Tax time is typically the busiest time of the year for accountants and bookkeepers, with many firms needing accountants to work 9-10 hours a day, 5-7 days a week. With the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) accepting tax returns starting 1 July, with a deadline for filing on 31 October, the busy season is usually just that – busy.
Naturally, during this period you’re probably more concerned with handling your current clientele than you are with acquiring new tax clients. However, this is also the peak period in the year where businesses and people are actively looking for your services. This is the perfect time to generate new tax and bookkeeping clients. Who knows, these clients may be looking for other services as well.
Here is a crash course on how you can find and convert new clients during tax time.
1. Know your target audience and plan accordingly
Before diving into the different strategies for finding and converting new tax clients, it’s important to understand that your marketing language and tactics will need to be adjusted based on the type of tax client you are targeting. There are major differences in personal and business tax clients, so it’s important to understand those differences and tailor the strategies below based on your unique target audience.
Take your time fine-tuning the desired audience. If you’re targeting companies, think about any specialisations or niches with which your team has experience. Don’t move forward with any customer acquisition strategy until you’ve narrowed down your target audience. Remember, your goal here should be to attract more of your ideal clients, rather than driving enquiries from businesses or individuals who don’t suit match your goals in growing your firm.
2. Start with arm’s length marketing
Many accountants and bookkeepers don’t know where to begin when it comes to recruiting new clients. Well, the best place to start is with your sphere of influence. These individuals are you and your company’s direct network, including friends, family, business contacts, and current and previous clients.
Taking an arm’s length approach to marketing is an excellent way to generate new tax clients, especially during the busy season. Because everyone needs to file taxes, you can easily work probing questions into a conversation. Consider emailing previous clients or business contacts to check in and see if they are interested in learning more about your tax services. Be willing to ask for new business; it’s an important step for generating new clients.
3. Creating a referral program
Similar to arm’s length marketing, another great way to generate new tax business is to develop a client referral program. Word-of-mouth advertising, or referrals, are two of the most effective strategies for drumming up new business. The reason referrals work so well is because the person or company giving the referral has already developed trust with the lead. When they refer your firm, they are transferring that trust to your company. Referrals provide peace of mind to the lead and break down a lot of the reservations that come with new relationships.
A referral program is a great way to perpetuate word-of-mouth advertising and referrals. Because you’re currently in the midst of tax time, now is the perfect time to push referrals from your current client base. Be creative and find unique and desirable incentives to elicit referrals. A key part of your referral program is sourcing client reviews, that you can use on your website or on directories like Find a ProAdvisor.
4. Use digital marketing
If you want to create a scalable approach to tax client recruiting and conversion, you need to be using digital marketing. Digital marketing is an excellent tool for generating traffic to your website and communicating your value proposition. Not only can you reach a larger audience, but it’s also available 24 hours a day and provides evergreen marketing communication that will live long after the tax filing deadline of 31 October.
Some of the best strategies for generating clients online include the following:
Optimising your website for conversions
If you’re a tax agent or a bookkeeper who wants to generate more clients online, you should optimise your website to increase your conversion rate. A ‘conversion’ takes place when someone visits your website and takes some additional action, such as calling you, completing a lead form, asking a question or some other step that expresses intent or interest.
There are several ways to increase web conversions, but some basics are:
- Adding an opt-in form with minimal entry fields
- Creating a pop-up highlighting your tax services
- Adding actionable language and guarantees
Try local PPC
PPC is pay-per-click marketing. This type of digital marketing lets you target specific search terms and pay to have your website pages show up at the top of organic results. If you’ve ever searched Google for a term such as ‘local tax agent’, you’ll see the PPC results marked with a green ‘Ad’ tag. Using Google AdWords, you can find opportunities and search terms for local phrases that will help increase your qualified traffic. Use the AdWords keyword planner tool to find highly used phrases that have relatively low competition.
Use social media to find and retain clients
A social media presence plays a major role in your lead generation. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are powerful platforms that can be used to generate tax clients, handle customer service and increase brand awareness. For instance, LinkedIn is an excellent way to facilitate B2B lead generation. Because most employees have a LinkedIn account, you can easily find and connect with contacts from companies or industries for which you specialise.
Focus your content on EOFY
Tax-themed content is extremely important during tax time. You want a heavy dose of tax articles on your website, in your newsletters and on your social channels. Customers are searching for tax help, and if your blog and social channels aren’t covering tax and other EOFY topics, they’ll go elsewhere for that information and, ultimately, that business. During tax time, you should be publishing tax-themed content on your blog, social channels and email newsletters.
Don’t forget email marketing
Effective email marketing is becoming a lost art. With so many new flashy toys in the digital marketing arsenal, email marketing can be neglected. However, email is still one of the most effective ways to convert leads. Always segment your email lists. Try segmenting based on current customers, past customers and leads; this will help you customise and frame your conversations.
EOFY is in full swing, and most tax agents and bookkeepers are up to their necks in work. However, that doesn’t mean you should stop trying to attract and convert new clients. In fact, during the busy season is the perfect time to find new tax clients. These potential clients are attentive to tax information and have their eyes and ears open. Try the online and offline strategies above to grow your tax clientele this year.
This article originally appeared on the Quickbooks Resource Center and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org..
Passive income is money that you earn without active involvement. In other words, it is income that isn’t attached to an hourly wage or annual salary. Passive income streams could include things like cash flow from rental properties, dividend-yielding stocks, sales of a product (that requires little or no effort), royalties, and more.
Essentially, these side hustles can help you earn money without contributing much, if any, active effort. If you are paid for a service you perform, that’s active income — you have to put in time and energy in order to get paid. If you can continue making money while staying mostly hands-off, that can be a form of passive income. That doesn’t mean you won’t have to put work in up front to get started — you probably will. But besides some maintenance, most passive income ideas shouldn’t require your active involvement.
There are obvious benefits to these low-effort side hustles. Earning more money without putting in more hours offers the opportunity to make extra cash without burning yourself out. If you’re successful enough, it might even give you the freedom and flexibility to quit your day job and do whatever you want instead, whether that’s going to school, traveling, writing, or making art.
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There are a number of ways to earn passive income. Some options, like the following types of passive income ideas, take relatively little active supervision.
1. Open a High-Yield Savings Account
High-interest savings accounts are an alternative to traditional accounts, and they’re attracting more attention these days thanks to higher interest payments that might be 2% or more. By simply putting your money in the bank, you may be able to start to earn passive income on it. If you invest in an FDIC-insured account, the first $250,000 of your money is protected. There are both banks and online platforms which offer high-yield savings accounts.
Savings accounts are generally appealing because they are a separate place to store money you don’t necessarily want to use on day-to-day expenses. For example, it could be a good place to save for emergencies, or even to save for a vacation or a move across the country.
When you find a high-interest savings account, take a look at the fine print. What conditions are attached for you to get that rate? The financial institution may require you to have a certain amount of money deposited into that account each month, maintain a certain balance or have your bills automatically deducted from it. You may need to use your debit card a predetermined number of times, as yet another example — or be limited in the number of transactions that can take place each month.
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Although this may take an up-front investment, buying into a business and becoming a silent partner can be another passive income source.
Even if the company you are thinking of investing in seems solid, it’s important to have an understanding of the challenges the organization may face. There are some red flags to look out for, such as a company whose revenue is earned from just a couple of clients — or just one client — as opposed to several.
It’s also important to lay out the exact terms of your investment and compensation. (Learn more atPersonal Loan Calculator).
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Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is another type of crowdfunding that allows people to borrow money from individual investors. Through these sites, you can be matched with an individual seeking a loan, and lend your money at a rate that could be higher than the usual bank rates.
That’s because investors taking part in peer-to-peer lending tend to bear the bulk of any risk. It is possible that borrowers will default on their loans, leading to a higher risk if an investor were to lend with a lower credit rating, for example. Returns are never guaranteed and while investors will receive a return on the money they invest, they could also lose some or all of it in the long run.
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Another popular passive income source is rental property. You might want to purchase a home to rent out to an ongoing tenant to earn rental income or list a property on a short-term rental site. Hiring a property management company lessens your day-to-day involvement, thereby making this venture a more passive income strategy than active.
Obviously, setting up this type of income requires a pretty big outlay, and it may be a while before your rental property generates a profit over and above the many expenses required to run it. In addition, there are always risks in the rental markets to keep in mind.
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If you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a piece of property, you can always check out your options on crowdfunded real estate sites. These may require a smaller initial investment, and likewise the costs are also shared.
Crowdfunded real estate investments can be complex, however, and you’ll want to balance the risks and rewards.
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When companies choose to share a portion of their profits with the investors who own shares of the firm, those payments are called dividends, and they work generally the same way from company to company.
Typically, dividends are paid in cash (though some might be paid in stock), on a regular schedule. Dividends are usually paid quarterly, though there are variations.
Investors might receive dividends from companies they’re invested in, or from mutual funds they’re invested in that hold shares of dividend-paying companies.
There is no guarantee that investing in dividend-paying stocks will continue to earn you passive income.
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If you’re just getting started with investing, you may want to use automated investing tools to help you choose the appropriate allocation of assets for your goals.
Typically, an automated platform — also called a robo-advisor — is a digital investing service that provides you with a questionnaire so you can establish your financial goals, risk preferences, and time horizon.
On the backend, a sophisticated algorithm then recommends a pre-set, automated portfolio that aligns with your responses. These portfolios often have lower account minimums compared with traditional brokers, and the portfolios themselves are typically comprised of low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs) — which adds to the cost efficiency of some robo products.
You can use a robo investing as you would any account — for retirement, as a taxable investment account, or even for your emergency fund — and you typically invest using automatic deposits or contributions. The allocation in each portfolio is usually pre-determined, and investors cannot change the investments.
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When you open your retirement account, you can choose to invest it however you want. For example, you could open an individual retirement arrangement or IRA.
One way to earn income in a retirement account is by investing in mutual funds. You can choose the level of risk you want to take with your money by finding a mutual fund that is higher or lower risk.
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When you join a company’s affiliate program, which requires minimal upfront investment, you earn a commission from every product that someone purchases from that company. All you have to do is post the link on your blog, website, or social media pages. Amazon Associates is a great place to start.
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Another one of the best passive income opportunities is renting out your car on a site like Turo. It’s basically the Airbnb of cars, and, according to Turo, the average annual income for one car on the site is $10,516.
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If you have a clean driving record as well as a newer car, consider getting in touch with a car advertising agency. You simply drive around town with ads on your car and easily generate passive income.
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Do you have space in your driveway that you aren’t using? Then rent it out on platforms like Stow It, where you can find people who will pay to rent out the space.
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If you have extra space in your garage, shed, or storage unit, then you could start earning passive income by using a peer-to-peer storage site like Stashii to find people who need your space.
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You may not have space to store other people’s things, but you might consider investing in a real estate investment trust (REIT) that focuses on storage units. For example, one option is Public Storage, which has ownership or interest in 2,548 properties located in 38 states.
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Even if you don’t own a rental property, with your landlord’s permission, you may be able to rent out a room in your apartment or list it on Airbnb.
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Have you ever done a home improvement project that required you to purchase tools? You may never need to use those tools again. Thankfully, now you can rent tools, and rent out your tools, on peer-to-peer platforms such as Sparetoolz to earn passive income.
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Let’s say you don’t have any songwriting ability, but you would like to make money on other artists’ work. You can invest in royalties through Royalty Exchange and earn passive income on the intellectual property.
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If you don’t have the time or energy to create content for your own blog, then look into ones that are already successful and see if the owners are willing to sell. You could also hire someone to manage your blog so that you’re truly earning in a passive way.
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If you have a special skill or knowledge about a certain topic, you may be able to create a video course where you teach people about that topic and charge them to take the course.
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You may want to research online platforms where you can sell everything from digital art to e-books. Whether you’re an artist, graphic designer, or writer, you can create digital products to sell online.
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Many companies, bloggers, and individuals use stock photos on a regular basis. You may be able to upload your best photos to stock photo sites and earn passive income on them.
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If you’ve been dreaming about an amazing phone app that you think a lot of other people would use, you may want to look into hiring a development team to create it.
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You may be able to earn passive income through sales of a product that you create. This could be a book that you write or a physical product that you design and make. You might also list items you already own on sites like eBay and earn extra income through those sales.
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Do you love to write songs? Then you could license your music and start earning passive income. You’ll just have to team up with a music licensing company to get started.
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Through platforms like Amazon’s KDP, you can self-publish a book, set the price, and generate income every time someone makes a purchase. You will be able to set the price of your book and be in full control of your book’s Amazon page, where you can list pictures of the book, reviews, and videos promoting it.
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You can start selling books online without having to write anything. How? By focusing on blank books, such as journals, sketchbooks, and planners. Simply find a design you believe will appeal to people and begin collecting royalties when people buy your books.
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Another artistic endeavor that could be a good way to generate income is creating greeting cards that you sell to a wholesale or retail stationery company that accepts independent artist submissions.
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If you want to sell products online but don’t want to store any of the goods, you could always look into dropshipping to create passive income. With dropshipping, you don’t have to have much money to start since you don’t need inventory to fulfill orders for customers.
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Blogging seems like a pretty cool space to operate in and gives you a lot of creative freedom. You can make your blog all about crafts, share tutorials, ideas, and more. It’s up to you how your space operates.
Blogging might seem like too much work to many people, but it doesn’t have to be a full-time job for everyone. For some people, blogging can be fun after a day at the office — and, with time and effort, it could turn into something more lucrative.
Here are a few ideas on how you can make passive income from blogging:
- Affiliate marketing
- Google AdSense: Cost Per Click and Cost Per Impression
- Sponsored posts
- Selling products
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If you enjoy creating videos more than writing, then consider starting your own YouTube channel. Once you get enough viewers, you can begin to generate passive income through YouTube advertising.
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Like an online course, an ebook is a way to share your expertise with the world. Anyone can self-publish a book online through services like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, iBooks Author, or Kobo Writing Life.
The percentage of royalties you earn varies depending on the publisher. Of course, the more marketing you do, the more copies you’re likely to sell — and there’s no shortage of online marketing strategies to investigate. But once you write and publish the e-book, it’s out there ready to generate passive income for you.
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Podcasts are still popular, and they can generate some passive income for you. If you start a podcast that resonates with people, then you can grow your audience and monetize your show by sponsoring with ad partners. If you get enough listeners, you may be able to sign up for podcast advertising networks.
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Similar to an ATM business, a vending machine business allows you to use your creativity and determine high-traffic areas where you could make a lot of money. If you buy in bulk, you’ll be able to save on the snacks and drinks you purchase for your machines.
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There are only 24 hours in a day. If you go to a job each day that pays you a set amount of money, that is the maximum amount that you’ll ever make in a 24-hour period. That is called earned income.
By investing some of that earned income and creating sources of passive income, you may be able to increase your earnings. Diversifying your income stream may also improve your financial security. Some benefits of passive income are:
- More Free Time: By earning money through passive income sources, you might be able to free time in your schedule. You may choose to spend more time with your family, pursue a creative project or new business idea, or travel the world.
- Financial Security: Even if you still plan to keep your 9-to-5 job, having multiple sources of income could help increase your financial security. If you lose your job, become sick, or get injured, you may still have money coming in to cover expenses. This is especially important if you are supporting a family.
- Tax Benefits: You may want certain legal protections for your personal assets or to qualify for tax breaks. Consulting with an attorney and/or tax advisor to explore setting up a formal business structure like a sole proprietorship, a limited liability company (LLC), or a corporation, for example, might help you decide if this is a good route for your particular situation.
- Location Flexibility: If you don’t have to go into an office each day, you’ll be free to move around and, possibly, live anywhere in the world. Many passive income streams can be managed from your phone or laptop.
- Achieve Financial Independence: The definition of financial independence is having enough income to cover your expenses without having to actively work in order to cover living expenses. This could allow you to retire early and have more freedom to live your life the way you choose. Whether you’re interested in retiring early or not, passive income can be one way to help you reach financial independence.
- Pay Off Debt: Passive income may help you to supplement your income so that you will have the opportunity to pay off any debts more quickly.
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Although it might sound like a dream come true to quit your job and travel the world, earning through passive income is not quite that simple.
- Earning Passive Income Is Not a Passive Activity: Whether you’re generating passive income through a rental property, running a blog, or in another way, you will still need to put in some time and effort. It takes time to get these income sources up and running, and they don’t always work out as planned. If, for example, you run an Airbnb, you have to maintain the property, ensure a high-quality experience for guests, and address any issues or concerns guests may have to secure positive reviews.
- Passive Income Requires Diversity: In order to earn enough passive income to quit your job and cover all your expenses, you would most likely need more than one source of income. Although you may no longer need to clock into a 9-to-5 job, you will likely still need to spend time managing multiple income streams.
- It’s Lonely at the Top: It might sound great to never have to go to the office again and to have the freedom to travel, but earning money through passive income can become lonely. Not having anyone to talk to during the day might make you feel lonely, and if you aren’t self-motivated, you may find it difficult to stay on task if you need to manage your passive income.
- Getting Started May Require Investment: Depending on how you plan to create passive income, it may require an initial financial investment. You may need money for a down payment on a rental property, the development of a product you plan to sell, or for investment into dividend-yielding stocks.
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No matter which type of passive income you choose to pursue, it’s important to keep track of your finances and both your short-term and long-term financial goals.
Tracking multiple sources of income in a monthly budget can be a complex task. To be profitable, it’s important to pay attention to how much money you put into the maintenance of your passive income stream(s), such as property upkeep or monthly online services.
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In addition to passive income, there are other types of income you can earn.
Earned Income: This is the most common type of income — money you make from a job. With earned income you are trading your time for money.
Profit Income: Profit income comes from the sale of a product after expenses have been deducted.
Interest Income: This can be money earned from one entity lending to another entity, such as a person, company, or bank. This can also be referred to as interest from accounts such as savings accounts and certificates of deposit (CDs) in which you receive a 1099-INT at the end of the year.
Dividend Income: Most dividend income is earned by the distribution of income from companies to shareholders owning stocks that pay dividends.
Rental Income: Rental income is earned when you rent or lease a house, car, or other property you own to someone else.
Capital Gains: This generally refers to profit (or gain) that is subject to taxation when you sell an asset such as stock or real estate. There are both long- and short-term capital-gains tax rates depending upon how long you held the asset before sale.
Royalty Income: Royalty income is generated when you own the rights to a piece of art, music, literature, or another asset licensed for other people to use, or from the extraction of oil, gas, or minerals.
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Establishing a passive income stream is one way to diversify your income and can help you build wealth and achieve financial freedom in the long term. There are a variety of ways to earn passive income, such as through investing, rental properties, and automated investing.
Some passive income sources require a financial commitment or upfront investment, such as purchasing a rental property, and others may require a time commitment. And passive income, of course, is rarely 100% passive. Often there is considerable time and effort that goes into setting up a passive income stream. And some sources of passive income (from investing, real estate, running a business or creative endeavor) require ongoing maintenance.
This article originally appeared on SoFi.comand was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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