s needs and motivations.

Finally, take your place as your company’s new rainmaker.

Brian O'Connell | December 8, 2010 | no comments
Tags: , , , ,

Using Email to Profitably Market Your CPA Business

The time honored concept of "best practices" is a bit of a fading star in today’s business environment. The concept isn’t a bad one, but it has a slight problem that tends to influence the way we think about doing business. It tends to confine us to into old rules, methods and assumptions. This is because "best practices" can be an encumbrance when it comes to innovation.

I think it was marketing Guru Mark Brownlow who first suggested that it would be better to change the term to "profit practices". He’s trying to change the way we think about these practices. Rather than simply following the status quo this new term leads us, hopefully, to making sure our efforts are actually generating revenue.

An easy way to meet your customers where they are is to use transactional e-mails. This is an e-mail sent in response to a visitor’s actions on the site. One place where transactional e-mails can benefit a CPA is on your website’s service pages. At the very least put an e-mail form at the bottom of all your service pages, or better yet make a special offer. You could offer a short report on the subject. Prospects that read that far and respond on that form are very hot leads. Follow up on these inquiries immediately with a transactional e-mail.

Transactional e-mails bring in revenues between three and six times higher than bulk mailings from the same clients, states a report from Experian. Transactional e-mails are a key profit opportunity.

Respect the permission of e-mail subscribers by not bombarding them with e-mail or sending irrelevant messages. When you do this, you risk losing subscribers and the amount of revenue they bring in to your company – which can be very high. A recent study from Epsilon put the value of an e-mail address at $23.

Use social media carefully. Fans of your facebook page may not necessarily want to be marketed to, but you can use your facebook page to collect e-mail addresses from the ones that do.

Don’t spam. Sending e-mails to people who have never heard of you is pointless. Potential customers who choose to hear from your company and are interested in your products are worth vastly more than those acquired through buying lists or other ways.

Exercise restraint. Sending too many e-mails causes people to skip over your messages and to unsubscribe from your list – it’s just that simple. If you annoy people with constant e-mails they will eventually get annoyed. Down the road when they actually need a CPA it’s unlikely they’ll even consider you.

Occasional e-mails about a product or a special promotion is okay; force-feeding offers to your customers, though, will turn them off quickly.

Treat e-mail marketing like the revenue stream that it is instead of just another number in the marketing budget. This means you should:

  • Hire the right team
  • Invest in the right partner and technology
  • Apply metrics to your efforts to get a clear sense of the benefits

The biggest challenge of e-mail marketing is to meet marketing objectives while offering compelling and relevant content in your e-mails. To do this, pay attention to what content customers click on within the e-mails. What prompts them to take action?

Employ these "profit practices" to improve the revenue from e-mail campaign instead of using aged "best practices."

About the Author

Jim Tourville is the Director of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s biggest website design businesses dedicated entirely to CPA sites . His firm at present provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and tax preparation firms.

Brian O'Connell | December 1, 2010 | no comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

My 10 Favorite iPhone Traveler’s Applications for Professionals

The iPhone is changing the way service professionals do business. Powerful and portable the iPhone is much more than the latest geek toy. It’s a worthy asset for any accountant or CPA.

Here is a list of apps that help traveling accountants and CPAs stay organized and make doing business easier when they reach their destinations.

Want to know the best part? They’re all free!

1. Trip Tracker – A fully automated application that keeps track of your travel itineraries with minimal set-up. All you have to do is register your frequent flier and hotel rewards numbers on the site and your complete itinerary will automatically be displayed in the program. The app will alert you to status changes as they occur.

2. GateMaps – This is a brand new app, but once it’s fully developed it’s going to be really amazing. The application currently supports only five major hubs: Atlanta (ATL), Chicago O’Hare (ORD), John F. Kennedy (JFK), Los Angeles (LAX), and Miami International (MIA). As the app is developed more airports will be added.

3. Skype – An excellent program for international travelers who want to save their pennies abroad. There’s no charge for placing calls via skype over wifi. If you prefer, the mobile version of Skype also includes their text feature. As of summer 2010, Skype has started charging for using the app with 3G.

4. Yelp – Yelp is very handy when you’re out of town. It provides user reviews for restaurants, bars, and shops making it a whole lot easier to find a good, nearby place to eat.

5. Unit Conversion – This handy app is a must for the international traveler. It provides up-to-date currency conversions on demand.

6. Taxi Magic – This is my personal favorite. You push a button and a cab magically appears. Just input where you want the cab to pick you up and you’re all set. You don’t even need to make a phone call. Taxi Magic automatically finds the nearest taxi dispatcher and arranges a ride. Want to know if you have time to order a drink or buy a postcard? No problem. You can monitor your cab’s progress via GPS. This application is available in most major cities in the United States.

7. Bump – This is a very interesting little app. All you need to do is hold two phones next to one another and it swaps their contact information. Think of it as an iPhone business card, only better. Your card is a lot less likely to wind up in the laundry if it’s on someone’s smart phone.

8. Expensify – I love this one. Expensify is simple and brilliant. All it does is track your receipts for you, but it spares you the hassle of lugging around pockets full of loose scrap. It keeps track of your expenses  as you go. When you’re ready it compiles them into a single IRS-friendly report. Data entry? Now would I do that to you? All you need to do is take a snapshot of the receipt.

9. HopStop – This app turns your iPhone into a public-transportation-sensitive GPS of sorts. By inputting your start and end location, your route will be calculated, taking into account buses, trains, transfers, and turns, and always getting you there as quickly as possible.

10. World Customs and Cultures – Lessen the chances of cultural missteps with this app, which compiles a list of local customs so you can avoid offending important clients.

Generally business travel has turned into something of a duty. Just passing through airport security is a arduous and all too often mortifying ordeal. Forever lost are the days that staff competed for a chance to fly for the firm, but with the right apps an iPhone can do a lot to take some of the pain out of your essential business travel.

About the Author

Norm Miller is the Marketing Supervisor of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s leading web design businesses dedicated exclusively to CPA sites . We presently provide websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and bookkeeping firms.

Kenny Marshall | November 26, 2010 | no comments
Tags: , , , , ,

Showcase Your CPA Website with Google Ads

The fact you can buy your website a good listing in the search results of Google  is not by any means a very well kept secret.

If nobody has heard of it having a great CPA website isn’t going to help you sell your firm all that effectively. There are lot’s of ways to publicize your website, and one of my favorites is advertising using Google Pay-Per-Click.

If you’ve ever done a search on Google, and who hasn’t, you have no doubt seen sponsored listings. They appear on the right side of the search results page, and often up to the first three positions on the left side. These listings are being displayed through Google Adwords pay-per-click (or PPC) marketing platform. An ad incurs an impressions when Google displays the ad on the search results page. An advertiser pays for the click when you click on one of the sponsored listings. In other words, that advertiser pays Google per each click their ad receives.

The cost of the click that is payed to Google it ultimately impacted by the landing page quality score. Quality score is driven by a lot of different factors, including the relevance of the page content to the search term, and the Click Through Rate, or "CTR".

Click through rate is the rate of clicks to impressions. If your ad is displayed 500 times, and receives 100 clicks, then your CTR is 20%. A high CTR signals to Google that you are showing a relevant ad for the search phrase, and this will improve your quality score for that keyword.

The higher the quality score is of the landing page, the lower the actual cost per click will be. Adwords is essentially an auction. You bid on keywords. In very straight forward terms, the higher your bid, the higher your website’s ad will be displayed.

Now there are a number of valuations and specific calculations Google makes to define where your ad will be placed. These calculations occur in real time when a search is performed. In a future article, we will take a closer look at the specifics of these calculations. For this article, it is simply important to grasp that your bid is not what you will ultimately pay for a click . If your quality score is 7 and you bid $5.00 for a click, you will pay less for a click then if your quality score is 4, and you will never pay more then your bid, or $5.00, for a click.

Remember Google’s first priority is to show relevant search results, even for the sponsored listings. They could just give the first spot to the person who bids the most, but that would only ensure the person willing to spend the most money would be listed first. The highest bidder however, may not be the most relevant search result.

A very good illustration of this is your company name. Let’s say you are Adidas, and you want to bid on the keyword “Nike”. The most relevant search result for the keyword “Nike”, is obviously the Nike website. Google is going to give Nike a higher quality score for that keyword, in effect rewarding them for their relevancy for that keyword.

Before we look at tips to improving your quality score, it’s important to also understand match types. There are three match types you can and should bid on for each keyword. The three match types are exact, phrase and broad.

Exact Match: Exact match is the best keyword to bid on. An exact match means the search phrase being searched on is an exact match for the keyword for which you are bidding. For example if you are bidding on exact match for “Accounting Firms”,  your website’s ad will be displayed only when someone searches for “Accounting Firms”.

Phrase Match: Phrase match means your keyword is a phrase within the search string. For example, if you bid on a phrase match of “Accounting Firms”,  you ad will be displayed when someone searches on things like “small accounting firms”, or “accounting firms and CPAs”.

Broad Match: Broad match essentially let’s the search engine determine if the search phrase is a match for your broad match keyword or not. Bidding on broad match keywords is both important, and dangerous. It’s important because a broad match for “accounting firms” might be triggered when someone searches for “accounting services”. It also can be triggered when someone misspells a word, such as “acounting firms”. The danger is that Google may determine that “Accounting Supplies” is a close enough match to “Accounting Services”, and trigger your broad match keyword. This is why Google allows advertisers to declare "negative keywords". We’ll talk more about negative keywords in a moment.

Now that you have an understanding about your keyword match types and website’s quality score, here are some pointers on how you can improve your quality score and click through rates.

Ad Copy

Your ad copy should reflect the search phrase, or keyword you are bidding on. The person doing the search will be more apt to click an ad that has their search string. For example, if you bid on “CPA Services”, you want the headline of your ad to be something like “Quality CPA Services”. If your ad title says "Jim’s Accounting Firm", the person doing the search then has to stop and think… if they click your sponsored link, are they going to find what they are looking for? They often make their decision within a split second, so you don’t want the prospect to have to stop and think. Give them exactly what they want. If that means writing 50 different ad titles for 50 different keywords, so be it. Your work will pay off in the end.

Landing Page

The landing page is the page on your site that the searcher is taken to when they click your ad. Typically this should not be the homepage of your website. If someone searches for "Strategic Business Planning”, they should be taken directly to the page on your website that explains your business planning services rather than a generic accounting related homepage. If the ad goes to your homepage, and they have to search through a big pile of CPA related content just to find what they are searching for, they’ll probably just click the back button and go to the next advertiser.

If your website doesn’t have a suitable landing page for the keyword, add one. It really is that important.

Kenny Marshall | November 17, 2010 | no comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,

SEO Focus: Use Video to Enhance your Accounting Website’s Search Rank

Introduction
There is an exciting new trend in SEO that can increase your search engine authority and page rank quickly and easily. Google and friends are spending a great deal of time and energy on indexing videos for competitive keywords. Looking to take the inside track on your market? My next few articles will discuss how to take advantage of Video in optimizing your CPA Website Design.

Why use videos?

People Search For Videos
More and more people are adding the search term “video” to their inquiries.

Video Gets Extra Prominence In The Search Engines
That’s right. Even if the searcher DOESN”T include the word “video” in their search videos are still highly likely to be ranked for it’s related keywords.

Video is Viral
Video consumers tend to be very computer literate and active. They tend to share content with one another. Unfortunately they also tend to be young, so the personal viral element is not likely to be too profound. Still, there is an automated viral element to video sharing sites. They tend to copy videos from one another.

Nobody Else is Doing It
Just ask Bill Gates. Doing it first means EVERYTHING. Apple invented GUI, not MS. Mac has a better GUI than MS. I love OSX. But I don’t use it. Never will. MS got Windows packaged and out the door first. The things I like to do on my computer, the things I NEED to do (Like provide first rate CPA Website Design and Accounting Firm Marketing Support), require Windows. That’s all it takes. Be the first to do it and you’ll be the first to reap the benefits! Sit on your hands and someone else will do it first.

This SEO Focus will have 3 more parts…
How to make your Video
How to Submit your Video
How to Publicize your Video.

As always, this series of articles will assume that you are working on an Accounting or CPA website design. If you are an executive search consultant, financial planner, or some other type of web owner in a completely unrelated field, you’ll need to extrapolate an appropriate strategy yourself but the basics of these articles will still apply to you.

Kenny Marshall | September 17, 2008 | no comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

The Other Half of the Accounting Website Battle: MARKETING!

It doesn’t matter how good your CPA Website is if nobody knows about it. In order to make money off a site, people need to KNOW about it.

Once you have a website, you’ll want to publicize it as widely as possible.

We’ll be talking about these strategies a LOT! Put your URL on all your stationery, business cards etc. Also… Include it in your email signatures and ask your friends and clients to mention it to their contacts.

And remember the golden rule of website marketing!!!

Online directories such as Superpages, YellowBook, and City Search can also be useful ways to drive traffic to your site.

You’ll also want to consider search engines. There are various ways of approaching search engine optimization. Submitting your site to Google, Ask. com etc is easy, but getting to the top of the rankings and staying there is not and, depending on what you want to achieve, can be quite expensive. Google offers pay-per-click advertising for search terms, which can be very effective. This subject requires a whole fact sheet for itself – if you’d like CPASiteSolutions’ free guide to search engines, email a request to ken@cpasitesolutions.com.

Who’s Kenny Marshall?

Kenny is a vice president and marketing consultant with CPASiteSolutions.com, a leading provider of websites for accounting and CPA firms. He has been marketing accounting services for over 10 years and has been working almost exclusively with internet marketing for more than half that time.

Kenny Marshall | June 16, 2008 | no comments
Tags: , , , , ,

Why do you need a website? Ask your kids.

I can tell you exactly what their response will be. Your son or daughter will look at you like you’re an alien (you know that look) and say something like, “You don’t have a website?”

Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

Ask anyone between the age of twelve and twenty-one: the web makes the world go ’round. Whether it’s renting a summer house, buying insurance or choosing a dog groomer, the first thing most of us do these days is consult the internet. If you’re offering a service in a competitive marketplace and your prospects can’t find you on the internet you will miss out.

Professional service firms are no different.

And the website is not just there for anonymous browsers googling for “accountants in Sacramento”. These days you can bet that word-of-mouth referrals will have a quick look for your site before deciding to become a client. Referral sources will pass on your URL or perhaps even just say “they’re on the web”.

We’re beyond the time where accounting firms can get away with not having a website. Today, if you don’t have a site, people will wonder why.

Maybe you just can’t keep up?

And this will only become more and more the case – it’s never going to go back to the way it was before the world wide web came along, so go out RIGHT NOW and start looking for a good CPA Site Design Firm.

Kenny Marshall | June 12, 2008 | no comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Newer Posts »