Rocket Talk - How to Work With a Copywriter

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Developing a strong working relationship with a copywriter can provide a transformative shift to the efficacy of your marketing strategy. When you have access to personalized, high-quality content on an as-needed basis you can begin to provide your clients and prospects with an incredible value-add. You can also transform your website into a perfect encapsulation of your brand. Join Kirk Faulkner and Raudel Sanchez as they talk about the different ways you can develop a great relationship with a copywriter.

5 Steps to Writing Keyword-Rich Blogs for Financial Advisors

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Blogs are the secret weapon that allow financial advisors to expand their outreach. If your website is the home base of your digital storefront, then your built-in blog serves as an outpost that attracts new prospects while engaging current clients. Content is king and continues its multi-year reign. By continually refreshing your blog with new content, Advisor Launchpad drives new business to your website through Search Engine Optimization. With SEO-powered blogs, you can:

  • Address multiple points of interest and maximize your audience
  • Boost your search results placement
  • Increase traffic and future business

It all starts with having the right “keywords,” or the words and phrases that sites like Google love to promote. Indeed, the most effective blogs have keyword-rich content, and with a little planning, you can ensure that your own content does, too. In this blog, we’ll explain why featuring certain keywords can benefit your website’s SEO and your company’s digital presence.

Identify your Focus Keywords

A “keyword” is simply a word or phrase that people use to search on Google or other search engines. It’s not quite mindreading, but it does take a degree of anticipation to select the right keywords.

As you create your website’s content (beyond your blog), be mindful of the kinds of terms your audience may be searching. For example:

  • If you’re looking to attract clients interested in annuities for retirement, you can assume those prospects will search for keywords like, “Retirement Annuities in Your City, State.”
  • By anticipating that demand, a potential blog post title could be: “Retirement Strategies: 5 Things to Consider About Annuities.”

This strategy tells interested buyers that you have what they need.

Put Your Keywords in the Right Places

Placement is important. Once you’ve decided upon the most important keywords for your blog post, be careful to place them where they’ll have optimal impact. The more the merrier, and keywords should appear in at least some of the following places in your blog post:

  • The Title
  • Headings and Subheadings
  • The Introductory sentence
  • The Concluding paragraph
  • Anchor text (hyperlinked text to other related pages on your site)
  • Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Ask yourself: what do people want to buy? What does my business do best? With fresh content in the pipeline, you’ll consistently be reaching new clients and longtime customers alike.

Keep Your Keywords Consistent

Keywords help you create a strong theme. By stating and then reiterating what your firm does well, you create a culture of consistency throughout your website. Therefore, when you link to your blog post from other pages of your website, be sure to continue using the exact same keywords. You’re not being repetitive, you’re reinforcing your brand.

This consistency is particularly crucial when outside sites link to your own. It tells search engines how credible your materials are and leading them to rank your pages more highly.

As always, make sure you Tweet, Facebook, and share links of your new content to continue driving traffic to your site. If you don’t promote yourself first, no one else will.

Optimize Your Blog Images

Believe it or not, search engines like Google evaluate the file names of your blog post images when ranking pages in search results. There is a big difference between a file saved as “blog pic 1” and “Retirement Annuities Meeting.”

Be sure to include the relevant keywords in the title of the actual image file, then fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword-rich description of the photo.

These little details go a long way.

Keep Posting Content!

Start strong, then keep going. Last week’s blog might as well have been from 2014, so keep it fresh. Google and your new clients will thank you for the effort. By regularly updating your blog with relevant, carefully-crafted content, you will steadily rise above other outdated websites.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. As long as you update it and use precise keywords, your blog will continue to drive traffic to your website.

Conclusion

Google and other search engines may have changed the online game, but once you know the rules, it’s yours to win. Know your keywords, craft consistent content, then promote it and repeat the process.

SEO is vital to your digital marketing strategy, but we also know how confusing it can seem. Contact us today or fill out the form to your right to learn how Advisor Launchpad helps improve SEO for financial advisors.

Rocket Talk: How Do I Start to Grow My Business with Online Marketing?

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The whole goal of using Advisor Launchpad for your online marketing solution is to help you increase the amount of business you generate from new and existing clients. We want to help you find new prospects and inspire the clientele you already have to engage with you further. In this new episode of Rocket Talk, Advisor Launchpad’s Kirk Faulkner and Raudel Sanchez dive into the fundamental principles of what makes for good online marketing and how you can further your efforts using our tools.

5 Tools For Managing Your Online Reputation

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Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying that your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. That is to say, your brand is your reputation and your reputation is your brand. It takes a lifetime to build and could be dashed apart in an instant.

Managing your online reputation is all about protecting this valuable asset and making sure that there is an accurate representation of your brand promise available for prospects and clients to find online. Here are five tools that you can use to manage your online reputation and make sure that when you are not in the room, people only have good things to say.

Google Search

While Googling yourself might seem like an overly self-centered thing to do, it is an important activity that anyone who is serious about their online reputation needs to do on a regular basis. It is the quickest way to discover where you stand in the rankings of the SERPs (Search Engine Return Pages) that are most important to your brand. Of course, nothing is more important than your name. If you are not coming up near the top of the search for your own name, consider putting additional effort into your social presence. Several of the other tools on this list will give you the opportunity to increase your standing in the search rankings.

Be sure to also search Google Images for your name. Make sure that the pictures that come up are ones that you would want potential clients to see. If there are images that you have access to and would like deleted there is a process for that. First, delete the original picture then visit Google’s ‘Remove Outdated Content Page’. Once you have cleaned up your images, you can rest easier knowing that anyone else who runs a Google search on you will be seeing your best representation.

Google Alerts

One of the most comprehensive strategies for monitoring your online persona is to create a simple Google alert for your name and your company’s name. Google alerts are nothing more than an email that arrives in your inbox with any news of new occurrences of the designated phrase. Since it is not feasible to consistently Google yourself every morning, a Google Alert will take care of this for you.

You can also set Google Alerts for key clients and competitors. This will give you a head start on responding to all kinds of news that affects your business. It will surprise you how powerful being the first person to respond to a new story can be in many different instances.

Local Listings

One of the most important aspects of your reputation has to do with your location. Attracting clients who are near you is a powerful way to increase your book of business. Local searches have been shown to more frequently lead to engagement by those conducting the search. A recent study by Google found that “a greater percentage of local searches lead to a purchase within a day versus non-local searches (18% vs. 7%).”

Local search has become much more important in recent iterations of the Google algorithm. Businesses whose information is correctly and consistently listed across the Internet gain preferential treatment in search listings. If you are looking to improve your discoverability, Google Local Listings is a must for your reputation management.

Namechk

One of the most important things you can do for your brand is secure your name or your company’s name across the different sites and social platforms. Securing your name provides consistency to your users and allows your business to be seen and recognized in more places. Namechk is a site that has partnered with the top social companies to help you ensure your brand is consistent and easy to find across the internet.

Use Namechk to see if your desired username or vanity URL is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites. You can also use it in the early stages of naming to find a brand identity that you can consistently register for the majority of the most popular sites.

If This Then That

One element of a great marketing experience that we fervently recommend is automation. If you are trying to do everything manually yourself, you will undoubtedly experience burnout and human error and it will negatively impact your ability to execute your marketing strategy. If you are using FMG Suite, you are already experiencing some of the best automation on the Internet, but if you are looking to automate aspects of your brand management outside the FMG Suite environment, there are few tools that can match If This Then That (ITTT) for its ability to automate your workload.

ITTT’s recipes allow you to create instances of automation on almost any major social platform. Do you want an email every time you are mentioned on Facebook or Twitter? Want to make sure your branded content is evenly distributed across all of your different social platforms? ITTT has everything you need to not only keep an eye on your reputation but to create the kind of ubiquitous experience that communicates you have spent the time and effort to own your brand online.

Your reputation is a valuable asset that you can not afford to let get tarnished. Use these great tools to keep an eye on your reputation and manage it going forward.

Rocket Talk: How to Craft Your Content Strategy

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Coming up with a comprehensive content strategy can be tricky. There are a lot of things to consider when you dedicate the time and energy to such a monumental task. Join Raudel Sanchez and Kirk Faulkner as they discuss the ways you can tell that your content strategy needs some work and then some ways that you can find your content creation formula to make the whole process easier.

Rocket Talk: What is a Whitepaper and How Do You Use It?

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In the spectrum of different tools that digital marketers use, few are as powerful and versatile as the well-crafted whitepaper. Most people have heard the term by now, but many don’t understand what makes a good whitepaper. In this Rocket Talk, Kirk Faulkner and Raudel Enrique Sanchez discuss what a whitepaper is, how to create a great one and what you can do with it once you have it.

Why QUALITY Content Is King in SEO

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How Content Influences SEO InfographicIn 1996, Bill Gates saw the rising value of Internet content. While he recognized the importance of output volume, he knew the future of web copy would demand excellence.

“If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will.”- Bill Gates

If there was ever need of additional proof of Gates’ prescience, this statement would provide it. Twenty years later, the Internet abounds with content and a growing user appetite for increasingly valuable material.

As a financial advisor, you have to feed your clientele with relevant and trending information. The industry is inundated with hackneyed writing, making it essential that each post enriches your audience in compelling ways. Changes to search algorithms have made web crawlers like Google, Yahoo and Bing more discerning when it comes to judging the quality of your content. Appeasing their higher standards is the key to optimizing your site for search and improving your rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

There are three main aspects of your content you can improve to help improve your site’s ranking in the digital marketplace Bill Gates envisioned:

Originality, Personality, and Interactivity.

Provide Original Insight

The majority of the content being produced at any given moment is simply regurgitated versions of something else that was already published. The internet is aswarm with the same article sliced 15 different ways. If you want to experience the loving electric embrace of high search rankings you need to share information and experiences that are unique to you and your business.

When it comes to sharing lessons learned in the trenches, it is not a bad strategy to overshare. By opening up your coffers of knowledge and sharing your treasure with the web at large you are not only demonstrating your expertise in your chosen area, you are providing the exact type of insight that improves a users over all experience of your site. Your bounce rate will fall, your average time on page will increase and your quality scores, the number that signifies Google’s determination of how well you address a certain keyword, will go through the roof.

Demonstrate Your Personality

When you meet a prospective client, you smile as you shake hands. Having an approachable style and voice has the same effect. Your writing tone is essential to making your clients feel welcome but also needs to communicate professionalism and expertise. This can seem like a difficult tight rope to walk. Take some time to consider your word choice. Is your language festooned with jargon or approachable to a layman?

Another aspect of your writing to consider is your character. What persona are you projecting in your online publications? Are you the only narrator they experience? One incredibly powerful strategy to help your readers connect with your writing is to introduce a cast of characters made up of members of your staff, your family or your clients. The more that your readers feel that you are sharing of your life the more they will fell comfortable trusting you with aspects of theirs.

Use Interactive Content

One of the most important aspects of a web experience is how personalized it feels to the person having it. Something as simple as recommended similar articles that appear at the end of a particular piece can be the difference between a reader spending a few seconds with your site or going further, taking a deep dive into your content library and experiencing the breadth of your content.

Being concise is the new currency. Take advantage of our increasingly visual culture and use videos and images to tell your story. Bill Gates also predicted the importance of this component, suggesting the “need to have audio, and possibly video” to give customers a complete experience. A combination of pithy writing and powerful visuals will result in increased SEO performance and a steady stream of new opportunities for your company.

Get Started on Creating High-Quality Content

Advisor Launchpad provides comprehensive digital marketing services for financial advisors seeking to establish their online reputation and get ahead of the local competition.

From copywriting to SEO to web design, we have assembled various packages to meet your budget and marketing needs.

Contact us today to learn more information.

How To Strengthen Your Social Marketing

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Financial advisors have limited time to worry about their social marketing. Between LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, it can be especially hard to build a brand that remains unique to your firm and yet specific to each platform.

At Advisor Launchpad, we’re here to strengthen your social marketing by simplifying your focus. Our advice? Pick a platform, build a game plan, and stick to the process. It’s that simple. Rather than trying to master LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook all at once, invest your time in one platform at a time.

Today, we’ll provide an overview of each outlet so you know what types of content work best.

  1. LinkedIn: “The 24-Hour Trade Show Booth”

For financial advisors, LinkedIn is regarded as the most important social marketing community. While Twitter and Facebook bring more personality to the conversation, LinkedIn is usually the first destination prospective clients and industry colleagues will search you. It’s the place where thought leaders carve their niche and cultivate their audience. 

To join the conversation, you need original, engaging, and thought-provoking content. LinkedIn surfers aren’t only interested in hearing about what you do. They want to know how you think. Not only do people use LinkedIn to network, but also to stay abreast of the most innovative ideas in their industry. 

Inspirational pieces about your unique work philosophy or your distinct approach to financial planning will make the most lasting impressions. To captivate audiences about your company, shine a spotlight on your team, your work culture, and your firm’s successes. If you can attract readers with your business ethos alone, it’s only a matter of time until they become your client. 

LinkedIn rewards topicality. Stick to your niche, focus on your audience, and publish content that continually reinforces your expertise in the financial world. Think of LinkedIn as your 24-hour, seven-day-a-week trade show booth at a financial planning conference. 

What would you publish to continually attract (and retain) your visitors? 

2.   Twitter: “The Eternal Elevator Pitch”

LinkedIn posts age slowly, but last week’s tweets might as well be from 1850. Twitter is a social media beast that feeds exclusively on a steady stream of fresh and pithy messages.

While providing a second outlet for the content you share on LinkedIn, Twitter presents an opportunity to network in a more engaging and public way. Beyond linking to your white papers and blogs, Twitter encourages you to continuously interact with others in your field. 

Retweets, comments, and even a well-timed GIF show readers that you possess a broad perspective that extends beyond your own practice. That’s an attractive quality to prospective clients. Think of Twitter as your personal newspaper, carefully curated to highlight the qualities that make your firm unique. Though much of the content on your feed may come from third parties, if you retweet it, you’re technically still the publisher. 

While your LinkedIn profile largely consists of your own blogs and updates, Twitter can be an eclectic collection of tweets from The Economist, stock market updates, a random Bill Murray GIF, and the occasional thought piece of your own. 

A word to the wise: while propriety is paramount, don’t be afraid to build the Twitter feed you want, not the one you think others respect.

3.   Facebook: The Happy Hour of Social Media” 

The secret is in the title: Face. Book. The ubiquitous social network demands one thing above all else: users want to see you. In contrast with LinkedIn and Twitter, Facebook is by far the most personal of the social media outlets. 

With well over 2.13 billion active users on the platform, Facebook is less about overt branding and more about personality. This plays well into the hands of financial advisors.

While you may already have a personal Facebook page, you will want to establish one specifically for your company. When you do, lean into the recreational side of social media that Facebook enables. Continue sharing your company’s original blogs and content, but go a step further by posting videos of you and your firm. 

45% of users watch over an hour of Facebook videos a week. If you can tap into that demand - whether via clips explaining a hot topic in the news or behind-the-scenes videos of your team at work - you’ll be personally inviting prospective clients into your world. 

If LinkedIn is your round-the-clock trade show booth and Twitter is your elevator pitch, think of Facebook as a corporate happy hour. You’re technically still working, but you’re surrounded by people who want to loosen up and get to know the real you. 

Use video to get the most out of Facebook.

Getting started!

We hope this guide helps clarify the larger differences between the three pillars of social media. However you choose to get started, prioritize building an authentic personality on one platform rather than a haphazard presence on all three.

Pick your platform, build a game plan, and stick to it. Over time, you’ll master each platform and reap their individual rewards. 

What are backlinks and how do you get some?

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has a language of its own. From “whitehat” to “blackhat” and “nofollow” links to “dofollow” links, this digital lexicon requires more than a few definitions to make sense of the madness.

Today, we’re looking at one of the central components of an effective SEO strategy: “backlinks.” Widely heralded as the currency of SEO, backlinks are incoming hyperlinks that point from one website to another. For example, if Advisor Launchpad mentioned an article in The New York Times, that hyperlink would be considered a backlink for the famed publication. 

Backlinks are an integral piece of search engine ranking algorithms. If your website receives an abundance of backlinks from high-quality sources, Google will recognize your growing authority and boost your ranking.

While backlinks have long been part of the digital marketing conversation, the means of actually getting them have changed drastically. First, there was the old-school approach that saw hosts spamming comments sections with links to their own websites. Then came the “ends justify the means” crowd who bought backlinks from “link farms” to help increase their popularity. 

Though these tactics worked for a time, Google and other search engines caught on to the schemes and leveled harsh ranking punishments (and even banned) websites attempting to cut corners. The backlink goldrush inevitably led to a more tightly monitored and regulated market.

Backlinks are crucial to help grow your online presence, but only when they are earned through networking and a consistent emphasis on producing quality content.

Here are a few tips to get started:

  1. Position Yourself As A Thought Leader

Backlinks themselves carry little value; it’s the destination they take you that matters most. Rather than fret over the number of backlinks you can attain, focus on the most important goal: establishing yourself as a thought leader in both your local and industry markets.

The financial advisory world is inundated with competing voices that often regurgitate the same information. Carve a niche in that community, and you’ll not only boost your backlinks, you’ll also grow your business. 

  1.    Build Your Content “Skyscraper”

What’s the best way to enhance your online presence in the financial space? Take a look at what’s already working. Run a quick Google search of popular financial blogs and articles authored by competing advisory firms. Tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Buzzsumo can help you pinpoint the biggest content influencers and closely analyze their backlinks. 

Take note of the topics they cover and the tone they take, then put together a game plan to exceed their efforts. Brian Dean of Backlinko calls this the “Skyscraper Technique,” an approach derived from the “whatever you can do, I can do better” school of thought.

This could entail writing a more comprehensive or “ultimate” guide to the topic at hand, providing more real-world anecdotes and explanations to personalize your content, or simply altering your blog’s structure to feature more image-based or list-driven content. 

In short, be aware of the content that has a proven track record of success, then expand those qualities and put your own unique spin on it. 

  1.    Leverage Industry Partnerships 

Once you have cultivated your content, it’s time to launch it in the marketplace. Your best target? Financial industry partnerships and local community alliances. 

Say you published a blog that stresses the importance of incorporating an estate plan with your overall financial strategy. Your investment management firm works closely with local attorneys who specialize in estate plans. In this scenario, you could ask those attorneys to feature your guest blog on their website, or simply have them link to your article in one of their own posts. Google prizes these sorts of backlinks, as they rank high in both quality and relevance. 

Beyond leveraging your industry relationships, consider reaching out to local businesses with whom you may already have clients. The power of community credibility cannot be overstated. If a local shop gives you a shout-out in one of their own blogs or newsletters, you’ll earn both backlinks and new business. 

  1.     Publicize Through Social Media 

While leveraging your professional network, be sure to double your influence by capitalizing on social media. LinkedIn shares, Facebook posts, and Twitter retweets go a long way to getting your quality content on the map. Continue cultivating relationships with your social media followers, and it won’t be long before they start promoting your content.

Ultimately, getting backlinks takes time, creativity, and commitment. By focusing on developing unique and compelling content, then taking a multi-pronged approach to publicizing it, your website will gain backlinks as your company gains business. 

How Long Should Your Blog Posts Be?

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If you’re working to maximize your website’s SEO, consistent blog posts are an excellent way to provide new content for search engines to analyze as they determine your ranking. But how long should you make each post for maximum impact? Here are some essential guidelines to ensure that you are optimizing each post for SEO, without losing the impact on your readers!

Set a solid minimum

As a simple guideline, blog post should contain at least 300 words in order to rank well on search. There are a multitude of reasons why long posts will rank higher than short posts, but the essential factor lies in how easily Google and other search engines can determine the subject matter of your post. Consider each keyword that you use as a “clue” for Google to decide what your blog post is about. A longer length naturally includes more SEO keywords so you are leaving a perfect trail of breadcrumbs for Google to follow.

Include “long tail” keywords

In a lengthy article, you’ll be able to optimize for multiple long tail variants of the keyword central to your article. Use the opportunity of a longer article to include different phrases than you normally might. For example, the simple keyword “Retirement planning” can be expanded to “Retirement planning for young professionals” or “retirement planning for Doctors,” depending on your prime demographic. With a little added thought, your article will have a chance to turn up in search results for all these “long tail” variants.

Ready to go long?

Though there are different rules as to what post length is ideal for optimizing your SEO, the consensus is, the longer the better. Most marketing specialists advocate for aiming for 1000-2000 words, but with one caveat…the content has to hold the attention of your reader.

The natural downside of longer blog posts is the potential for boring your audience. The quicker a reader loses interests, the more it impacts your bounce rate, and all of your hard work will be in vain. So as you hammer out your 1,000 words, don’t lose sight of the main points of your article. Inform while you entertain, include statistics that spark your readers’ interests, and avoid using stale or outdated language.

There are many ways to keep your reader engaged throughout a large article. Add photos throughout for an easy break on the eyes. Tell an amusing anecdote about your kids’ refusal to add their Christmas money to their piggy bank, then dive into a larger examination of saving versus spending. Make sure your paragraphs are short and clear. Add lots of subheadings using ALP’s easy-to-use dashboard so people understand the main idea of each section. By thinking strategically as you write and format your article, you can ensure that the main points stand out even as you aim for a longer length.

At the very least, ensure that each of your blog posts exceeds 300 words so Google has enough information to work with to rank your website’s SEO. If you’re an experienced writer, experiment with writing posts over 1000 words and see if it makes an impact on your search rankings. Through trial and error, you can determine the optimal length for SEO without losing the interest of your readers!