The most desirable first contact with potential clients for just about all local firms are quality CPA websites. Their most important function is that they they need to offer a favorable picture about your business. Your site offers 24/7 prospecting for your firm. Still, your sites's content needs to always be new, and this requires hard work. This makes sure your site is listed high enough in search engine results pages (SERPs) so that possible clients can discover your business.
This is hard work, and one strategy is to hire an intern that will help you manage your web marketing programs. College students and new webmasters are always looking for opportunities to try out their web marketing skills. Here are some pointers to effectively bring a student into a practice to help create and manage marketing programs and CPA websites.
Intern Experience
It is a good idea to look for potential candidates who have existing online marketing skills. This includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) experience. It isn't terribly difficult to increase your rankings, but it takes diligence and hard work. You want a steady stream of fresh content. It's a big challlenge keeping superior CPA websites fresh and interesting. Examine writing samples, especially if any are written about financial management and accounting. You obviuosly don't have to spend time teaching them the fundamentals of your business, but you'll have much more luck teaching a writer to sell accounting services than you will trying to turn an accouniting student into a writer.
Your current clients see you as a dependable professional. It is equally important to project this to your prospects as well. Your intern does not directly work with your clients. However, their work represents you and your practice directly. It is a good idea to review their work carefully. Because they will be representing you online, you want to make sure the quality of their work is sufficient.
Your intern needs only a basic set of math skills to be able to create and monitor performance metrics for your website. An understanding of spreadsheets and basic statistics is all that is needed to measure the effectiveness of the marketing programs over time.
Your Intern and Your Staff
Even though the intern role may be a temporary one, it is a good idea to treat your intern as if they are a permanent employee. You want to think about how compatible they will be with your permanent staff. They will all be working together. You want to be sure there is seamless communication between the intern and your staff, so that the site content they produce can properly reflect your firm's image.
Marketing Effectiveness
Because search engine programs can take several months to produce real, visible results, it is a good idea to let the intern make suggestions on SEO and SEM programs. They can make valuable contributions for your CPA website. It is a good idea to consider their input. Considering all your options is also a good idea. Your intern can contribute greatly to your firm's revenue stream.
Once the first advertising campaigns are over, you may decide to continue to work with your student past the original scope of the project. Business School interns and aspiring web developers can continue to bring value to your practice's online success, in particular in the competitive atmosphere of accounting websites.
Author Resource:-
Kenneth Marshall is a business consultant and one-time Vice President of CPA Site Solutions. His special area of expertise is marketing small firms by exploiting CPA websites. While using social networking sites and Search Engine Optimization forms the basis of his strategy he also stresses the importance of traditional network marketing and customer service in helping CPA firms build their customer bases.
http://www.websites4accountants.com/
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