Outsourcing Your CPA Marketing
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.