Spam Filtering

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.  You’re always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There’s no need to create and maintain a blacklist of email addresses.

Search Engine Optimization

There are quite a few of these types of plugins, but two plugins are especially easy to use to create and improve your blog’s ability to rank well on search engines.

All In One SEO PackGoogle XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Social Networking

This is a crucial function that allows readers who find your Posts useful and informative to pass it on, as well as submit it to various RSS feeds or communities such as Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

Share This
An example of this is at the end of this post.

Site Statistics

Even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer.   That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

This program will begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Comments

A great blogging feature is the ability for your readers to interact with your site.  Providing your visitors with the ability to comment on your posts will give thme a sense of ownership and a more personalized touch.

Subscribe to Comments is a robust function that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries.  The function includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address

Podcasting

• Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS)
• Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
• Podcast Download stats, with cool graphs. See below.
• Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
• Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
• View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
• Control over where the player will display within your post and what it will look like.
• Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
• Supports unlimited number of media files.
• Automatic Media player for MP3, RM, OGG, MP4, MOV, QT, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
• Preview image for videos
• Support for seperate Category podcasts

One of the goals for any professional (e.g., accountants and lawyers) in any online marketing campaign should be to gain “expert status.” Because we as tax professionals deal in the intanigible — information and knowledge — it is crucial to “package” ourselves in a way that relates to current and potential clients.

One of the best ways to do this is to provide guidance, or as I would prefer to express it, “shed SOME ligt on the subject without giving away the complete answer.” After all, knowledge is power money. You, after all don’t want to give away the cow, just some milk.

LinkedIn has provided an opportunity to do just that with their Questions and Answers area

You can browse through Open Questions as well as through different categories — One of which is Finance and Accounting. It is important to note that many of the questions are asked by folks who are already in your general industry. However, the questions usually focus on some specific area within that industry … an expert’s area.

Some of the questions include:

• If annual reports contained EEOC statistics, what would we learn about most companies?
• Know a good accountant in St. Louis, MO who has experience working with early-stage start-ups?
• I would like some information on how to do accounting for businesses out of my geographic reach, can i log in onto the client’s computer to update / maintain their accounting records?
• Can you help me to connect with CPAs or other financial services professionals in the New York metro area or Florida that service small business clients?

By participating in such an envoronment, you are connecting with othe like-minded people, creating a network of contacts, and perhaps getting some great information for your own website (see 8 Reasons Why Client Questions Make Great Blog Content by the Blog Squad).

Wendy Maynard @ Kinetic Ideas makes an excellent point:

“People don’t buy things. They buy solutions to problems; they want to fulfill a desire or meet a need. To market your business effectively, you have to KNOW your target audience and what problems they face. In your marketing efforts – whether written, online, or in person – you should be able to provide your audience with a solution that is specific and directly benefits them…AND you should care about their problem.” — Hat Tip to Michele Golden at Golden Marketing for pointing Wendy’s article out.

(Her follow-up hit, “Accountants Who Blog“) is also widely quoted or referred to)

The article purports to “tell CPAs how blogging can advance a firm’s marketing, project management and research efforts” and for all intents and purposes does a fine job.  The article has been cited by numerous other blogs:  CPA Firm Technology Blog, Courtsnewcommtechblog, Golden Practices with Michelle Golden, The Solo Accountant Reporter, just to name a few.

Her article has also been included as content on various other websites (Questia, Allbusiness.com, Allbusiness.com again, etc.

(BTW — Both are a HUGE lesson to be learned there as to the power of what GOOD content can do).

Eva provides some examples of accounting blogs:  www.briantankersley.com/cpatech, Tax Guru (www.taxguru.net) blog, Taxable Talk blog (www.taxabletalk.com). Tax & Business Law Commentary blog at http://taxbiz.blogspot.com, and Our Taxing Times blog at http://trishmc.typepad.com, as well as some nontax accounting and law professor blogs, including one of my tax professors from Villanova Law, Mauled Again.

Where oh Where?

There are a number of folks asking where are the accounting blogs?

• Eva Lang notes that while lawyers have quickly adopted blogs, accountants have not.
  
• JE Moore, The Solo Accountant also noted the discrepency between lawyer blogs and accountant blogs.
• Michelle Golden asks the question: “CPA Bloggers: Where Are The Accountants?” (but notes a few months later that it is growing in “More Accounting Blogs.“

This excerpt from WebCPA (Blogging for Dollars) sums up the lack of accountant vs lawyer blogs:  Golden, whose blog, online at www.goldenpractices.com, lists links to blogs written by CPAs, said that the accounting profession has been slow to adopt blogging as a communication and marketing tool, as compared to those in the legal profession.”

“Lawyers are all over blogs; there are thousands of law blogs and there are two dozen accounting blogs,” Golden said. “The most effective blogs are industry niche-based, but a big problem [that accounting] firms have is declaring, ‘I’m a specialist in X,’ because they are overly worried about the implication that they don’t specialize in Y and Z. If they’re a small firm, they’re worried that they’ll disqualify themselves, but if they’re a big firm, it’s politics. When it comes to blogging, they mistakenly think it’s an all-or-nothing deal. Even if somebody is innovative enough to move forward and blog for industry niche X, other partners oppose it, saying, ‘I don’t want to do a blog, but I’m an expert in Y, and that’s going to make me look bad.’ This is an unwise sacrifice of a great opportunity for the sake of ego.”   Amen I say …

Progression and the Struggle to Keep Blogging

Again, it’s been three years since that article was written, and the question she asks is still relevant.  David S. Rachford over at CPAMarketingCenter.com alludes to one of the underlying reasons why some blogs fail to survive — lack of consistency.  He suggests that one should establish a regular posting schedule and that you can start with posting once a week; but make it realistic.  He adds that “consistency is key to improving your search rank, and your position online.”  I would only add that it is crucial to keeping the blog alive, meaning that a lack of consistency will create a negative feeling towards creating a new blog entry and a feeling of just giving up.

Says Reed Tinsley, CPA, CVA, CFP and a Houston-based consultant for the health care industry writes a blog at http://rtacpa.blogs.com, said that in the last 12 to 25 months, he has gained roughly 50 clients from his Web site and blog, which he tries to update every day.

“If you read my blog, I’m not pontificating like a lot of blogs do,” Tinsley said. “The intent of my blog [is] a receptacle of quick ideas or updates, changes in regulatory issues people need to know about. I’ve told my colleagues lately, I’m really surprised about how much business and inquiries I get through the Web site and I think part of that is the blog itself.”

The Association for Accounting Marketing has this to say about the emergence of Blogs.

“Similar to an online diary, a blog allows a firm to generate buzz by initiating two-way communication directly with readers. Some consider blogging to be an unsophisticated tool, but businesses now use them regularly to reach clients and expand mature markets. Savvy bloggers employ RSS feeds as a way to pick up regular readers. — 9/2007. MarketTrends, Association for Accounting Marketing.”

…. To Be Continued