Jassen: Now let’s talk about some not so face-to-face methods for building your CPA business. Here you got seven ways to build your CPA business online but doing it without spending a fortune.

James: 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’s 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: 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: Content is going to be what generates people coming to your website. So you need to be 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: So let’s talk about the articles. You can do articles on your website. So you write new content 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. 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’s great. That is because that’s free traffic. That’s incredibly powerful.

James: 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: Right. 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 offer CPA accounting services for a very specific niche. Let’s say you wanted to focus on real estate agents. So you want to have 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 or more 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: 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: 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… 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: 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 niche.” Some other specialized report – for people to 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, proove that I’m right about this marketing of widgets and special reports and everything.

Jassen: Can I say something out there really quick?

James: Sure.

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

I think you should outsource it if you’re not willing to do it yourself. So getting back to the 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 you follow Craigslist rules 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 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: That’s it.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want more marketing tips on how to successfully market your CPA business? Check out The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book.