Are You Blogging Yet?
There is a variety of benefits to blogging, which are outlined below.
A blog allows your clients to follow the latest happenings of you and your firm, as well as to keep current on the latest investment and retirement plan trends. Clients can follow your blog in their RSS feeds and be updated automatically as they review the latest postings from other blogs that they follow. If you can’t think of blog topics, consider your current clients as your target audience. Are most of your clients interested in the latest compliance issues or in increasing participation rates? Are they large or small plans? Sending out surveys is a great way to discover what is interesting to your clients. Blog posts can open up conversation between you and your clients and allow you to offer additional services to them.
Your prospects may not be following your blog, but if you have their email addresses, you should be sending them your e-newsletter. Your newsletter should contain a snippet of your blog post, which will link to your blog for the full article. In this way, viewers can see the entire article and other useful information available on your website. If you’re using an e-newsletter platform, such as Constant Contact, you can see you is interested in your blog and who signs up for the blog.
Although your blog is geared towards clients and prospects, it may attract people that you don’t even know. Search engines, such as Google, increasingly rely upon blogs to provide information. If your blog contains relevant information regarding fee disclosures, your post may show up in the results of people searching for more information on the topic. If those people are plan sponsors looking for a new retirement plan advisor, they might contact you for more information, a meeting, etc. If you optimize your blog for search engines, your post could show up in the top results of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. When managed correctly, having a blog also pushes your website up in search result rankings. If people are searching for a financial advisor in your area, this could give you a huge advantage over your competition.