Why Your Personal Finance Business Needs a Blog Right Away!

Are you a financial advisor wondering how to get more leads online? Are you struggling to convert your prospects into clients? Read on to learn one marketing channel which will help you to establish yourself as an authority, and get more clients in the most renowned way.

Personal finance or finance in any form used to be like rocket science for me until recently. The only thing I know about personal finance so far is that we need to earn, invest under some section such as 80C, 80D etc.. to save taxes, and file our income tax return.

A few months ago, I got in touch with a chartered accountant/personal financial advisor/wealth management guy because I was taking out a loan to buy a flat.  It was then when I realized how important personal financial planning is for everyone, including you and me.

This article is not about the importance of personal finance, but is instead directed to all those personal financial advisors and wealth management guys who are operating their businesses as an individual or as a company.

Most of the finance professionals I have spoken with already have a website, but they are still clueless about increasing their online visibility and clientele.

If you are a finance professional wondering why you should have a personal finance blog or website and how it can help you to get more clients or to improve the brand of your company, read on!

How a blog will help your personal finance business:

For the sake of this article, I’m going to assume that you are not just an individual who is managing a portfolio worth millions, but rather that you are a company owner who is running a company and managing everything yourself, (with or without employees).

I’m also assuming that you already have a website with the typical pages (about, contact, portfolio, services, etc.) explaining what your company does.

95% of the professionals in your field are marketing their businesses the same way.  But right now you are reading something which will change the way you do business, and will help you to reach the goals you wish to achieve.

Before I lay out the benefits of having a personal finance blog for yourself or your company, let me illustrate some of the biggest marketing roadblocks currently faced by professionals in your field.

Challenge #1 – Competition: 

It doesn’t matter where in the world you are from, you know who the biggest players in the personal finance and wealth management industry are. And if you are someone who has recently joined the league of financial advisors, you must find it very challenging to come up against the big names in your industry.

Challenge #2 – Converting prospects:

Regardless of the number of times you explain to a potential investor how important it is for him to have a solid portfolio, he will likely give his business to larger, more well-known companies because of recommendations or because they are a bigger brand than you are. If you have faced these kinds of issues when attempting to convert a prospect into a client, you are not alone. I have spoken to more than 6 personal finance advisors around India, and they face similar issues.

The problem is not in securing enough clients, but in gaining the more significant clients (HN1 clients).

Let me show you how a blog can help to solve this problem:

The benefits of a blog for your personal finance business:

Beating established competition:

Most of the established names in your industry have made names for themselves as leaders in the offline market. It may be difficult for you to beat a competitor who has established his business with offline marketing channels, but you have an opportunity to establish yourself as a market leader using online channels.

India is undergoing an online boom, and when you create your footprint online, you are being futuristic in terms of growing your finance business. With the number of people online increasing exponentially, you know with confidence that there are very large numbers of potential clients searching online for information pertaining to their personal financial needs.

Just to give you an idea of the reality of this situation, here is the search query for “systematic investment plan” from 2012 to 2014. Notice the increase in searches and, being a finance guy, you know how much money even a single one of those potential clients can make for you:

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This is just one of the thousands of queries applicable to your field.  I have personally noticed that many similar queries are seeing a noticeable increase over time as well.

More leads via search engine traffic:

Usually your website consists of only a few pages, and I’m sure your web-developer has told you that they are optimised for queries like “personal financial advisor”,  “wealth management”, “financial services” or other search terms which could bring clients your way.

With a blog you will be targeting more keywords (questions which people search to find an answer to), and those very people are your prospects.

Trust factor:

One of the biggest challenges of being a financial advisor is to earn the trust of your prospective client. It is relatively easy to earn someone’s trust, but it is very difficult to encourage someone to trust you with his money.

When you are writing an article on your blog with your image on the sidebar or after the post, this will instantly built trust and credibility for yourself with your readers. And if you are doing it properly, you will not only earn the trust of your readers, but you will also be receiving requests from people to manage their funds and portfolios.

• Read: How to build a trustable blog for longer return

Long term return:

Let me explain the major benefits of having a finance blog.

As a financial advisor, you often evaluate gains as long-term or short-term. Think of your blog as a long-term gain, because once your article is live on your blog, you will continue to get traffic from search engines for years. Unlike Google AdWords or another form of online advertising where you pay to get leads, this traffic will be free, and will last for a very long time. This is short-term work (the time it takes you to write the post) for long-term gains (years beyond the writing of the post).

• 9 quick and substantial blog post ideas for your business blog

Sell your services:

Once you have earned the trust of readers with the help of your blog and articles, they will look to you for the services you offer. Having a services column on your blog will inform them as to exactly what services you offer, and thus what you can do for them. For example, below is a screenshot from a service page of one of my clients’ blogs, which is also my favorite personal finance blog, JagoInvestor:

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There are many more benefits of having a blog for your financial/wealth management business such as:

• It will help you to establish yourself as an industry leader (with your articles).
• People like to share useful articles on their social-media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and this will drive extra traffic to your blog.

What it takes to have a blog for your finance business:

While I was researching the difficulties which personal finance advisors face, here are a few of the questions I heard from them:

• Should I have a blog along with my website?
• What is requires from me to run a blog?
• How much it will cost me to have a blog?
• How do I decide on a name?

Think of your blog as an extension of your marketing effort. You can have a blog with your main website, or on a separate domain. The key here is that your blog name should be memorable. If your company name is something like SKMfinancialadvisor, JSfinance or something similar, I suggest you have your blog on a different domain name. Something similar to JagoInvestor, Taxsavers, MutualInvestors, etc. should work well.

Here are my rules of thumb for the name of your blog:

It should be easy to remember, easy to write and easy to pronounce.

If your existing website fulfills these criteria, you can have a blog on your website.  Otherwise, buy a new domain name.

To run the blog, you need to either have good writing skills yourself, or have people on your team who can produce well-written personal finance tips.

Ask yourself the following question:

• “What queries might my potential client search in Google?”
• These queries could be something like:
• “What investments are tax free?”
• “Equity Vs. Mutual fund investment”
• “Which life insurance plan…” and so on.

The cost of setting up a finance blog varies based on your goals and requirements.  In my experience, it costs somewhere between $800-1000 as one time investment, and $1000 annually for maintenance costs.

Conclusion:

Having a blog for your financial advisory business is going to be very beneficial to you professionally.  Along with creating a name for your company, it will help you to establish yourself as a brand.

If you don’t yet have a blog, now is the time to get one!

For further reading:

• Strategies for your business blog which you can use right away

If you have any questions, feel free to ask via the comments section below, or you can drop us a question via the contact form.

Remember to share this article with your personal finance friends on Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp etc.  (They will thank you later!)

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