Do You Know How Much Money
Your Website is Making?

Conversion Tracking is the Key to Making Your
Marketing Dollars Pay Real Dividends

For most businesses tracking website conversions is easy.

Most retail businesses and many services can exploit tracking software like Google Analytics that can count every purchase as it occurs, so when calculating metrics like conversion rates and cost per conversion all you need to do is a little long division. Websites for CPAs, unfortunately, can’t track sales. Traffic tracking calculates sales by counting the number of visits to your “Thank You For Your Payment” page and totaling the online payments. The whole process is pretty much automatic. You can simply divide your total sales by your website expenditures and get instant feedback on your website’s ROI.

This doesn’t work with websites for CPAs. Tracking traffic is useless for calculating ROI unless the sale occurs over the web.

Selling professional services isn’t like selling retail goods. When websites for CPAs lure new clients the lead usually come in over the phone. There’s no way a website can track these types of hits so most high end professional services; doctors, lawyers, architects, etc.; need to find other solutions for calculating ROI.

I’m not saying that there’s no reason to track the traffic on these websites. Analyzing traffic patterns on your website can help you glean a lot of important information about who your visitors are, what they want, and where they’re from, but that’s a post for another day. For purposes of figuring out your conversion costs even the best websites for CPAs can’t provide accurate tracking information in regards to conversions.

The only way accounting firms and other professionals have to calculate their ROI on their websites and other marketing campaigns is to do things the old-fashioned way. Back in the old days we called it “conversion tracking”.

On it’s surface conversion tracking looks easy, but it’s actually very difficult to implement because it usually means breaking bad habits and replacing them with good ones.

I don’t need to tell you that breaking bad habits is hard. Make it clear to your staff that you expect them to to take the new procedures seriously.

Conversion tracking takes place during the sign up phase.

When you first fill out the client’s contact sheet you need to ask, flat out, where the client heard about you and why he decided to call. Add this information directly to the client contact file and record it separately in a notebook specifically for that purpose. Once you have this information determining an websites for CPAs ROI is easy.

Your staff is going to balk. Asking these questions can be awkward and it can be hard to impress on employees the importance of proper conversion tracking. Be patient, but be firm. There can be no mistake that this is now an important part of their jobs.

The vast majority of your clients won’t hesitate to answer these questions, and most of the ones that don’t will have honestly forgotten who or what referred you. A few gentle probes will usually shake something loose.

“Were you referred by a friend? A co-worker? Did you find me on the web?”

This technique has a huge advantage over the automated techniques enjoyed by online retailers. Over time the information you gather is much more useful. By taking advantage of Conversion Tracking you not only determine the effectiveness of websites for CPAs, you can determine the conversion metrics of all your marketing campaigns.

Frequently, the first impression potential clients will form of accounting firms is their online presence. This is an excellent chance to develop solid CPA websites that are visually appealing to visitors. It is also a chance to offer information and details about accounting services the practice offers, and an opportunity to convert visitors into clients. A solid way to do this is to add a blog. Adding a blog can be very beneficial.

Blogging is very important in the modern online world. It allows businesses to showcase their expertise in their fields, and it allows individuals to share their ideas. Creating blogs on CPA websites is a great way to introduce the firm to potential clients, and present the practice as approachable to its current clients. It also establishes subject matter expertise in the field of accounting.

There are several strategies to consider while creating and maintaining professional blogs on CPA websites.

When creating a blog on a firm’s website, the firm is creating content as its own publisher. While it is important to post to an accounting blog often to keep the blog fresh, it is also important to make sure the posts all have something valuable to say first so that readers will not lose interest; a blog is not a place to just sell accounting services. Accountant website blogs should be clear, concise and contain good grammar, while sharing accounting expertise with readers.

The field of accounting is relevant to anyone who pays taxes, so firms should try to set themselves apart from the competition. Accounting blogs should have current information on tax laws and tax filing tips so that readers may educate themselves. When blogs offer something of value, readers will want to come back. A CPA blog should also list what services the firm provides, and offer to provide the answers to any questions readers may have. Creating interactivity on blogs is important. It establishes community and a loyal base of readers.

Accounting practices need to share their blogs with others in their professional networks and in their fields. It is important that they promote their blogs on their CPA websites and print the names on their business cards. The more popular CPA blogs become, the more search engine authority they earn. This drives traffic to the blogs and brings more leads.

A critical part of keeping successful CPA blogs is that the authors should keep current with what interests readers. An excellent strategy is to periodically conduct a survey that asks blog readers what their concerns are. The survey should offer a few topics that might interest readers, and one of the responses should be left open-ended so that readers can suggest something original.

Blogging is a tremendous opportunity to boost search engine rankings for modern CPA websites. Every post that is created is a new opportunity for search engine listing. Writing CPA blogs that draw regular readers is the key. This benefits accounting firms by putting their brands in front of leads while selling their services to their current customers, and presenting the search engines good content to raise their search engine presence.

When looking at accounting website templates for the first time it’s easy to get distracted. Many providers will offer you what they think you want to see rather than what your firm really needs. To that end many accounting website template providers will neglect a websites long term marketing appeal and sell an illusion of quick ‘n dirty prospect conversion.

There are a lot of reasons for this. First of all these websites are cheaper to build. Long term marketing requires a number of specialized tools and features that add to an accounting website template’s development costs. Perhaps more important, however, is that promises of short term conversions offer a significant appeal to customers new to the internet.

Unfortunately anyone familiar with internet marketing knows that this is a false promise. Very few of your first time visitors are going to be looking for an accountant. The vast majority of the people visiting your site are looking for information. It won’t matter how flashy your site is or how expertly written your sales copy is if you don’t offer a visitor the information they want the overwhelming majority of your visitors are going to leave without giving your site, your brand, or you a second glance.

There are a lot of reasons not to push too hard for a first visit sale. Dedicated buyers are going to buy whether you push them or not.

Unfortunately the reality is that not many of your visitors are going to be dedicated buyers. Maybe our visitor already has an accountant she likes. Maybe she’s still able to use the short tax forms. This doesn’t mean she’s not a good prospect!

According to market research the average life expectancy of a client/accountant relationship is 6 years. That means statistically speaking just about everyone visiting your site is a long term prospect. Maybe her accountant is at the end of his practice. Maybe he’ll get married and move. Or take a job with a large firm. Any number of things could happen. Even poor folks could need you someday. Income changes. People get married. One day they could start their own business or even just buy property. I’ll never forget the panic I felt the first time I laid eyes on a 1040 long form and knew I needed to fill it out.

The real key to using a website to grow your firm is providing not only the information the visitor wants, but also offering such an overwhelming quantity of high quality content that the visitor will come back again and again. What we’re offering them isn’t just a service page and a contact sheet. We’re offering them a library of financial information. Each visit exposes your brand to them again and again. Long term marketing isn’t about making a sale, it’s about positioning yourself as the natural solution to turn to when the prospect is ready to buy. Down the road it’s a pretty safe bet that everyone will need an accountant, and if your website has been engaging and informing a prospect for months or years when that time comes the odds are you won’t even need to make a sale. The prospect will call you pretty much ready to buy.

So… How can you identify accounting website templates with a long term marketing strategy?

It’s fairly simple really. Look for content.

Financial guides and free-reports are great soft sell tools and are very effective at attracting return traffic. They also offer a great side benefit in that they can help you cross-sell your off season services to your existing clients. Use these articles to showcase ways you can help your clients save money, and position you as the expert that can help you do it. You want your visitors to have easy access to them. Divide them up into categories (Business Owners, Home Owners, Self Employed, etc) and make them searchable to make it easy for visitors to find information of interest to them.

Other great features for luring repeat visits are interactive financial calculators, tax due date pages, downloadable tax forms and publications, and most importantly a high quality email newsletter.

Aggressive old-school marketers will advise you to block this content. They’ll tell you to use it to “trap” email addresses for direct marketing. DON’T DO THIS. As soon as you start demanding contact information you’ll alienate your best prospects. Savvy visitors will know full well that if you won’t give them what they want one of your competitors will.

When looking at accounting website templates keep long term marketing in mind. Look for these features in addition to the standard short term marketing features; services pages, contact forms, driving directions, etc; pretty much all providers offer. Long term marketing will not only bring in more conversions over time, it will also bring in better ones.

As a successful CPA starting your organization from scratch is fun and exciting but to get started you need to ensure your business can attract new clientele. At minimum you want adequate clients to maintain your organization through the busy tax season. Then after the tax season passes by, you’ll want to develop your business even more so that it can sustain itself through the next season as well.

Providing this level of service leaves little time to market your business into a steady and continuous revenue stream. You need to ensure your success in the long term. To do this, you must learn how to successfully market your business.

“Interrupt”, or “outbound”, marketing techniques are expensive and they do not work. They are usually only 3% effective at best. A much better strategy is to shift the allocation of your marketing budget towards inbound marketing techniques. Your only cost is the expense of labor it takes to create them. Inbound marketing will give you more time to do what you do best, which is accounting. It will also free up more of your budget so you can invest in other parts your business.

To successfully use inbound marketing, you must have a solid strategy. The best strategy is to carefully blend the following techniques:

Pay per Click Advertising

Get yourself a Google Adwords account. The fastest and easiest way to get a good listing in Google is to buy one. It may seem a little expensive at first, but you’ll find it will start paying for itself in no more than a few months.

If you’re a CPA Site Solutions customer call your design representative about setting up Adwords for your website.

Creating a Blog

Make yourself known as a thought leader by starting an accountant website blog. This is an excellent way to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in the field of accounting. Show off a little, but don’t be too pretentious. A blog is a great place to show your prospects how much you know about the field of accounting

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Increase your rankings with search engines and domain authority by optimizing your website. This will increase the visibility of your site online. Be sure that your content is optimized for the keywords under which you would like to rank on search engine results pages.

Social Media: Expand Your Firm’s Network

Use social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to establish and engage a community around your business. In this way, people can see the faces behind the firm. It also helps you establish trust. Links from social media sites rank highly with search engines. This can help with search engine rankings for your website.

One added benefit of using Facebook is its feature-rich marketing toolset. Not only does it contain a robust advertising engine that helps you fine-tune your target audience, but you can also offer exclusive specials to your Facebook users. Promotions such as these can take off on their own. They require very little work.

Video Distribution

Producing and distributing great website videos are an excellent way to educate and in some cases, entertain your community. Use videos to show your prospects how to prep their documents for tax season, or create a client testimonial where your firm helped a client maximize their return. Videos are favored by search engines. They help boost the authority of your domain.

Article Distribution Sites

Blogging offers many benefits, and article distribution opens up a whole new channel via the web. This not only helps your rankings with search engines, but it brings interested leads to effective websites for accountants.

Inbound marketing kinda fun and you’ll soon discover that a successful inbound marketing campaign is far easier to create than a traditional outbound marketing campaign. It is also far less costly when compared with outbound and interrupt marketing campaigns. Perhaps most importantly, inbound marketing campaign delivers uniform, long-term results.

Although the economic climate may be tight, this is actually a great time to build your firm.

The recession affects everyone. Still, those worries are paired with opportunity. Make arrangements to connect with your business customers, new leads, and clients that are influential and offer them some extra, highly personalized services. This can result in not just developing your customer base, but it can also help you increase your client base.

Your best clients will always be by referral, and when there are fewer clients to go around it’s a good idea to try to shift your focus from getting the most clients to getting the best clients. Providing exceptional personal service is the best way to do this. For a relatively small investment in time you’ll soon find your clients are no longer customers but have become fans, and they will eagerly refer you to their friends and associates.

Before the busy tax season, a great way to get started with your clients is to plan 4th quarter tax planning sessions. Most professionally designed CPA websites have calendar functions that can help with appointment setting. The uncertainty of the economy creates an opportunity to explain to your clients that their lives are dependent on impact planning. It has a direct impact on their future.

An important metric for the impact of successful tax planning is money. However, boosting the confidence of your client and giving them some hope is the real value. This provides a real competitive advantage for your business. Your leadership gives your clients confidence and a sense of hope. This will make them more dependent on your firm. It will also help them manage day to day stress. Reducing stress can of course improve your clients’ lives.

Tax planning effectively isn’t just about minimizing the amount of taxes a client needs to pay over a period of time. It also has to do with investing, managing cash flow, and in some cases, planning an estate. You want to bring your clients lives back to order. This is the true value of effective tax planning. The natural result is managing fear, reducing negativity and alleviating stress. This can significantly improve the quality of your clients’ lives.

Once you have properly executed a planning session, it can make a big difference in terms of referrals. Your clients will speak of their experience to their family, co-workers, and friends. It is a great way to set your CPA practice apart from the competition, increase your client base, gain referrals and for existing clients, expand your service engagements.

At the planning session, you should:

1. Listen to and validate the concerns about the current economy. You don’t want to sound too optimistic or you will not seem realistic. Your client is not thinking optimistically.
2. Relate the client’s concerns to their situation in particular. Everyone is affected differently by recession, so speaking generally will not be as effective as if you connect someone’s personal concerns about the economy to their situation.
3. You must be realistic. Everyone needs to file taxes, it is inevitable. This shifts the client’s focus to their lives instead of the act of filing taxes.
4. Effective tax planning can bring a sense of hope. You need to present strong guidance. You can create a CPA website reference library of topics on which you can coach, which will help you improve your clients’ lives by giving them a sense of direction.

Here’s how to combine all of these points:

Keep in mind that everyone is feeling stress and anxiety about the economy, and the reality is that it will likely become worse before it improves. For clients with kids, this is especially hard. The responsibilities of parenthood are frightening enough even in the best of times. To help your clients adjust do more than just file a return, help them out by doing some strategic financial planning with them. Show them that no matter what the future brings they’ll be able to adapt effectively.

It is important to remember that recessions bring anxiety, stress, and uncertainty. In order to make informed decisions, you must provide strong leadership for your clients. It isn’t just about filing a tax return.

Arranging tax and fiscal planning with influential customers is the most effortless and cost effective method of increasing your firm’s profile within your local community. Your customers will speak of you, telling others how your business spent the extra time with them helping them manage their lives and their finances, not just filing their tax return.

OK, maybe this isn’t the most original post I’ve ever done.

If you Google the keywords “Charlie Sheen Marketing” you’ll see at least a dozen articles with titles like “Charlie Sheen: Crackpot or Marketing Genius”. Now personally I don’t see why he can’t be both. Madness and genius has never been an “either or” proposition and I’ve certainly seen plenty of evidence to support both contentions. Of course exploring narcissistic personality disorders probably won’t do much to help you build your practice, but whether with intent or just by dumb luck he’s demonstrated some highly effective marketing techniques that even us mere mortals should be taking advantage of.

CPA firms are no different from other businesses in that they need to bring in new clients as well as retain old ones. To accomplish that, your optimal weapon is an useful, pleasing website that clients find helpful over and over.

Good inbound marketing for CPA websites is dignified but never boring. If you’re providing valuable content to your clients with online articles and targeted emails, you will attract clients. And you will keep them because they appreciate your responsible guidance.

Good accounting websites consistently report on the latest developments in the profession. Show that you’re looking towards the future. Or as Charlie Sheen says, “I’m more interested in what I can do next than what I did last.”

Don’t be hesitant about sharing tips that can save tax money and expenses. Other firms will envy your confidence.

Keep abreast of the latest tips to aid your clients, and load them onto your website. Along with your valuable information should be an easy financial calculating tool for the client to see how much money can be saved by using the suggestion he or she just read.

To be dignified is not to be cowardly, but to show your strength as a smart defender of your client. Great accounting websites project loyalty to clients, and confidence in yourself–”you’re either in my corner, or you’re with the trolls” says Charlie, but if you turn this around a little it can actually work for you. Show your clients you’re in their corner and they’ll respond with loyalty and respect.

Effective accounting websites should be personable and very open to communication. Want to encourage contact and trust? List contact information for all your professional staff on your website.

Prospective clients are taking a risk when they meet with a new accountant. You can lesson that risk and welcome them by offering free initial consults. That signals to the client that you’ve got their back.

Having blogs on accounting websites adds friendliness and builds a community of clients and professionals who all share the same concerns and goals.

Follow these tips and you’ll be amazed. An online inbound marketing campaign is more powerful and more economical than traditional advertising.You’ll build credibility and loyalty by drawing people interested in financial services to you, instead of shooting ads blindly to the masses.

Often there is backlash against the offensive marketing “hard-sell.” But inbound marketing, involving communication only with individuals who locate your accountant website due to their own drive, takes only a gentle assurance that the person has identified the most expert accountants in town, who rightly may proclaim like Charlie, “I try to be known more for my work than for anything else.”

Let’s you and I have a discussion about improving your website’s internet visibility right from the planning and design stage.

You can have the best CPA web design on the entire planet and in the end it could still wind up a total flop. In order for your site to succeed commercially the right people need to be able to find your site at the right time, and the best way to do this is to get a good position in Google.

Choose Good Page Titles

Meta tags are a crucial part of your CPA website design, and the single most important meta tag is called a “page title”.

Don’t try to take over the internet with unreasonably long title tags. You can make a title tag as long as you want but after 70 characters or so the search engines are going to ignore them.

As a CPA firm you’re going to want your title tag to include your market and some primary keyword. You’ll want it to look something like this: “YourTown, ST Accounting: Practice Name”

You’ll notice that in this example we used “ST” as the abbreviation for your state. When writing page titles keep in mind that very few searchers actually write out the name of their state, so as a rule it’s best to optimize your page to the abbreviation.

Title tags do appear in the margin of most browsers, and as a result many web noobs want their firm name to figure prominently in their page title. This is almost always a huge mistake. Titles are a primary element of a pages relevance to a specific search term so unless your firm has a recognizable brand like “Netflix” or “Kelly Clarkson” it’s not likely to actually be used as a search term by people looking for your service. Also, your firm name is probably not a terribly competitive phrase. Odds are you’ll eventually rank well enough in it without even trying. Keywords like “accountant” and “CPA” are highly competitive, as is the name of most towns. You’re going to have to work hard to get listed for these keywords so use your title tags to get a leg up on them.

Don’t Neglect Your Description Tags

The “Page Description” is also a meta tag, and it’s rather like the red-headed stepchild to the “Page Title”. Google doesn’t use it to rank sites anymore so a lot of CPA website designs ignore it, and this is a mistake because Gooogle actually displays this tag as part of it’s search results. This makes a good page description an important factor in converting an impression into a click-through. Keep your description tag below 150 characters or Google won’t display the whole thing or may not even use it at all.

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free product that allows you to view the traffic that occurs on your website. Google Analytics also has the ability to show you what keyword phrases people used to find pages of your site. This product has so many advantages that I would make it mandatory for you to have if you are looking to improve the position or ranking of your site in the search engines. All you need to do to make it work is add a strip of code to the bottom of each page.

Google Analytics offers a lot of market research factors that most site owners never use, but as an accountant you’ll very likely see some value in it. For example, you can use IP addresses to get a pretty good idea what nearby towns your visitors are coming from. This can help you determine where your marketing dollars are returning value, and where you might be wasting money. For more information on Google Analytics and what it can do for you, just type “google analytics” in a Google search.

Provide High Quality Content

Meta tags in and of themselves used to be enough to get a CPA website good rankings, but scores of meta driven sites began to crop up with truly terrible content. This resulted in pages of spammy irrelevant content appearing at the top of search pages and Google quickly changed their algorithm. The search engine robots have become very sophisticated and can easily compare a pages tags to it’s visible text and make sure they match.

Google is hip to all the dirty tricks that spammers used to rely on like cramming the page with keywords, using tiny text, writing hidden text on the same colored background, etc, so don’t even waste your time trying to be clever. You need to take the time to write some good, high quality content that will demonstrate to Google that the page is truly relevant to the title by using your title tag keywords in the text. Don’t overdue it. The best way to optimize the page is to NOT worry too much about optimize the page. Shoot for about a 1% keyword density, so if your page is 500 words try to use each keyword in your title about 5 times.

The search engines won’t just count your keywords. They also consider the placement of your keywords on the page. If they see keywords in headers they tend to assume they are more relevant. The same is true of keywords found in opening paragraphs or in the article summary at the very end of the page. They look at keywords in highlighted fonts like boldface and italics. They even consider the relevance of other pages on the site that link to the one they’re ranking.

Finish The Journey You Started When You Designed Your Website

Design isn’t the end of your journey, it’s the beginning. It doesn’t make any difference how search engine friendly your practice’s accounting website design is you’re going to have a country mile or two to walk if you really want a superior search position in today’s market.

You’ll need to do some “off-site” SEO by bringing in as many “backlinks” as you can, and you’ll need to get a good position on Google Places by claiming your business and getting your clients and friends to write your business numerous good reviews.

All we’ve done today is put you on the right road. If you pay attention to these easy CPA website design principles during the planning and design phase of building your site you’ll be reasonably positioned to stand out as a leader in today’s exceedingly competitive marketplace.

CPAs may all share the same profession, but their function can widely vary – from focusing on tax preparation only, to specializing in QuickBooks support to SMEs, to offering audit support.

But no matter their specialty, one undeniable fact is true in every case: just as with any business that offers goods and services, professional accountants must have clients. It doesn’t matter how competent or client-centered a CPA is – without an adequate number of new clients to provide revenue and keep the doors open, his business will cease to be.

Therefore, one of the first and most important question any accountant can ask is, How do I get my clients?

It may sound prosaic, but it’s true: having really great accountant websites are the key to any successful accounting business.

These days, you have to have an online presence, or your marketing efforts will fall flat.

This won’t change in the future, either. With thousands of students studying accounting, coupled with one of the most challenging of economies, finding clients is becoming a very competitive endeavor. Having a website will remain critical.

Here are 10 tips for how to use accounting websites to find accounting clients:

1. Make sure your website looks professional. Creating a website is no longer a rarefied craft. Plenty of options exist for you to not only get a web address, but also pick a professional design that’s targeted exclusively to the clients you want to attract.

2. Don’t try to do it yourself – use a web designer. While your strength is with numbers, a professional web designer knows how to make your site look great and run smoothly.

The trick is to not just attract visitors to your site, but also keep them once they arrive. To that end, your site should be both lovely to look at and chock full of helpful info.

3. Don’t overlook the importance of social media sites for getting the word out. The simple act – which takes all of half an hour – of creating profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is enough to gain exposure.

Facebook is the most important of these. To get started on this popular social sharing platform, simply create a personal profile and then create a “fan” page for your business. Get your friends to “like” your page, and soon their friends and their friends’ friends will be seeing your business’s name and a link to it. Then, use Facebook (and the others) to keep your clients informed about tax season and other financial matters.

4. Links are vital to generating traffic – so, on your website, be sure to post links to your social media pages. If someone visits your site and likes what they see, this will be an easy way for them to help you spread the word. A “like me on Facebook” or “follow me on Twitter” link will expose you to even more potential clients.

5. Post links to the websites of your notable clients. When folks see your client list, and maybe even click through to your clients’ websites, it acts as that all-important “social proof” that helps you appear trustworthy.

6. Useful websites for generating leads are online merchant sites such as eBay and Craigslist. These, and other similar sites, have extremely high traffic rates and are designed with classified sections that advertise services. You typically won’t be charged to advertise your firm; advertising with these sites will expand your reach to well outside your local client base.

7. Traditional advertising on newspaper websites can generate significant traffic to your homepage and physical office. Take a look at your local papers. You might be able to also get in their online edition, where you could either be listed in their “marketplace” or be featured in a banner ad. In addition, seek out papers and local publications in surrounding towns that aren’t too far for a new client to travel from.

8. Hike it up a notch; look for websites that advertise specifically for accountants. There are lots of websites like Accountant Finder that list accountants for a small fee, making it that much easier for leads to find you.

9. Bid system and lead generating websites such as adknowledge.com are plentiful online. These services, when used properly, can get you in contact with the clients you want and who need what you have to offer.

Do your homework here and ensure that you investigate the site before you join it. Some have fees involved and some are fly-by-night operations. If you want quality clients, use a quality lead generation site.

10. Finally, seek out and listen to experts in your field and take the time to learn from their mistakes and successes. Using Internet resources such as Websites 4 Accountants is a great way to learn new tricks and tips that can greatly improve your lead generation, which will then increase your sales.

Obtaining clients for your accounting business can be a challenge. But when you utilize a high-quality accounting website as your start point, your marketing efforts can be very successful – and more than worth the hard work.

If you’re trying to grow your CPA firm these days, you need to go online. The business world is now wide open, and you could find yourself bringing in leads from around the planet. However, once you’ve put yourself out there on the world wide web, are you losing potential customers by failing to communicate quickly enough?

Just having good CPA website isn’t in and of itself enough. You need to know how to use it effectively.

Financial professionals run into 5 dangers when first getting into the web space. Crafting a solid online presence requires a number of different tactics: social networking (like Twitter and Facebook), drawing attention to your site via article marketing and other tactics.

But what if you haven’t planned ahead for the increase in communication? But what if you aren’t sure how to find the blog comments and respond to them?

Take the following paragraphs into account as you craft a plan to meet the needs of your customers and deliver outstanding results as you expand into cyberspace.

Got a Comment on Your Blog? You MUST Respond!

Making a blog is an excellent way to attract a customer base and keep the world informed about where your business is heading. It also helps keep your website dynamic and interesting. But don’t just “set it and forget it.” If someone gives you feedback in the form of a blog comment, you have to comment on that comment. It’s just plain polite to respond to people who have made the effort to read your work. When you do, you show your professionalism, and you also keep any negative situation from getting out of control.

If you take the time to respond to each comment, you’ll find your blog receiving greater and greater attention. By the same token, if you ignore your commenters, others who check out your posts won’t be encouraged to leave a response.

Respond in Good Time to Emails

This one’s a big one: if you’re leaving email unanswered for weeks at a time – or even worse, not answering them at all – your customers are not going to be your customers very long. The best course of action is to set up your email client with an auto-response so that your clients know the email has reached you. After that, it’s best to reply as quickly as you can in person, even if it is just an “I will look into that” response in the interim.

Keep Track of Your Forums

Forums are notoriously difficult to make popular, so why would you leave questions unanswered and comments ignored? If you decide to start a forum, it’s absolutely critical that you monitor it regularly (check in every hour or so) and respond to all worthy posts – especially if they’re negative. And it goes without saying that all spam and otherwise inappropriate posts should be promptly removed.

Take Twitter Seriously

The age of Twitter is here. Even if you can’t stand this social networking microblogging phenomenon, your clients might be deeply involved in it. Folks are now using Twitter as a way to reach companies – and, alarmingly, lodge complaints against them. (They also say nice things, too.) Assume that folks ARE reading these comments and make sure you respond to them. It’s certainly important for the person who leaves the message – but it’s even more crucial for anyone “watching” your conversation to see that you haven’t ignored your naysayers and supporters. Respond to negative and positive tweets alike: ask the user to contact your company for a resolution, or thank them for their positive comment. This will engage them in a medium with which they are comfortable and may even get some exposure to your website and firm from your clients friends.

Being actively involved with your customers in this way can be the difference between success and failure in a competitive market.

Take Internet Messages As Seriously As Old-fashioned Letters

The object of both types of communication are the same, after all. But we can’t deny it: almost no one sends letters today. Email has taken their place – and whereas email is used casually in our social lives, in business, it should be treated with as much care as one treats a letter.

If you decide to get online – and I definitely suggest you do – please don’t make the same mistake made by others. Getting a quality CPA website up and running and then going back to business as usual is not going to work.

A well considered CPA website design can successfully bring in potential clients using landing pages that contain these 5 key factors. This article gives you information about what techniques CPA websites ought to employ when establishing a knockout lead capture page.

Accounting & tax prep businesses with a terrific CPA website design will find it is simpler to entice future clients when they utilize a squeeze page or landing page. Studies have shown that this is an effective and proven method of acquiring leads. There are a number of ways you can use to create landing pages if you don’t have time to do it yourself such as employ a copywriter to write for you or utilise a landing page generator like Instant Splash. A lead capture page is essential in obtaining a site visitor’s contact information and is essential for any business operating online today. But any old landing page won’t do. The lead capture page must be formatted in such a way as to capture your visitor’s attention and get them to enter their contact details. With that in mind, here are the five key elements of a killer lead capture page for accounting firms with websites.

1. Headline

Nothing grabs a reader’s attention like a great headline. Write a good headline and you’ll see results right away. Great headlines are usually short. They don’t need to sell anything, they just need to be compelling enough to get a prospect’s attention–fast. If you don’t, chances are your prospect will move on to another CPA’s website.

2. Use Subheadings to Make a Point

Subheads are placed just below the headline. Whereas headlines are short, subheadings provide more detail and are a little longer.

Subheads also break up the sales copy and make it easier for your readers to digest the information that’s presented. There are a couple of ways to use them. For example you can use them as an opportunity to introduce a graphic or a screenshot of your product. It doesn’t really matter how you use them, just that you do use them.

3. List the Benefits

Now that you’ve captured a visitor’s attention, you need to discuss the benefits of what you are offering. Potential clients don’t necessarily want to know why you think your service is great, they’re more interested in knowing how they can benefit from it. That’s just human nature. One way to do this is to give them a sneak peek of a sample newsletter if that’s what they are signing up for. Words like “Discover why… or “Learn the secret to… followed by a short bullet list are highly effective at capturing a potential lead’s interest.

4. Use an Action Button

The call to action is one of the most overlooked elements of a lead capture page. By asking prospects to click on a link or sign up for a newsletter, you’re already ahead of the competition. You don’t want to spend time persuading reader’s about the benefits of your product and forget to ask them to what to next. The most effective CPA websites use a call to action that is short and action oriented, a concise sentence for example, or an action button or link.

5. Opt in Email Forms

The last step is to make sure you provide a clearly visible form for the potential lead (aka site visitor) to fill out. The most effective method is to simply solicit an email address using a simple contact form. Placing a visual element on all sides of the contact request form might increase your conversion rate, that is the number of site visitors who leave their contact details. There’s no absolute proof of that actually happening so it’s up to you to decide if you want to do it or not, but if you’ve taken these ideas to heart and incorporated most of the all-important components, you’ll have yourself a knockout squeeze page and be well on your way to making your accounting & tax prep a successful company both online and off.