Ken Marshall

Generating New Clients for Your CPA Business - 10 Best Strategies

To become a success, accountants require paying clients. These straight forward steps will help market your accounting firm more effectively without meaningfully raising your expenses.

Professional accountants come in all sizes and stripes - with some focusing on preparing tax returns, others on business leadership such as CFO services, and still others on specialized markets like medical billing and health care practice management.

One truth ties them together: despite how broad-based or tightly focused their practice, they can't afford not to gain a clientele, or they go under. This hurts not merely you, but your entire community. Regardless of how talented or service-minded a CPA is - without enough paying clients to bring in cash and keep the place running, his business will go under.

Therefore, one of the first and most important question any accountant can ask is, How do I get my clients?

It may sound prosaic, but there's an important truth to running an accounting practice these days. Whether you like it or not good quality accountant websites are the key to any successful accounting business.

Today, if you are not online, you will simply not be able to generate enough leads or sell potential clients on the worth of your services.

This won't change in the future, either. With thousands of students studying accounting, coupled with one of the most challenging of economies, finding clients is becoming a very competitive endeavor. Having a website will remain critical.

So what can you do to help your firm thrive in this environment? Below are 10 pointers for how to obtain and make the best use of your accounting website:

1. Ensure that your website isn't amateurish. These days, it is extremely easy to create a website. There are several choices out there that allow you to obtain a domain name (your URL or web address), as well as easy-to-use software programs that will allow you to tailor your website to target the clients you want.

2. It's best to use a contractor to set up your website for you. Your talents lie with numbers, not design. A professional designer can effortlessly make your website look and run just right.

The key to designing accountant websites is to keep visitors on your site once they are there. To that end, your site should be both lovely to look at and chock full of helpful info.

3. Don't overlook the importance of social media sites for getting the word out. You can increase your exposure by simply creating profiles on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Facebook is the most important of these. To get started on this popular social sharing platform, simply create a personal profile and then create a "fan" page for your business. Ask your friends and current clients to "like" your page and you're on your way. You can use these sites to send out advertisements about business deals and reminders about tax season.

4. Links are vital to generating traffic - so, on your website, be sure to post links to your social media pages. If someone visits your site and likes what they see, this will be an easy way for them to help you spread the word. A "like me on Facebook" or "follow me on Twitter" link will expose you to even more potential clients.

5. Post links to the websites of your notable clients. People judge you by the clients that have hired you, so brag a little about who trusts your work.

6. Useful websites for generating leads are online merchant sites such as eBay and Craigslist. These, and other similar sites, have extremely high traffic rates and are designed with classified sections that advertise services.

7. Don't forget about ads in the newspaper that include your web address, which still work well for local clients. Getting people to click on links and visit accountant websites is a lot easier than getting them to drive accross town to visit or even just pick up the phone and call. Check your local newspapers. You might be able to also get in their online edition, where you could either be listed in their "marketplace" or be featured in a banner ad. Where possible try to concentrate your ads in business and financial sections and include a tag line that will entice business owners to call. In addition, seek out papers and local publications in surrounding towns that aren't too far for a new client to travel from.

8. Be proactive; see if you can find websites that cater to accountants alone. Accountant-Finder.com, for example, is just one of many sites that provide potential clients with a starting place to find you.

9. Don't turn up your nose at lead-gen websites such as adknowledge.com, either. There are plenty out there and they may bring in new business. These services, when used properly, can get you in contact with the clients you want and who need what you have to offer.

10. Finally, seek out and listen to experts in your field and take the time to learn from their mistakes and successes. Using Internet resources such as Websites 4 Accountants is a great way to learn new tricks and tips that can greatly improve your lead generation, which will then increase your sales.

People who tell you it's not hard to find new clients and develop a prosperous accounting firm are, unfortunately, not telling the whole story. But when you make use of a well-made CPA website as the start point, your marketing can be surprisingly effective - and well worth the effort.

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