Christy Pinheiro EA

I hang out a lot at the TaxAlmanac message boards, which are a great online resource for tax pros. A recent discussion was about tax marketing newsletters-- the ones that are targeted at CLIENTS.

Tax marketing newsletters that are designed for clients should be short, to the point, and they should be in plain English. You can create your own marketing newsletter simply by signing up with Constant Contact or iContact (or any of the other email services). I wouldn't never send them out using postage/paper-- it's expensive and they would get thrown away as junk mail.  I would do an e-mail newsletter only. In fact, I signed up for a newsletter service last month to launch this tax marketing newsletter (aimed at tax pros, not clients) and it was easy.

The only thing I didn't like was that the "sign up" HTML that goes on my websites cannot be personalized to a target audience as much as I'd like. It costs about $15 per month for the service, which is way less than I would pay if I was paying for postage on a paper newsletter.

The real value of the newsletter is the mailing list-- the conventional wisdom behind this marketing tactic is that you can presumably contact hundreds of clients QUICKLY with a single e-mail about important tax law changes, and perhaps 5% will contact yo with a question that could lead to billable hours or a tax consulting appointment of some type. And there's always the added plus that your e-mail newsletter will be forwarded (by the client) to a family member or a friend, and then you have an instant referral.

For example, in the last newsletter, we included a little blurb about our enrolled agent exam study guides, which generated lots of web traffic to the PassKey Publications website. It was an easy way to get the "message" out there without being intrusive or using aggresive sales tactics. You can do this, too-- in your own newsletter, by including links to your website and list of service offerings.

"What are Google Adwords?"

I'm always surprised when someone asks me this-- and every time, I always think-- I'm going to start a consulting business for tax pros who can't figure out how to online network and set up online promotion. But then I always get to busy and it falls by the wayside. AdWords are Google Advertising. They are super-easy to set up, and you can "design" your ad campaign to your own area, or your own state, or even nationally. You can advertise tax services, bookkeeping, OICs, whatever clients you want to target, where, when, and how much you want to spend.

There are many ways to seek out clients. You can advertise on the web using Google AdWords, Yahoo ads, or other Internet marketing techniques.

AdWords is a highly effective Internet marketing technique that is easy to use, even for beginners. You can target your advertising to just your immediate area or make it nationwide, and you can set daily “maximums” for your advertising dollars, such as $5 per day.

You must have a website in order for the advertising to work, however. And if you don’t have a website yet—GET ONE! You can’t really do business without one these days, and it’s the cheapest form of advertising out there. My website costs me $55 per year, and it works for me twenty-four hours a day.