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.
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.
In all my years designing websites for CPA’s one of the most infuriating problems I have is when a new client comes to me with an existing website ready to take the next step and we find out that he doesn’t even own the domain name he’s been using for years!
Don’t be taken in by this scam. Many web hosts will offer to reserve the domain name for you, then turn around and reserve the domain in their own name in an account that you can’t access. And don’t think that dealing with a large company is any protection! My biggest competitor does this, and they actually charge people a $50 fee when they leave if they want to take the domain name with them!
When allowing a host to purchase your domain name ask them some screening questions:
If the answer to ANY of these questions is “No” politely inform the representative you are speaking with that you will reserve the domain yourself.
It is easy to register your own domain and it will guarantee that you can keep control of your address even when you change website providers. Registering a URL is easy and usually very cheap (less than $15 a year).
My company provides a service that meets all these criteria and caters specifically to accountants and CPAs. When I do a client registration I set them up with a retail account in their name on this service. They can lock me out simply by changing their password and if they ever leave our hosting service they will be able to continue to manage their domain themselves. They not only own their domain, they actually have administrative control over it.
Your domain name is your real estate on the web. Make sure you actually own it and not your web host!
TIP
When you change your Email address always make sure you log into your domain name registrars site first and make sure they have the new email. It may save you a HUGE headache when the time comes to renew.
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