Getting Paid While Doing Lead Generation For Your CPA Firm

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]