Your website can provide powerful marketing that helps your firm acquire new clients and develop new business relationships. Online video messages are currently one of the strongest ways to help convert ‘cold prospects’ into ‘warm potential clients.’

More than 14 billion videos are viewed online each month. Many businesses are increasingly turning to online video as an effective way to engage viewers and win more business.

Take advantage of this growing trend to showcase your business online with a high-quality, professionally-produced video at a price far below traditional video advertising.

Video Opens Several Doors for You:

• Build rapport with potential clients before the first call or meeting.
• Pre-sell your firm’s services.
• Establish your credibility and professionalism.
• Communicate the value of working with an accounting professional.
• Act today so that you can experience for yourself the power and intimacy of an online video message. Video allows you to build your firm while spending less time pre-selling your services in person.

Sample Video:

How it Works

It’s easy and surprisingly inexpensive to add a short professional video message to your site.

You get assistance with the creative process and a professional videographer is sent to your location at a arranged time and and date. The videographer guides you to ensure that your interview and business footage looks and sounds great.

The footage is submitted for your approval. After the shoot is complete you can view and make edits. It’s a remarkably simple, straightforward process resulting in a quality video message.

Insert your video onto your site. Once production is complete you get a copy of your video, which you can then insert it directly onto your website and submit to popular social networking websites.

For pricing information and to sign up for this exciting new service, please see our Video Page on our site.

This is the third part of a series. At this point you’ve got the mechanics down for making your video and uploading it to video sharing sites that have some “search juice”. That’s the easy part, the hard part is doing it again. And again. And again…

This requires some creativity on your part. Here are some practical suggestions that make this process much easier. If you want to succeed at this strategy you need to integrate it into your normal ongoing network marketing process.

Navigating using video on your firm's website.

Your videos can help your accounting firm three ways:

• Videos can help you establish your authority over the subject matter in question.
• Videos Can Help You Market Your Firm. Video is a great chance to connect with your customers and prospects alike on both a professional and a personal level.
• Videos can help you improve customer service and client retention.

Establish Your Authority
Video offers you a chance for you to establish yourself as an expert on tax preparation, tax planning, accounting, QuickBooks, etc.

Record all your presentations, to plebes and pros alike. You don’t have to give away the farm. A few informative snippets from a helpful seminar or college class is enough to establish you as an expert/leader in your field.

You can also establish authority with informative videos that explain some tricky tidbit of tax law or financial management. A lot of the knowledge that you have and take for granted is what people are looking to understand.

Many people may not understand the specifics of a financial statement. Providing them with information they can take home and use can help towards making you and your firm a solid resource.

Market yourself and your firm
Record all your public presentations. A few inspiring soundbites from a speech or sermon that you’ve given help to establish you as a prospect’s neighbor; a part of the same community. It’s a real opportunity to connect with like minded people.

Your hobbies and interests can pay off. Record yourself fishing or riding or even playing chess in the park (keep that last clip short, though, OK?). Some customers might even be willing to give you a video testimonial.

How about a tour of the office? Introduce me to some of your staff?

Show some videos of the annual office party, or the client trip you took to Atlantic City. Set slides to music. Have some fun with it!!!

Improve Your Customer Service
Create “How To” videos that will help clients overcome everyday problems at work. QuickBooks alone can keep you busy at this for months.

What kind of problems are your customers routinely having when integrating their accounting software into their business? Break it down step by step for them.

If a customer asks you a particularly astute question get ahead of the curve and commit the answer to video before another customer makes that mistake or calls to ask the same thing.

Tips

Lastly, here’s a few tips for publicizing and sharing your videos:

• Be Careful About Embedding Videos on your Site: Embedded videos look great, and they are a great sales tool, but don’t embed videos that are hosted on public video sharing sites. To the search engines these look like “reciprocal links” and without boring you with the tech I’ll just  say “reciprocal links are bad”. If you want to embed video on your site you’ll need to host it locally or on a remote server that isn’t a part of your SEO strategy.
• Try to make your videos topical. If you connect your topic to popularly searched subjects more people are likely to find and view/review your video.
• Reviews and comments are great! They make the page dynamic and search engines LOVE dynamic pages. Ask your friends, family, and clients to review and rate your videos.
• Keep your videos short and to the point. Avoid lengthy titles/credits.
• Swap “plugs” with other video bloggers. The search engines may be able to penalize us for swapping links with each other, but they can’t stop us from agreeing to say nice things about each other.
• Participate in the video communities you are uploading to. Leave reviews and comments on other people’s pages, and they’ll be more likely to check out yours.
• Post links to your videos from your social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Have your own experience regarding using video for your website that you would like to share? Send us a comment so we can include it in a future blog post.

This is part 2 of a series on using video with your accounting firm’s website. If you haven’t yet you will want to read the first post I wrote on creating video for your accounting firm.

There are literally scores of video sharing sites, and in a perfect world you would want to submit your video to all of them, but that’s going to be WAY too much work. Instead, just submit your video to a few of the more important ones.

These sites are ad driven, so as a rule the more pages they have, the more money they make. They are constantly stealing videos from one one another. Over time your video will just naturally be picked up by more and more sites.

Here are my 5 favorite video sharing sites (in order of importance). Set up accounts with as many of them as you think you can manage.

• youtube.com
• viddler.com
• revver.com
• livevideo.com
• dailymotion.com

This is a section of one of my YouTube profiles. I've circled the backlink. Search Engines love backlinks and each video you upload adds value to this link. Your Accounting Videos all point to this page, which in turn points to your website.

The first step is signing up for user accounts. When setting up your user account, spend a little time on your profile. Make sure you fill it out completely and include a unique and recognizable picture or avatar.

Most importantly, make sure that you enter your website address. All your videos and all of your comments will link back to this page. There is usually an SEO benefit to having your profile page link to your website.

Once your profile page is done it’s time to submit your video. Take your time while you are going through the submission process.

The title of the video is very important. Search engines will actually see this title so make sure you include a relevant keyword or two (or three). The submission form will usually let you list keywords. Searchers on the site use these tags so take the time to fill them out.

There will also be a short description field on the submission form. Some sites will automatically create links out of URLs in the description. Make sure when you enter your description you include a URL to your website and if possible throw in a choice keyword or two.

It's very important to include your URL in your video description. As you can see in the example above YouTube turned it into a backlink for CPA Site Solutions.

Provide as much information and be as thorough as you can. These pages will be up for a long time so it’s worth taking a little extra time to make sure it represents your accounting firm well.

Once your video is uploaded it’s time to drive some traffic to it. Include a link in your email signature. If you have accounts you can also use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to drive traffic to it.

This is a “lather rinse repeat” strategy. Once you’ve uploaded your video it’s time to get the next one started. The more videos you upload the greater the benefit and the more subscribers you are likely to accumulate.

Better yet, providing you choose your page titles effectively Google LOVES video. The more videos you upload the more search slots you are likely to steal from your competitors.

I know… this sounds like a nightmare. You had a hard time thinking of one good topic. How are you supposed to come up with two or three a month?

For the last installment I’ll try to help you out a little with that. We’ll talk a little about some specific topics (enough to keep you busy for a while) and we’ll help you find some easy ways to follow trends that will increase the chances of your videos being viewed.

Have a story of your own about using video? Send us a comment we would love to hear from you.

It is becoming increasingly common to use video to enhance CPA web sites. You can easily use this technique to increase your CPA Website Design Search Engine Presence and keep your clients informed about your services.

We’re going to start out by showing you how to make your video for your firm’s website.

This can get pricey if you do it wrong so let’s skip the high priced director, expensive cameras and actors. We don’t need to make a commercial here. We just need a video for your firm’s web site.

Get a Screen Capture Video Utility.  The trick to making this into a video is using a screen capture video utility. Camtasia works really well, but the price tag is pretty high.  I found an easy to use screen capture utility on download.com called Easy Screen Capture Video for 10 bucks.

Create Good Content. If you don’t have all the expensive trappings there is still one thing you DO need… good content. Give the viewer something for his trouble. Choose a topic that you know about that other people don’t. Choosing a subject is easy if you consider an obvious source, your clients.

You get questions all the time that serve no useful purpose other than to chew into your billable hours. How can I track my return? How can I change a vendor name in my QuickBooks? There are any number of these types of questions. Still not sure check out the pages of frequently asked questions that are included when you have an accounting website with CPA Site Solutions.

Show the Answer to Common Questions on Your Computer Screen. After you come up with a question, then answer it. Make it a question you can answer by showing me how on your computer. Now all you need to do to make a good and informative video is to use the screen capture utility to record yourself answering the question.

Work Slowly. It is more efficient if you work slowly. It is easier to try to edit chunks of screen time out of your video than it is to stretch them out, and if you move your mouse around too fast the screen capture utility may not track it properly.

Careful of Content Already on Your Computer. Be careful what’s showing on your desktop while you’re recording. You don’t want anyone seeing a social security number, credit card number, email address, password etc.

Write Your Script. It is often easier to write it while you’re doing the task. Think of your initial draft as a guideline as you will be tweaking your script constantly as you record.

Get a Decent Microphone. There are a lot of great microphones out there. Try to look for a Podcasting microphone as a normal mic might not give you the power output you need. You could also record from your webcam as some of them will have decent enough sound quality.

Voice Over Your Video. (Screen capture utilities won’t record sound). I can’t get too bogged down on the niceties of making videos (there are whole books on the topic), but I have three words for you: Windows Movie Maker. If you have a Windows operating system you likely already have this program installed on your computer. If you can’t figure it out turn the job over to any kid older than 12. It really is that easy. You can record your soundtrack right into Movie Maker. Everything you need to know is right here:

If you don’t have a windows operating system you’ll need to find some equivalent application. Apple computers come bundled with Apple iMovie.

In part 2 of this series we’ll take the next step to get video on your accounting firm’s web site. I’ll show you how to submit your new movie to video sharing web sites and talk more about how it can help your CPA website design.

Do you already have video on your website? Let us know how you use video and any tips you’ve learned along the way.