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.
Jassen: You had talked earlier about – when I mentioned not having your special report or what not – you mentioned outsourcing. So could you discuss some ways that a CPA could outsource some of the marketing duties of their business?
James Orr: Sure. I would love to because I’m a huge advocate of outsourcing. I will outsource as much as I possibly can. I’ll talk about five different ways that I think that a CPA or an accountant can definitely outsource some or all of their marketing. The first one is – we talked before about the importance of articles. You need articles to post on your website. You need articles to share and have syndicated out there so that they’ll link back to you and you get direct traffic from them.
So one great thing to hire out an outsource right from the very beginning is hire someone else to write articles for you. You could go to a lot of these outsourcing websites like guru.com, elance.com, odesk.com. There’s a whole bunch of them out there. You could put up a project that says, “I want someone to write me 20 articles. I’m willing to pay $100 in order to have someone write this,” or whatever price you set on it. Then people will come in, they’ll bid. You can find people bidding it down or if you didn’t set your budget high enough, people will bid it up a little bit. Then they come in and they’ll write the articles for you. You go proof read them kind of tweak them a little bit if you need to and then you could publish them on your website. They give you permission as when you’re paying them to do it. It’s a work-for-hire and so you have the right to publish them with your name on it. You’re the contact with information in your resource box. That’s the first one I would recommend people outsource.
Another one outsource and I’ve done a lot of this is that you could hire someone that keep your particular marketing up in a lot of these classified ad websites. We talked before about different classified ad websites but if you’re posting up and offer for a free special report, you can hire someone to every three days to take down the old ad and put up the new ad with that special report and do that for you. It’s really inexpensive to hire someone to do this. In an hour every three days you can have someone post up four or five different ads easily. So if you’re paying somebody minimum wage to do that unlike one of these sites like guru.com or odesk.com or whatever else it is, you could hire someone for an hour every three days to do that job for you and just pay them to do that then just fire and forget, they’ll take care of it.
Jassen: Exactly, great strategy.
James Orr: I would definitely recommend doing that. You’re not worrying about it and you know it’s getting done and then you spot-check it every once in a while to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.
Jassen: Right.
James Orr: Number three, you can hire someone to coordinate placing your articles or your ads in other people’s online newsletters or e-zines. There’s lots of people out there with these groups of 100, 200, 500, 5,000 people in either particular niches or particular geographical areas and they are looking for great content to share with their group or they’re looking for someone to pay a nominal fee in order to have an ad show up in their newsletter, e-zine. Some of these guys are willing just to have $10 to cover the cost of their e-mail provider, their web posting accounts. They’re more than happy to have you have your ad in there as a sponsor for a very nominal fee that kind of get your name out there and offer your special report to those guys. So you could hire someone to go out there and coordinate all those relationships for you. Again I would use those same outsourcing websites in order to do that. You just expand out your network that way.
Jassen: I like it.
James Orr: Here’s number four. You could hire someone to contact the owners of other blogs and see if you could actually post your article or do a guest blog on their websites. You could then tap into all the people that are coming to their blog and reading their content. You can now get exposure to all of those guys. It’s the equivalent of going and guest speaking at someone else’s meet-up group. Wouldn’t it be great if you went to a meet-up group and there were 20, 30, 50, 100 people in the room and they heard you speak for 15 minutes about a particular topic that is of interest to them? Well, you could go and contact other blog owners and say, “Look, I realize it’s hard to write contents for your blog. It takes time and I’d be willing write one for you absolutely free, I won’t charge you anything. May I just ask if I could put my little resource box at the bottom when I’m done? I’d be happy to write an article specific for your audience about tax issues,” if that’s what they’re interested in. So go ahead and volunteer for that or better yet hire someone to contact those guys and do that for you. You could combine someone else writing the articles with that one and have the whole process automated where they made the contact then someone else who you really trust to write the articles can write them for you. You outsource both sides of that.
Then the last one, we were talking about this one the other day, Jassen. You can hire someone to focus on social media of your business. You don’t want to go and update Twitter and update Facebook and find friends that are in related industries, make contacts and do all that stuff. Sure, it’s kind of cheating a little bit because the idea behind social media really is making those personal connections and building those relationships. But if you want to hire someone else to do that for you, it definitely can be outsourced and there are lots of people that are outsourcing it. Do you really think that President Obama or Britney Spears are doing all of their own posts on Twitter and Facebook? No, of course not. No, not at all. Those guys are having someone else handle their social media. You could do the same thing.
Jassen: Okay. Those are some great tips. Thanks, James.
James Orr: You’re very welcome.
This was emailed to me this morning on the Australian Cattle Dog rescue group, and it’s pretty good. Just one of those reminders that, as humans, we make our lives complicated. All that complication is 100% artificial, and after all, “…life’s what you make it, let’s make it rock” (Miley Cyrus). Booyah.
-Jassen
If A Dog Were Your Teacher
These are some of the lessons you might learn…
When loved ones come home, always run to greet them
Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride
Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy
When it’s in your best interest… Practice obedience
Let others know when they’ve invaded your territory
Take naps and stretch before rising
Run, romp and play daily
Thrive on attention and let people touch you
Avoid biting, when a simple growl will do
On warm days stop to lie on your back on the grass
On hot days drink lots of water and lay under a shady tree
When you’re happy dance around and wag your entire body
No matter how often you’re scolded… Don’t buy into the guilt thing and pout,
run right back and make friends
Delight in the simple joy of a long walk
Eat with gusto and enthusiasm
Stop when you have had enough
Be loyal
Never pretend to be something you’re not
If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it
When someone is having a bad day, be silent…
Sit close by and nuzzle them gently.
~~unknown