Check out my top posts from the last quarter!
They’re a mix of practical tips on marketing (#1), writing (#2, 5), blogging (#3), and social media (#4). The top post draws heavily on my personal experience. I learned some lessons the hard way.
Looking for good blogs by registered investment advisors or financial advisors? An impromptu Twitter exchange in February yielded the following recommendations, with thanks to @QuonWarrene for providing the first reply to my question:
You’ve probably seen some of these names on my blog before, in the following posts:
White papers can be great marketing tools. Done right, they give web surfers reasons to join your email list and persuade them that you understand—and have solutions to —their problems. However, done poorly, white papers waste your time—and your readers’ time. To help you avoid pointlessly sinking your energy into white papers, I’m sharing four reasons you should not write a white paper.
White papers should solve a problem faced by members of your target audience, as I explained in “White paper marketing: Walk a fine line.” This makes them compelling to your readers. It also helps your white papers get found, as readers conduct online searches for “how do I…?”
A problem and a topic aren’t the same thing, as I showed in “Which investment white paper would you read?” “Small-cap stocks” is an unexciting topic, while “How to profit from small-cap stocks” solves a problem faced by readers who seek to boost their investment returns.
If you don’t know how to identify a good problem, listen to questions your clients and prospects ask you. You can also seek their input through social media, surveys in your e-newsletter or on your blog, or other methods. Identifying your reader’s problem is a key step in the writing process that I describe in Financial Blogging: How To Write Powerful Posts That Attract Clients.
Your readers seek objective advice. If you inject your company’s products and services throughout your white paper, you lose credibility because readers view your piece as an advertisement. They quickly stop reading.
Respondents to my “Walk a fine line” survey agreed that references to your company’s products and services should be limited to the end of your white paper.
While blog posts can be opinionated rants, white papers typically feature data or examples to support their points. This is an area where larger companies have an advantage over smaller firms because of their data generation and analysis capabilities. They’re also more likely to have a budget to license data from providers such as Ned Davis Research.
Larger companies don’t always win in this area. For example, I’ve seen some firms generate original content by interviewing members of their target audience.
Also, there’s good publicly available data. However, please be careful to credit your sources and observe the rules of copyright “fair use.” Not sure about what’s fair use? Check the resources in “Legal danger for financial bloggers: Two misconceptions, three resources, one suggestion.”
Today’s readers are impatient. If you don’t write about a compelling topic in a way that’s easy for them to absorb, they’ll quickly stop reading. For tips on how to make your writing more reader-friendly, see “5 steps for rewriting your investment commentary.”
I’m curious. Can you think of any additional reasons why you shouldn’t write a white paper? For examples, do you think that the less formal approach of an e-book, which I discussed in “E-book or white paper: which is better?”, would better suit your audience?
Michael J. Evans of The Cogent Advisor in Chicago is the latest participant in my Q&A series with financial advisors who blog. Advisor Tim Maurer suggested Michael for this series, saying via Twitter, “@CogentAdvisor stands out as a recovering commodities trader serving traders through evidence-based investing.”
I was interested to learn how Michael manages the burden of regular blogging by mixing his own substantive posts with a strategy of highlighting other people’s content with his quick takes on that content. This is a technique more blogging advisors should consider.
If you enjoy this Q&A, check out others in this series, which started with a Q&A with Michael Kitces.
Q. When did you start your blog?
A. The Cogent Advisor Cogent Conversation blog grew out of my monthly e-newsletter. Clients and prospects had mentioned how much they enjoyed the educational information I was sharing in our monthly newsletters, and urged me to write a blog post and share insights more often. My first post was in March 2012.
Q. How has your blog brought you new business or improved your existing client relationships?
A. It’s been an interesting and unfolding experience! I started to blog to further my passion and mission to educate investors in an additional forum. As I started to post ideas targeted to my niche of financial professionals and other high-end professionals, I found I was being contacted by followers from wider circles about a variety of subjects ranging from wealth management to money challenges in their relationships and more. While I appreciate the business connections, I’ve also enjoyed serving as a connector among intelligent and inquisitive people. Some of them have become clients, but all of them help me think and grow as a wealth advisor and a person.
In terms of specific business growth results, I’ve heard many anecdotes from clients who have shared specific posts with others they believed might benefit. I’ve also heard from prospects who have accessed the blog to learn more about me and my firm’s culture. By combining blog posts with related supporting tweets, LinkedIn announcements, and periodic e-newsletter “best of” distributions, our overall social media presence continues to develop as well.
In a report we compiled last year-end, our LinkedIn connections and e-newsletter open rates remained relatively consistent in 2013, but we found our Twitter followers and LinkedIn impressions were up 27.0% and 4.5%, respectively, between Q3 and Q4 2013. It’s admittedly difficult to directly connect specific social media stats with client growth. However, given the blogging benefits described above and the general health of our firm, we’re convinced that our blog plays an important and integral role in our overall business development efforts. Besides, it’s fun!
Q. What blogging techniques or topics have most helped your business?
A. My mission is to educate successful professionals to build durable wealth. Everything in my blog relates to sharing content that my readers can use to enhance the quality of their lives and to Free Their Wealth for Something More®. To be effective and efficient with our mission, we aim to produce one more substantive Cogent-authored post each month (which is then republished in our e-newsletter), and then regularly serve as a “content curator,” by sharing others’ posts along with our brief take on them.
I try not to sell anything on my blog. If I do my job and produce or share others’ ideas that help readers visualize a better future for themselves and their families, I’ve accomplished my goal. I’m convinced that the business development will flow naturally from there as I share my Cogent content.
Q. What are three of your favorite—or most effective—blog posts? Provide the titles, URLs and a comment about why you included them.
Q. What’s your best tip for advisors who blog?
A. Write from the heart, on ideas of relevance to your audience (which assumes you have identified who your audience is)! It enhances the quality of your readers’ lives, positions you as a subject matter expert, and makes the effort more enjoyable and personally rewarding – financially and emotionally.
Media coverage can boost your visibility, helping you to attract more clients. Joanne Cleaver, a fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, suggests in her guest post that you expand your ideas of the topics on which you’d like to be quoted.
By Joanne Cleaver
If you know enough to write regularly about investing and financial planning, you know enough to be quoted. But how can you elevate your hand-built riser into a national platform?
The best way to gain expert status is to be quoted by journalists. Their responsibility is to present credible information in context. When your expertise adds clarity, insight and experience that brings an article to life, you will become a go-to source. That establishes you as an expert and builds your reputation .
That’s all well and good. But how do you get started? Here’s how to break the anonymity trap of not being quoted because you aren’t known, and not being known because you’re not being quoted.
First, sign up for HelpAReporterOut.com.
For $19 a month, HARO delivers to your inbox a daily list of requests from journalists looking for immediate sources for stories they are working on now. Simply reviewing the requests helps you detect what journalists need.
Your initial reaction will be to respond only to requests that seek financial experts. With 50 or more HARO requests daily, it’s only a matter of time before you find a request for precisely your technical and advisory expertise. And offering quotable, useable financial insight is a great way to win media mentions.
But you have more to offer than professional commentary. Your life experience—as a parent, a business owner, a volunteer—also is invaluable fodder. For example, you might respond to a reporter search for parents who have recently navigated the college application and financial aid process. Your pitch would pivot on your experience as a parent who’s better informed than most on financial topics, but you’d also be interviewed about your frustrations and feelings about financial aid.
Responding to a HARO request that appears tangential to your professional expertise does two things: it opens a relationship with the journalist, and it is a chance to showcase personal insight that rounds out your professional reputation and presents you as human, empathetic and approachable.
Both types of media mentions—professional and personal—build reputation and blog readership…as long as that silver bullet hits your target audience.
____________
A former daily newspaper deputy business editor, Joanne Cleaver helps professionals develop and deliver the right messages to the right audiences through media and communication training. Learn more at http://wilson-taylorassoc.com/media-training.
I’m a word lover, but even I have to admit that images can punch up your written communications. I’ve written earlier about using photos, but sometimes word-based images can do the trick. Here are three techniques I’ve used to generate them, starting with the most sophisticated. But I’m no techno-geek. If I can use these techniques, so can you.
Is it worth your time to create and use images? “Content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views than content without,” according to “A Complete Guide to Visual Content: The Science, Tools and Strategy of Creating Killer Images,” which appeared on BufferApp.com’s blog. This is increasingly true even on social media such as Twitter. Sometimes those images can feature words.
Canva.com is a website for creating images at no cost to you in its most basic form. It’s not your only option for doing this, but “The Art of the Perfect Post,” a webinar delivered by Guy Kawasaki, Canva’s chief evangelist, convinced me that it might be simple enough for me to use. He positioned it as much easier than PhotoShop and similar programs.
To create an image in Canva, you click and drag the elements of background, text, and images. Canva provides some ready-made layouts for you. Some backgrounds are free; others cost $1. There is no cost to access Canva. I’m far from being a Canva pro, so I suggest you poke around the firm’s website to learn more.
Here are some images that I created using Canva.
One thing I wish I’d realized: Once you upload your images from Canva, they disappear from your Canva account. As a result, if I ever want to edit these images, I believe I’ll need to recreate them from scratch.
Wordle is a website that generates “word clouds” showing the frequency of words that appear in text that you input. For example, here’s a Wordle word cloud that I used to illustrate my blog post on “Plain English and good writing.”
You don’t always have to time to create something fancy. That’s when I take a screenshot of text that I’ve created in my word processing software.
For example, I created a text block to accompany my virtual book tour’s links, as in “Week 4 of the virtual book tour for Financial Blogging: How to Write Powerful Posts That Attract Clients.” It’s not pretty, but it’s better than nothing.
I use Microsoft Office’s Snipping Tool to capture the screenshots.
If you have other tools that you recommend, please share.
When you go to the effort of snaring a guest writer for your blog, especially when the person is an influential “catch,” please follow some simple formatting tips. These tips will improve your readers’ experience and boost your guest’s visibility. This will reflect well on you.
Don’t plunge directly into your guests’ posts without introducing them. Your readers won’t always recognize the name or expertise of your guest blogger, so explain it. If you have a personal connection with the blogger or a reason why you care about the topic, consider mentioning that too. This helps to put your brand on the post. As a courtesy, I usually run my introduction by my guest prior to publication to avoid inadvertently offending them or writing something inaccurate.
Visual cues make it easy for your readers to know where your introduction ends and the guest post starts. I use two techniques.
Displaying a guest author’s headshot photo on your blog sends a powerful visual message. It’s quickly evident that someone other than the blog’s host is taking center stage. I suggest a headshot photo because that’s what your guests are most likely to have taken by a professional. A polished appearance will enhance the credibility of their information.
A brief bio also helps your readers to appreciate the value offered by your guest author. I usually limit bios to two sentences, with up to two links to the expert’s website, blog or social media sites.
Read “Simple tip for boosting your guest posts’ effectiveness” to get my take on the issue when you’re the guest.
May 13, 2014 update: I updated this post by adding another thought to Tip 1.
“10 Ways to optimize your e-newsletter landing page” is one tiny but useful section of Joe Pulizzi’s Epic Content Marketing. It’s important to craft 
Here are some tips from Pulizzi that will help you attract more people to your e-newsletter list because you convey the benefits of your content and make your signup easy to navigate.
Explain how your prospect will benefit from subscribing to your newsletter, as Pulizzi suggests. For example, say how it’ll help them achieve financial peace of mind or otherwise improve their lives.
The benefits needn’t be limited to how your newsletter articles help readers. You can also offer a special report as an enticement for readers. That’s what I do with Investment Writing Top Tips.
Sharing testimonials or awards for your newsletter, another Pulizzi tip, also reinforces your newsletter’s benefits for the reader.
Make it easy for readers to find your signup form on the page. This is why it’s important to “bring the signup above the fold,” as Pulizzi suggests, so it is visible without the reader scrolling down the page. You can view my newsletter signup page for an example of positioning.
Pulizzi also suggests that your signup should “include a button that says ‘subscribe’ or ‘sign up’ (not submit),” taking advantage of words with positive connotations.
Put less important information farther down the page. This includes a privacy statement, which is still essential. Pulizzi also suggests that you tell subscribers “what you will and won’t do with their information. This can go bottom of your page,” says Pulizzi.
Another design tip is to rid your newsletter page of anything that might distract the reader from signing up, says Pulizzi.
Pulizzi suggests that you show readers a picture of your newsletter. I think he means a small image of your newsletter’s first page (see example of my newsletter on the right) or maybe just a table of contents.
Also, link to a sample newsletter. Until recently, I’ve handled this by providing an archive of my monthly newsletters, instead of one sample that I’d need to update periodically.
Limit the number of fields in your newsletter sign-up form. As Pulizzi says, “ the fewer fields, the more likely prospects will be to sign up.”
When I started my newsletter I required only two fields, first name and email address. Now that I’m more confident of my newsletter’s appeal, I request, but don’t require, last names and company names.
If you’re new to content marketing, Epic Content Marketing offers a great overview of content marketing’s many components. It suggests steps that the reader can take to launch their content marketing strategy and manage their content process. There’s information for more experienced marketers too. I noticed some items for action, such as checking out the persona creation tool at upcloseandpersona.com. I’d also like to take a more analytical look at my content strategy.
As a writer, I noticed that some of the writing isn’t as tight as I’d like. For example, information that’s presented as a series of nine bullets screams for a rewrite. Too many bullet points exhaust the reader.
On balance, I enjoyed the book because it made me think.
Disclosures: I received a free copy of this book from McGraw Hill in return for agreeing to mention it in my blog. If you click on the Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I only link to books in which I find some value for my blog’s readers.
Carolyn McClanahan’s fearless sharing of her opinions across social media, including on her blog, spurred me to ask her to participate in my Q&A series with financial advisors who blog. She’s a great example of an advisor who communicates her passion about her topics, which include the intersection of medical and financial planning issues. Carolyn, who began her career as a doctor, is with Life Planning Partners in Jacksonville, Fla.
Q. When did you start The Quest for Simplicity, your blog for Forbes?
A. November 2011.
Q. How has your blog brought you new business or improved your existing client relationships? Please explain and quantify, if possible.
A. Unlike most financial planners, whom I assume blog for business development, I’m blogging for my colleagues in the industry and opinion makers. The purpose of the blog is to educate other financial planners and the public about an area in which our firm, Life Planning Partners, excels—incorporating health conversations into all aspects of financial planning. The firm’s goal is to be an innovative financial life planning practice that is nationally recognized as doing great things for our clients and the profession, demonstrates a model other financial planners want to emulate, and serves as a base for us to make great change in the world.
Has my blog brought us new business? Probably not directly. Do our clients love my blog? Yes, they are very proud of the work we are doing to improve the financial planning profession. They participate in all our “experiments,” love when I share their stories (with permission of course), and refer clients to us readily. I think the referrals are not due to the blog alone – it is a combination of our great service and our ideals. Our business is so good that we had to close to new business for now. Our waiting list had grown to eight months long. I think we are doing something right. New business comes from a confluence of factors.
Q. How else does the blog affect your relationships with clients and prospects?
A. We actually share our business plan with our clients. By doing this, we’ve created a “tribe” of people who get what we do and are very supportive of the change we are trying to make in the financial planning profession. The blog is part of how we implement this change.
Most of the new clients who come to us have read the blog. My unbridled openness about some very controversial topics actually attracts clients to us. And the really good news—people who are uncomfortable with us do not come to us. Therefore, we have only ideal clients and our client retention is off the charts. We have authentic, deep, and difficult conversations with ease.
Q. How will you know if you’ve succeeded as a model for other advisors?
A. Our metrics are:
1. The number of people who read my blog.
2. The number of speaking engagements and type of topics I’m asked to provide.
3. The number of planners who ask about our business model so they can incorporate it in their practice. I will watch with interest how many firms move to retainers and hourly work over time.
Q. What blogging techniques or topics have most helped your business?
A. I think our authenticity and unbridled approach in discussing real problems goes a long way. Storytelling is the most effective way to get a point across.
Q. What are three of your favorite—or most effective—blog posts? Provide the titles, URLs and a comment about why you included them.
A. My most popular post is “Five Quick And Important Facts On Health Insurance Through Obamacare.” I think this was popular because it was practical.
Cliffs Notes Version of the Affordable Care Act — Again, a practical explanation of the law.
Gun Owner Rights and Obamacare – Yes It Is In The Law — Although I received a lot of flak about this article from the gun lobby, clients were overall very proud of this article. It was written right after the Aurora massacre, and was the first article pointing out the National Rifle Association’s hand in Obamacare. A reporter from Politico told me this article was the start of President Obama’s executive order protecting health care worker’s rights to ask about firearms in patient care settings. It shows how powerful words and calling out the truth can be.
Q. What’s your best tip for advisors who blog?
A. Writing a weekly blog is a lot of work, especially when you are running a small business. Over the past couple of months, I’ve run into a number of challenges. We are still reeling from the huge growth of our business, we are trying to hire additional help, and I spent some time taking care of loved ones.
A tip I read somewhere that I wish I would have followed? Have pre-written posts in place in case you run into a tight spot and have nothing to post.
Otherwise, only write about topics that you care about – your passion will come through.
If you enjoyed this post, check out this blog’s Q&As with Michael Kitces and Jim Blankenship. If you have a great blogging success story worthy of being featured in a future Q&A, please contact me. I’d like to hear from you.
I invited Jim Blankenship of Blankenship Financial Planning in New Berlin, Ill., to participate in a Q&A about his blog because I was struck by the depth of material on his blog. When I tweeted a question to him about his blog post explaining the file-and-suspend strategy for Social Security, he quickly tweeted back with a link to a blog post answering my question. I imagine it’s powerful to have this kind of information easily accessible.
This is the second in a series of Q&As with advisors who blog. The first was with Michael Kitces of Nerd’s Eye View. If there are other advisors whom you’d like to hear from, please let me know.
Q. When did you start your blog, Getting Your Financial Ducks in a Row—and how did you choose your focus?
A. When I started in April 2004, I was sending a paper newsletter to my clients (first quarterly, then monthly), so I just took the newsletter articles and blogged them. In late 2008, I started specifically writing articles for the blog.
I focused first on tax laws and IRAs because my clients had specific questions about these areas. A bit later, I added the Social Security focus. I have focused on these three areas since then, but always writing for my audience’s interests. When they send me questions outside of these three areas, I write about them as well. Sterling Raskie joined the firm in 2012, and one of his primary areas of focus is insurance, so he’s been writing about that quite a lot.
Q. How has your blog brought you new business or improved your existing client relationships? Please explain and quantify, if possible.
A. It’s rare these days to have a new client come to me who has not read either my blog or syndicated articles from it. My articles are syndicated on sites including Forbes.com, TheStreet.com, Morningstar Advisor, and FiGuide. The great benefit is that folks who’ve read my writings already understand much about how I work, who I am, and my areas of expertise. In addition, from having read my articles, there is a level of trust already built into the initial conversation.
This has helped with long-distance relationships, which have increased significantly over the past two to three years. We now routinely have clients that we exclusively work with long-distance. They account for something like 40% of new clients. In contrast, prior to starting the blog, long-distance clients only came about when someone local moved away.
Q. What blogging techniques or topics have most helped your business?
A. The blog’s niche focus on taxes, retirement plans, and Social Security has reinforced the fact that we’re experts in these areas.
Keeping to a schedule has also helped. I started with a haphazard approach to blogging, without any schedule. I soon recognized that I needed to be more consistent in my blogging efforts, so I set the goal of writing three articles per week, one on each of my focus areas. Sticking with this schedule has helped me to manage the time to blog, as well as letting my readers expect a level of activity. As with all things that take time, you will make time for the things that you put a priority on, and I have (since late 2008) always put a priority on keeping that schedule.
I maintain lists of topics to write about, spurred by reader questions, real-life client situations, and articles I’ve read, so I never run out of things to write about. Sometimes the mix of topics differs week-to-week, but the primary focus areas are still represented in my writing.
Q. What are three of your favorite—or most effective—blog posts? Provide the titles, URLs and a comment about why you included them.
A. I don’t really have any favorites. Here are three of my articles that have had the most hits.
Charitable Contributions From Your IRA – 2012 and Beyond — this explains how the elimination of the Qualified Charitable Contribution option changes the tax effect of making contributions to charities from your IRA. Of course, the tax law was extended, so this now applies to 2014 now—until the law is extended again.
The File and Suspend Tactic for Social Security Benefits — as the title suggests, this is a straightforward explanation of the tactic.
A Little-Known Social Security Spousal Benefit Option — this explains the option where a higher-wage-base spouse files a restricted application to receive half of his or her spouse’s benefit at Full Retirement Age, but delays filing for his or her own benefit to age 70. Not many folks understand this one, so I’ve written several articles to help explain it. I still get questions every week.
Q. What’s your best tip for advisors who blog?
A. Just do it. It’s not rocket science. Find your focus, be consistent, and put a priority on writing, even if it’s once a week or once a month. Over time, this will build up to a significant body of work that potential clients can refer to, and it will make a difference in how you interact with people.
In addition, use all of the tools available — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest — to promote your blog posts. Explore using various plug-ins to your blog to push out your articles, such as RSS, email subscription, and automatic tweeting. These free tools are worth their electronic weight in gold, in terms of promotion and reaching out. Answer questions via each tool, and strike up conversations.
Track your traffic – you can’t know if you’re getting through if you don’t track it. I use a combination of Google Analytics, WordPress statistics, and Bing webmaster tools to track traffic.
Always respond to comments on your blog posts in a timely fashion — this keeps the conversation going beyond your initial writings. It’s no different from returning phone calls.
