1. Know your sales cycle. It amazes that many business owners either don’t know their sales cycle, or don’t think they can employ one. In the drug trade, there is a well defined sales cycle. There may be different levels of users, but most of them can generally be lumped into one of three categories: low quantity recreational users, medium users, and very heavy users. Drug dealers understand this concept, and inherently know when their customers are going to be in need of more product. If Joe Blow goes through two grams of cocaine in a week, guess what? His dealer is probably calling him every 5 to 7 days.

What is YOUR sales cycle? Think about how long a quantity of your product or service lasts. Yes, I said service. If you are in the HVAC business, then you can take advantage of seasonal cycles to create a base of non-emergency service business. AC maintenance in the spring, furnace system checks in the fall. It’s that easy. All consumables have an obvious sales cycle, and printer companies have known this for years. HP, Dell, Epson, etc., practically give away printers. Why? Because they make their money on ink and toner!

I work in a field that, on the surface, doesn’t seem to have a sales cycle capable of generating repeat business. If somebody has a problem with the IRS, and we fix it, let’s be honest: They don’t WANT to be our customer again. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t have an ongoing business relationship. We have branched out into different financial services that our clients can use, such as estate planning, payroll service, ongoing quarterly and annual tax return preparation — all of which are things on pretty well defined sales cycles.

If your product or service is something that is a one off, like ours is, then you have to expand your thinking and look for cross-sell opportunities. That is a whole other subject beyond the scope of this post that I’ll cover in the future, but think about it from a critical standpoint. If your business is something apparently mundane, like a rock shop or a second-hand clothing store, what can you do to spice it up? Well, how about a Rock of the Month Club for all your local customers? Or perhaps do monthly promotions on specific types of garments? This month is handbags, next month is pants, month after that is blouses, then jackets. In short, turn your mundane store into a continuity program.

2. Your product IS your business. A pot grower that grows weed with tiny nuggets, or doesn’t flush chemical fertilizers before harvest, is going to have a crappy product that customers won’t want to smoke. Xtasy tablets cut with way to much heroin are going to be a poor seller. Cars whose transmissions fail at 20,000 miles repeatedly due to a planetary gear defect won’t last the first model year. An airline with the worst on-time landing record in the industry is going to suffer horribly in ticket sales. An awesome band that suddenly gets a really horrible new lead singer isn’t going to sell out any concerts. In my line of work, a tax resolution firm that constantly rips off customers that haven’t even signed a service contract or given authorization to run that credit card is going to be the subject of numerous consumer complaints and a civil lawsuit by the Texas Attorney General (this just recently happened).

3. Customer service will make you rich. Drug dealers often gain new customers by giving away free product. It’s a loss leader, because they know that one good customer will make them a ton of money in the long haul.

4. It’s OK to fire your customers. Some customers cost you more money than you make from them. Some customers, despite your profits from them, aren’t worth the headache. Do you think a drug lord keeps supplying a dealer that is perpetually weeks and weeks late with payment on prior shipments and skims off the top? No. That guy probably ends up as alligator food.

5. You grow your business by focusing on what matters most (aka, the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule). There is a reason that the drug trade in large cities is primarily conducted by large, organized groups, such as gangs or organized crime syndicates. These organizations employ two incredibly important factors that most businesses would envy:

1). Tremendous employee loyalty, derived from extensive screening processes on hiring, and extreme consequences for leaving.
2). Numerous points of sale out where the customers are, making it convenient for the customer to purchase.
3). Employees are often given significant reign to act on behalf of the organization or the customer.

What can you do to garner employee loyalty? How can you endear your employees to you and your business to such an extent that they will bend over backwards to get their job done, make customers satisfied, and act in the best interest of the business? Perhaps more importantly, have you EMPOWERED your employees to take action that will keep problems to a minimum, and allow YOU to focus on growing the business?

Making it easy for your customers to purchase your product or service is critical to success in business. If your product is not carried by the stores that your target market gravitates to for purchasing that product, it’s not going to do well. If you sell via direct selling, is it easy or hard to buy your product? What can you do to make it easier? An example from a network marketing company I was involved in the launch of back in 2005: The product was outstanding, the customer service from headquarters was outstanding. What was the problem? You had to sign up as a distributor in order to buy the product online. What they should have done was allow people to buy the product, and then put that customer into direct contact with the nearest distributor in their ZIP code. The company is still going, but this one major flaw in their product launch kept them stifled for a year. It was so bad that many of us with large downlines (I had over 2,000 people in my downline) LEFT the company and took most of our downline with us.

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance that you are an online vendor or affiliate marketer. With that mind, think about this: Does your web site flow and layout make it difficult to do business with you? Is your checkout system more than one page? Is your order button easy to find? From a pure traffic standpoint, do you have enough inbound entry points out in the world (e.g., inbound links)?

You grow your business by focusing on the things that really matter. In short, this comes down to marketing and watching the money, and making that money work for you. You don’t grow your business by also being the guy that takes out the trash and mops the floor. You don’t grow your business by being the one person that does everything: You are inherently limited to the size you can grow.

Let’s take a deeper look at that from the perspective of a one-man drug operation. Let’s say we have a guy with a decent chemistry background, but with no real connections outside of the fact that he spends a lot of his free time at night clubs and raves. He sees the drug deals going on at the raves, and decides to enter the game himself. For under $2,000, our new friend can set himself up a nice little meth or Xtasy lab in his kitchen, and have enough raw material to make enough drugs over the course of a long weekend to net a street value of about $10,000.

Now, Mr. Indepedent Drug Dealer has to go to raves and somehow start selling his product. Perhaps he goes to places he’s been before, and opens a casual conversation with people he’s seen buying or using. Knowing that his product is his business, he hands out a small number of 100 mg doses throughout the evening, with the reminder, “There’s more where that came from.”

Over the course of a few months, our new entrepreneur is likely to build a small customer base that will actually net him a decent income, say $30k to $50k per year. But, in all reality, that’s about his income ceiling doing everything himself. Running manufacturing while also trying to stay low key to prevent running afoul of either law enforcement or larger operations limits him tremendously.

Compare this to a local drug lord. I’m talking big time, head honcho. This guy has foot soldiers throughout the city, hitting up every club, every night. Dealers on street corners, in places where customers KNOW they can come get product. Not only that, but he has multiple product lines: Cocaine, heroin, meth, pot, you name it. Not only that, but he doesn’t rely on single sources of manufacturing. Mr. Kingpin has a network of growers he buys weed from, runs several meth houses, imports cocaine from LA *and* Miami. This guy isn’t running a mom and pop drug shop — this guy is Fortune 500. See the difference?

Mr. Kingpin is in a position to deal with rival gangs. He’s in a position to demand higher product quality from his suppliers. He’s well insulated from law enforcement, because he’s not actually out dealing. His lieutenants and foot soldiers are empowered to make things right for a customer, up to a certain amount of product. These employees are also empowered to improve collections by whatever means neccessary, much to the misfortune of the customer that owes too much money.

Yes, it’s a pretty extreme example, but think about how you can ethically and legally apply the same principles to your own business. You don’t need to be a ruthless murderer selling crack to fourth graders to understand the basic principles of business that are carried to an extreme by our drug cartels and organized crime families. Business is business, regardless of your product or service.

Do you need help with your business systems, operational efficiency, marketing, or tax issues? If so, then give me a call. My direct number is (970) 930-1040 and I’d be more than happy to discuss any operational or strategic challenges you are facing in your business.

To your success,

Jassen Bowman, EA

Since a significant part of my lifestyle design objective is to continue to do the jobs that I do now, but do them from anywhere, I required a rather robust set of solutions in order to pull off the virtual office. My desire was to be able to perform sales, marketing, and all client functions without much interaction with the “home office. In other words, I did not want to burden a member of our office staff with having to open my mail, sort it, scan it, and email it to me. Also, it was important that my clients experience an invisible transition not only to the virtual office, but also that they don’t even notice when I bounce from place to place geographically.

The solution I have set up is by no means ideal. In fact, I sense there is a business opportunity for a company to offer the majority of these services from one place, rather than having to utilize multiple different services to achieve the end result. Also, it should be noted that the nature of my business REQUIRES that I have access to fax and mail — yours may not have such a requirement.

CRM System

Most businesses require some sort of CRM system to organize their client information, perform sales functions, etc. Since no solution existed for my particular industry that would suit the needs of both the sales department and the tax resolution departments of our company, I programmed my own, with generous assistance from James Orr. This system, TaxCRM, not only replaced ACT! and Timeslips within the company, but also offers massive functionality and reporting custom to our industry. Designing my own system also allows me to add features at will, and integrate it with whatever other services I choose to use.

The Google Factor

Google offers a large suite of services to small businesses that I make judicious use of. Our entire company is on Gmail, allowing rapid communication via Google Talk, and a powerful web-based email service in Gmail. Google Calendar allows us to share calendars amongst staff, and will soon be integrated with TaxCRM.

In addition to these services for the entire company, I also utilize Google Voice as my sole incoming phone number. I set GVoice to ring both my cell and desk phones simultaneously, and is the only number I give out. I don’t even know what my new AT&T mobile number is, to be honest. I do all my SMS text messaging via GVoice, and all my voicemails appear there, and also in my Gmail inbox. As you will see, my GMail inbox is my central inbound communication “portal”.

Fax

The vast majority of my clients still utilize fax communications. Many don’t even have email. In addition, the IRS communicates heavily via fax, and zero through email. Because of this, I needed my own email-to-fax service. I settled on using RingCentral, and pay $10/month for incoming and outgoing fax service. The service has been reliable and easy to use so far, no complaints from me. All my incoming faxes come in as a PDF to my GMail inbox, and I can send outgoing faxes (with attachments!) by sending a simple email.

Postal Mail

The IRS sends all it’s notices via mail, and so it is imperative that I receive these. It took significant research to find this company, but Virtual Post Mail has a slick system. I have a mailing address in the Los Angeles area at which I receive all my IRS mail (and whomever I give this specific address to). They scan the envelope, and I view the image online. If it’s something I want opened, such as from the IRS for a client, I tell them to open the mail and scan the inside pages, and can then retrieve that a few hours later as a PDF. This service runs me $20 to $30 per month, depending on usage. Postal mail to email services are few and far between, with Earth Class Mail being the most popular, but also the most expensive. I have had no problems so far with Virtual Post Mail, after two months of usage.

Sending postal mail is also something I have to do occasionally. For this, I found a company called Postful that does this. Companies that offer outbound mailing services are numerous, and Postful does not have the lowest rates, by any means. However, they offer several features that make them awesome:

• An API so I can send mail directly from TaxCRM
• The ability to send one-off color postcards from uploaded images
• An email-to-postal-mail feature that allows me to send a letter on company letterhead directly from Gmail

This combination of features is what made me settle on Postful. The cost for sending a postcard is 55 cents, letters start at $1. This is a pay-as-you-go service, so I just put money on account to have credits when I need them. It’s a service I won’t use much, but it is an incredible convenience for sending letters from the road. I will continue to use Click2Mail for sending direct mail campaigns, due to cost, but Postful is great for what I need for client services in particular.

Mobile Communication

Getting some sort of smart phone is something I knew I would need. My search basically came down to getting a Droid (I was with T-Mobile already) or an iPhone. Their were pros and cons to both units, and I ended up getting the iPhone for a variety of reasons. The iPhone 4 came out literally a month after I bought my iPhone 3, so I felt like a stooge for not waiting, but whatever — it works for what I need. Several apps make life easier for mobile productivity. For example, the WordPress app allows me to to post to this blog from anywhere. Twitter, Facebook, and Hootsuite apps make social media marketing possible from the road. The Google App allows me to use all my Google services, and iPhone Mail syncs live with Gmail. The Kindle app lets me keep my library anywhere, anytime, and an awesome app called JotNot allows me to use the iPhone camera as a document scanner, which is important for my work. Other apps are allowing me to brush up on my Japanese, use online banking, and even interact with TaxCRM remotely. All in all, I can’t complain too much about the iPhone.

Skype

Skype was something I hadn’t played with at all until a couple weekends ago. My original plan for being able to make outbound calls was to literally take my desktop VOIP phone with me wherever I went. However, I have to admit to liking Skype, and have plans for making further use of it. There is even a Skype app for iPhone, which has interesting consequences.

So there’s the current run down. I funnel ALL incoming communications — email, text messages, voicemail messages, faxes, and even snail mail — into my GMail inbox. By subscribing to and using all these services, my life is greatly simplified in many ways, and I can work more efficiently in general, even when I’m in the office. But of even greater benefit is the fact that I’m in no way, shape, or form tethered to the office. I’m not the only one, either. We actually have several full time staff members that work full time from home. None of them need fax or snail mail like I do, but the other pieces of this system allow them to work remotely.

If working remotely is part of your lifestyle design, then look into some of these tools for yourself.

Sincerely,

Jassen Bowman, EA

P.S. Don’t forget, if you need tax help, I’m just a phone call away. You can reach me directly (at my Google Voice number, of course), by calling (970) 930-1040. Initial consultations are always free.

1. Are they recommended by a trusted colleague?

One way to start the search for an accountant is to ask people that you already trust for suggestions. Your banker, insurance agent, attorney, and financial planner most likely know and work with accountants on a regular basis. Also inquire to the companies that you do business with, such as you barber, florist, butcher, and plumber. Chances are, these sorts of business owners use an accountant for some business functions, since these tend to be the types of business owners that are excellent at what they do, but not so great with dealing with the complexities of taxes and accounting.

2. Ask around your Chamber of Commerce.

If you are familiar with your local Chamber, they can be an excellent resource. You can ask at Chamber events for referrals to accountants, and you are likely to meet many such service providers at Chamber functions, trade events, and leads groups. Also, many Chambers have an internal complaint system and can let you know whether or not complaints have been issued locally against an accountant or firm.

3. Do they have any complaints with the Better Business Bureau?

When many individuals decide to take action and make a complaint against a firm, they often think first of the BBB. Check with your local division, or look them up online, and make sure that the company you are considering hiring has a good record with the BBB. If they have a Gold Star award from the BBB, then you’re on the right track to working with a company that is reputable and stands by their word. The BBB’s new letter grading system can also help you in selecting a good firm.

4. Have they ever been investigated by your state Attorney General’s office or state board of accountancy?

This is another place to do your own due diligence. Complaints with the state AG or Board of Accountancy is an automatic red flag and should be highly considered before selecting a firm.

5. What services do they provide, and what services do you NEED?

Think about exactly what you’re looking for in a service provider. Do you need full service accounting, outsourcing all functions to another person or firm? Or do you just need year-end tax preparation? Knowing the answer to what services you need will help you pick the best person to do what you need, and will affect your budget for getting it done. For example, if you just need tax preparation, then you might be better off with an experienced tax preparer instead of a CPA firm that mostly does auditing and general accounting. If you only need payroll services, then you might want to hire a payroll company rather than a bookkeeper that does payroll on the side. If you need the books updated weekly or monthly, most communities have competent, independent full charge bookkeepers that you can hire.

If you’re looking for somebody to come set up your books and show you how to use your accounting software, you may want to consider a general CPA or a competent bookkeeper. If you do all your own books using Peachtree, Quickbooks, MS Money, or another popular commercial software package, it can be very helpful to have somebody to call should something go wrong. The large commercial accounting software publishers all provide some sort of certified expert rating system for individuals that are experts on using their software. You may want to look for and consult with such a certified expert on your particular accounting software. For example, Intuit offers its Quickbooks Certified ProAdvisor program to consultants. Finding one of these certified individuals can really help you a lot if you’re doing the books yourself.

If your only interest is in tax compliance, look for a CPA that specializes in taxation, or an Enrolled Agent (EA). An EA is an individual licensed directly by the U.S. Treasury to handle tax matters, and this individual can represent you before the IRS just like a CPA or an attorney. By nature of the credential, EAs are dedicated tax professionals and are generally more competent in areas of tax issues than a general CPA, unlicensed tax preparer, or bookkeeper.

Selecting the type of professional you need is a serious consideration in this process, and depends largely on what you plan on doing yourself, and what you expect to need help with.

6. Are they licensed in some way?

Credentials are not always the most important thing to consider, but they do reflect at least a minimum level of professional competency, in theory. If they are a CPA, they’ve passed a rigorous four part examination and have at least a bachelor’s degree in accounting and two years of professional experience, at a minimum. If they are an Enrolled Agent, they have passed a very rigorous three part exam covering individuals, businesses, and practices and ethics that is administered directly by the Internal Revenue Service.

The individual preparing your tax returns, doing your books, or processing your payroll doesn’t necessarily need credentials in order to do the tax and do it right, so experience is a critical piece of the puzzle you’ll want to inquire about.

Do keep in mind that if you’re audited by the IRS, only CPAs, EAs, or attorneys can represent you, unless you wish to represent yourself, which is not recommended.

7. How much experience do they have?

How many years have they been doing what they do? What type of companies do they generally work with, such as which industries and what size companies? Inquire as to how many of each of your type of entity they work with each year. If they’re experienced working with your type of legal entity, within your industry, or your size of company, they might be a good fit.

8. How do they charge, and how much?

Don’t be afraid to ask about the money. Some firms will charge by the hour, or on a piece rate for the type of work being done. Bookkeepers will usually charge an hourly rate, while tax preparers often charge a flat rate per form and schedule. If your tax return is pretty complex, expect to pay more, which could be a base rate plus an hourly rate for doing accounting work to generate the numbers needed for various line items on the return. If you’ll be seeking software assistance, find out what they will charge for this, usually at an hourly rate. It can’t hurt to know whether you’ll be over your head in terms of what you can reasonably afford for the services you are seeking.

A word of caution: Price should not be the ultimate determining factor when decided who to use and what services to do yourself. If you’re genuinely over your head when it comes to certain tasks, don’t be afraid to spend the money. There’s an old saying that goes like this, “Do what you do best, hire out the rest.” Accounting can be one of the most frustrating aspects of owning a business, and trying to do it all yourself can take time away from what you should be doing, which is running your business to the best of your ability to generate a profit.

9. Are you comfortable with the individual?

Even if you hire a large firm to do your accounting, there is still going to be an individual person that will be doing the work and with whom you will work with almost exclusively. You need to sit down with this person and make sure that you are comfortable working with them. If anything makes you uncomfortable in any way, you need to find somebody else. Think about it: This person is going to have access to an incredible amount of private financial information, so it has to be somebody you feel comfortable trusting.

10. Don’t be afraid to make a change.

Even after selecting somebody to work with, don’t be afraid to find somebody else if things aren’t working out. Your accounting is too important to the success of your business to leave it in the hands of an incompetent person or somebody you don’t completely trust. Problems with your current accountant could range from having just plain bad interpersonal chemistry to gross incompetence on their part, or perhaps you have the wrong specialist to meet your needs. Regardless, don’t hesitate to take your business elsewhere, since your accounting, bookkeeping, and taxes are simply that important to the life of your business.

Using the ten steps outlined in this article will give you a great start towards finding the accountant that is right for you. Identify the type of professional that can best provide the services you need, ask around for referrals, then check them out and interview them personally. This process will ensure that you get the best accountant for your business needs.

Until next time,

Jassen Bowman

James Orr: Well, I really see it being two primary ways and one way is a couple of subways. So the two primary ways is either geographical expansion where you are offering your service maybe in your local market at first and then you decide – it occurs to you at some point, “Well, what if I offered my service in the next city over?” So you could be, “I’ve got an accounting service that we offer to clients in Fort Collins and I also offer to people in Loveland or people in Denver, people in Colorado Springs,” or you could go out of state and keep expanding that way. That’s what I called geographical expansion. You are almost pretending that you have a virtual business in all these different areas. You could either create new websites for that or you can create new content where you focus on catering to people in those communities with your service.

Jassen: Okay.

James Orr: The next way, the other major way are niches. We talk a lot about niches tonight and focusing on specific ones but I break that down in three sub-categories. The one that people tend to be able to do easiest is they tend generalized when they begin. So they offer accounting services to everybody. Anyone in the world is their client or potential client.

The easiest way to start increasing the number of niches you serve is start narrowing down your niche from there. You can’t get too specific. Well, you probably could but it’ll be really hard for you to get too specific with your niche because you really could go after very specific sub-niches. Instead of just real estate investors you could go after multi-unit property real estate investors or single family home real estate investors.

The more specific you get, the easier it becomes to really target and laser focus in on those guys. So if you wanted to focus on single family home real estate investors you can buy a mailing list of single family home real estate investors and if you’ve got a really good widget for them like a special report that deals specifically with the challenge that you know they have from your point of view, your accounting, that CPA type of stuff then you can really do a great mailing to them where they can request the information for free. Then you’ve got a much smaller list of people that have raised their hands and you can cater to that niche. So getting specific you get all those benefits we talked before about focusing on very specific niches. That’s one way to do it.

The other way to do it is to expand out. Most people don’t do this but instead of just offering accounting services you could offer accounting and business planning services. You can niche up instead of niching down into a specific industry you can say, “I’m going to expand and expand my services and maybe what I want to offer.” So maybe you offer a planning service where you do financial planning or retirement planning and you also do accounting, different ways to expand up and deal with that.

Then the other side is go with closely related niches like you Jassen, you probably could do some accounting type services or bookkeeping services but you also have the enrolled agent side so you’re specifically doing IRS, debt reduction and debt negotiation type stuff and so that’s a very closely related niche that you’ve expanded out to. Does that make sense?

Jassen: Yes.

James Orr: Okay. So those are really the two major ways and then the second way you had some kind of sub things which is niche down get into some really fine details. You can niche up and take on a bigger perspective or you could like side niches where you have closely related topics to do.

Jassen: Alright. Well this has been really informative. I hope that everybody on the line got a lot out of this. Definitely we went through a lot of marketing information here. I’m sure that people have additional questions on their mind out of this so if folks wanted to get in touch with you James, how could they reach you to kind to pick your brain on some more of these stuff?

James Orr: Well, I’m going to practice what I preach here and tell them you can go right to my blog at learntoberich.com and on the right hand side is a link that says downloads. Guess what? You’re going to find all widgets there. You’re going to find lots of special reports and audio downloads and great resources for you to access regardless of what industry you’re in. We cater to a lot of different industries. You’re welcome to go there and download the resources and you will then be automatically signed up to receive our newsletter and some information from us. So we would love for you to do that and get some more information. The website again is learntoberich.com and it’s all spelled out all the words spelled correctly and everything.

Jassen: Alright. Well, I really appreciate you joining us tonight and for sharing all these information with our listeners. Is there anything else you want to add before we close out?

James Orr: I think that’s it. I really appreciate it you have me on and I hope that everyone got a lot of great information and is going to actually act on it and implement some of the ideas to really increase their business.

Jassen: And that is the key right there, isn’t that is? Taking action on what you learn not just sitting on it.

James Orr: It absolutely is. That is the big difference.

Jassen: Alright. Well, thanks a lot, James. I’ll look forward to speaking with you again soon and you have yourself a wonderful night.

James Orr: I appreciate it. Thanks, Jassen I’ll talk to you soon.

Jassen: Alright take care.

James Orr: Bye-bye.

Jassen: Bye-bye.

James Orr: Absolutely.

Jassen: Okay. Now we’ve already talked about a little bit about meet-up. You mentioned that in an earlier segment but could go on to some more detail about using meet-up to meet new people and grow your CPA clientele?

James Orr: Yes I definitely can. There are basically three ways that I can think of to use meet-up and they sort of overlap in some ways. The first one is you can use it find niches that you are interested in serving as a CPA or accountant. Then you can join those meet-up groups, become involve in the group. Share information, be helpful, and learn about their challenges. Learn about their problems, see if you can help. Offer them access to your network and try to get access to their network and just overall become part of that community. So that’s number one is focus on specific niches your interested in.

The number two one is you can actually create your own meet-up group and cater to those niches. Seven or eight years ago I forget what it was now, there was not a local real estate investor group in Fort Collins nor in Colorado where we are and so I ended having to form a local real estate investor group. I started holding meetings and then I started networking with everybody. It turned out really great so I recommend people start groups if there isn’t one in niches that you want to cater to. Then grow your contact base from there. People will flock to you. People interested in that will want to join your group and provided you’re giving them good value and good information and great opportunities there, they’re going to want to keep coming back. They’re going to see you as an expert and be more likely to do business with you in the future. So you can definitely grow your own meet-up groups if you need to do it that way.

The last one is you can go outside of your local market and contact group owners outside of your area who you may want to cater to. One of the great things about being a CPA business is you really can do it remotely, right?

Jassen: Yes.

James Orr: So if you wanted to go and start saying, “I’m going to really focus in on this one niche.” You could go find other meet-up groups outside of your local area and cater to them and give them access to your special reports or your lead generation tools and then let them offer them to their group as a free resource that they can download as long as they get their contact information. Then you can start marketing to them over time to.

James Orr: I want to correct what you said because part of the challenge is that people do look at CPA or accounting business as a service business. One of the great things about using widgets is you can convert a service business to a physical product business. By going out there and creating products whether that’s a special report, a little mini booklet, a audio CD, maybe it’s a three hour seminar you do, whatever it is that you can do in order to create a physical product then you can start marketing things like physical products that will have an upsell or back end of your actual service. So you want to actually take that into account when you’re thinking about other ways to market your business. You’re right. Most people would be scratching their heads, “How do I market my CPA business on ebay?”

Jassen: So explain real quick, how do they do that?

James Orr: Well it’s easy. What you do is you go create a very specialized report for a very niche industry and you sell that report as a product on ebay. So for instance you might make a two hour audio CD talking about how to setup your bookkeeping system for electricians or for retail shop owners or get more specific than that in mind but you can go and do all the variety of these things.

It might be really simple things that you have – a normal conversation about with all of your clients and it seems so second nature to you but every time they hear it they’re like, “That makes perfect sense. So now I know how to setup my file system,” or “Now I know how to setup quick books,” or “Here is the software I need.” Whatever those questions are you could make an information product, a physical product. Maybe it’s a booklet, maybe it’s a special report and you could sell it even at a loss – I don’t recommend it – but you could sell it at a loss and consider it cost subduing business for your lead generation. So maybe you have a CD that cost you a dollar to make, you’re going to sell it for $0.99 on ebay and with the marketing fees you have to pay ebay maybe you’re at a $0.30 loss. But now you’ve got someone’s name, address, telephone number and e-mail address who is interested enough to pay a dollar for that product. Now you’ve got an opportunity to put them on your mailing list. There is a much higher probability that they would become a client than just someone on the street.

Jassen: Exactly.

James Orr: Does that answer your question about how to market a service on ebay?

Jassen: Definitely I’m sure some of our listeners are surprised in what they’ve never thought about being able to market a service on something like ebay with it’s geared toward physical products. But they’re very, very doable.

James Orr: Yes. I would generate a hundred plus new increase a month from selling information products on ebay for a business.

Jassen: Okay. I think most of our listeners would be thrilled if they were able to generate a hundred new inquiry in a month into their CPA firm.

James Orr: I agree. I was doing a lot of products and this is not just one product doing this. I mean would create lots of very niche focus products and I’ll be able to sell those over a period of time. You know as in aside, if you hook up with someone else that has a product or service that they’re selling, couldn’t you do like a joint venture like let’s say somebody was creating websites. You can go and joint venture with somebody who’s selling websites to electricians or contractors and network with them and bundle the two together in a special report on how to setup your business from the tax side plus this website. Now you just share the names and addresses and contact information.

James Orr: Well I’m going to tell you that this is one of the more aggressive ideas I have. So it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. I don’t recommend people use traditional business card. You can definitely have a traditional business card. What I’m more talking about here is like a mini flyer. You can have mini flyers printed up online or you could use business cards for it but the business card is really an offer for one of your widgets – special reports, something that they can download, free consultation, whatever it is that you’re trying to market. The idea is to get these out as aggressively as possible. It sort of inline with a lot of multilevel or network marketing companies might do in order to just blast the word out in a gorilla marketing style. Just get it out there as much as possible.

So I’ll just name off a couple of different ways to do this and you can decide whether or not you want to do any or all of them but realize that some of them are a little bit more aggressive. You may get some slack for doing some of them but just make sure you’re complying within the law and don’t do anything crazy. So here’s some really basic ideas.

Whenever you go out to a restaurant you can definitely leave a business card with your tip. The bigger the tip the better it’s going to be at being detected, I can tell you that. If you’re going to a restaurant you can leave your card with free information about that. You’re probably not going to get a huge amount of business from it but you’ll never know. You could have the right person to pick it up and you kind of get one and these things are cheap. The more you get out the better it is.

Another one is ATM machines. Anytime you go to an ATM machine to make a deposit or withdraw money, you can leave a business card near the ATM machine. Where I got this idea from is a lot of these networking companies will stick like half cut open envelopes with [20][01:13:50] business cards right inside of the machine and people find that effective. They made it work. I know people that are marketing their network marketing company business with that. So just adopt it and use it that way.

Here’s one of my favorites and that is if you go to a library and you’re taking out books and reading on things, a great bookmark to use would be a business card and if you happen to forget that when you return the book then so be it. If you happen to be in the library reading the book and you happen to bookmark it and put it back in the shelf accidentally so be it that way to. The same thing goes for books in bookstores. You’d be surprised how many books I see in the bookstore where they somehow have a magical business card stuck in the middle of it.

Jassen: Yes. [laughter]

James Orr: So it is a way in order for you to get your word out about your business. Leaving them as bookmarks in bookstores but you can also use bulletin boards. Anytime you’re out in the supermarket or the mailbox place or anything like that that has a bulletin board and you’re allowed to post things on, the university library, any place like that you could put little things on the bulletin board. Just make sure you put it out there and replace it frequently every time you go there go ahead and replace it.

Jassen: You just carry these things around with you and so when see the opportunity to leave one then do so.

James Orr: Absolutely. My first real estate broker told me that if you leave in the morning with 10 business cards in your pocket, you should do whatever you need to in order to get those out during the day. Whether that’s posting them on bulletin boards or handing them to strangers or whatever you need to do and if you do that everyday you’re doing a good amount of marketing just to get your name out in the business world.

James Orr: Absolutely.

Jassen: I know we don’t have the time to go really in depth on each tool but could you give a quick rundown of the free marketing tools that Google makes available for promoting your business?

James Orr: Absolutely. So here’s the quick list of nine – and you’re right, we really don’t have time to go into detail but I will mention each one and you could do your own research on it. I’ll tell you what it was generally used for.

The first one is Google AdWords. Google AdWords is Google’s advertising program. You can buy advertisements on the Google network. You can also do keyword research. So if you want to find out how many times people are searching for Denver CPA you can go on to Google AdWords and do a search and find out how many people are searching for that, whether that trend is up or down, how much people are paying for that keyword. You can do all that research on Google AdWords plus buy advertising from Google on there for specific keywords. That’s number one.

Number two, we mentioned before is Google AdSense. Google AdSense is the program where you put ads on your website and when people click on those ads you get paid part of what the advertisers are paying google. So that’s one of the ways to make money when you’re doing lead generation. That’s another great resource from Google. It’s called Google AdSense.

Number three is Google Analytics. This is the little tracking code you put at the bottom of your website and allows you to track, measure and therefore focus on and improve your marketing efforts. You can find out where your traffic’s coming from or putting articles out on somebody’s article directory type sites – is that really helping you? You can measure that with Analytics. You can use that as a measuring tool for improving your website.

Google FeedBurner is that RSS e-mail subscription type of interface where people want to receive updates whenever you publish new contents to your blog, they can receive that via RSS with Google FeedBurner. The other thing I like about FeedBurner is that it allows you to see what articles people are clicking on so that you can go and write more articles about that particular topic. Maybe you find out that certain types of topics you’re writing about are more popular than others. Well, focus on more of those. It’ll get people what they want. So you can go ahead and use that too.

Google Groups – great tool for going and finding and networking with certain niches. So if you want to focus on the electrician niche you, you can go and actually find an electrician group on Google Groups. Start hanging out there, find out what their problems are, what their challenges are and then become a part of that community and market yourself there as well.

Google Website Optimizer is number six. That is used for improving your website conversion. Remember before, Jassen we’re talking about testing headlines to see which one works best?

Jassen: Yes.

James Orr: Well, Google Website Optimizer is the tool you would use to do that. They take care of all the crazy math about how many people you need to actually visit it before it becomes significant. So they’ll tell you clearly which one is going to be the winner if you have two different headlines. They’ll swap them out and alternate between two different headlines if you’ve got visitors coming to your site and they will then show you which one is the best one for getting conversions. So that’s called Google Website Optimizer.

Jassen: Nice.

James Orr: Google Webmaster tools – a great resource for people that own websites you could put your site map which is basically just a list of all the different pages on your website. You could feed that in the Google Webmaster tools and then Google will know to go to all those pages to see if they can index them in search engines. The other thing that’s nice about Google Webmaster tools is that it allows you to see all the different keywords that you are ranking for. So if someone types in “Denver CPA service,” are you even coming up? Is your website showing up at all for that search? Instead of having to go and look through Google and see if you appear on page seven, Google will actually tell you what keywords you’re ranking for, where you’re ranking and that could change overtime so it keeps tracking that for you. You can look back and see if you’re improving, things of that nature. So it’s very helpful.

Google Trends is number eight. That allows you to do keyword and market research. Do you want to see if certain types of words in your industry are increasing in popularity overtime or decreasing? What is the new home buyer tax credit – is that what they’re calling that thing?

Jassen: Yes, the new home line of credit right now – the $8,000 for first time home buyers.

James Orr: Yes. So if you want to see if that thing is decreasing in popularity or if it’s increasing in popularity you could go to Google Trends, type in that keyword and it’ll show you a graph over time of the number of people searching for that. So you can use that as a way to figure out topics that are coming in to vogue or leaving the public’s mind and you can focus on those words when you’re writing content or articles.

The last one here is Google Alerts. Google Alerts is great because it allows you to spy on your competition or you want to see every time another competing CPA firm in your town is doing any marketing on the Internet. You could put in their name in Google Alerts and Google will e-mail you once a day or once week or whatever frequency you set whenever that name shows up in any new web searches. You can also do it to put your own name of your business in there and see when people are talking about you. Whether it’s good or bad or whatever you can go and see if someone says negative about you, you can go and defend yourself. Whatever you need to do, make comments or contact the owner. Whatever you need to do in order to stay on top of people doing that and you do use Google alerts for that. So those are the Google tools.

Jassen: Google Alerts is a great service. I have bunch of alerts set up and I love seeing what people are saying about either myself, you, my business, our industry, niches that I’m tracking things. It a very powerful tool, I love Google alerts.

James Orr: Yes. It’s free. By the way all these tools are pretty much free. The only one I think you need to pay money for is AdWords and that’s when you’re buying advertising.

James Orr: Yes. I think most people are under the false illusion that they’re going to convert a very large number of people directly from their website into clients. While it does happen, it is much easier to get someone to come on your website, order a free special report or a free download and join your mailing list and over a period of several contacts, begin to know, like and trust you and then when they’re ready they’ll actually contact you about your service and actually become a client. So what you want to do is you want to have regular contacts with your internal list, people who have requested information from you, people that are existing clients and reaffirm that they’ve made a good decision being with you, reestablish yourself as an expert. Do all those things and there are four ways that you could use that to cultivate new and repeat business and referrals actually from your internal list.

Number one is the monthly newsletter. I personally would prefer if you’d physically mailed it – I’m not getting a kickback from the post office. I’ll tell you why you should actually mail it. It’s because people discount e-mail. So if you actually take the time to go print out 8 ½ x 11 two-sided newsletter once a month, you can upload your newsletter to the U.S. postal service, you can upload your mailing list to the postal service. They’ll do all the printing and mailing for you and it’s dirt cheap so you can definitely go and do that. But you should mail it out because it’s going to give more value. People are going to notice it. Even if they throw it away, you’ve now gotten the hits on your name and your information where someone else the next day or two days later says, “Hey, I need an accountant.” Guess what? They just saw your name and they’ve been seeing it every month for the last six months and they’re going to think of you. More so than someone else who’s just sending them an e-mail once in a while. You definitely want to have some type of physical mailing and get it in their hand. So that’s number one.

Number two is occasional e-mails with updates, promotional offers and special reports and important announcements. I think you should e-mail your client base regularly and just let them know what’s going on. Maybe you’ll tell them, “Look, I’m about to take vacation here in the next two weeks. So I just want to make sure that if you have any needs that I’m available for you over the next two weeks or if you’re going to miss that then I’ll be back in a month, a month from today in order to handle anything you need. So let me know if you need that and by the way, we have a new client discounts where it’s free hour consultation and 10% off your first tax return,” whatever it is you’re going to offer. So you could go ahead and do that. Put out any special reports you put out there so you could get occasional e-mails where you do that. I think that’s really important too.

The third thing out here is to give them access to you via social networking sites. I told you before that social networking is really about getting to know the person. These are things you like outside of business. They want to feel like they know you more so than you’re just an accountant. So give them access to you. I mean, create a Twitter account and share with them when you do certain fun things or vacations you take or restaurants you go to or sporting event, share whatever your hobbies are. Then people will know, like and trust you and be more likely to do business with you by becoming involved in those things. You can use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all those different social media type websites in order to do that.

The final way that you can actually use your internal list to cultivate and get new business and repeat business and referrals is there are definitely applications out there on the web where you can take all the new blog articles and contacts you’ve added to your blog over the last week. You can have it automatically sent out once a week to your entire client base where it says, “Here are the new articles I wrote with like a one sense description of what’s included,” and they can click on the link in order to read those. You can set that up so that it automatically happens. If you’re adding contents to your blog there’s going to be an e-mail sent out that lists all the different content that that was added and you don’t need to do anything extra. It just gets taken care for you. So I think that’s a good way to do e-mails more so than the newsletter you know.

Jassen: Okay. The purpose of the RSS e-mail feed is to get people coming back to your website, right?

James Orr: Right. They just keep your name up there so that when they finally do need you, you’ve established yourself as an expert. They know you. They trust you because you’re constantly there, you’re reliable. They’re willing to do business with you. So they’ll do referrals to you especially if you ask. If you put down there, “By the way, I love your referrals,” or if you highlight people that have given you referrals – yes, you want to go and do that type of e-mails so it’s consistent and top of mind awareness.

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.

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.

James Orr: Yes and I think I’ve covered it but I will definitely go into it again because it’s really important. We talked before about some of the reasons why you’d want to do it. The idea of advertising your general business and what you do versus a special report that really speaks to the particular person and tells them that you specialize in the industry, you cater to that industry and that you have very specific unique information that you can offer.

Now, as like a behind close doors thing, the seven things that people need to know for saving money on their taxes, they’re probably going to be very similar for regardless of what industry you’re dealing with. I mean, the tax codes and business tax deductions are pretty standardized. I mean it’s not like they say, “Wait, you’re in this business except for some rare exceptions.” You’re in this business you have very different tax code, right?

Jassen: Right. The only exception that are big ones are real estate – there’s some extra stuff and then farming, there’s some different stuff. Those are the two major ones where there are big differences.

James Orr: Okay. So the report that you have “The seven ways to save money on your taxes for electricians,” is going to be the same as “The seven ways to save money on your taxes for plumbers and contractors and specialized sales people.” All these things can be relatively standardized where you might add or subtract one and reword it and re-tweak it but it’s the same stuff. So could go create a series of special reports and use that and you want to name them for that particular niche.

So when you talk about that niche you talk specifically about that niche and you talk because you have a client or you can visualize having a client or you want those types of clients. You talk to them in their language about their business and how you could solve their specific problem. So that’s part of what’s most attractive about using special reports and other type of widgets in order to get people to inquire.

Jassen: So with these special reports, you’ve already talked about using them as an incentive for people to give you their contact information so that then they go on your prospect list and you can market to them repeatedly.

James Orr: Right.

Jassen: When you are using that list off of a specific widget, are you segregating your list based on either the niche industry that they are interested in or on the specific report that they requested? How would you handle that sort of situation?

James Orr: You know, that’s a great question. The answer is you really should. However, most CPA’s or accountants are not going to and it’s fine that you’re not. The reason why you would want to segregate it is if you wanted to do a specific offer to all the electricians or all the contractors on your particular list. However, you’re going to get to the point where you’re going to know some of these people. So some of the ones that become clients or that you’re seeing on a regular basis, you’re going to be able to go and pull out the 10, 20, 30 names that are on there that are all of a specific industry.

You’ll going to be able to do that manually for the most part if you really wanted to. But the correct way to do it is to actually put a little tag in there if you’re building your mailing list. Put down what list they actually subscribe to. What special report they wanted. However, if it’s too burdensome for you to figure that out and you really don’t want to deal with it, it is okay. You have my permission to not do it. Just put everyone on your regular newsletter and contact them all, do your normal sharing to build your credibility to have them like you, to have them trust you. So when they’re ready to do their service they can then upgrade. So you should do it but you don’t have to do it. I guess this is how I would answer it.

Jassen: Okay. There are different types of widget that you can use when we’re doing this. One of the ones you mentioned earlier was audio interviews. So could you talk a little more about marketing your CPA business using interviews?

James Orr: Sure. Just like special reports where you’re having the seven things you need to know about whatever it is or the four things. By the way, the number doesn’t matter, guys. So just make up a number and come up with three really good tips to share with them. I mean, there may really be 11 but you can share with them seven. So just pick the best ones.

Jassen: Right.

James Orr: So the same idea here with audio interviews. You can take a written special report – maybe it’s even something put out by the IRS. IRS has some great resources by the way. You know that, right?

Jassen: Yes. It’s just that everybody is either definitely afraid of the IRS or whatever their feelings are but the IRS really does have a – I don’t know if they call them pounded but they definitely have a good group of writers that their jobs are to take this complex subject that we call the Internal Revenue Code and just do it down to literally an eighth grade reading level so that everybody can understand it. So they actually do put out some really, really good publications.

James Orr: Yes. You go take one of those publications and you either extract 10-20 questions. You should figure about five minutes per question for the most part. But if you’re going to pick out 12 questions or so and then you have – you could either hire someone from your local university who’s in the media department; they’re going to be doing interviews as a career. So you can get them in there, pay them $25 for an hour of their time or an hour and a half of their time and have them do an interview with you where you record the interview and you answer the questions that somebody in that particular industry would have about how to save taxes and the services you offer and how you can help them.

You can have a variety of these different audio interviews for a variety of niches that you can then use to market those audios with. Audios have a very high proceeds value. The idea that you have an audio CD and you have them copied – you can have them copied for like a dollar each in quantities of 50 or so – and 50 of these things made and look really good and when people order them you can have them sent out or you could have them downloaded straight from the Internet, whatever you want to set them up. Use those as audio interviews to go and market information about what you can offer them.

Jassen: Alright, great. This is supposed to be an hour long webinar but it looks like we’re already out the hour mark. [laughter]. We’re about halfway through the outline here. So just to make you aware of that.

James Orr: Okay.

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]

James Orr: Absolutely. Here’s and interesting point about this and one of the ways you get better with marketing is you decide and commit to always be measuring and testing and trying to improve your marketing in general. So you need to know if I put out an ad how much traffic is that generating? How many people are signing-up from that? How many people are requesting my special reports? That way you can go back through and can change one little thing for instance, I’m going to suggest that you first start with headlines.

So you want to go and change you headline in your ad and maybe it’ll be – the headline will be your special report title in the lower – the four things you need to know before you file your next tax return or how to save yourself hundreds of dollars on your next tax return for electricians, plumbers or real estate agents or whatever you’re going to focus on, on that particular niche. Then you can go give them that special report but you want to find out if you place an ad in one spot on Craigslist, do AdWords on a social media type website – how many people do you normally get coming through from that ad and how many people of those sign-up. Then you can measure those numbers to improve on them and you’re constantly running horse races in order to see which horse is going to win. Your control, the one you ran last time and that was the winner versus the new one you’re running this time and you want to see if you can have the new horse beat your old control horse in order to do better this time than you did last time.

It becomes a really fun game at least for me when you start doing this marketing cast and you keep doing better and better and better and see if you beat yourself. So I think that’s step number one in those three ways. Does that make sense?

Jassen: Totally, I love that.

James Orr: Okay. So the one thing I said first always be measuring, testing and trying to improve your marketing headlines. That’s the first thing to test. Once you kind of had a decent headline the next thing you want to be testing is your call to action. What you’re actually saying to get people contact you, order your special report, download the free report, call-up the 24-hour recorded message line. Whatever your call to action is to get them to join your mailing list or contact you, request information, you want to be testing different ones to see if you can improve the response rate. So your marketing headline may test how many people you’re actually getting to read your article. Then the next call to action is to see how many people that have been to your page actually take the action you want to give them, call in or click the form or fill-out something and so you want to be testing that in the second way. So that’s the second way to do it.

Jassen: Okay.

James Orr: The last one to be testing is the specific thing you’re offering. Are you offering a special report like what we’ve been talking about? Are you offering a free consultation? I know that’s extremely popular with CPA’s. It’s the free consultation. You could be doing that. You could be doing an audio interview or you take one of your clients in that particular niche and you talk to them. Maybe it’s not even a client. Maybe you say, “Hey look I know you’re a real estate investor in this field, I’d like to pay you $50, $25,” – or maybe they’ll do it for free – “I’d like to interview you and find out what your biggest tax problems are or your biggest tax challenges are? What do you worry about in your business and I want to address those in a frequently asked question and answer session.” Then you can have that CD being a CD that you give away as a lead generation tool in order to get name, address, telephone number, e-mail address from potential other real estate investors who want to get that information from you and then you can market to them over and over and convert them to clients.

So those are the three things to test. Headlines first, call to action and then the widget or the thing that you’re giving away in order to attract people.

James Orr: Yes, absolutely. This is really where I think a lot of my expertise comes together. This is not every single way to do it. These are seven highly effective ways to do it.

Of course number one again is focus on building that internal list. So all the strategies that I’m about to talk about – the other six are going to be ways to build your list so you could continue to market to your list over and over again. When online – I mean, you definitely can do an e-mail type list but – I would actually go for both an e-mail and also U.S. Postal mailing address so that you could follow-up with their physical newsletter, physical postcards or a Christmas card or thanksgiving card or other holiday card if that you’re nature. Whatever you need to do in order to do both the physical mailing ones and also the e-mail ones, I think it’s very important. So let’s talk about some of the other ways to do that.

Jassen: Okay.

James Orr: Jassen, you know this. What’s one of the best ways in order to get traffic to your website?

Jassen: Articles by far. Hands down.

James Orr: Content is going to be what generates people coming to your website. So you need to writing tons of articles and you need to have them on your website. Now what we’re talking about is writing articles to get traffic to your blog or your website. By the way, for those CPA’s that don’t know what blog is – website is kind of like the old term for something that’s static. A blog is more a platform for a constantly changing, constantly updated website that has relative content to people coming to visit the site. It could be articles, it could be information about what your business is doing, how you’ve been involved in the community, things of that nature. So you definitely want to have a constantly growing, evolving type of content website which is what we call web blog.

Jassen: Okay.

James Orr: So let’s talk about the articles. You can do articles on your website. So you write new contents and that was going to primarily attract new visitors that are finding your website through search engines but it also encourages people to subscribe to your site so that they receive content on a regular basis. It’s going to also encourage them to share those articles and resources with other people and link to those directly.

Now the other type of thing you can do with articles is you can actually do what’s called article marketing. An article marketing is taking articles and publishing them out or making them available so that other people can grab them if they think they are good quality and put them either on their website or in their newsletters or e-zines or anything like that and then they can then market out your article as contents to the people that they’re helping or following or being part of their everyday business. What’s great about this is when you use articles that you wrote and you allow other people to use them, you get direct traffic from the articles because at the bottom of the article you’re going to have what’s called a resource box. It’s going to talk about the free gift that people get for subscribing to your newsletter or request this special report that’s got the seven ways to save money on taxes for certain business types.

So you’ll have all these different things in your resource box which will have traffic coming from wherever the article was published back to your own website. But another interesting thing happens when you have those links in that resource box. What happens is that search engines give you credit whenever another website links back to your website. It’s kind of like a popularity contest and so the more links you have coming in to your website, the more likely your website is to grow in popularity and become more important which in turn were going to show your website more likely higher on the search results than other websites. So the more article you have that with links coming back to your site the more popular you are and the more likely your site is to come up in search engines for articles that are already on your site.

Jassen: That great. That is because that’s free traffic. That’s incredibly powerful.

James Orr: It is. It’s free traffic both from the search engine because you get that link popularity but it’s also direct traffic from people when the articles are on their website. So you really get a nice double benefit from doing article marketing. So I highly recommend writing articles and having them on your site and also using product marketing.

Jassen: Well, then I contrast that being free because the next one on your list is not free.

James Orr: Absolutely. So article marketing invests a little bit of time but it’s free. The other way to do it you can actually pay the major search engines like Google or Yahoo in order to send traffic to your website based on keywords. So let’s say you really did want to do a CPA accounting services for a very specific niche. Let’s say you wanted to focus on real estate agents. So you want to be more real estate agent clients. Well, you could go and take out an ad on Google or take out an ad on Yahoo or Facebook or any place like that and you can have your ad say, “Accounting for real estate agents. Let us do your accounting and save you money on your next accounting thing.” So basically you can have an ad there that when someone clicks on it, you pay the advertiser a fee then that traffic comes directly to your site. So you might be paying $0.50, $1.00 or $1.50 for every person that clicks through to your site. So you can see that comparing that to article writing where you’re getting free traffic to your site – the taking the time to write some articles much more attractive.

Jassen: I like that.

James Orr: So that’s number three on the list. Here’s the fourth way in order to build traffic to your website without spending a fortune. That is creating informative and how to type videos and market them on You Tube. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Jassen but the You Tube search engine is the second most popular, second most used search engine on the Internet.

Jassen: Really?

James Orr: Yes. The first is Google. The second place that people search the most on is actually You Tube. So if you have an informative video – let’s say you have a video that says, “Four ways for real estate agents to save money on their taxes,” and it’s basically you on there, maybe its got a picture of your screen, your computer screen instead of a picture of you or maybe it’s just you on the camera, you get someone in your office to take a picture of it and then you over four bullet points of ways that they can actually save money on their taxes. Maybe it’s deducting certain expenses, maybe it’s hiring a professional to review their tax return. Whatever it is those four reports and then you can put that video up on You Tube. It’s free to put the video on You Tube and then once people go on there and their searching for saving money with taxes or real estate agents stuff, they can find your video and then at a certain percentage of those guys will come from the video. They will contact you, your website or they may join up to your mailing list or something like that. So using videos is highly effective as well.

Jassen: Well, a tip for You Tube. In addition to putting your URL in the video itself people need to keep in mind that the description box to the right in upper right of the video, you can put a clickable link in there as well. So people that are filling up their descriptions on their You Tube videos when they’re uploading them be sure to put your website, your domain name up in that description box as well.

James Orr: Absolutely. Yes, definitely a good idea. So let’s go on to number five which is advertise special reports and your service to specific niches on classified ads websites like Craiglist, Backpage, Kijiji and things like that. So the basic idea here is you have a special report again – I’m really big on using widget because you don’t want to just say, “John Smith, accountant,” or “John Smith, CPA,” and “All accounting services for your business.” Really bad idea, it’s not nearly as effective. By the way, I want to encourage you to test me on this, okay? Go ahead and run an ad that says, “John Smith, CPA accounting services for your business.” Run that ad versus running an ad that says, “Five ways to save money on your taxes for real estate investors,” or “Seven tips your bookkeeper doesn’t want you to know from an accountant for another specific [inaudible][00:26:28].” Some other specialized report – people request that. Test these two ads head to head and tell me which one does better. I already know the answer but you should do it for yourself, proof that I’m right about this marketing of widgets and special reports and everything.

Jassen: Can I say something out there really quick?

James Orr: Sure, absolutely.

Jassen: For folks that are thinking, “I have to write these special report, I’ve got to this, I’ve got to do that,” I will say this, that you are better off putting out there, “Hey, do you need accounting services for your real estate brokerage?” You are better off doing that rather than doing nothing simply because you don’t think that you have the time or talent or whatever to write a report or put together a package of information to send people. So folks who are listening, it’s better to do something even if it’s not a 100% perfect than to do nothing at all.

James Orr: I would agree except it’s so easy to pay somebody $30 bucks to write a two page report and outsource the process than it is to do and it’ll be much more valuable to you to have that done for you if you’re not willing to write it yourself.

Jassen: I totally agree. But just for people who don’t want to do that or don’t think they can or what not, it’s better to do something than nothing.

James Orr: True although it’s much easier to write a check and do it the right way.

Jassen: [laughter]

James Orr: I think you should outsource it if you’re not willing to do it yourself. So getting back to the thing ads, so Craigslist highly effective and definitely be creative with where you’re marketing your service. You could definitely contact people on Craigslist who already have in the business that you want to target, just offer them the report. Make sure follow Craigslist rule or Backpage rules or Kijiji rules to make sure you’re in compliance but you can definitely can post ads or contact people via those resources in order to find new people coming to your website and building your online business.

And these last two I’m going to cover really quickly. Number one is become active in discussion forums supporting your niches. So if you know you’re going to target a niche of electricians, you can go to electrician type discussion forums where they are talking about marketing their business, to running their business and you could become active in that forum answering questions about taxes and offering your special report for electricians or an audio interview with one of your best electrician clients where he talks about how you save them all sorts of money and kept them out of trouble and all those types of things. Then offer that as a free resource for them on there but if you become active in two, three, four or five different discussion forums, you’re going to have lots of new people coming in to your internal list and then you can market and convert those guys over a period time.

Then the last one is social media websites. So there’s tons of groups out there, Twitter type related content group type things and Facebook and all these other social media type websites. You could tap into those existing groups or make your own and I kind of encourage that in a similar way to what we talked about what meet-up except you’re doing it online.

Jassen: Right. Just to meet people in their – going back to the big fish in a small pond thing, you know introducing yourself to other ponds.

James Orr: Absolutely.

James Orr: Absolutely. In my mind there really are four major ways to go out there and network in the community. You know some people will say, “I’ve got this other obscure one and of course you can definitely come up with those too.” But here are the four ones that I think of when I think about networking.

The first one is you need to be building and marketing your client and prospect database. So basically the strategies that we’re going to talk about when were talking about offline networking really are ways to build that list inside your business so you could continue to market them. It’s not enough to be able to have one-impact marketing. You don’t want to have message go out there once they see once and that’s it. You really want to be able to hit them over and over again so that they know, like and trust you and then they want to become clients of yours. So you need to have that internal list. So that strategies that we’re going to talk about are going to grow that list.

Number one –hands down, join your local Chamber Commerce. It is a great way to meet other business owners which a lot of accounting CPA guys are focusing on, working with business owners. Isn’t that primarily what the market is working with?

Jassen: Exactly, I guess.

James Orr: Yes. So you want to go meet other business owners. You want to go to four-hour parties. You want to go to after-hour parties. You want to go and do the actual lead generation group type things. In my opinion a lot of people go there and say, “How many business cards can I collect? How many people can I add to my list?”

I have a slightly different take on it and that is I think you should go and make one or two or three better quality contacts. Have some face time, develop a little bit of relationship, of course exchange business cards, you want to give them your card. You want to collect their cards from them and the only reason to give your business card really is so that you could get their name, address, telephone number and so you could put them on your newsletter list and make sure that they get contact from you on a regular basis from now on. That way when either they need an accountant or when they have a referral who could use an accountant, they think of you first. So that’s really the number two, putting on the list was joining your Chamber of Commerce and that’s a really important one. In your business do you use Chamber of Commerce at all?

Jassen: You know we actually don’t. For those that are listening and don’t know, I’m an enrolled agent and we do tax representation. We operate nationwide and we don’t need this kind of networking type functions. We finally put together a plan however which is very, very recently like literally is a course of week to start doing some of the stuff within our association what not. But now we’ve never taken advantage of the chamber and leads groups and things like that.

James Orr: Okay. They’re very effective especially regarding local business. So if you’re trying to grow your own local business, you’re focusing on that you know, chamber of commerce is another great one. The other one that I found to be highly effective is meetup.com. Meetup.com for those people that don’t know is a website that has local meetings where you go to on very specific topics. So somebody who wants to start a meet up group about bash fishing or writing books or playing video games or playing board games or anything like that, you can find very specific meet-up groups for a variety of topics.

The ones you probably want to focus on or ones that are more business oriented. So once that you have business owners go into and you could do very similar things you do with the chamber you go to the meetings. You become part of the group. You network with them. Establish good relationships. Get their contact information. Make sure that they’re on your mailing list to get your newsletter and then you grow that relationship over time. Then the great thing about meet-up groups is there so many different ones and you can go out there and join a variety of them and just really connect in at a great level with these guys. So that would be the third one on my list.

Have you used meet-up much?

Jassen: Yes, I love meet-up. Maybe two weeks ago I was looking at a bunch of different of meet-up groups just here in the local, the greater Denver area and it really kind of surprise me that the number of individuals that were members of business related meet-up groups was second only to membership for local singles meet-ups. I was really surprised. I thought that it would have been much lower thing behind singles would have been I don’t know maybe hiking and outdoors type groups and maybe parenting and things like that. Business was number two. I was really surprised by that.

James Orr: Yes. A CPA trying to really focus on growing their business, there are plenty of business related meet-up groups that they can join. I realized too that some of your referrals are not necessarily going to be coming from other business owners but they’ll be coming from individuals who happen to know business owners and that they’ll be able to refer business to you as well. So you’re not just going – I wouldn’t exclude somebody from your newsletter, your list just because they don’t own a business right now.

Jassen: Right. People that … I’m sorry go ahead.

James Orr: I was going to cover the last point but if you want to add something go ahead.

Jassen: Well, I was going to say individuals know other individuals that own businesses even if they don’t own a business themselves.

James Orr: That’s correct, absolutely. Now that ties right into this last point which is volunteer your time and meet other charitable minded individuals. So if you’ve got a great charity or volunteer group, definitely get out there and volunteer. Make new contacts. People tend to give much more credit to people that are willing to go and volunteer their time and be charitable than a business that is not. So if you go out there and you really do it because you want to volunteer because you want to be charitable and you’re meeting these great new contacts that way – they really see you in a great light and they’re much more likely to do business with you by meeting you in that capacity.

Jassen: Great. Those were great ideas. Thanks for sharing those.

James Orr: You’re welcome.

Jassen: Okay, great. That’s a pretty good overview of how to use those lists. Now the next thing I want to talk about is the world of niches. Using niches to market your CPA business more effectively, can you go into that a little bit?

James Orr: Absolutely. One of the problems that I see with a lot of businesses and specifically with CPA’s and accountants, is they tend to be too general in nature. They say, “We offer accounting services. It doesn’t matter the business that you’re in we offer accounting services for just about every business.” I think that’s a mistake and it maybe 100% true that you will take on just about any business, that you can do accounting for just about any business, however I think it’s a mistake from a marketing perspective because people want to work with companies that specialize in helping them in their specific situations.

So as an example, I’m a real estate investor so I own rental property and I would like to have a CPA that says, “I focus and I work with real estate investor clients.” So the accountant has a specialty and they know how to deal with certain things that I have in my business. It doesn’t take too much extra to know how to deal with that. The majority of the accountants out there isn’t CPA’s can definitely work with people at rental property but you want to actually advertise to the world that you do focus on that specialty. There are lots of advantages in doing that as well. So that what I’m talking about when I’m talking about focusing on specific niches.

Jassen: What are some of the advantages?

James Orr: One of the advantage is you can become a big fish in a small pond. So if you go out there and you start offering accounting services to – let’s use real estate investors as an example – so you go find real estate investors, you find out where they hang out, things they like to do, where they’ve read the information and then you kind of market yourself as a specialist. An accountant that work exclusively or primarily with real estate investors and you can offer special reports or bonuses or training materials or any information that’s going to be attractive to real estate investors. You can become someone who is really catering to that market. You could become the only accountant that that’s really focusing on serving that community in your local market or maybe much smaller numbers. So you become a bigger fish in that small pond of real estate investors.

One thing I want to point out is that you can have more that one niche. So don’t think that I’m suggesting that you specialize and only deal with one type of clientele rather I would say go pick two, three, four or five even more niches and just start marketing directly to those guys that you each have a specialty maybe you do a special report on each one of those and then you can use those to market and get clients to raise their hands and say, “I’m interested in hearing more about what you have to say.”

Jassen: Okay. Now when you’re becoming this big fish in a small pond that you’re talking about, what do you think about the effectiveness of some of the marketing results that you can get when you’re doing that? I mean is there a difference in the effectiveness of your marketing in what you can get out of your marketing?

James Orr: Absolutely. If you’re going to go – and we’ll continue on with this real estate investing as an example – if you’re going to go and you’re going to focus marketing as an accountant or as a CPA and you’re going to focus on working with real estate investors. If you put out an ad in a real estate investor newsletter or you go to real estate investor groups then you network specifically with real estate investors and you have a special report or an audio interview or some other type of widget – what I call marketing widget – in order to attract attention. If you go out there and you used those particular products you’re going to have a much better, more effective response than if you go out and you to say, “I offer accounting services.” If you go and you say, “Here are the eight ways to save taxes on your rental properties,” and you have a special report maybe one or two pages long that talk about some of the different ways as an accountant you can help real estate investors save taxes on their rental properties then you have a much more effective marketing message, a much more effective widget in order to get prospects to raise their hands and give you their name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, get on your mailing list so that you can market to them over time. Then when they do have an accounting need, the first guy on their mind who they know, like and trust and they’re willing to go and spend money and become a client of yours.

Jassen: That sounds great. These widgets that you’re talking about, they have a lot of different uses, right?

James Orr: Absolutely. I think we’re going to be talking about that here at another question but I can definitely talk about them all day long. So I’m a huge believer in creating widgets and the more widgets you have out there – they are like having new fishing lines in the water where you’re having clients respond to those things and coming in to your funnel that you can use and then market to your internal list.

Jassen: This evening on our How to Market Your CPA Business webinar by one the nation’s leading authorities on lead generation and really helping business owners grow their businesses in specific niches. James Orr has lent his expertise to a number of industries and he is here with us tonight to talk about accountants and CPA firms.

How are you doing James?

James Orr: I’m doing great. I have really appreciate you have me on and thank for that very nice introduction. It’s lots nicer than the last one I got from you which was a little bit over the top but I appreciate that.

Jassen: [laughter] Well, you know it’s true. Ever since I first met you, I’ve always looked at – we actually talked about this last week about individual strengths and weaknesses. We had an interesting conversation about that but I have always felt that one of your biggest strengths that you bring to the table in the business world is your ability to step into a niche industry, learn how it operates and learn some of the specifics about it and then apply your lead generation strategies to that industry.

James Orr: Absolutely and one of the things that I have in my background is we did run a very large network of websites servicing about 1,200 different industries. So one of the benefits I get to bring to the table here is I get to see lots of data points. I’m not just talking about taking one particular business owner and doing lead generation with them. I’m able to say, “Look we were running websites, literally millions of websites for each city the nation for variety of industries and I can see what worked, what did worked.” Our strategies that worked really well and I’ve also done my own business locally as well. So I could bring that to the table as well.

Jassen: That is awesome. Tonight what have on tap is we’re going to talk about a bunch of really different marketing strategies for CPA’s in particular, correct?

James Orr: That’s correct and how I look at it is almost like little mini articles or little mini nuggets of information about to take a very particular type of marketing strategy and apply it or how to look at marketing in a certain way. So we’ll try to break them up into tracks. If you’re listening to this afterwards, if you’re listening to it on the audio, you don’t need to see the screen although we did this initially as a webinar. On the screen really are just some notes on how we did this. Basically you’re going to get everything you need from the audio and we’re going to break it down into five minute sections or however long the individual nuggets sections are so that you keep track of.

Jassen: Okay and we’ve got a bunch of those to get through so let’s dive right in.

James Orr: Okay, great.

Jassen: Alright. So the first major area – we’re going to start with the big picture kind of area and then go in from there. So to start with, let’s look at two major marketing focuses for marketing your CPA practice.

James Orr: Okay, when I look at this I really see there being two major categories to focus on when you’re doing marketing of any business and specifically when you’re marketing your CPA or accounting business. That is marketing, nurturing, growing and maintaining you individual clients and prospect list. So all that marketing you’re doing to internal database or internal list and then the other side of that number two would be marketing to directly grow your client and prospect list. So all the other marketing you do in order to generate immediate business and also add prospects to your cultivation, your database file for marketing to them is the second one we want to approach. So you it’s like internal marketing and then marketing to the world in order to grow your internal marketing. Those are the two categories I think of when I talk about focusing those.

Jassen: For our listeners that don’t understand the difference, can you explain the difference between your house list and your prospect list? Can you explain to our listeners what the difference there is that you’re talking about?

James Orr: Sure. I don’t actually call them house list and prospect list. House list I would call everything inside your house. So basically anything – any name, address, telephone number, e-mail address that you have for your particular business is what I consider an in-house list. Now that could be made up of existing clients or it could be made up of people that inquired about something, requested information, requested a special report or anything like that and they’ve been added as a potential prospect.

For me I would treat those guys very much the same except for some very small relatively unique circumstances where I’m only marketing to pre-existing clients. But everyone is going to get the newsletter, everyone’s going to get the special offers, everyone’s going to get special reports. So prospects and past clients are all treated the same because you want your past clients to know, like, trust you and be really engaged on what you’ve got going on. Then you want your new prospects to know, like and trust you and really engage in the whole process and then when they’re ready, when they need an accounting service, when they need a CPA they know to go to you or when someone else they know needs an accounting service they can refer to you as well.

Jassen: Okay and then the second side of that in the marketing to grow that list, what do really see is the differences in communication that you’re sending out those two different groups?

James Orr: For me, I’d like to look at it as trying to get people interested to request information from me. So whenever I’m marketing out to the public, I’m trying to say what can I dangle in front of somebody that’s going to make them raise their hand and say, “You know I’m interested in getting information about that,” or “I’m interested in that type of service or that type of product and I really want to get more information.” Once they get more information that’s really when you’re trying to do the conversion from prospect to client.

So for me all that external marketing, whether it’s newspapers or postcards or your websites or all these other marketing type things we’re going to be talking about. Basically if you use those to get people onto your internal list then you can use your normal newsletter and regular contact in order to help market over and over again to that list then convert them to paying clients.

I was recently approached to do a product launch with Andrew Fox, though, and I have to admit, I like what I see. Andrew Fox is a British guy that has been a mover and shaker behind numerous large product launches, but as one of the guys that’s making hundreds of thousands in commissions on actual sales. So to see him come out with a product of his own was kind of cool. His current course is sharing his secrets for becoming a super affiliate — being one of the top affiliates that makes a product really move, and making big commissions for yourself in the process.

I’ve had the pleasure over the past two weeks of getting to preview a lot of the content in the program he’s put together. He provides a really nice overall intro to Internet marketing in general if you’re lacking that, but more importantly he goes into product launch mechanics, which are really important to anybody doing affiliate marketing, even if you’re not in launch mode. It’s these launch tactics that are worth learning, because when you find a product you want to promote as an affiliate, you’re essentially in launch mode for yourself.

Andrew just put up a video with an intro to the course. It’s worth watching for the content it provides alone, even if you’re not interested in purchasing the product itself, which is titled “Affiliate Millionaire”. Click here to watch the intro video.

Since it *is* a product launch and I am an affiliate, Andrew obviously kicks a percentage back to me for purchases through my link. So, if you purchase the product through me, email me a copy of your receipt and I’ll throw in a bonus of my own: A free ticket to my upcoming Adsense bootcamp. I guess this officially qualifies as a training course announcement, since I haven’t actually announced that course yet, but it’s coming up in a few weeks.

Again, just take a look at the video, and take some notes, as he presents some good stuff for free just for dropping by to watch the vid: Click here to watch the intro video.

Until next time,

Jassen Bowman

1. Discipline. It should go without saying that a sport like figure skating takes tremendous discipline. The kids that excel in this sport at a high level sacrifice a lot of the things that most teenagers take for granted in out society, such as sleeping in, having all the time in the world to do their homework, and being able to screw off pretty much whenever they want. The same goes for a successful entrepreneur. Success, at it’s core, involves doing the things that other people simply won’t do, such as working longer hours when necessary, and spending money on marketing, sales training, and testing and tracking, rather than lattes and trips to Vegas.

2. Vision. There isn’t a one of these kids that would be out here spending this much time and effort on skating, and their parents spending the insane cash required, if there wasn’t some vision attached to doing it. Even if that vision is just for the personal accomplishment that comes inherent in the sport, there’s still a vision. Of course, there are also some of these kids that want to be the next Michelle Kwan or Scott Hamilton. It’s the same thing in business — you need a vision. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Is it to build something to pass on to your kids? Is it to retire young and rich and live the good life? Is it to snub your high school classmates that said you couldn’t do it? Regardless of your WHY, you really need to have one. Otherwise, what’s the point?

3. An understanding that the basics are fundamental. The crowds love the big jumps, the crazy lifts, fast, tight spins, and physics defying death spirals. But more than anything, the skating fundamentals are what win and lose championships (and Olympic medals). Solid edges, precise footwork, proper takeoff and landing positions, these are what earn points, particularly under the IJS. It’s the same thing in business: Your fundamentals need to be strong. Things like having a strong and effectgive marketing plan, holding that marketing ruthlessly accountable for results, measuring and improving employee effectiveness, knowing what’s making you money and what’s losing money, etc. That super cool Flash web site might make you think you’re doing the right things, but it’s useless if everybody clicks off it before it loads. The prettiest business cards in the world don’t mean a damn thing if you aren’t exchanging them for other people’s business cards so that you can add people to your contact list. Heck, that contact list is worthless if you’re not using it to maintain regular communication with your target audience.

These are just three of what are probably hundreds of things I could come up with if I sat here long enough. However, this session is over, and hockey is about to start. And there’s a saying in figure skating: If it were easy, it’d be called hockey. If business were easy, it’d be called a job.

Moving to the red rink….

-Jassen Bowman