Jassen: Exactly. Okay. Now the next one – people are going to scratch their heads when they first hear this but just because you have a service business like a CPA firm that doesn’t mean that you cannot use ebay to sell your services.
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.
Jassen: Exactly. The next two things I want to talk about are two very specific and kind of out there marketing tactics. These are very specific strategies that CPA’s can use to market their business. The first one I’d like you to talk about is using business cards to market your CPA firm. How do you do that?
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.
Jassen: Okay, great. Now, one of the things that I know about how you run your business is that you are a huge fan of all the Google tools that are available to you.
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.
Jassen: That is awesome. Next thing I want to talk about is how to take your – this list that you’ve been talking about building this whole time. You’ve got this list and so what are some ways that you can cultivate new business specifically from that list?
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.
Jassen: Now, one of the things that some CPA’s may not think about doing what their business is taking advantage of joint venture opportunities. This is another area where you can essentially outsource some or a good chunk of the work of marketing by partnering with other people in businesses. Can you explain some methods that CPA’s may be able to take advantage of joint venture opportunities?
James Orr: Yes. I’d like to explain that joint venture concept for CPA’s with an example using a client. Let’s say you have a client, you’re a CPA and you have a client who is an electrician. Let’s say they own a tile store. So they own a business where they sell tiles. You could go to that store owner and say, “Look, I’d like to create a special report for people.” People that are doing tile in their houses are probably homeowners. So I want to do a special report on how homeowners can save money, certain things that they need to take advantage of on their taxes and as an accountant, as CPA I can help them with that. I want to do a special report and offer as a free thing for all of your clients. I want you to send out either your normal newsletter or want to do a special newsletter with you offering them this free special report on ways they save money as a homeowner and I want you to write a little testimonial saying that, “John’s been an accountant of mine for 17 years and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else as an accountant. You should definitely go and order this report if you like to learn how to save money.”
John has now endorsed you to his list of clients with a special report something of value to them. Maybe it’s an audio report, maybe it’s a printed special report. Whatever it happens to be and when they request that report from you, they get added to your internal mailing list. So what you’re doing is that you’re tapping into John, the tile company owner’s client list in order to do marketing for yourself. Maybe in return, you also send out a special coupon or something else like something of value for the tile owner company in your newsletter. So maybe this becomes a monthly thing for you. You take one client that you spotlight and they do a mailing to their list for you and you actually put their information in your newsletter. Then everybody benefits by doing this joint venture. They get new clients, you get new clients. You can expand your business. You can keep growing your list in giving people things of value and reasons to open up your newsletter when they get it. So all the way around, it’s win-win-win for everybody. You could do that over and over again and a lot of people just overlook that opportunity.
Jassen: Okay. This is something you can do with a fair amount of frequency, right?
James Orr: Sure. You could take four guys a month that you actually you go into joint ventures with and then in your newsletter, you have four spots for those guys to be in there. If it’s the whole back page and they get a quarter of the back page each and it’s just a coupon. So you absolutely could do this with a lot of frequency. In fact, you could outsource somebody else to go and contact your guys. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could go and outsource the process of someone else seeking out those contacts for you in doing joint ventures.