Christy Pinheiro EA

Question: How easy is it to use AdWords to promote my practice?

Answer: Easy! You can start with a minimum budget of 50.00 per month, which you will only actually use is people "click" on your ads.

The trick is getting people to find you. And it's easy, as long as you target your market correctly. I'm going to give you an example.

Let's say you set up your AdWords account and you want to target same-sex couples, which are a lucrative tax client segment. You practice in California, and you only want to do California residents.

Fine. You set up your adwords account to ONLY run ads in California, and you make sure that your keywords are highly effective, which means that you DON'T use basic keywords like "tax prep" or "CPA". These will just drain your ad dollars because they are not targeted to your niche.

So, you think about it, and you use keyword phrases like, "taxes for Gay couples" "taxes for same-sex couples" "tax returns for gays"-- stuff like that. Thinking of the keywords is the hardest part. It took me a few months to get all of them, and I just log into my adwords account when I think of a good one and add it.

There are a lot of good books and articles out there on effective Adwords marketing, and you can find them online and even through Google's Adwords dashboard (they have training videos, etc). You can do it all yourself-- don't pay anyone to do it for you. It's easy. 

Good luck! (By the way, I am not affiliated with Google in ANY way-- I just really like their marketing tools and I use them myself).

Have you used Adwords to promote your tax practce? Is there a ratio or a number of clients you recieved from this?

Yes, I've used Adwords very successfully. The big increases I have seen were in web hits to my websites. In one case, my website went from 100 hits a month to 1,000.

One of the EAs I interviewed for my tax marketing book uses a ton of Adwords, too. His computer will actually make a little "bing" noise when someone finds his website and clicks on it.

If I remember correctly, he gets about 40 unique web hits per day because of Adwords, and he estimates that about 10 of those people call. His practice grew from zero clients to about 1,000 clients in less than 6 years. I feel that's pretty impressive. A lot of that is referrals, too, now that he is established. But he does everything-- payroll, bookkeeping, tax returns, corporate returns-- you name it.

He has about 5 staff that do the ancilliary stuff. You have to decide what type of work you really want to do first, and then target your ads to the clients you want to reach.

"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.