Susan B. Weiner Investment Writing - Susan B. Weiner Blog

Ever wondered if you could improve your financial or investment blog posts?

You can benefit from a FREE critique by a professional financial writer whose clients include leading investment and wealth management firms. That’s me.

Some of your colleagues have bravely volunteered their blog posts for my review. I’ve written about the strengths–and opportunities for improvement–in Nathan Gehring’s “And About That Financial Plan” and Jonathan Smith’s “Opportunity Arriving Daily” in the Discussion section of my Facebook business page.

When you read my recommendations, you’ll get ideas about how to tweak your own posts.

To volunteer for a critique

If you’re a financial advisor who’d like to volunteer for a gentle critique of a blog post you’ve already published, please email me at info@investmentwriting.com with
* Your name
* Contact information
* Link to your published post

My gentle critique of a financial advisor’s already-published post is intended to be a monthly feature in the Discussion section of this Facebook page. That means there are only 12 openings each year.

Feeling shy?

It’s no problem if you feel too shy to learn in public. You can sign up for “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Teleclass for Financial Advisors.” If you sign up by 12 midnight on AUGUST 31, you’ll pay the Early Bird rate.

If you have questions about e-newsletters, mosey on over to “The freelancer’s guide to e-newsletters” on Michelle Rafter’s WordCount blog. I’m quoted extensively in answers to questions including

• What’s so great about e-newsletters?
• How long should it be?
• What kind of software can I use?
• How can I get subscribers?

If you’re a financial blogger, you can recycle your blog posts in your newsletter, perhaps adding one unique bit of content for your subscribers.

It takes time to build an e-newsletter email list. Even if you don’t think you need one yet, start building your newsletter now.

Kristin Harad’s video series on marketing for financial advisors caught my eye-especially because she talks about niche marketing. I’m a big believer in niche marketing.  So I was delighted when she offered to write a guest post for my blog.

By coincidence, Kristin’s guest post arrived not long after a wealth management firm executive suggested to me that Facebook ads could be a powerful tool for financial advisors.

Generate Quality, Low Cost Leads with Facebook Ads

by Kristin Harad, CFP®

Adding new prospects to your sales funnel can be a costly endeavor for financial advisors.  Workshops, mailings and other tactics can be effective, but the cost-per-lead from these channels is often quite high.  Recently, I’ve discovered how to effectively use a new marketing channel that’s been right under my nose to bring in a steady stream of quality leads at an incredibly low cost:  Facebook.

Now, you probably know that Facebook has become the second largest Web site in the world and last month it was all over the news for registering its 500 millionth user.  But what you perhaps didn’t know is that Facebook also offers an incredible self-service advertising platform that is an absolutely amazing tool for laser-targeting ads to your precise audience.  There are four reasons I really love Facebook Ads:

1)  It’s really easy to create and manage ads.  No technical nor design expertise required.
2)  You can target practically any niche.  Target your ads by location, demographics and interests. You can reach your EXACT audience.
3) It’s highly effective. Put together a well thought-through campaign and you can move people through your sales funnel to becoming paying clients!
4)  It’s really cheap! You don’t pay anything for impressions and some of our ads cost just six cents per click!  I’m adding targeted prospects to my marketing database at a cost of just 83 cents each.

It’s fast and easy to start testing your own Facebook Ads campaign.

Start by going to www.facebook.com/ads where you can sign up online in just a few minutes and instantly begin creating ads that appear on nearly every page of Facebook.  It’s very easy to create the ads — you can make one in just a couple minutes and you don’t need to have any technical or design expertise.

Be sure to design at least five different ads so that you can test different ideas to see which performs best.  The headline and the image you use in your ads have the most impact on click-through rates, so write a few very pithy headlines.  Images of people generally attract better click-through rates.  The more often people click on your ad, the more it will be shown and Facebook will actually reward you with a much lower price.

Next, and most importantly, think carefully about how to target your ad.

Start with location.  My firm mostly serves families within 25 miles of San Francisco, so in the Location section, I target by City, then type in San Francisco and select cities within 25 miles.  Under demographics, identify who your best potential clients are.

Next comes age, relationship status, likes and interests. Since I work with expectant parents and young families, most of my clients are between their late 20s and early 40s, so I put 28 – 44 as the age bracket.  I choose ALL for relationship status, especially since many people on Facebook don’t state theirs.  However, many advisors base their niche off of relationship status, so it can be a really power way to target.  (If you are focused on couples who are getting married, think of the precise messaging you can deliver when you target people who are engaged!)  Then, you’ll come to the small Likes & Interests section, which is where the real power targeting comes from.  This identifies users by what they have placed on their own Facebook page, and you can target them based on practically anything!

As an example, I put in ‘pregnant’ and ‘pregnancy’ as two keywords.  Based on what I picked for location, age, gender and these two keywords, Facebook estimates that my ad will reach 2,200 people.  That’s 2,200 pregnant women between 28 – 44 in the San Francisco Bay Area — my exact customer demographic!  You can’t find that kind of precision anywhere else.  More importantly, now that I know exactly who is going to see these ads, I can write messages that speak directly to them.  For instance, “Pregnant in San Francisco?” or “What New Bay Area Moms Must Know.”  It’s pretty easy to catch my audience’s attention when I know exactly who they are.  Plus, I can quickly create other ad campaigns that micro-target other groups, like expectant fathers or parents of a kindergartner.

These ads work incredibly well for me.  Dozens of people click on them each day, visiting special pages on my Web site that I’ve set up for them.  About 1-in-5 visitors take a further action on my Web site, like subscribing to my email newsletter or signing up for the monthly events that I hold.   It’s critical that you design a Web page with a specific action in mind for these visitors.  Send them to your company’s home page and they will bounce off without spending two minutes on your site.  But, if you offer an informative and relevant free report in exchange for their email address, they will opt-in to your marketing database by the dozens!

That’s what makes Facebook a great way to fill the top of the sales funnel.  Is anyone going to click on a small ad and instantly purchase complex financial products for thousands of dollars?  Of course not!  But by structuring a well-thought out campaign that is designed to pull targeted prospects into the start of my sales funnel, I can begin to form a relationship with them that will evolve over the months ahead and I absolutely convert a portion of these leads into paying clients over time!

Finally, Facebook ads are incredibly low cost.  You can set your own budget, and I’m only spending about $25 per day.  You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and the price is usually well under one dollar per click.  I think it’s a great marketing tool that is absolutely worth experimenting with, so give it a try today at www.facebook.com/ads.

About the Author:  Kristin Harad, CFP® is the President of VitaVie Financial Planning, a fee-only financial planning firm in San Francisco.  She offers a free video series on marketing strategies for financial advisors at http://www.next10clients.com.

…if people don’t read them. As the saying goes, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Don’t count on readers for your financial advice or investment services blog posts to come to your blog. Grow your audience by making your content available the way your readers prefer.

A client recently reinforced this lesson for me. She said, “Susan, I love those links you post on LinkedIn!” I was surprised. This client had declined my offer to send her my e-newsletter, which is the main way my clients read my blog posts. However, my content developed greater appeal when delivered via LinkedIn, a way that suits her style. Linking to my blog posts in my LinkedIn status updates is a bigger success than I’d realized.

Here are some ways you can make your blog posts available to satisfy your readers’ preferences.

1. LinkedIn status updates. I explain how to post links in “Reader question: How can I share my investment commentary on LinkedIn?”

2. LinkedIn groups. Once you’ve shared your link as a status update, it’s easy to share it with your LinkedIn groups. First, go to the status update in which you shared your link and click “Share.” Second, check the box that says “Post to groups.”

Start typing the names of the relevant groups in the box to the right. The group names will auto-fill. Finally, hit the Share button in the lower left.

3. E-newsletter. An e-newsletter is a great way to package your blog posts for readers who’ll never visit a blog or use an RSS feed. My blog post, “E-newsletters: Great marketing tool for financial advisors and writers,” discusses this option in greater detail.

4. Other social media: Twitter, Facebook, and more. You can post links to your blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites much as you would on LinkedIn. Of course, link-posting will reach a point of diminishing returns. Figure out which sites yield your best results, and then focus on them.

You may find that more of your prospects are on Facebook than Twitter or other social media sites. I think this is especially true of parents who get online to monitor their children. I recently started a Facebook business page because I felt I needed to make content available in more ways to my audience.

5. Guest posts. Appearing as a guest on someone else’s blog is another way to get your content seen. While many blogs want original content for their guest spots, some don’t. You can learn more in “Audiocast: How to Guest-Blog on Personal Finance or Investments.”

If you’re not using any of these methods, it’s time to re-think your approach to blogging.

• “The class is great! I’m really getting a huge amount of value – there really is a process to writing.”

• “Loving the blog writing class I am taking with @susanweiner #FF”

• “Susan’s coaching is a classic case of ‘under-promise, over-deliver.’ I highly recommend her as a writing coach or teacher. Her coaching has improved the quality of writing in my blog posts. My writing skills were very rusty when we started. Susan’s practical, insightful suggestions–along with her Blog Post Preparation Worksheet–have been an incredibly valuable resource.”

This teleclass won’t be offered again until 2011. Do you really want to wait?

E-newsletters are a great way to market yourself, as I’ll discuss on the WordCount Last Wednesday (#wclw) Twitter live chat on August 25 from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Eastern. You can get details on how to tune into my #wclw chat at http://bit.ly/92SQdH

Learning from personal experience

My Investment Writing e-newsletter has brought me many new clients. Sometimes I get calls or emails within 24 hours of sending out a newsletter. Other times, it’s the steady drip of emails that brings my name to mind when a prospective client has a need I can meet.

The funny thing is that I didn’t set out to write a newsletter. I simply started writing a mass email to stay in touch with the great people I’d met at my last corporate job. I wanted to give them some useful content in addition to my rhapsodies about gardening and bicycling, so I started reporting on Boston Security Analysts Society events. To my surprise, my former colleagues told me they looked forward to my emails. A newsletter was born.

Services that help you format and manage your e-newsletter

If you create an e-newsletter, don’t try to distribute it using your regular e-mail or you might get tagged as a spammer. Now that my subscription base has grown, I pay $30 a month (fees start at $15/month) to ConstantContact.com for access to their website to manage the email lists, format my monthly newsletter and help me avoid the spam filter.  It’s easy to learn and the customer service is great.

If I were starting a newsletter today, I might start with MailChimp. It’s free for up to 500 subscribers. My financial advisor friends tell me it’s also social media-friendly.

Other options, which I’ve only heard of from friends and colleagues, include:

• aWeber.com
• CampaignMonitor.com
• iContact.com
• Yahoo groups

Most of the pay services will let you experiment with a free account before you commit. By the way, if you want to use Constant Contact, you can give my name as a referral sources, so you get a $30 credit once you become a paid subscriber. I’ll also get a $30 credit. However, I think you’ll probably want to start with MailChimp.

My top three posts if you’re new to newsletters

• Three tips for how often to publish your newsletter
• Guest post: Can I replace my paper newsletter with an e-newsletter?
• Should you drop subscribers who don’t open your e-newsletter?

Edward Siedle questions the integrity of some CFA charterholders in “Investors Misled By Brokers Masquerading As Fiduciaries: CFA credential implies a standard of care not always upheld,“ an August 9 “Expert View” on Forbes.com. Siedle is a former SEC attorney and the president of Benchmark Financial Services.

While I think Siedle overstates his case, he raises an interesting point.

Suitability standard vs. fiduciary duty

His basic argument: If CFA charterholders work for broker-dealers, they’re bound to a standard of suitability, rather than fiduciary duty. This is a conflict I hadn’t thought about before reading his article.

Apparently many brokerage firms handle the potential conflict by forbidding use of the CFA credential by those who use the suitability standard.

Siedle quotes Robert Dannhauser, the CFA Institute’s director of advocacy outreach. Dannhauser says, “…in many such instances, the firms do not allow CFA charterholders to display the CFA designation after their name on business cards or other publicly available material, so that clients do not perceive any different standard than what the firm has adopted for all of its employees. This hopefully offers clients a clearer view of what they’re getting. The key is for practitioners to not represent themselves as one thing but offer a different level of service than might otherwise be expected given that representation.”

Siedle counters by saying, “However, in my experience, many brokers do use their CFA status in marketing themselves to investors–especially to institutional and high-net-worth investors who are most likely to be familiar with the designation.” Moreover, “Unfortunately, it’s only after the retail broker dressed up like a fiduciary screws up that the investor might discover that he and his employer do not accept a fiduciary standard of duty.” I don’t know the details of the case that Siedle uses as an example.

Siedle seems to imply that every charterholder who works for a company such as Bank of America works for a broker-dealer. This is an exaggeration. The companies he names are not pure broker-dealers. Many of the charterholders at these firms may work for registered investment advisors that explicitly require them to act as fiduciaries.

Challenge for the CFA Institute’s ethics curriculum

Still, I’d be curious to know if the conflict between fiduciary duty and the suitability standard comes up in the CFA Institute’s ethics curriculum. If not, it sounds like a good topic for the future. As a CFA charterholder myself, I feel confident that the CFA Institute will tackle this issue.

Financial advisors, don’t post it and forget it.

If the only thing you do with your blog posts is upload them to your blog, you limit your audience. Instead, recycle your content and make it available in other formats that your target market enjoys. Recycling is a powerful technique that helps financial advisors’ ROI on blogging.

It’s easy to expand your audience with a little extra effort, including

1. Offering an email subscription to your individual blog posts–Many people still prefer receiving their reading matter via email instead of visiting your blog, Twitter, or an RSS feed. Google Feedburner is a popular choice for bloggers who want to offer this option. Feedburner delivers each post individually.
2. Offering a monthly e-newsletter made up of articles from from your blog–This allows you to emphasize the posts of greatest interest to your target audience. You can also add content that appears only in your newsletter, to give blog readers an incentive to subscribe. You can use a service such as Constant Contact or MailChimp for newsletters.
3. Packaging posts into an e-book or special report–This is how I create Investment Writing Top Tips, the e-book that my new e-newsletter subscribers receive in appreciation of their subscriptions.
4. Post links to your posts via social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. You’ll find some of the details of how to use your LinkedIn status line in “Reader question: How do I post my investment commentary to LinkedIn?“
5. Printing out appropriate posts to share with clients,prospects, and referral sources–If you’re meeting with a client whose main concern is saving for her children’s college education, you’ll make an impression if you can hand her some of your blog posts on that topic.
6. Turning blog posts into audio or video–I expanded on my original blog post content when I created my audiocast on “How to Guest-Blog on Personal Finance Or Investments.” I may pick up some audience members who prefer to listen to content.
7. Turning your content into presentations–I remember the first time I turned my former employer’s quarterly client letter into PowerPoint slides with graphs. It was the same old words, but the salespeople and relationship managers responded with such enthusiasm I felt as if I’d invented something brand new.

Do you recycle your posts in another way? Please share in the comments section.

If you’re not already reusing your financial blog posts, start today!

Conferences can be shy financial advisors’ worst nightmares. You spend so much time among so many strangers. You feel especially intimidated if many attendees seem to know one another. As an introvert, I feel your pain. My shyness inspired an idea that may help outgoing as well as shy financial professionals.

Create a provocative badge.
“If I can’t strike up conversations about my professional services, can I make people ask me about them?”

That’s the question I asked myself before I attended the CFA Institute’s annual conference in Boston. So I created a homemade badge that might spark conversation. My badge, printed on bright yellow paper and slipped inside a name tag holder, said “Ask me about top 10 tips for investment commentary.” You can customize your badge to use any good conversation starter.

Offer an incentive.
Everybody likes to get something valuable for free, so offer a free report, consultation, or other benefit to the people who ask about your badge. At the CFA Institute conference, attendees who asked about my badge could give me their business card to receive a free special report via email. It was a win-win situation. They got tips honed by my investment commentary presentations to CFA societies across the U.S. and Canada. I got the chance to deepen my relationship with them.

Speaking of incentives, when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter, you receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips. Plus, my newsletter includes some content that you won’t find anywhere else. Sign up now!

The investment strategies of Bill Gross, founder and co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, influence the asset allocations of investment professionals around the world.  Should he also influence your approach to your market commentary?

“Vigilante on the move,” a profile of PIMCO that appeared in The Economist, got me thinking with the following paragraph.

“Some colleagues might welcome a lower profile for Mr Gross, whose utterances occasionally backfire. In a typically punchy commentary in January he recommended avoiding British government debt, which was ‘resting on a bed of nitroglycerine’. But gilts failed to explode, and PIMCO was forced to reverse course.”

When you make investment predictions, you’re bound to be wrong some of the time.

Is this embarrassment something that you should avoid at all costs by shunning predictions and strong opinions? Some managers hedge their bets with wording such as “a continued recovery is more likely than a double-dip recession, however….” Or, should you embrace controversy?

What strategy will help you most with clients, prospects, and referral sources?

Please answer the poll that will appear in the right-hand column of this blog until I take it down next month. I’ll comment on the results in my September e-newsletter. Or you can leave comments below.

Poll question

Clients and prospects will respond best when asset managers’ market commentary…

• Never makes predictions
• Makes qualified predictions that give them an “out”
• Sometimes makes predictions
• Always expresses at least one strong opinion
• None of the above (Please leave a comment)