Jassen: Now, one of the things that some CPA’s may not think about doing what their business is taking advantage of joint venture opportunities. This is another area where you can essentially outsource some or a good chunk of the work of marketing by partnering with other people in businesses. Can you explain some methods that CPA’s may be able to take advantage of joint venture opportunities?
James Orr: Yes. I’d like to explain that joint venture concept for CPA’s with an example using a client. Let’s say you have a client, you’re a CPA and you have a client who is an electrician. Let’s say they own a tile store. So they own a business where they sell tiles. You could go to that store owner and say, “Look, I’d like to create a special report for people.” People that are doing tile in their houses are probably homeowners. So I want to do a special report on how homeowners can save money, certain things that they need to take advantage of on their taxes and as an accountant, as CPA I can help them with that. I want to do a special report and offer as a free thing for all of your clients. I want you to send out either your normal newsletter or want to do a special newsletter with you offering them this free special report on ways they save money as a homeowner and I want you to write a little testimonial saying that, “John’s been an accountant of mine for 17 years and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else as an accountant. You should definitely go and order this report if you like to learn how to save money.”
John has now endorsed you to his list of clients with a special report something of value to them. Maybe it’s an audio report, maybe it’s a printed special report. Whatever it happens to be and when they request that report from you, they get added to your internal mailing list. So what you’re doing is that you’re tapping into John, the tile company owner’s client list in order to do marketing for yourself. Maybe in return, you also send out a special coupon or something else like something of value for the tile owner company in your newsletter. So maybe this becomes a monthly thing for you. You take one client that you spotlight and they do a mailing to their list for you and you actually put their information in your newsletter. Then everybody benefits by doing this joint venture. They get new clients, you get new clients. You can expand your business. You can keep growing your list in giving people things of value and reasons to open up your newsletter when they get it. So all the way around, it’s win-win-win for everybody. You could do that over and over again and a lot of people just overlook that opportunity.
Jassen: Okay. This is something you can do with a fair amount of frequency, right?
James Orr: Sure. You could take four guys a month that you actually you go into joint ventures with and then in your newsletter, you have four spots for those guys to be in there. If it’s the whole back page and they get a quarter of the back page each and it’s just a coupon. So you absolutely could do this with a lot of frequency. In fact, you could outsource somebody else to go and contact your guys. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could go and outsource the process of someone else seeking out those contacts for you in doing joint ventures.
Jassen: You had talked earlier about – when I mentioned not having your special report or what not – you mentioned outsourcing. So could you discuss some ways that a CPA could outsource some of the marketing duties of their business?
James Orr: Sure. I would love to because I’m a huge advocate of outsourcing. I will outsource as much as I possibly can. I’ll talk about five different ways that I think that a CPA or an accountant can definitely outsource some or all of their marketing. The first one is – we talked before about the importance of articles. You need articles to post on your website. You need articles to share and have syndicated out there so that they’ll link back to you and you get direct traffic from them.
So one great thing to hire out an outsource right from the very beginning is hire someone else to write articles for you. You could go to a lot of these outsourcing websites like guru.com, elance.com, odesk.com. There’s a whole bunch of them out there. You could put up a project that says, “I want someone to write me 20 articles. I’m willing to pay $100 in order to have someone write this,” or whatever price you set on it. Then people will come in, they’ll bid. You can find people bidding it down or if you didn’t set your budget high enough, people will bid it up a little bit. Then they come in and they’ll write the articles for you. You go proof read them kind of tweak them a little bit if you need to and then you could publish them on your website. They give you permission as when you’re paying them to do it. It’s a work-for-hire and so you have the right to publish them with your name on it. You’re the contact with information in your resource box. That’s the first one I would recommend people outsource.
Another one outsource and I’ve done a lot of this is that you could hire someone that keep your particular marketing up in a lot of these classified ad websites. We talked before about different classified ad websites but if you’re posting up and offer for a free special report, you can hire someone to every three days to take down the old ad and put up the new ad with that special report and do that for you. It’s really inexpensive to hire someone to do this. In an hour every three days you can have someone post up four or five different ads easily. So if you’re paying somebody minimum wage to do that unlike one of these sites like guru.com or odesk.com or whatever else it is, you could hire someone for an hour every three days to do that job for you and just pay them to do that then just fire and forget, they’ll take care of it.
Jassen: Exactly, great strategy.
James Orr: I would definitely recommend doing that. You’re not worrying about it and you know it’s getting done and then you spot-check it every once in a while to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.
Jassen: Right.
James Orr: Number three, you can hire someone to coordinate placing your articles or your ads in other people’s online newsletters or e-zines. There’s lots of people out there with these groups of 100, 200, 500, 5,000 people in either particular niches or particular geographical areas and they are looking for great content to share with their group or they’re looking for someone to pay a nominal fee in order to have an ad show up in their newsletter, e-zine. Some of these guys are willing just to have $10 to cover the cost of their e-mail provider, their web posting accounts. They’re more than happy to have you have your ad in there as a sponsor for a very nominal fee that kind of get your name out there and offer your special report to those guys. So you could hire someone to go out there and coordinate all those relationships for you. Again I would use those same outsourcing websites in order to do that. You just expand out your network that way.
Jassen: I like it.
James Orr: Here’s number four. You could hire someone to contact the owners of other blogs and see if you could actually post your article or do a guest blog on their websites. You could then tap into all the people that are coming to their blog and reading their content. You can now get exposure to all of those guys. It’s the equivalent of going and guest speaking at someone else’s meet-up group. Wouldn’t it be great if you went to a meet-up group and there were 20, 30, 50, 100 people in the room and they heard you speak for 15 minutes about a particular topic that is of interest to them? Well, you could go and contact other blog owners and say, “Look, I realize it’s hard to write contents for your blog. It takes time and I’d be willing write one for you absolutely free, I won’t charge you anything. May I just ask if I could put my little resource box at the bottom when I’m done? I’d be happy to write an article specific for your audience about tax issues,” if that’s what they’re interested in. So go ahead and volunteer for that or better yet hire someone to contact those guys and do that for you. You could combine someone else writing the articles with that one and have the whole process automated where they made the contact then someone else who you really trust to write the articles can write them for you. You outsource both sides of that.
Then the last one, we were talking about this one the other day, Jassen. You can hire someone to focus on social media of your business. You don’t want to go and update Twitter and update Facebook and find friends that are in related industries, make contacts and do all that stuff. Sure, it’s kind of cheating a little bit because the idea behind social media really is making those personal connections and building those relationships. But if you want to hire someone else to do that for you, it definitely can be outsourced and there are lots of people that are outsourcing it. Do you really think that President Obama or Britney Spears are doing all of their own posts on Twitter and Facebook? No, of course not. No, not at all. Those guys are having someone else handle their social media. You could do the same thing.
Jassen: Okay. Those are some great tips. Thanks, James.
James Orr: You’re very welcome.
This was emailed to me this morning on the Australian Cattle Dog rescue group, and it’s pretty good. Just one of those reminders that, as humans, we make our lives complicated. All that complication is 100% artificial, and after all, “…life’s what you make it, let’s make it rock” (Miley Cyrus). Booyah.
-Jassen
If A Dog Were Your Teacher
These are some of the lessons you might learn…
When loved ones come home, always run to greet them
Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride
Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy
When it’s in your best interest… Practice obedience
Let others know when they’ve invaded your territory
Take naps and stretch before rising
Run, romp and play daily
Thrive on attention and let people touch you
Avoid biting, when a simple growl will do
On warm days stop to lie on your back on the grass
On hot days drink lots of water and lay under a shady tree
When you’re happy dance around and wag your entire body
No matter how often you’re scolded… Don’t buy into the guilt thing and pout,
run right back and make friends
Delight in the simple joy of a long walk
Eat with gusto and enthusiasm
Stop when you have had enough
Be loyal
Never pretend to be something you’re not
If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it
When someone is having a bad day, be silent…
Sit close by and nuzzle them gently.
~~unknown
Lead generation is often viewed as a money suck. But it doesn’t have to be. This transcript from the CPA marketing webinar will show you how to get paid for doing advertising
Jassen: Alright, that’s great. Now the next thing here is a lot of people look at a lot of these marketing stuff and they immediately think, “Oh, that’s going to cost me all kinds of money.”
James Orr: Right.
Jassen: But here you have three ways to get paid to actually get your lead generation.
James Orr: Yes this is kind of a foreign concept to a lot of business owners. They look at advertising and marketing as an expense on their books. I built several business models where I’ve generated six figure incomes from doing the lead generation site.
Jassen: Right.
James Orr: So what I want to point out to you is that I know like deep down in my bones know.
Jassen: [laughter]
James Orr: I know there are a lot of people out there that don’t believe me. They’re like, “No, you’re not going to be able to make your money back through lead generations.” I’m telling you I’ve done it, okay. I have done lead generations on the scale that I was able to generate six figures net revenue from doing lead generations. So you can build a list of potential clients and make money doing it. Here are the three ways that I recommend you do it.
Number one is if you’re willing to put advertisements on your website, you could put Adsense or Yahoo’s equivalents on your website so that when people come to your website, some of them may click on ads that are for maybe even competing products or services and you’ll get paid $0.50, $0.10, $0.20, a $1.00, $1.20, $1.50 whatever it is that that ad is paying. When they click on that site you can actually make money by having people come to your website clicking on ads. So if you have a ton of contents – remember you’re doing articles – and people were coming to your website?
Jassen: Yes.
James Orr: Only a small percent of those guys are actually going to request information from you. But if you have ads on your website, that percentage may go down a little bit but you’re also going to have some people clicking off your website by clicking on those ads. So you’re going to recoup some of your expense by doing it that way. So that’s way number one, it is having ads on your website and do lead generation.
I want to point out that maybe you don’t do your lead generation on your main blog. Maybe you create a new separate website that’s more of a lead generation type website specifically for each niche. So you could have a website of the accounting for real estate investor website where it’s all the website is, is a request for special report specifically for real estate investors from you as the accountant or CPA and you have ads on that site. Maybe you don’t have ads on your normal blog website. So you do marketing directly to get people to go to the lead generation what we would call in the website business as [inaudible][00:36:38] stage where you have them fill-out a form and once they fill-out the form they’re on your mailing list and they the report automatically. Then you can have ads on squeeze page itself or maybe on the thank you part of the squeeze page after they enter their contact information. You can make some money back on that. So you don’t have to do it on your main site if that’s a concern with you.
Jassen: Exactly.
James Orr: By the way I did it on my main site. In case people are wondering whether I only did launch squeeze pages or I did allow my main site or both. I did it on my squeeze pages and also on my main site.
Jassen: Okay.
James Orr: Second way to make money when you’re doing lead generation is you can sell information products as a lead generation strategy. One of the things we are going to talk about here is the idea of selling products that are specifically for a niche on how to solve a problem or how to deal with certain issues. For instance, one of the things you do as an enrolled agent is you help people negotiate their tax liabilities, correct?
Jassen: Correct.
James Orr: So you could have a information product and so could other CPA’s that happened to be enrolled agents as well. You can have and information product on there where you actually say, “Negotiate your own tax with the IRS. Here’s a one hour audio CD and we’re going to charge $24.95 for the audio CD. It talks about how to do it yourself.” Then you walk them through the steps. Now a certain number of people are going to order that and they’re going to want to do it themselves but they’re still going to want to hire a professional for assistance.
That could definitely be a lead generation tool for your business or for other CPA or accountants who want to do that. So you could be teaching people how to do what you do – certain strategies and things that you use but then there is a certain number of people that they want to know the information because they want to understand the process but they’re not willing to do it themselves. They want to hire a professional or maybe their situation is more complicated than they originally anticipated and then they still need your help as a CPA or an accountant and they’re willing to do that. Who are they going to go to? You’ve established yourself as the expert. You’ve established that you’ve got information you know how to do it. You do it for clients all the time. This is how you do it. So they’re going to call you and they’re going to say, “Look I know I can trust you,” they’re not going to say that specifically, probably but they’re going to think that, “I know I can trust you. I want to hire you to do this for me.” So selling information and products is a way to either completely eliminate or reduce significantly your cost of getting people to your website in order to do that and there are some great places to go and do that which we’ll talk about later too.
Jassen: Okay. So what’s the third strategy?
James Orr: The third strategy is you can also – when you have your internal list – recommend products and services that you wholeheartedly endorse that can also pay you a referral fee. So for instance, there are plenty of affiliate programs out there where you can make money by recommending products and services to. Just an example, there are companies out there that will pay you commission for referring someone for business cards. I know a lot of CPA’s is going to be like, “You know what I don’t feel very comfortable recommending someone to get business cards.” Well, you’re doing a favor to a lot of new businesses who don’t have access to these resources.
So if you order your business cards from this company, you really like them, you have a lot of other people that have done and you’re very satisfied, you could put a link at your electronic newsletter or you put a special page on your website and have a link to that page in you physical newsletter. Then the people who need business cards they go to your website and they’re like, “You know, my CPA recommend these guys for business cards.” When they use your link you may get 20% of the sale or something like that. So you can use that as a way to either increase the value of your existing clients or get some value from prospects who haven’t actually started using your service yet.
Jassen: Right.
James Orr: So a lot of people will discount that as, “How much money can you really make?” You can make a lot.
Jassen: [laughter] You know there are affiliates out there that that’s their entire business. It’s all they do. They make millions of dollars a year just recommending other people’s products.
James Orr: I don’t think that most people are going to make millions of dollars a year but yes there are exceptions out there. People do it extremely well. What I’m hoping you’ll do is this – I don’t think you should go start a new business through affiliate marketing. But you should be able to significantly reduce your lead generation cost or eliminate it completely and maybe make it profitable doing lead generation when you’re marketing for your accounting or CPA business.
Jassen: You know I want to go back to the Adsense thing real quick. You and I have talked extensively about this over the past month or two in particular the issue of deciding whether or not to place Adsense ads on your primary website. There are pros and cons to that and you touched on it a little bit but what do you think are the biggest two or three factors that somebody needs to take into account when they’re trying to make that decision?
James Orr: You know, for me I would rather have the upfront revenue and have all of the other stuff be at the back end. For someone who’s a CPA or an accountant and their primary business is doing accounting, I don’t see it being as strong an argument. So what I would actually do if I were the CPA and that was my primary business is, I would test it for awhile without having any ads on that at all. Then what I would do is I would measure the difference in response, the difference in the people that are signing-up and what I perceived to be my loss for having ads on there when I do my test and then make that a very logical decision saying, “Okay I dropped from 20% opt-in rate on my website of people that actually sign-up for my newsletter or sign-up to request my special report when I added the ads to it, it went down to 18%. For me I’m okay with that.”
Jassen: Okay.
James Orr: Maybe the number for you is any drop is too much or maybe you’re like, “Whoa, I dropped from 20% to 10%.” I don’t want to do that. So you definitely want to take that into account. The other thing some people will argue if there is a credibility factor and that some people see Adsense on your website and they don’t think it’s nearly as credible type of a website. I disagree but there is probably certain percentage of the population that believes that. So just take that into account. Just like I said, you don’t have to put that on your main site. If you’re concerned about that go ahead and make 10 websites. Nine lead generations websites that are basically just request a special report type sites or request the article or request to download and then have your main blog have no ads on it at all.
Jassen: Right.
James Orr: You can almost look at it, Jassen as if you’re starting a lead generation company that generated leads for accounting services and then you’re buying your own leads that cost.
Jassen: Right, exactly.
James Orr: I mean that’s one way to look at it. So you’re starting up another business that does lead generation for accountants and you happen to do it yourself. In fact, if you get really good at this you could spread out nationwide and do lead generation for accountants nationwide. Then only take the ones that are like the best for you or in your local market if that’s you want to do.
Jassen: Exactly. So for anybody listening there’s a business opportunity right there for you, right?
James Orr: Yes. No extra charge. [laughter]