All of these resources and more come free with your website. To use them, all you have to do is activate the plugin that turns them on and fill in the settings.

For example, let’s say you wanted to add a contact form to your site. You have a great plugin called “Fast And Secure Contact Form.” It has all kinds of settings you can play with, which make it very, very, flexible.

To activate it, click on the “Plugins” link in your sidebar menu, and then click on “Installed” to see the full list of plugins that are already installed on your site. Locate the Fast And Secure Contact Form plugin in the list and click on “Activate.”

Once you have activated the contact form, you’ll find that a new item has been added under the “Settings” link in your sidebar menu. It will be listed as “SI Contact Form.” Now, don’t ask me why Mike has never made the names the same, but it still works. Matter of fact, if you like it, there is a “Donation” button on the settings page. A gift of $5 or so is about average for the guys that create these things, so, if you’re of a mind, click and give. It’s not required, but it’s nice.

After you’ve gotten to the settings page, one of the first things you’ll want to do is set the email address for where you want the contact form sent. If you leave it as is, it may wind up coming to me, and that could be embarrassing to both of us.

Play around with the settings, and when you think you’ve gotten them where you want them, save them, copy the “shortcode” and paste it in the page or post where you want the form to show up. Feel free to create a new page or post. After all, what’s an Angstrom unit for if you can’t use it to create all the pages you want.

Ave the page or post and preview it.

If you get a contact form showing up, so far, so good. Fill it out and send yourself a message. See how it works. If you didn’t get one, or if you don’t get the email, check your settings, change them some, and try, try again.

After all, Mr. Angstrom doesn’t mind how many units go flowing through the ether.

And, of course you believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and that little guy who puts the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Get real!

Your prospects all have cellphones and have thrown away their phone book. They’re looking for the local plumber, electrician, realtor and your competition using the internet search engines. Each month, over 40% of the more than ten billion searches done online are actually for local products and services.

And, the search engines will give search results featuring a local supplier or service before it gives less relevant results.

If you don’t have a website, and if it doesn’t tell the world where you are, you won’t get found!

Your website becomes your yellow page ad, your business card, your brochure, and your prospects first impression of you. And, it has to broadcast all that in the first two seconds after your visitor gets to your website.

You could pay a designer to build a site for you, you could try to build it yourself, or you could pay some service to host it and give you a bunch of tools you don’t need. Or, you could get a free site with features designed to draw your visitors in to a conversation with you.

Simple things like online financial calculators, an interactive question and answer forum, a calendar of your upcoming workshops and seminars, maps to your office, email and newsletter marketing, interactive polls, unlimited pages for content, your practice profile, staff and principal profiles, a free client newsletter, new articles each week … you getting the picture?

Got three minutes? That’s all it takes to set up your own site. Just click on the link below, and get started right now! No charge, no obligation!

This is what your visitor will see …

Not to worry. This is a simple change, but you will need to have yourself a suitable logo or graphic ready for upload. If you don’t have one, and want to create something to use, just to get rid of the branding that shows it’s a free site, then download Irfanview Graphics Editing software (http://www.irfanview.com/) , and create your own.

Irfanview is not something you want to use if you’re planning on doing anything really sophisticated, but it is a great little image manipulation software that will convert images from one type to almost any other known type, and, it has the ability to add text. Adding some text to an image will get you started, until you get what you want. That’s what I did when I got started in this stuff, and you didn’t notice the difference, did you?

So, find an image you want, resize it and crop it until you get the size that matches the theme you’ve selected, the add your text (your practice name, for example) and upload through the “Custom Header” link in the admin panel sidebar. It’s as easy as that.

First you learned to do taxes and keep books, now you can do graphics editing! Will wonders never cease?

If you’re not interested in editing graphics, and have between $25 and $50 you’re willing to invest in a professionally designed logo or graphic. Then I recommend LogoNerds. I got the logo you see used on this site done for only $27. I think that’s their going price still, but they do have a $47 package that includes a lot more than one logo.

Another thing you’re going to want to do is make sure you have the name of your site showing the way you want. Take a look at that blue bar at the top of your browser window. What does it say?

I’m looking at my test site (a href=”http://kirkward.accountingpractitioner.com” target=”blank”>http://kirkward.accountingpractitioner.com and it says “My Accounting Site – Mozilla Firefox.”

Of course you can tell from that, that I am using the Firefox browser (which I highly recommend). If I was using IE, then it would have said “My Accounting Site – Internet Explorer.”

If you haven’t changed it yet, yours will probably say “My Accounting Site” also. If that’s what you want, that’s fine. But, if I were you, I’d probably want it to reflect my practice name. You know why? Well, that’s the page title, and it’s one of the first things that the search engines look for.

To change your page title, look in the menu sidebar and click on the “Settings” link, then the “General” submenu, and then change the “Site Title” (Settings -> General -> Site Title) to what you want the search engines to see when they are looking at your site. Don’t be afraid to put some keywords in there … things like Expert, Accountant, Specialist, or some such foo fraw. It’ll help in your rankings.

Save that, and you’re done for this lesson. Take a look and see what you think. If you have any questions, of course, visit the support forum at http://support.accountingpractitioner.com and check out our tutorials there. Or, log in to your site and submit a help ticket request to take advantage of our exclusive “Rainmaker” level of personal email service.

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 youre faced with the problem of how to create all the papers, speeches and other work product youll 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.

Alternatively, you may be better off subscribing to an online resource, such as http://instantpracticebuilder.com and selecting from an inventory of pre-written speeches, articles, reports and other materials. When subscribing to an online service, you usually have the assurance that the material you receive will be the most up-to-date available, plus many such online services also provide Print-on-Demand services for your materials, as well as private label materials they provide.

Once you have developed or acquired an inventory of material you can use for articles, reports and speeches, your next step is to present this information in a way that will get you recognized as a knowledgeable expert, whether it is as a speaker in front of a group, such as a local civic organization, or in a printed form, such as a workbook or manual for business owners.

Many times, in addition to providing materials and resources, online subscription services also provide advice and guidance getting speaking engagements as well as methods on how to generate income from your speaking engagements.

By becoming recognized and remembered as a knowledgeable expert, either through your own expertise, or through the use of a volunteer or paid mentor, you will gain the reputation necessary to earn the trust in the minds of clients and prospects that should create a deluge of clients and fees.

Author: Kirk Ward
Article Source: EzineArticles.com