Kathy O'Connell, CPA

When you want to attract new clients, don’t bother with LinkedIn. A CPA website is really what you need to build your client base.

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

The plain fact is, to run a healthy, highly professional business, you need this networking social media site.

Here are the top 5 benefits of LinkedIn for accountants:

1. Banish Isolation

One huge advantage of LinkedIn is the plethora of professional networking groups you can join. When you’re a sole proprietor, it can be a welcome relief to meet other CPAs and swap stories about the highs and lows of running a business.

You may not have a company break room, but you can still spend a part of each day around a virtual water cooler on LinkedIn.

2. Get the Inside Scoop

Joining some professional groups on LinkedIn has another purpose, too – they help you stay informed about the industry. The groups, which are both national and regional, help you stay up-to-date on the latest tax laws, best practices, and relevant conferences.

Barry MacQuarrie’s excellent series about LinkedIn for CPAs lists the 7 essential LinkedIn groups to join:

• Your company’s group
• AICPA
• Your state CPA society
• SocialCPAs
• Your practice group (that is, your niche)
• The International CPA Association
• Your competition

3. Diversify Your Connections

When you’re joining groups, don’t limit yourself to just the accounting groups. Join groups for service professionals, sole proprietors, and small businesses. Join regional networking groups. If you have a specialty, join groups in that niche – restaurants, elder care, or entertainment.

The more businesspeople you meet on LinkedIn, the more you learn, and the more resources you can turn to when you have a question or problem.

4. Recruit

Despite the shaky economy, hiring is always tough. Selecting the best individual to bring into your company is big decision – one that can have an enormous impact on your firm.

Maximize your chances for success by maintaining an active profile on LinkedIn. As opposed to Facebook and Twitter, this social media platform is geared only toward professional networking – which means it’s a prime location for folks looking for work.

When it’s time to hire, look first to LinkedIn, both for applicants and for colleagues who can refer good candidates.

5. Keep a Safety Net

You may be happy as a sole proprietor or firm partner now – but it’s always a good idea to have a safety net.

If, for some reason, you need to find a position at another company, an active profile on LinkedIn is a very nice asset. Having an updated profile, which is essentially your resume – combined with the groups you’ve joined and participate in – is an excellent starting point in your job search.

Link Your Website to Your Profile

LinkedIn probably won’t help you attract new clients. But to build a professional, sustainable practice, it’s world class.

To display the LinkedIn icon on your home page and link your CPA website to your profile, just give us a call at 1-800-896-4500, or email support@cpasitesolutions.com.

As always, you get some new designs to choose from for your CPA website this month - 8 modern looks.

You can change your design at any time at no charge – so take a look at your new choices and let us know if you’d like an update.

Design 449 Gold	Design 450 Gold
Design 451 Gold	Design 452 Gold
Design 453 Gold	Design 454 Gold
Design 455 Gold	Design 456 Gold

These designs are all Gold level. If you’re a Silver client and would like one of these looks for your site, consider an upgrade to Gold. When you upgrade, you can choose from all 300+ site styles.

All of the 8 new designs have slideshows – and all of them can be customized with pictures of your staff and your hometown for no additional fee. You just need to provide the photos!

Just Call Us

If you’d like to swap out your current style for one of these new designs – or any of the designs in our portfolio – just give us a call at 1-800-896-4500. Or you can email a Dedicated Webmaster at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Remember – change is good!

Brian O'Connell, President

It’s not easy running an accounting business. You need to manage a lot more than your clients’ books – from human resources to operations to IT.

Chief among these “extracurricular activities” is marketing. You really do need to pay attention to marketing. After all, if you don’t market your services, you won’t have many clients.

But marketing is a big field. There are lots of ways to promote your business, all of which take up plenty of your time. How do you manage them all when you also need to focus on client work?

The answer: Focus on your website, and just use the other marketing streams to pull prospects to your site.

Your CPA website should be your marketing hub, and all other forms of marketing – ads, referrals, direct mail, and so on – should be treated as spokes on the wheel.

It may seem like a small detail, but when you shift your thinking this way, you focus your time and energy and make the most of each marketing stream.

Which means more of what your marketing is all about: getting new clients.

5 Spokes of the Marketing Wheel

Your marketing wheel: your website is the hub, and the spokes are your additional marketing efforts.

Think of all your marketing efforts as a wheel. The wheel’s hub is your website, and it has 5 spokes, which represent the 5 main areas of marketing.

Social Media

It’s easy to get distracted by social media. But remember the end goal of marketing: to draw in new clients, not to make friends or post clever status updates.

Your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts should serve to funnel people back to your website, where the work of “conversion” happens (converting them from a prospect to a client).

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a popular topic these days. Experts say that delivering messages straight to the inbox is the best way to get someone’s attention.

But don’t forget that an email message doesn’t contain a signup form – you still need folks to go to your site and actually become a new client. So emails need to pull the reader back to your website.

The emailed newsletter that sends automatically from your CPA Site Solutions website links readers back to your site. Custom email messages should do the same. To review how to send a custom message, with links to your site, see this Help file.

SEO/SEM

Search listings are called the “new Yellow Pages.” Put simply, if you want people to find you online, you MUST place well with the search engines.

If you search for an accountant in your area on Google and Bing and your URL doesn’t show up on the first page, you might need SEO (search engine optimization) services. Check out our Local SEO package.

SEM services – pay-per-click ads – are included in our Platinum service. If you want to focus your advertising dollars on targeted ads for folks who are actively looking for your service, take a look at our SEM package to see if it’s right for you.

Offline Marketing Streams

Offline marketing options include:

• Direct mail
• Print advertisements
• Radio and TV advertisements

Each of these areas should include a mention of your website. You may pique people’s interest with a postcard in the mail or a 30-second ad on the radio… but to actually “make the sale,” you need to give them a website address so they can visit your pages and get comfortable with you.

Referrals

Another very important offline stream is word-of-mouth referrals. Again, if a client recommends you to a friend, they’ll give your web address – not a memorized phone number. (As long as they give your name, the prospect will be able to find you in a Google search.)

Your Website Is the Hub

Your website is the heart of your marketing – the place where the conversion actually happens.

Why is that?

Quite simply, for someone to convert from a prospect to a client, they must become familiar with who you are – as a person, and as a professional. It’s just part of our psychological makeup – the need to gain a certain amount of trust before entering into a transaction with another individual.

Your website should answer these questions:

• How professional are you?
• What do you look like?
• What specific services do you offer?
• Are you an expert in your field?

If people get satisfactory answers, they become comfortable enough to take the plunge and sign up with you. And THAT is the ultimate goal of all your marketing.

Coordinate – Save Time and Effort

Don’t spread yourself too thin among every kind of marketing campaign.

Establish your website as the foundation of all your marketing efforts – use other marketing tactics to pull prospects to your site – and then enjoy the boost in your client base.

A professional, fully loaded website from CPA Site Solutions is designed to do the heavy lifting of turning prospects into clients. To get a 60-day free trial, sign up today.

Brian O'Connell, President

Are your clients satisfied with you? You want to believe they are – but sometimes clients get frustrated with their accountants because of what seems a small thing:

They can’t get in touch with you.

Especially during busy season, this becomes a real problem. A client who has a simple question becomes increasingly annoyed when their calls go unanswered. You may have your nose to the grindstone, but, despite your best efforts, your clients may start looking for another CPA if they can’t get two minutes with you on the phone.

I want to show you how to leverage CPA websites to mitigate this problem.

Using all kinds of tools that come with your site, you can provide your clients with the high level of customer service they’re expecting. Which gets you satisfied clients.

When You’re Too Busy for the Phone

When you’re chest-deep in client work, you don’t want to take the time to answer the phone. It interrupts the flow and dramatically lowers your efficiency.

In the busy season, encourage your clients to use these methods to get their questions answered – and avoid the phone.

Contact Us Forms

All websites with CPA Site Solutions come with a “Contact Us” form that clients and prospects can fill out on their own time with their question and contact information. Each submission generates an email to your inbox.

This means your clients feel the relief of submitting their question, and you can answer them when it’s convenient for you.

Clients can schedule meetings with you right on your website.

Book Appointments Online

Half the time, clients call you just to schedule an appointment. Wouldn’t it be helpful if they could schedule those themselves?

Well, they can, with our “Book Appointments Online” feature. They see your calendar (with your busy times simply marked “busy”) and they fill out a simple form that requests an appointment for one of your free blocks.

FAQs

Sometimes clients have answers to standard questions and they don’t really need personalized service. That’s where your FAQs come in, which come free with all our websites.

Here are some examples of questions your FAQs answer:

• When should I refinance my home?

• How much should I expect to pay in closing costs?

• Is interest on educational loans tax deductible?

• What kind of records do I need to keep in my business?

Videos

A video is an excellent way to get information across. With the enormous popularity of YouTube, folks are increasingly comfortable with this format.

It’s not hard to make your own video! I recommend Screenr. With this free tool, you can record yourself answering clients’ most common questions. Not only does it satisfy their need for information, but it also puts them at ease to see and hear you talking. It’s almost like a little appointment in itself.

Keep Clients Happy with Our Help

We are more than happy to help you take advantage of any or all of these methods to stay in touch with clients – and keep them satisfied with you.

If you have any questions about these features, give us a call at 1-800-896-4500 or email us at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Remember – although it doesn’t take much to annoy your clients, it also doesn’t take much to make them happy again.

Does your site show a blank space where your tagline should be?

If you’ve spent any time online, you know that a website only has a few seconds to grab your attention. If you can’t immediately discern what a website does, you click away. This certainly holds true for CPA websites.

So, besides design, how do sites succeed in keeping their visitors on the page long enough to convert them into clients?

Through taglines.

A tagline is a memorable phrase that sums up your firm’s premise. An effective tagline gives visitors an immediate sense of who you are and why they should keep reading.

Because a great tagline grabs attention and encourages readers to explore your offer, it gives your site a major advantage – which means you win more clients.

What’s Your Unique Selling Proposition?

A Unique Selling Proposition – or USP – is what differentiates you from your competitors. It’s the reason folks choose you over someone else.

Your tagline should make your USP clear. A great example of this comes from FedEx: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” This brilliant line instantly conveys FedEx’s USP – that they will deliver your package the next day no matter what.

Play to Emotion

When constructing your tagline, remember that people respond best to slogans that stir emotions – particularly fear and greed. You might focus on how your firm gets the client more money (greed) – or how it prevents their business from failing (fear).

An example of a tagline that plays on fear is from Head & Shoulders: “Get ready for beautiful, flake free hair.” Even if the consumer didn’t have a fear of having dandruff before they read this tagline, once they do, their aversion to having flaky hair motivates them to buy the product.

Communicate the Benefits of Choosing You

Most important, your tagline needs to convince your prospects that they will gain real benefits from staying on your page. Here are some of the best taglines from CPAs in major cities – all of which convey the benefits of choosing them for your accounting needs:

“Helping Clients Achieve Financial Freedom” (San Francisco)

“Providing the Highest Level of Personalized Service” (San Francisco)

“Show Us a Business and We’ll Improve It!” (Los Angeles)

“Helping Clients Keep More of What They Earn!” (Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C.)

If any of these appeal to you, use them! You’re competing for clients regionally, not nationally. So unless you’re in the city where we found these, it’s absolutely fine to adopt one of these as your own.

Our Dedicated Webmasters Can Add a Tagline

If you have a tagline you’d like to use, good for you! Our Dedicated Webmasters are more than happy to place it on your site.

They can place it under your logo, or they can add it as a heading on the home page.

Here’s an example of a tagline on a client’s welcome page:

"Fighting for Your Dollars' Best Interest" uses emotion and benefits to lure in the reader.

Call us at 1-800-896-4500 if you have a tagline you’d like us to include on your site, or email support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Remember – you have just a few seconds to convince visitors to stay. Make the most of that precious time with a winning tagline. Your prize will be more clients!

Provider of CPA Websites Now Offers Professional Designs and Increased Functionality for Email Marketing Campaigns

Winooski, VT – November 11, 2010 – CPA Site Solutions, a provider of CPA websites, released a new Email Marketing System that automatically matches the design of outgoing email messages with the accountant’s website.

The new email marketing system is primarily used to automatically deliver a professional client newsletter to each of an accountant’s clients on a monthly basis.

“The new email template is user friendly and efficient, and the format is great,” comments Thomas Moghaddam, a CPA Site Solutions client. Moghaddam continues, “I would recommend this system to a colleague. No question about it.”

Brian O’Connell, President of CPA Site Solutions, explains the significance of the updates: “The beauty of the new system is that it helps accountants build their brand by providing a consistent message to their clients and prospective clients each month. It’s all done automatically and requires absolutely no time from the accountant.”

Email Marketing an Exploding Field

Today, marketers increasingly turn to email for their promotions and client communications. Spending on email marketing will reach $1.1 billion in 2010, according to a Jupiter Research forecast.

O’Connell says, “I’m not surprised that email marketing is growing fast. It just makes sense when you consider the high cost of postage and printing. In this economy we’re all looking for ways to acquire new clients without increasing expenses.”

James Polk, a CPA Site Solutions client, has found the automatic monthly newsletters to be beneficial. He explains, It couldn’t be easier to stay in contact with my clients. Every month after my newsletter goes out, I get calls from my clients complimenting or thanking me. I’m already doing extra consulting work for 4 of my clients as a direct result of the emailed articles CPA Site Solutions sends each month.”

About CPA Site Solutions

CPA Site Solutions (http://www.cpasitesolutions.com) provides websites for more than 4,000 CPA and Accounting firms. They offer personalized websites, a dedicated webmaster, a secure client portal, a client newsletter, secure email accounts, search engine optimization, and 109 additional website features designed specifically for Accountants.

This demo video gives an overview of CPA Site Solutions’s offerings:

Brian O'Connell, President

Busy season is around the corner. Are you looking to grow your client base this year?

If so, I have two words for you: CPA websites. Having a website for your accounting firm is the number one way you’re going to pull in new clients.

But before the busy season kicks in, make sure you get your site looking and working the way you want. Maybe you need to know how to import contacts into your Email Marketing System. Or you need some help with Search Engine Optimization. Or perhaps you’d like to try out a new design.

Now is the time to ask for our help with your website.

And we offer 6 ways to get that help.

1. Videos

Our website – cpasitesolutions.com – is loaded with helpful videos. Our tutorial videos show you how to perform various tasks, and you can find those in the Help section. Others are more of an overview of various features, like this one about the Workteam Collaboration Suite:

2. Help Section

We have a vast Help section with numerous articles that give you step-by-step instructions on how to tinker with everything on your site – with sections like Modifying Your Site and Interactive Tax Organizer.

To access the Help section, click on the link at the bottom of our home page – as pictured here:

The link to the Help Center is in the footer of most our pages.

3. Leave a Comment

If you leave a comment on one of our Help files or in our Blog, we answer you with an email within 24 hours.

4. Chat Us Up

We have 60 hours of live chat coverage every week – from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.

To get to our live chat option, click on the image in the right sidebar on our FAQs page or on About Us (as pictured below on the left). Once you click on the link, you get a pop-up window and a webmaster comes online. You type your question in the box on the bottom (circled in the image on the right below).

The link for our live chat option is in our right-hand sidebar.

Once a webmaster comes online, you just type your question into the box at the bottom.

5. Email

Many of our clients ask questions through email, and that works very well. Just send your question to support@cpasitesolutions.com and a webmaster will reply. If you have a Dedicated Webmaster that you prefer to work with, just email him or her directly (e.g., Allison@cpasitesolutions.com or Rikk@cpasitesolutions.com).

Our goal is to answer all support requests within 24 hours – and it’s usually much quicker than that.

6. Just Make a Call

Our webmasters are available by phone all day Monday through Friday, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, at 1-800-896-4500.

This is probably the most popular method for getting help – and it works great. Just give us a call and let one of our friendly and knowledgeable webmasters work with you to get your site where you want it to be.

Get Help Now – Then Get Clients

To attract more clients, you need your primary marketing tool to be in tip-top shape.

Your service pages should be updated; you should be thrilled with your design; and you should understand how all your tools and features work.

We can help you get your site just where it needs to be, in time for the busy season. We’re here to help!

Brian O'Connell, President

If you could list the top 5 contributors to the health of your business, would you include email? I think most of us would think on a grander scale – areas like client relationships, the ability to attract and retain clients, or staff expertise.

But think how impossible it would be to achieve any of those “bigger” pieces without email. It’s pretty tough to build a business if you can’t communicate with your clients, prospects, partners, and staff.

So what do you do when there’s a problem?

Our CPA websites come with a robust email solution that’s easy to use and accessible from anywhere. And part of the solution is a Dedicated Webmaster, who’s there to help you with any challenges that come up.

What Happens When Your Email Goes Down?

When you’re a CPA Site Solutions client, if you have one of those nightmare situations where your email goes down, all you have to do to get help is call our office.

Our Dedicated Webmasters will get to work on the problem right away – so you can get back to your clients.

Technical Problems? We Take Care of Them

Maybe the best part of this level of support is the hours of frustration it saves you. After all, you’re an accountant – not a techie! Let us take care of the technical details while you focus on your core business.

Our webmasters diagnose and quickly repair server issues, DNS issues, or MS Outlook issues so your firm’s email always runs smoothly across all your computers – at the office, at home, and even on your smartphone.

Meet a Few of Our Webmasters…

Watch this video to see some of our Dedicated Webmasters in action. Allison hosts the video, and Jon and Erik are shown talking to clients. (You can spot Norm and Joe in the background, too.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxMz_GwWgX0

Put Us to Work for You

If you’re a client, don’t be shy about calling up when you need help with your email (or anything related to your website). Our number is 800-896-4500.

If you need a website, check out our offer. When you sign up, you get 60 days with no obligation – so you can evaluate our Webmasters and see if they deliver the service you need.

Brian O'Connell, President

Why do accountants buy CPA websites? So they can retain their current clients and attract new ones. Sounds simple, right?

But of course, a lot goes in to the retention and attraction process. And certain elements are more important than others.

Email marketing is one of the power players in your website package. In this era of advertisement saturation, the inbox is a sacred space. Getting targeted messages straight through to your clients’ and prospects’ email is highly effective from a marketing standpoint.

Of course, with every website from CPA Site Solutions, clients get an Email Marketing System that automatically sends out monthly newsletters and can be set to deliver custom messages.

I’m happy to say that the EMS just got even more effective.

Now, your emailed newsletter automatically displays your website’s colors and your company logo; you can also customize the look of your messages so they’re as professional as possible. We’ve also added a feature that allows you to pinpoint the exact time you want messages to send.

A more professional and targeted EMS means a stronger reputation, more client trust, and a better response to marketing messages. These are the way to sell your services and build more clients.

EMS Messages with a More Professional Look

Newsletter Messages

Here are the two ways your newsletter was improved:

1. Your messages now incorporate the colors of your website design by default.
2. Your messages automatically pull in your company’s logo.

Newsletter messages used to look like this:

This is the previous look of your newsletter messages.

Now check out your newsletter’s new design:

Here's the new look for all your newsletter messages. They can also be customized with different colors.

This new template – using your website’s colors and displaying your logo – takes effect on all monthly newsletter messages starting with the November 2010 issue.

And, if you’re looking for something a little different, you can customize both the background colors and the headline colors. Check out this Help file for step-by-step instructions on how to do that.

Custom Messages

You can customize the look of custom messages as well, so that they also display your website’s colors and logo. Read the Help file for details.

Controlling When EMS Messages Are Delivered

Newsletter Messages

Your newsletter messages automatically send on the 10th of each month.

However, if you’d rather have them send on a different day, you can now easily schedule that. You can even set the time of day you want the message to send.

Please refer to the Help file and scroll down to “Customizing the Newsletter’s Time of Delivery” for information on how to change the newsletter send date and time.

Custom Messages

How Do These Changes Get You More Clients?

Email marketing is an exploding field. Marketers are finding that email is the best medium to target their audience. After all, millions of people check their email at least once a day. (And your business clients surely check email many times a day.)

Prospects and clients are suspicious of unsolicited emails. Your new EMS helps combat this.

However, folks are suspicious about unsolicited email. It’s the age of spam – and if people open an email that doesn’t immediately grab their attention, they’re likely to throw it away.

The professional new design of your email messages helps assure them that the message is coming from a reputable source. They also see your logo right away and understand you’re their trusted financial advisor – not just a spammer.

Further, if you send your messages at the optimal times, you’re more likely to reach a receptive audience.

Think of it this way: when you get to work in the morning and find 30 new emails in your inbox, aren’t you likely to delete anything you don’t immediately need? On the other hand, once you’ve settled in to your day and put out any fires, then you can take a measured look at the emails coming in. There’s a better chance you’ll open and evaluate each message that comes through.

Bottom line – a more effective EMS does a better job of what it’s intended to do, which is to market your services and earn you clients.

Enjoy Your New EMS

These new changes are already in effect. The November 2010 newsletter has been sent to your EMS, so you can log in to the Portal and take a look at the new template anytime between now and November 10th.

And remember that you can change the date and time the newsletter sends, this month and going forward.

If you have any questions about these improvements to your service, please call a dedicated webmaster at 1-800-896-4500, or email us at support@cpasitesolutions.com.

Do you need a CPA website? Make the most of your site - consider buying one with a robust Email Marketing System. Sign up now and get a 2-month risk-free trial.