I mentioned in the book that Nimble was very new and I expected to see quite a few changes to the service happening in the not too distant future.  My prediction proved to be true as, even before the ink is even dry on the book, changes to Nimble are coming through thick and fast.

In the book, I stated that the service was completely free, but that it might not always be the case.  I hoped that it would only be larger clients requiring more functionality that would be the ones who needed to pay.  This is exactly what is happening from January; single users will still get to use the service for free while larger companies will need to pay for each additional person using the service.  At just $15 per additional user, it’s still a lot cheaper than other comparable services though.

It’s not all bad news though – Nimble are continuing to offer additional features to all its users (including single users for whom the service is still going to be completely free).  Already introduced is a new integration  with MailChimp, my favorite mailing list service (because it’s free to small users), which I describe in great detail.  In the book, I described how to save your Nimble contacts as a CSV file which you would then need to upload to MailChimp.  Not any more though – now you can import all your Nimble contacts to MailChimp in just a few clicks – saving you time (and maybe some frustration as well if you are not so technically minded).

But there’s even better news than that.

One of the main reasons why I wrote that you would probably need to run Nimble in tandem with one of the social dashboards such as Seesmic, TweetDeck or HootSuite is that there was no integration between Nimble and your Facebook Business Pages.  But this is all going to be changing very shortly as Nimble is already testing out the feature with some of their users and will roll the service out to all of them before the winter is through.

The final big improvement to Nimble coming over the next couple of months is integration with Google+, the new kid on the block on the social media scene.  Nimble really are ahead of the curve in integrating Google+ so early in the game.  Of the three giants on the social media dashboard scene that I mentioned in the previous paragraph, only HootSuite provides Google+ integration at the moment and so Nimble are definitely on the ball here.  In the book, I wasn’t convinced that it was worthwhile setting up a Google+ account if it meant you had to log into the account separately from all your other social media accounts.  When Nimble will allow you to post to Google+ at the same time you post to your other social media streams, that negative will be gone and so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t add Google+ to your social networking efforts as well.

One of the few features still lacking from Nimble is its inability to schedule updates at future times.  If this feature is not essential to you though, once Nimble’s newly announced features are available to all users, it could very well be time for you to consider ditching your old social media dashboard and using just Nimble because of the stronger CRM elements that are at is core.

Click here for more information on Nimble and to sign up free 

Unlike most of the major book publishers who are often pricing their ebooks higher than the hardcover versions of their books (if you understand the logic of that, please let me know as I don’t get it at all), Informer Books are passing on the savings of not having to chop down and pulp some trees and make ink from whatever it is that ink’s made of (unicorn blood probably for the price that HP wants for its inkjet cartridges), with the price to Amazon US buyers being $9.99, and the price to Amazon UK buyers being £7.98 – just 40% of the price for the paperback editions.

So, if you got a shiny new Kindle – or some other ereader – in your stocking this Christmas, then don’t miss out on picking up this e-bargain.

More Information on Internet Marketing Bible for Accountants

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The winner, by a wide margin, was from search engine optimization, which accounted for 53% of generated leads, compared with 28% for pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords and 19% for social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

With Google still accounting for two-thirds of all searches in the US (and around 90% in the UK and Australia), these statistics reinforce what I said in my book, Internet Marketing Bible for Accountants, that getting to the top of the Google rankings is the best source of new leads that any accounting practice can hope to get.  And all those leads are completely free as well.

At first glance, getting to the top (or near the top) of the search engine listings probably seems like a completely impossible task.  Make a search under a keyword phrase such as ‘yourtown accountant’ and the number of results returned will probably be in the millions.  You could be excused for thinking that you have better odds of winning the lottery than getting to the top of the search engine rankings.

Fortunately though, you would be wrong.

As an exercise, I checked the results coming from searches for the keywords ‘accountant’ and names of median-sized cities in the US, UK and Canada in an attempt to find ‘average’ results in each country.  I was actually quite surprised by what I found.

In most cases, when I was on the third page of the Google results (listing results from number 21-30), most of the results that I was getting were not directly relevant to my search if I was looking to employ the services of an accountant or CPA in those cities.  In many cases, the results were recruitment advertising where companies were looking to hire accountants on one of the major job sites or else they were listings from directories with more lists of accountants – more minor versions of listings like those of yelp.com.

On the page before this, the second page of the results showing listings 11-20, the results were a little better.  Around half of the results on average were for web sites belonging to ‘real’ accounting firms, while the other half were more job ads and directories.  It was only on the first page of Google where the majority of the results were for ‘real’ accounting firms who I would be interested in contacting.

So what can we learn from this exercise?

The bottom line is that getting on the first page of Google in your city is probably not going to be nearly as difficult as it might appear at first glance.  Just making a few minor changes to your website (or creating one in the first place if you don’t already have one) is probably all you need to do to get your practice listed somewhere on the first page of Google.  With the information contained in the book, Internet Marketing Bible for Accountants, this is something that you should be able to achieve with just a few hours’ work.  With a little more time and effort spent in obtaining some links coming into your site, a top three listing should also be within your grasp, providing that your practice is not located in one of the biggest (and thus most competitive) cities in the country.

If you don’t know anything at all about making changes to your website, or simply don’t have the time available for it, then Informer Books’s sister company, Informer Marketing, could take care of the entire search engine optimization process for you at a very affordable price.

So don’t throw away the opportunity of generating many more leads from your website.  Either order your copy of Internet Marketing Bible for Accountants today, or contact Informer Marketing for a quotation on how much it would cost to optimize your website.

Read the entire Digital Marketing Report from webmarketing123.com here.

Mashable today has an excellent example of the type of content which is perfect for sharing in the form of an article explaining how people who work from home are able to deduct some of the costs of their home against taxes.  There are several reasons as to why this makes a great example of an article which your clients will find to be a useful read:

1.  With many people working from home these days. it’s an article which will be highly relevant to a lot of potential clients.
2.  The article is written in an easy-to-read fashion, avoiding too much jargon and so everyone is going to be able to understand it – not just accounting professionals.
3.  The length of the article is just about right – long enough to get some very useful information across, but not too long that readers will click away before they get to the end.  There are links at the end for anyone who is particularly interested in the subject matter to obtain more information.

If you are interested in writing some of your own content, it’s worth using articles such as these as templates to give you a guide as to what you should be aiming for.  Alternatively, you can simply link to it from your social media sites with a quick introduction of your own recommending it to your Friends and Followers and giving a reason or two as to why you think it might be of interest to them.

Read the full article here.

As well as writing a good ad, it’s vital that the ‘landing page’ – the page that the ad leads to – is well-optimized.  Too many advertisers take the lazy approach and send everyone through to their home page.  But those who take the trouble to create a specific page which gives the visitor exactly what they are looking for will be rewarded in two different ways:

1.  Google rewards good and relevant pages by reducing the cost of the AdWords leading to that page.
2.  More potential clients are going to take the action that you want them to take and so your conversion rates are going to be higher.

Already a very important part of Google’s secret formula for ranking AdWords,  the quality of landing pages became even more important following the latest change in Google’s algorithm a couple of weeks ago.

SearchEngineLand has an excellent blog entry containing seven useful tips for increasing conversion rates of landing pages.  Some of them are not too surprising (such as the fact that people are less likely to complete forms which ask for too much information), but a few of them offer food for thought.

For example, I was surprised to read that a simple line beneath forms saying, “We respect your privacy” had an impact on the number of people completing the forms – I thought that most people could tell the difference between a legitimate site and a spammy one by now.  But I stand corrected.

I also liked the information that bigger sign-up buttons led to more click throughs – simple advice, but it’s little gems of information like this which can have an enormous impact on the success of internet marketing campaigns.  How much more successful would your advertising be if you could double your conversion rate?

Read the full list of seven useful tips here.

The main sticking point at the moment is that I don’t know the final page count just yet and, until I have it, I can’t finalize the book cover and so this will be one of the final elements that will be added.

The book is well on target for its planned publication date of 3 January 2012, however.  The book is currently out for comments and critique from several practicing accountants and CPAs.  Their comments will be included in the final draft which will be produced during the month of November.  December will then be ‘production’ month where the book is made ready for print and also formatted for release on the Kindle and the other majr ebook formats.

Currently it’s not yet possible to pre-order the book, but it is possible to sign up on Amazon in order to get an email alert as to when pre-orders will begin.  Click on the links below in order to see the listing and to sign up for the email alert as soon as it is available for pre-order.

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

In an article which they published recently, they come up with a list of their ‘seven deadly sins’ which can stop business’s Fan Pages from achieving their full potential.

It’s well worth a read for anyone who already has a Facebook business Fan Page which is not performing as they would like or for anyone who is about to set one up.

Read the full article here.

Because of this, Informer Books has created a separate division, Informer Marketing, which has been set up solely in order to assist accountants with their marketing.  This company is also run by Nick Pendrell, author of Internet Marketing for Accountants to give all clients peace of mind that their marketing activities are going to be taken care of by one of the leading experts in the field of online marketing.

Due to economies of scale as a result of working only with accountants, Informer Marketing’s fees are far from excessive compared to most internet marketing companies, however, with a wide range of packages available that are suitable for businesses with all levels of marketing budgets.

Check out Informer Marketing’s offers today to learn how inexpensive it would be to get them to handle some or all of your marketing needs so that you can concentrate on the parts of your business that you do best.

If your practice is located in a small town, or your competitors have not spent much time on even the most basic elements needed for a good ranking, the information in the book is probably going to be enough to get you onto the front page of Google.  But if you’ve tried all of the basics and still find that you are unable to crack the top few positions, then you’re going to need a little extra help and put a little extra effort into your search engine optimization activities.

Mollie Vander has collected an impressive number of links in this article which she has written for Mashable to both online and offline resources for learning more about the process of search engine optimization.  Conveniently, she lists the resources according to ‘Basic’, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Advanced’ techniques so that you increase your knowledge step-by-step.  Hopefully, by the time you get to the ‘Intermediate’ techniques, you should already be way ahead of your competition without having to wade through the ‘Advanced’ techniques.

Check out the full list of resources here.

Even if you are not already actively marketing your business and making yourself a large footprint on the Web, it doesn’t mean that your customers aren’t already talking about you.  This article from the always excellent Mashable explains how you can monitor conversations happening online about your business and some of the best ways of lessening the damage.

I give more detailed advice in the book as to the best ways of reacting to any criticism you may receive online, but this article gives you some useful basic advice.

Read the article here.