Your CPA website is up and running. You have some fresh content and good blog posts to attract new visitors and interact with your current audience. You have even installed online chat to ensure better conversions. Screen sharing is another step you can take to help existing, new, or potential clients in less time.

Pictures Worth of Help. You might already use a free online presentation tool to help others understand certain concepts. There are times when screen sharing with your client would offer a much easier solution. A view of your computer screen offers more than anything you might say.

Making a Connection. Making the connection to screen share is not always easy. There is always an application your client needs to download. Getting through that process can be a show stopper in making a connection with your client work.

No Download Needed. Web Worker Daily has a great article on a new service called Yuuguu. Although you need to download an application, no download is needed for your client. You can screen share right within the instant messaging window.

Free Screen Sharing

Screen Share. You send a web address to your client via email along with a special pin. The client goes to the web address and enters the pin. You then click on “show” and your client can view your screen. You can then communicate via live chat or voice.

Pro Version. As with many online applications, there is a pro version that offers even more functionality. If you find the free version works but want even more, the extra cost might be worth it.

Potential Clients. You might have an online chat or get an email from a potential client. Convert these prospects by showing how easily you can answer questions with Yuuguu.

Have you ever used screen sharing with your clients? Do you like how it works? Send a comment with the form below.

You have a blog and have thought about writing topics. Still there are times when you need a fresh perspective. Here is a way to leverage the pool of your clients needs along with making your CPA website blog even more interactive.

Get Writing Ideas. Regular visitors to your CPA website, both clients and potential, are a great resource of ideas. Requesting ideas from them on what they want to hear about is a great way to leverage that resource.

Writing Feedback Direct from Your Clients

Free Blog Writing Ideas. Skribit is a free solution that can be integrated within your CPA blog by just signing up. Any reader is able to type in suggestions that you translate into a blog post.

Website Integration. You can customize how the widget or feedback box displays on your CPA website. After making your choices, copy and paste the code. The code needs to be inserted into each blog post, just like the comments box (see link for how to insert the code).

Sidebar or Suggestions Tab. You get the choice of a sidebar display or a suggestions tab. The sidebar display actually shows at the bottom of your post. Most readers won’t fail to see it. The suggestions tab is off to the side and could be missed however it also is less obtrusive.

Just like what type of background color, text color, or font which way to display the widget is up to you. You do get a visual preview making it easier to decide.

More Ideas. See what other CPAs are writing about. Try tweaking what another blogger is talking about to your own audience or brand. Skribit also has a section full of random suggestions made by other members to pull from.

Skribit helps to leverage your particular audience while also allowing for a bit more interactivity. Visitors like to a chance for website interactivity. Giving that to them helps expand your audience and, ultimately, your client base.

Have your own experience about interacting through your CPA blog? Send a comment below and remember, you comment, we follow.

Your CPA website needs to attract new visitors, but that is just step one. The next step is helping to ensure contact with your accounting firm is made. One of the tools freely available is the use of online chat. Another choice for free online chat is available that also allows for keeping track of all your instant messaging networks in one place.

CPA Website with Free Online Chat. Meebo.com offers the chance to add free online chat almost anywhere on your CPA website. Not only is Meebo.com free but you can create any number of different custom windows (widgets).

Free Online Chat from Meebo.com

Online chat allows someone visiting on your CPA website to send your firm an instant message. The message could be a quick question about what your accounting firm offers or where to go on your CPA website. Making communication this easy for any visitor increases the likelihood of future contact.

Create the Chat Window. After signing up, click on accounts, Meebo Me!, and then the “Add a New Widget” button. You name the chat window (widget), choose the size, click save and you are done.

Multiple Widgets. Create different widgets or chat windows to be added to different parts of your website. One could be named “Contact” and placed on your Contact Us or About Us page. Another could be named “Welcome” and be placed on your Welcome page. You then know, based on the widget name, where the visitor is located.

Add to Your CPA Website. Copy and paste the “Widget embed” and email it to support@cpasitesolutions.com. Be sure to mention where you want each widget to be located on your CPA website.

Keep Track on Desktop. An extra bonus can be had by adding the desktop application. You can then have the browser closed and still see when a visitor starts chatting on your CPA website.

IM All in One. You can also use Meebo.com to view all of your IM or social accounts. If you allow your Facebook and Twitter accounts, you can see all your activity in one place.

Do you ever use live chat yourself? Do you like having that feature available on websites? Send a comment and share with other readers.

You can enhance and advertise your CPA seminars with your CPA firm’s website. Here is another way to leverage an audience for what you have to offer. CPA Site Solutions now has an events blog that you can post your CPA seminar on for free.

New CPA Site Solutions Events Blog

CPA Events. Events is a regular updated blog with CPA seminars, events, and webinars that are related to CPAs and other accounting professionals. You can check the events blog on a regular basis or subscribe to the RSS feed and get automatic updates. You can also submit your own CPA seminar or event.

How to Submit. The events blog is soon to have a form to submit your CPA seminar or event. For now just email support@cpasitesolutions.com with your CPA seminar or event details.

What You Can Find. You can find any number of CPA seminars, events, or webinars throughout the country or online all in one location. You can use the search or just look under a category.

iPhone Ready. The events blog and the regular CPA Site Solutions blog can now be viewed on an iPhone or iPod Touch. This makes it that much easier to read about any new tips and tricks for leveraging your CPA website.

Where is your favorite place to go to find CPA seminars, events, or webinars? Send a comment and share with other readers.

Making connections with others helps bring people together while increasing your CPA firms overall influence. An example would be to showcase your clients. In fact, sometimes even the smallest gestures, like buying a random stranger a cup of coffee, can influence in ways you might not imagine.

Giving Is Easy

Give and Grow Rich. That is the recent title of a blog post from Copyblogger. An unlikely place for a CPA and other accounting professional to go on the internet? Maybe, but the clear and touching message behind the post make it an excellent read for anyone.

Generosity Speaks for Itself. When you give without the need for something back, you gain. The generosity speaks for itself so you don’t have to. There may be nothing that comes of it but often you do gain in unexpected ways.

Free Content. There is all kinds of free content, like the Financial Guides, available to any website hosted by CPA Site Solutions. A person could come to any CPA website, grab that free content, and leave. Even so you are better off keeping this type of information available.

Free Tools. Along with the free content are free tools, like in the Tax Center of your CPA website. These again could be used and you could never gain a client from the experience. Again you are better off keeping these openly available.

Free Newsletter. There is also the free newsletter with fresh, useful, information each month. Some try to hide the newsletter, or any of these free items, in password protected pages. Yet that would be a mistake. You want visitors to have access to all this free information.

The Value of Your Expertise. In the end a visitor is not necessarily looking for any of those free things. They are looking for reasons to trust your CPA firm. They find that in the information you give for free.

In the end what they really want is the value of your expertise.

They want to trust the general value of what you have to offer. Once they have this, then they know they can trust you with their specific, and personal, situation. When that happens you have naturally converted a visitor into a client.

What do you think about giving information away for free? Do you have your own experience from something you have done on your CPA website? Send a comment below and share with other readers.

Juggling Tasks Takes Talent, Helpful Tools, or Both

Reading the CPA Site Solutions blog, you can find many helpful online tools. These tools make juggling a CPA website, accounting firm, and client needs easier. You can leverage your time further just by commenting upon any CPA Site Solutions blog post for SEO benefits.

You Comment, CPA Site Solutions Follows

You Comment We Follow. You may notice to the right this post, a new icon. It says, “You Comment, We Follow.” When you comment on any post, CPA Site Solutions links to your CPA website. This provides your accounting website a little bit of SEO benefit. Over the long run, this can add up.

All Comments Welcome. Your comment can be short, long, asking a question, or making an observation. Any and all comments are welcome. For example, your comment might extend the idea of the post. You could mention specifics you might be doing on your own CPA website.

Subscribe to Any Comment

Subscribe to Comment Updates. You can subscribe to the comments feed automatically. You get an email of any other comments that happen after your own. This is a great way to get engaged with other readers. You also get a chance to learn what other people are doing with their own CPA website.

Share the Post. Right below the Follow icon is now a share button. This allows you to share any post with one click. You can even add this feature to anywhere on your own CPA website as well.

You can find some great tools, tricks, and tips reading the CPA Site Solutions blog. You can leverage that further through comments. Have your own ideas around how comments can be helpful? Send a comment below to share with other readers.

You have great content that is also unique. You have leveraged that content with user participation. Now you can help others get to your website even easier. Have anyone share your website with others with just one click of a button.

An Easy Way to Have Others Share Your CPA Website

The Problem. A user comes to your accounting website and finds content they want to share. How can you make it easy to share with just a click of a button?

The Solution. Use AddThis for your CPA website. AddThis is free, customizable, and easy to use. You can even get it as an add-on to your browser if you use Firefox.

How to Get AddThis. Go to the site, choose your customizations and what type of code you want generated. Click on “Get Your Button” and code for your CPA website is generated for you. You don’t even have to register to get the button which is a time saver.

Register for Stats. Register and you can get stats on how your accounting website is being shared. You can then use your traffic stats on your blog, for example,  to understand what your readers enjoy. Then the next post you create can be tailored to fit that and, hopefully, make your blog even more popular.

Website Implementation. Once you have the code, copy and paste it in an email to support@cpasitesolutions.com. Make sure you request where you want the button to appear.

You can add it to your blog from any website hosted by CPA Site Solutions. Just follow the same instructions you would when adding a comments box.

Have your own experience around making it easy for others to share your CPA website? Comment below and share with other readers. There are even SEO benefits to commenting, so go ahead and give it a try!

Just having a CPA website is no longer enough to improve your business. You need to make your website an engaging place for your current, and potential clients, to visit. When you do, you give reasons for others to talk about your firm. This is the best type of advertising out there, that you have to earn, not buy.

Mind Mapping. There is a great article from accountingweb.com that refreshes the use of Mind Mapping. Mind Mapping is a technique used to find solutions to questions by helping to gently guide, but not control, the flow of brainstorming ideas.

Leverage. Any website hosted by CPA Site Solutions has plenty of content, tools, and helpful information that can help your clients. The next step is to to leverage your clients into a community of participants around your CPA website.

You can use Mind Mapping as a step towards finding unique ways to engage your visitors. Engagement is a way of participating with your website rather than just getting content.

Mind Mapping Brainstorm. You can follow the basic premise (see article above for more exact details). Take out a sheet of paper, put your clients at the center, and think, how can I get clients more involved?

For example, do I have a good way to get feedback from them? Do I actively follow-up on that feedback? Are there ways that I could connect client A to client B and have them both benefit?

Write the ideas down and then keep the paper next to you. Make yourself notice the paper throughout the day and more ideas are bound to appear. Below is a primer for how to think about client participation on your website.

Online Community. Here is an example. In general people like to feel special or that they are a part of something, not just a customer. You can do this with your website by using some of the online tools like, for example, adding comments to your blog.

The more people can interact with your accounting website, the more it becomes something they use rather than just visiting. When they engage with you and other users of your website, they are part of an online community.

Online Communities Make People Feel Connected

Your CPA Website. Take a look at your current accounting website. How could you socially engage them more in your firm? By answering these questions, and incorporating them, you make your website more of a destination.

More Ideas. If you have a CPA website hosted by CPA Site Solutions, you could talk to your account manager. If you know what you want, the account manager may be able to inform you on how to do it.

You can create an online community around your CPA website. Your firm can be part of your clients conversations. Those social conversations are worth more for advertising than you can ever get through traditional means.

Have your own experience to share involving Mind Mapping or creating an online community? Send a comment below and share with other readers.

There are over 60 free logos available to any CPA website hosted by CPA Site Solutions. These have recently been changed. In technical terms, they have been vectorized. They can now be used for print without costly recreation costs. Here are newer additions to the logo gallery along with how the graphics have been updated.

Logo #1

No Loss of Quality. Images used on a CPA website are different from those used in print. When you try to use a logo from a website for print you get a lot of fuzziness. That fuzziness is very obvious to anyone, even those not used to looking for the finer details.

There are services available that can recreate a graphic from the web to be used with print. This can be a potentially costly solution that can be avoided.

No Longer Costly. When a logo is vectorized it can change to any size without that same fuzzy quality. That means you can use it for the web or print without having to recreate anything.

Business Cards, Flyers, and More. You can now brand your business for free. You can now use over 60 free logos for your CPA firm’s business cards, flyers, and more.

Logo #19

Find a Free Logo. Take a look at the over 60 free logos available to any website hosted by CPA Site solutions. Once you have found one, send the request via email at support@cpasitesolutions.com or call 800-896-4500 with the logo number.

CPA Site Solutions then incorporates your CPA firm name within the new logo. The new logo is sized appropriately for your particular CPA website design. The graphic is then placed on your CPA website.

Newer Logos. The amount of free logos available are increasing all of the time. Much like the amount of ready-to-go website designs.

Logo Site Viewer

Have your own experience with logos for your CPA website that you want to share? Send a comment below. Remember, when you comment you get a link back to your website which can help your search engine ranking.

A Secure File Exchange, or Vault, is included with any website hosted by CPA Site Solutions, but how can you get people to use it? Make it easy through client self-registration and use of the Vault application.

Client Self-registration. Clients can actually register themselves directly on your CPA website. Self-registration gets clients familiar with the system. It also offsets the time for one person from your firm to add user accounts, and then email them their login details. Clients can do this by:

• Clicking on the login text at the bottom of any page of your website
• Click on “Click Here To Register” at the bottom of the Portal Login prompt.
• Fill out the information and submit.

Client Registration

You can also create a link just for new registration to place anywhere on your website. You do this by following the directions above and then, instead of filling out the form, copy and paste the URL and then create a link.

Once a new user registers, you have to verify the user before they can login and start using the portal. See this link for more information on the user verification process.

The verification is only a few clicks so is easy and takes little time to do. The verification process creates an extra layer of security. Although anyone can technically register, only those that are your clients get verified by you.

The View. When a client logs in they are automatically within their own folder in the system. The client only has access to this main folder and a public folder, nothing else. They won’t see the firm, or other clients, folders or files.

Uploading and Downloading. Uploading and downloading a document is similar to any other paperless system. There is no real limit to the size of file, nor to the type, that can be used within the Vault.

Making It Even Easier. You can make going paperless even easier for you and your clients by using the Vault application available to anyone at the Gold service level and above. The application, once downloaded and installed, allows your client to right click on a file and send it directly to their folder.

This makes it much easier to make the transition to a paperless office and data stream. This type of set up saves you time and money over traditional methods.

Have your own client experience with using Secure File Exchange through the Vault? Send a comment using the form below, and share with other readers.