How To Market Accounting Websites by Writing Articles

One formidable system for luring online traffic that very few CPAs utilize is writing and submitting articles. I won't intimate it's free as it does demand some time, but it won't cost you any literal money. Be it time spent networking on social media or money on search engine optimization or paid search advertising on Google we all have to pay to promote our accounting websites somehow, but it's definitely cheap and convincing if you're able to stick with it.

Getting started is very easy. The first step in becoming an article author is submitting articles to article directories. First... find something to write about. Choose a subject that will attract your prospects and you'll maximize the probability of attracting good traffic to your site in addition to giving your website a boost in the search engines.

Article writing is easy. You don't need to be an expert writer. Most blog owners prefer shorter posts. Blog articles can be as few as 300 words and still get picked up. The key to writing a good article is sticking to subjects you know and love.

One great trick is to write an article as if you're writing a letter to a friend. Tell them about something funny, important, or useful. A lot of blog "authors" don't even write their own articles. They outsource the writing to a ghost writer. There are a number of freelance web sites where you can pay an eager aspiring author to write an article for you.

So why write articles? Let's examine the two big reasons:

1. Position Yourself as an Expert

By publishing online articles you are visibly positioning yourself as an accounting "maven", or expert. People are impressed when you get published, and over time they begin to look for you and think of you as an authority in your industry.

2. Links

Article sites give you something called a resource box. This a short section where you can put a by-line and short bio, as well as a link to your website and any other information you might want to include. Search engines use links to determine your websites importance and by extension your websites position in the search results when people do a search. In addition people sometimes click on these links to learn more about you so a "backlink" will also drive actual traffic to your website.

Your article doesn't need to be brilliant. Nobody expects to see a Pulitzer prize winner every time they read a blog. What people want, and expect, is that the article be good. They want it to offer them some quality information. This is what publishers look for. They want articles that their followers will find genuinely useful. Ideas and information are what matter. OK... they would obviously prefer that you run it through spell-check, but they're really not all that concerned with punctuation, much less literary niceties like "tension", "character", and "sub-context". Good is really good enough for a blog post.

Take your time with this process. Don't expect instant results. Write a bunch of article. Submit them to multiple submission websites. It's going to take some time for your work to trickle off the submission sites and work their way into real blogs.

There's an online service called Google Alerts you can use to track your article titles and identify people using your content. When you find people using your stuff contact them, thank them, offer them more, and you'll have used the article to leverage a relationship with a potential future publisher. Once you make some friends in the business you're positioned to move on to the next stage of article marketing. In the long run you're looking to become an invited guest author.

Yes, this is a great deal of work, and no, there are no guarantees that you'll be found by an Accounting Today reporter. But even if all you do is bring in a number of links your accounting website will improve in the search engines, win some guests, and at the end of the day attract new clients into the company.

Kenny Marshall is a marketing consultant and former Officer of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's biggest web firms dedicated exclusively to accounting websites.