Sales and Marketing. Websites.

Websites

In this day and age. if you are not Web-based then you are behind the times. All the
Internet really is. is an incredibly large encyclopedia. People, including you. go on the
Internet to look for information. Keep in mind that the new client isn't going to go
searching for you on the Internet: they're going to go searching for QuickBooks®
help, in which case, if you are a Certified Pro Advisor, they will find you. If you have a
website link from Intuits® Pro Advisor site, they will find out more about you: what
you do. who you are. how to get a hold of you. Very few small business owners will
have the time or patience to go searching the Internet for some inexpensive
backwoods bookkeeping shop. Would you? Unless someone directs them to your
website via certification such as Intuit®, they don't know who you are. Money is a
very personal subject. That is why it's 100% easier to get clients by referrals than by
cold calling. I'm not saying that you won't get any business straight from someone
going to your website: I'm saying it is just as difficult as going door to door when no
one knows who you are. Your clients however will appreciate a website that has
information that they can use. such as links to help them find out how to get IRS
Forms. Tax Deadlines and more. It helps also to have a simple way of contacting you.
via email, because they don't feel like making a phone call. We all get like that, every
once in a while. What a nice invention email has turned out to be! So my suggestion
is. don't waste your bankroll on an expensive website unless you are absolutely sure it
will make you money by bringing you clients.

There arc many websites that have free design templates. You need to know how to
make a Web page if you want to save some money. You can hire many companies to
build your website which can get costly, but that's what they specialize in. The best
software to use to build your own website is FrontPage. It is a Microsoft®-based
product (well, everything is a Microsoft®-based product, isn't it?) that I use to create
my own Web pages. It has taken years of trial and error to figure out shopping carts,
merchant accounts, graphics, links and the whole nine yards, and that is another book
. . . not mine. You can save yourself the aggravation by letting Intuit build a Web page
for you as part of their QuickBooks® and Pro-Advisor package. It is additional, but
they do have spccial promotions. Check with them when you sign up to be a Pro-Advisor bccause their promotions are constantly changing and I don't want to have to
keep updating this book just for an Intuit® promo. If you have the knowledge and
experience in creating a Web page, and are looking for free Web templates, try
www.27stars.com or www.fuzzwebmaster.com. They have many good templates for
free, plus additional templates that you would pay for. Depending on what your
budget is. make sure you have enough to survive on before you go out and start
investing in Web pages. You can also use the free site submission services that you go
to once a month to submit your website to major search engines. If you do it once a
month, you will get your website some free search engine advertising. The best sites
I've found for this are wvw.addpro.com and www.freewebsubmission.com. They
submit your site to about 30 major search engines at a time. They just want a
reciprocal link from your website to theirs. Put it on your links page: it's worth it.
You can register a domain at www.cheap-domainregistration.com. which is about the
most inexpensive site to register a domain. The costs range from $4.95 to $8.95 to
register for one year. Your web hosting is the company who you will be storing your
website with on their server. Because an Accounting and Bookkeeping Service does
not have a great deal of pages and images, you don't need to go out and find a hosting
company with a billion bells and whistles. You can find web hosts for as little as S3.95
per month. A good Web Hosting company that I know of is www.bizland.com. or even
cheap-domainregistration.com has a Web-hosting plan for as little as $3.95 per
month, which is cost-effective Web hosting that won't break your bank. You can even
find free Web hosting companies. I did it for a while, but found it to be incredibly
tacky. Banners filled the top portion of my Web pages bccause the free hosting
service meant that you would display their banner adds throughout every portion of
your website. Sometimes it's best to just pay a few dollars a month to avoid any such
inconvenience.