Marketing Bookkeeping, Accounting and Financial Services - First in a Series

There is nothing more heartbreaking than to spend weeks and months, and thousands of dollars developing your bookkeeping, accounting or tax practice and seeing it languish as you struggle to attract new customers and clients.

You have knowledge and experience, and you have a passion that you wanted to share with the world but it was not necessarily what the world wanted to hear.

To avoid the waste of both time and emotional energy caused by failed projects you need to understand the mindset of a client. Your client doesn't care where your degree is from, or how good your grades were, they don't even care if you have a license or certification from the state.

All your client cares about is whether they can trust you to do your job.

And just exactly how do you get that across to your clients and your new prospects? How do they discover the trust you want them to have?

The easiest method is to become recognized as an expert. As an expert, you are looked up to and trusted.

But here, we're not just talking about being knowledgeable, we're talking about marketing yourself in a way that you are perceived as knowledgeable. We're talking about getting speaking engagements, writing reports, articles, and white papers. We're talking about becoming an author and getting published.

Sounds like a lot of hard work doesn't it? And then you’re faced with the problem of how to create all the papers, speeches and other work product you’ll need in order to appear to be a knowledgeable expert.

You could try to hire yourself a booking agent to get you speaking engagements, plus a ghostwriter to prepare speeches, articles and reports.

Since a booking agent works on a commission, you'll probably have a hard time convincing them you have any value as a commodity. The typical booking agent is going to be looking for somebody who can start at $2,000 to $3,000 per speaking engagement.

It's pretty easy to find a ghostwriter, but quite hard to find a skilled and knowledgeable ghostwriter, who can write about bookkeeping, accounting or taxes. If you find a writer who is skilled in these fields, then you're probably looking at something like $1,000 a page to write a typical report. Certainly not the $5-$10 a page you find people quoting on the Internet.

When you are presenting yourself to your local market, you need to be able to present knowledge and expertise, whereas on the Internet it's mostly about having relevant keywords that match the search engines spider's algorithm.

You try giving a speech full of keywords (commonly referred to as buzzwords) to the local Chamber of Commerce, you will absolutely lose any credibility you may have had.

Probably the easiest solution is to find yourself a mentor, possibly a retired accountant or financial professional, with a penchant for writing. If you get lucky, they may even have a drawer full of old reports and speeches they developed when they were in active practice.

If so, then they may be willing to let you use their materials as a resource. Be prepared to pay a small price, either by purchase or royalty, if necessary.

Read more...