Advisor Blog

AdvisorVault Enhancements Improve Secure Client Portals For Advisors

Several enhancements were made to AdvisorVault last month in response to user requests.

Better Branding. You can now display a full size logo or banner in AdvisorVault that your clients will see. Until now, a size restriction was placed on the size of the graphic. To use a larger graphic in your client vaults, please email us the larger logo at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call our service team.

Portfolio Reports Folder. You can hide the “Investments” from view of clients and use any name for the folder where you upload reports. Previously, you could only upload portfolio report to certain folders and you could not rename them. Now, you can rename the portfolio reports folder and make the “home” page the folder where your client’s reports are displayed.

Template Emails From Multiple Addresses. AdvisorVault includes a template email communication system for notifying clients automatically in batches of 15 routine advisor business processes. After uploading a performance report or other document, for example, AdvisorVault generates an automatic notification that is personalized to each client. Until now, your firm could use only a single email address with the template notifications—a single advisor’s address would be displayed in the “from” field of emails generated by AdvisorVault’s template notification system. Now, each advisor in your firm can send template notifications in batches and the recipient will see his advisor’s email address in the “from” field of the email.

Simplified Batch Uploading. If you batch upload portfolio performance reports, you can hide from view any folder that you do not use to upload reports.

 

 
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When Clients Need You Most, Will You Be There?


Supporting clients during life’s most difficult moments is not just the right thing for a financial advisor to do, it's a good thing to do. It builds lasting relationships and makes you invaluable.

Advisors who stored clients’ homeowners policies in AdvisorVault were heroes after Hurricane Sandy.



AdvisorVault is not just a client vault, it's a client communications system created expressly for advisors. AdvisorVault works well with any portfolio reporting and financial planning app, and most CRMs.

Moreover, AdvisorVault comes embedded with business processes that help advisors fulfill their obligations to clients. For instance, AdvisorVault can prompt your clients to upload their homeowners policies, wills, deeds, insurance, and emergency medical information to a secure cloud-based platform on your website. With AdvisorVault, it is easy to send all your clients an email listing all the documents you want them to upload in case of an emergency and a URL where they can log in to upload those documents securely.

When a hurricane or some other disaster occurs in your clients' lives, be prepared to support them. Be there for clients when they need you most by using AdvisorVault.

Call us at (888) 274 5755.




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Advisor Websites, Advisor Portals Met The Test Of Hurricane Sandy

Thank you for your patience and understanding in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Nassau County in Long Island, NY, where we are headquartered, was severely impacted. Our office was without power all last week. We worked from a hotel banquet room in Queens.

Fortunately, power was restored over the weekend to our office. Many of our employees, friends, and neighbors are still without power, heat, or hot water, while others have lost their homes or businesses due to flooding by the shores.

In my community, about one of every 15 homes was damaged by a falling tree. Almost every backyard has a fallen tree, and perhaps half of those knocked down power lines or are leaning on them.

It is comforting that our backup and failover facilities worked without any hiccup. Every advisor website, along with 50,000 client vaults, stayed up and available 24 x 7.

The Advisor Products staff prepared for and recovered well from the Sandy disaster, showing dedication and professionalism.

We have been tested by the worst hurricane to hit Long Island since 1938, and we have met the test. We are working hard to continue to provide the highest quality, always-available service.

If we missed your call due to our phone lines being impacted sporadically, please do not hesitate to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We are grateful to the many of you who have expressed concern about the staff and our families.

Regards and we look forward to communicating again about better news soon.

 
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Advisor Products Begins Operating Under Disaster Recovery Plan, As Hurricane Sandy Nears Long Island

With Long Island expecting an extended rainstorm from Hurricane Sandy and the worst coastal flooding in seven decades, Advisor Products has taken every precaution necessary to avoid any service disruption to your website, client vaults, and client portals. With the storm expected to hit Long Island in less than 24 hours, our staff has been placed on high alert and the company has begun operating under our disaster recovery plan.

Your Website And Client Portals. Our hosting facility has increased 24/7 onsite technical support and ensured the integrity of backup power generators. In the event of a utility failure, redundant generators are prepared to supply the hosting facility’s load for 24-plus hours, and contracts in place with local fuel providers require same-day delivery if needed, ensuring extended continuity of service.

Internal Systems used by the Advisor Products service team are always “virtual.” If Internet service at our Jericho, NY office is uninterrupted, our VOIP phone system should enable you to reach technical staff as you always would. In the event of an extended power outage at the Jericho office, we’ve “reserved” an empty rack in our data center. A year ago, during Hurricane Irene, a tree fell right behind our office and knocked down power lines to our building, which is home to more than 15 other businesses. We moved internal hardware and software to our hosting facility and staff operated remotely for a week. If we need to relocate mission-critical systems again, our phone system may be down for a couple of hours while  moving  and rebooting systems at the data center.

Service. Jason Gucciardo, a 12-year veteran Web developer at Advisor Products, who also fields  customer-service calls, is located in Florida and available at (516) 333-0066 x230. Nipun Manglik (x214), who is in Las Vegas for his bachelor party and probably will be stuck there for a few days, brought a laptop with him. He will be available Tuesday, and he represents what makes America great. Project managers David Lucs, Kevin Chin, and Donna Voss-Costa, will contact you to reschedule appointments and deadlines for website and newsletter projects in the process of being developed.

Advisors In Sandy’s Path. Just before the storm comes through our area, IT Manager Jason Fogelson will power down equipment housed at the Jericho office to prepare for the possibility of a power outage.  Although internal network servers have backup power supplies, they do not last long and a controlled shutdown eliminates the risk of damage to servers from a sudden shutdown. Advisors may want to take the same precaution. If you’re running Microsoft Exchange, a CRM, portfolio management software or other network software in your office, shut them down tonight or early Monday morning and reboot them after the worst has passed.

Updates Throughout The Storm. Jason Fogelson and Steve Gordonson, VP of Technology, will be providing status updates throughout the storm. Please follow Advisor Products on Twitter to stay updated about service and support.
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SEO For Financial Advisors Works, And Here's Proof

Here's what the Debbie Hooge of  Vantage Advisors LLC says about SEO For Financial Advisors From Advisor Products:
In 2012 our company, after several years of frustration that our website never showed up on searches of the internet until the 2nd and 3rd pages of Google, we decided to hire Advisor Products to give our site a new look.Our previous website had cost us over $10,000 just a few years earlier.

While we were frustrated about incurring more expenses in such a short time, we knew we needed to get serious about SEO. We hired Advisor Products to do our SEO and redesign our site. As the marketing director for the firm, I was facing a lot of skepticism from the other advisors, but I persevered.

Like a lot of creative processes; the website wasn’t created overnight. The Advisor Products team worked closely with us and were very sensitive to blending their ideas with ours.

In the end, we are now on the first page of Google for our area, and our clients can actually find us. In addition, we are getting very positive feedback about the e-newsletter, calculators, and blog now associated with our website.

I could go on and on about things, like the ease of editing, the customer service, etc. But maybe the best thing I can say is that the cost benefit ratio of investing in a new website with Advisors Products is extremely positive and continues to get better.

SEO Copywriting For Financial Advisors from Advisor Products is a low cost way for advisors to improve their search  engine ranking. It is the product of years of experience in website design for advisors.

With so many snake oil salesman and ripoff artists now competing with us to build advisor websites, I am seeing advisors get sold  inexpensive sites that won't get them noticed and no content marketing features, and I am also seeing instances where advisors pay thousands for razzle-dazzle and nonsense. I am proud of the skilled team here at Advisor Products, the integrity we have maintained as competition has increased, and we remain committed  to make advisors who work with us successful at the lowest prices around.
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An Easy Social Media Solution For Advisors That Really Works: Revolutionary Social Media Content Tool For Advisors Launched By Advisor Products

Many advisors don’t know how to use social media for marketing or are too busy to use it effectively. Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors, which was just released by Advisor Products, enables use of social media successfully with minimal effort by advisors and at a low cost.

Social Media Content Stream For Advisors automatically posts status updates (also called “tweets”) to you or your company’s social network pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

The 140-character status updates contain links to wealth management articles and videos created by Advisor Products and posted to an advisor’s website. Articles and videos by Advisor Products cover financial news for high-net worth individuals. The tweets, articles and videos are FINRA-reviewed.

When your social network connections see a status update from you in which they’re interested, they click on a link in the tweet, which takes them to your website to read the article or view the video.

Feedback from the 10 advisors participating in a three-month beta test has been outstanding. One firm provided Google Analytics data showing as much as a 500% increase in traffic to its website.

The key is that this solution is incredibly easy to use and provides clients and prospects with valuable wealth management ideas.

If you're trying figure out how to benefit from social media marketing, this is the perfect solution.



Social Media Content Stream For Advisors is administered using a social media dashboard. The dashboard lets you schedule your updates. Once a week or once a month, you can schedule all your updates.

In addition, you can rewrite tweets and target them to your local market or niches, which will help boost your search engine rankings. If that’s too much work, simply set the stream to go out automatically.

Social Media Content Stream For Advisors is free for Platinum licensees and has already been enabled on your website. Simply log in to the Advisor Products BackOffice and hit the

You can add archiving of all your social media content for $348 annually by taking advantage of our partnership with Erado.

 

 
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Is It Realistic For Advisors To Expect To Benefit From Social Media?

Despite all the hubbub about social media for advisors, adoption is slow and its effectiveness remains questionable. Obstacles to success are formidable.

Compliance. RIAs must archive social content. Signing up and setup a compliance app to capture your social media content is an expense — albeit a small one — and takes time.

Knowledge. Many advisors do not know what a status update is. They have no experience with building a network of connections and followers.

Content. Advisors don’t know what to say. It’s like putting a microphone in front of someone in a crowded room and telling them to say something smart.

Discipline. Social media is not an activity you can do once a month and expect results. It’s like drip marketing and you need to drip on people daily or every other day.

Strategy. Most advisors don’t have a well-defined target market, so they wind up posting about content not aligned with any particular strategy.

Snake Oil. Since advisors are naïve about using social media, they are getting sold solutions that sound good but don’t deliver.

I’m happy to report that Advisor Products has a solution. It’s easy, low-cost, and effective.

We’ve added a social media dashboard to our platform. In seconds, you can send a “tweet” (status update) to all your friends and connections on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

For years, we’ve been producing content for advisors, articles about wealth management, and it’s pretty widely known that our content is the best coverage of issues for high-net-worth individuals available to advisors. In the last couple of years, we’ve partnered with tax expert Bob Keebler and economist Fritz Meyer to make our content even more substantive and authoritative. With the social media dashboard, we’ve made it incredibly easy for advisors to provide status updates that link to their websites.

You can personalize each tweet with keywords aimed at your target audience, which will help you with search engine optimization. In about 10 minutes, you can schedule a tweet a day for the next week.

One advisor who has been a beta tester showed us Google Analytics statistics showing visits to his website shoot up between 100% and 500% when tweeting our content.

By placing a special “free” report about wealth management on your website, you can convert visitors to your site into prospects and some will become real clients. Plus, tweeting to your clients about wealth management keeps you in touch with them. We’ve partnered with Erado Message Control to enable you to archive your social media accounts inexpensively.

The social media dashboard is a realistic way for advisors to benefit from social media. The social media content stream for financial advisors is a realistic and effective way to get started with social media.

The social media dashboard is going live on all Platinum sites in the next couple of days. Call 888-274-5755 if you would like a demo.
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In His Own Words: Financial Advisor Philip Benson On Implementation Of AdvisorVault For PortfolioCenter Reporting And Secure Client Portals

On June 1, 2012, Philip Benson Financial Services, an investment management and financial planning firm in San Francisco, purchased AdvisorVault’s integrated PortfolioCenter application from Advisor Products. AdvisorVault is a secure client portal system and can batch process PortfolioCenter reports. Within three months, Benson was successfully using the integrated application to deliver quarterly performance reports and invoices to clients securely, saving the firm time and money.

Philip Benson, 64, who spent three years at Merrill Lynch before giving up his securities sales licenses in 2003 and founding his fee-only fiduciary firm, explains his firm’s successful implementation of AdvisorVault as a secure client portal, in his own words below.

Why
We manage portfolios for 40 families — their investable assets and their children’s 529 college savings plans — and we do financial planning for most of them. I do the investment management and the financial planning along with the help of my associate. We needed to become more efficient. We did not want to raise our fees in this economy. I concluded the solution was not hiring more staff but maximizing technology. Each quarter, we both spent about a day and a half printing, stuffing, stamping and mailing the reports. It was obvious we could benefit from electronically uploading invoices and quarterly reports to a secure vault.

Research
I looked at several solutions, some of which were less expensive than Advisor Products. But AdvisorVault is keyed into financial services and Advisor Products has a relationship with Schwab Performance Technologies allowing it to provide bulk-upload features. Plus, your product has been offered for several years.

Adoption
Our project manager, Kevin Chin, suggested that, rather than sending out one mass email to all of our clients, we launch 10 clients at a time and follow up with calls to each of them when needed. That was a great approach. Out of 40 clients, only three have not signed up.

Personalized
We deduct the fees from most client accounts, but some prefer to write the check every quarter. We were able to personalize emails using AdvisorVault’s communication module for both types of billing situations. The beautiful thing is your developers make it look like the emails are coming from us directly.

Service
When I did my due diligence, I heard Advisor Products had a good product but that we might not be able to get as much support as one might want. That was absolutely not the case; it could not have been further from the truth. We got all the support we needed. And we are the type of client who may request a lot of support in the beginning and then we tend to sail on our own until something comes up when we need additional support.

Relationships
I don’t want AdvisorVault to distance me from clients. I want technology to help me stay in contact with clients and free me to build new business.  If only 75% of clients log in to look at their reports, I send an email asking the other 25% who have not logged in to ask if they need any help. When I mailed out paper statements, we did not know who was opening the envelopes. Now, I can reach out to those clients who had not reviewed their reports.

Efficiency
We were burning paper, ink and time. We were combining different documents into PDFs in preparation for printing. There was a lot of manual labor involved. The AdvisorVault piece that previously took a day and half every quarter takes about an hour now, plus we’re not spending on paper, ink, and postage.

Growth
Thus far, we haven’t done any marketing. I’ve never made an outbound cold call and all new business comes from referrals. We’ve been focused on taking care of our clients and building a solid infrastructure. We will be ready to engage in marketing and business development soon. Technology will enable us to have more free time to do this.

 

For more information about AdvisorVault, please call 516 333 0066 x224.
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Failed Record Of Wall Street’s “Top” Strategists Documented By Independent Economist

For wealth managers who believe the most prudent path to investment success is broad diversification, periodic rebalancing, and choosing low-expense investments — while relying on the precepts of Modern Portfolio Theory — some good news: a scorecard from an authoritative, independent source documents the failed record of Wall Street’s top ranked strategists at picking the best and worst industry sectors.

Fritz Meyer, whose economic research is distributed by Advisor Products and Advisors4Advisors, has methodically tracked Barron’s annual interviews with Wall Street’s top strategists for over a decade. An article with details about Meyer’s findings will be published tomorrow on websites of advisory firms that license Advisor Products content for clients.

The table below compiled by Meyer, an independent economist, shows the picks and pans of 10 senior strategists from Wall Street largest firms in a Barron’s article from December 19, 2011. It tells a story of failed forecasts.



 

The telecommunications sector, for example, was favored by just two of the 10 strategists in the weekly magazine’s 2012 investment outlook. One strategist suggested avoiding the sector while seven — a majority — voiced no opinion on telecom.

As of mid-August 2012, telecom was the No. 1 performing sector, with a 19% return.  “That’s a big miss,” says Meyer.

“If you think that even the smartest strategists on Wall Street can successfully and systematically pick the right asset classes, you’d be mistaken,” says Meyer, an independent economist with 30 years of experience in the investment world, including a stint as a strategist at one of the nation’s largest mutual fund companies.

Advisor Products provides content about wealth management for clients of investment fiduciaries. Its content platform can be added to any website and includes a social media dashboard enabling advisors to distribute content targeted to high-net-worth individuals to their social networks in less than five minutes a day. AdvisorVault, its secure online file-sharing system, is licensed by more than 400 RIAs and the company provides web development, brochures and creative services to independent advisors.

 
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Search Engine And Ethical Considerations When Using Other People's Articles To Write Blog Posts

Advisor Products creates great financial articles for advisor clients and prospects. Should you copy and paste some of those articles and use them as blog posts? Here are some issues advisors need to know about when using other people's content.

Content posted to many websites does you no good with search engines. To benefit from search engines, you  need unique content. To be clear, Advisor Products articles about wealth management are posted on hundreds of advisor websites. They’re not unique. So they do not help you with search engine optimization. Nor do they hurt you. The point is, if you buy articles from a vendor and post them on your website and other advisors also post the same exact articles to their websites, the articles may be great reading but they do not help you with search engines.

Making Articles Written By Others Your Own. The way to use articles by written by other people to gain search engine benefits is to make them your own. That does not mean changing a couple of words. It means using the article written by someone else as the basis for your own story -- pulling a few key facts but rewriting it to your specific audience.

For example, we recently posted an article for advisors to use on their websites about Section 179 deductions.  Yesterday I was speaking with an advisor who specializes in working with veterinarians and suggested he rewrite that article and make it pertain specifically to vets. Write about the equipment they typically might be using a 179 deduction for. Write about a local vendor who sells that equipment and how it helps to document the purchases. Localizing the story will also help you with search engines.

Don't game the search engines because they could penalize you for that. If you just change a few words in an article and try to outsmart the search engine robots that crawl your site, you put yourself at risk of being penalized. From my research, it seems there is no exact formula about how much an article can be duplicated without the search engines ignoring it. But Google and the other search engines are getting used and being relied upon on the Web because they provide authentically good information. So my personal take on this is to be honest and credible and rewrite an article written by others to really make it your own.

Ethical And Regulatory Considerations. Apart from the search engine considerations, using an article written by someone else on your website raises ethical and could raise regulatory issues. About 15 years ago, Bob Plaze, the outgoing Deputy Director of the Investment Management Division of the SEC, told me that RIAs should not take credit for writing articles that other people write. Ever since then, Advisor Products policy has been to post a disclosure on websites and newsletters we create for advisors saying that articles we provide are written by someone other than the advisor. For me, it was as much an ethical issue as a regulatory one.

Not all vendors serving advisors do this, however. Some vendors appear not to know about the regulatory risk that could be involved when an advisor posts  an article written by someone else as it were written by him, and other seem oblivious to the ethical issues.

Advisor Products makes no compromises on ethical and regulatory issues. We tell advisors when we feel like they may be doing something that could land them in trouble. We also submit all articles made available on websites and in newsletters to FINRA for review -- even though so many of our users are RIAs that do not need FINRA review of content -- because it's the prudent thing to do. FINRA's advertising rules aimed at protecting consumers are similar in most ways to the SEC rules regulating RIAs, so it is good practice for RIAs to use FINRA-reviewed content. Since the SEC does not review content, the only way you'll know when you've published advertising without necessary disclosures is when you're being cited by the agency or a state regulator for a deficiency.

Taking positions like this has sometimes opened Advisor Products to criticism and we've probably lost some business because of it, but we don't cut corners when it comes to ethics and compliance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Advisor Products Launching Open Source Content Management System For Advisor Websites

In 1997, when Advisor Products first started providing advisor websites (as AdvisorSites), there were no open-source content management software (CMS) systems. WordPress and Joomla were not founded until 2005. While Drupal was founded in 2001, it gained little traction until 2004.

Over the last few years, however, open-source CMS has flourished. WordPress, the most popular, is used by 16.7% of all websites, Drupal on 2.1%, and Joomla on 2.8%, according to W3Schools. Among the World Wide Web’s most visited one million sites, Drupal is the CMS reportedly used by 9.1%, Joomla by 11.1% and WordPress by 63.2%.

Open source CMS is popular because it’s free. Yes, free. These CMS apps are operated by not-for-profit organizations. The free software movement is an amazing phenomenon and books have been written about it. But the main thing most advisors probably care about is that, because they are free, Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress have spawned large communities of developers.

Tens of thousands of programmers around the world have built apps that extend WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.  Like add-ons for Firefox, apps in the Apple iOS App Store, and Play for Google’s Android operating system (formerly called Market), these extensions make it easy to make improvements to a website.

Say you want to add a rotating banner to your website, one that changes a graphic and text displayed in a big rectangular box across the top of your home page. In minutes, you can find a free or inexpensive extension on a CMS app store that does it for you. Web development is suddenly easier and you can come to market with the latest widgets and apps much more quickly by relying on open-source CMS.

Advisor Products chose Joomla because it is extremely versatile. While WordPress is simpler, it’s really a blog platform and is not as powerful as Drupal or Joomla. Drupal, while also more powerful than WordPress, is more complex and unwieldy than Joomla. Joomla is a happy medium.

Advisor Products has built a new “BackOffice” application that gives advisors control over their websites using Joomla’s powerful features. We’ve created components to add Advisor Products’ content to your Joomla-powered website. You can change text and graphics on any page, add new pages, and easily keep your site fresh with new content and tools. Because the system is so easy to use and renders beautifully designed Web pages with rich social, video and textual content, you are more likely to use the CMS system to keep your site fresh.

Many small independent Web developers use Joomla to develop websites for advisors, but they lack the support staff, content and industry knowledge necessary to create a successful financial advisor website.  Often these developers will not give you access to edit the site yourself.

We’ve come across one advisor who paid $27,000 for a Joomla site and branding that we charge $3000 for, and he was given now way to change his website himself. And just yesterday I spoke with an advisor who paid $14,000 for a WordPress site and had little choice but pay $100 an hour for his web developer to make simple changes to the site. We don't behave that way here.

We’re now able to add the most modern widgets and graphics to advisor websites and all of it is integrated with AdvisorVault, client portals, and our wealth management content.

Initially, the new CMS platform is available to RIAs only. It has not been integrated with our compliance tool for broker-dealer pre-approval of content. But that’s coming. We’ll keep you updated.

Please call us at 516 333-0066 if you would like to know how you can use this cutting-edge technology to improve your website marketing and client communications.
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Thinking Like Your Prospects Is Key To Advisors Succeeding In Search Engine Optimization

Do you see things from your ideal client’s perspective? To succeed in using search engine optimization to market your firm, that mindset is required.

After last week’s Advisor Products webinar about marketing, I spoke with one of the attendees about his search engine optimization and content marketing strategy.

 



While this advisor is a licensed professional, he’s not an SEO expert, and he was having trouble with the notion that using social media to engage a very specific type of investor could be more rewarding than marketing to the broad masses. So I explained that writing a blog about financial problems of doctors in LA would indeed bring him a smaller readership than writing a blog for all small business owners in LA, but that the doctors who found his blog about their specific financial problems would be more likely to appreciate his specialized knowledge, he got that.

But what would be his best niches? Is it plastic surgeons in LA, Amgen senior managers, beauty salon owners? He would give that more thought, he said. But the exercise we went through was helpful.

By definition, until you understand that marketing to a specific group is more effective than marketing to everyone, you won’t be able see things from your ideal clients’ perspective, and, therefore, you won’t be able to identify the key words your ideal clients will use to search for you on the Web. You will fail at SEO.

However, once you commit to specializing in a specific client-type — lobstermen in Maine, chiropractors in Kansas City, or airplane pilots in Atlanta — you can speak to them directly over the Web.

I do it. That’s why you’re reading this! I’ve defined my niche and I am speaking to you because you are a professional financial advisor. You are probably credentialed and hungry for growth. I provide you information you value. So you might click on my tweets, read my blog and follow me on social networks.

You can do it, too. You can host webinars for dentists in Denver, and share financial ideas addressing their issues, and they will find you via search engines. You can post tweets for professors in Pittsburgh, Slidecasts for senior executives at a local tech company, and videos for owners of diners in Long Island. If you post content that diner owners in Long Island need to know, they will find and follow you.

For instance, say you tweet, blog, and make videos targeted to owners of owners of McDonald’s franchises about the new 3.8% federal surtax. A year from now, when an owner sells his franchise, he’ll want to shield his children’s passive gain on the sale, and he’ll think of you because you’ve been sending him ideas on this very topic to him.

If you can define your niches, then think like hem and imagine how they will find you. What would wealth management problems might cause an Amgen employee to go on the Web and search for help? If you know senior managers at GM have a deadline to decide on what to do about their pensions,  what search terms will they use to find help with making the decision?  If you use those search terms in your blogs, tweets, and other content on your website, they will find you and follow you. Over a year or two,  these people who are searching for a needle in a haystack will call you and become clients because you specialize in solving their financial problems.

Content marketing is utilized on the Internet by businesses, but few financial advisors implement an SEO program because it costs money or time. Doing it right requires knowledge of SEO and wealth management as well as the ability to write words people will want to read. It’s not easy and success depends on doing it right. But if you do it right, it works. The fact that you’re reading this proves it.

 
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How Is Advisor Products Different?

I was on the phone with an advisor today who asked me why he should not choose a less expensive advisor website vendor or hosting service.

I showed him AdvisorVault and how he could easily and securely provide clients information about their portfolios, financial plans, and estate plans — information about their future and the future of their families.

Then, I showed him an article that we posted to advisor websites and social content stream a day ago or two entitled, “Is Media Biased Toward Bad Financial News.” Here's a snippet:
Headlines about the economy in July sounded dire. “IMF Says Doubt Weighs On Economy,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “Economy Looks Weaker As Retail Sales Slump,” said The Boston Globe. “Fiscal Cliff Could Trigger U.S. Recession: IMF Economist,” according to a CNBC story.

“‎While the U.S. economy indeed was not growing briskly this summer, it was growing, and gloomy headlines belied reasons for optimism. Here are counterpoints to bad news and recession-mongering, reasons to expect that a slow-growth recovery will continue.”

The article, like all the stories we provide on advisor websites and for use on social media by advisors, reflects the perspective of an advisor. When you link to articles in the press, they don’t have your perspective. They want to sell papers and get eyeballs.

In addition, the article was submitted for expedited FINRA review, a process we go through every month so that we can post timely news for use on advisor websites and newsletters. Even if you’re an RIA with no BD, FINRA’s review helps ensure nothing promissory, unsubstantiated, or outlandish goes to clients.

The article, which provides details on seven pieces of good economic news, is based on authoritative sources, in this case, ideas from economist Fritz Meyer. The story presents a well-reasoned analysis based on data.

The Web has created an information explosion so loud that rising above the din is extremely difficult. The only way you can hope to get through is by providing real knowledge and valuable ideas. Imparting valuable information about your clients’ wealth is the kind of marketing to which advisors should aspire, and that’s what makes Advisor Products different.

 

 
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Batch Upload Invoices And Other Documents And Deliver Them Securely To Each Of Your Clients

RIAs can now batch process invoices and other documents using a new feature in AdvisorVault. The "batch upload" feature lets you process documents created in just about any application and deliver them securely to each individual client's vault.

RIAs usually produce some documents and reports en masse for all clients. Billing statements, tax analysis, and portfolio reports are often produced in a batch of 50, 100 or 500, for example. Being able to securely deliver such documents in a single upload streamlines your operations, saves time, and increases communication with clients about their personal financial data.

The new batch upload feature in AdvisorVault allows you to upload for all your clients in a single upload, and yet each document is automatically be posted to each client’s vault. In addition, AdvisorVault can automatically notify each client about the upload in a personalized email from you that also also sent en masse.

The batch upload feature works with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and other documents, including Adobe PDFs,and it also works with any professional software you use for performance reporting, financial planning, billing or other internal tasks.

The batch upload feature parses client files based on a unique identification number. AdvisorVault uses that unique identification number to drop each document into the corresponding client’s vault. After a batch upload is set up one time, you can upload use the batch process for that file again anytime. An AdvisorVault technician helps you set up your upload the first time.

You can batch upload to any folder in AdvisorVault that you designate and can set a deletion date for each batch.  For example, you can set invoices posted in batch today to be deleted on January 1, 2014.

While the batch upload feature allows an advisor to batch process reports from any application, this is not the same as using AdvisorVault’s XML batch process. AdvisorVault’s integration with Advent Axys, AssetBook, and PortfolioCenter batch processes client performance reports to create dynamic HTML reports, which provide a more interactive user experience in your performance reports.

With some RIAs telling us their state regulator is now requiring them to show proof that their clients have viewed their quarterly invoices, the batch uploading to  AdvisorVault could become more important. Please let us know if you would like us to develop a report allowing your firm to see which clients did not view their quarterly invoices. If there is heavy demand for this report, we’ll accelerate development of this feature.

AdvsorVault’s batch upload software costs $1,000 a year and setting up each batch process costs $300. Call us at 516-333-0066 ext. 224 for a demonstration.

 
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Social Media Content Stream For Advisors Doubled Unique Visitors To RIA's Website

Charles D. Jones Capital Management, an RIA in Waco, Texas, says Social Media Content Stream For Advisors from Advisor Products is doubling unique visitors to its website.

“The data is pretty compelling,” Jones said in an email to me last week. “It explains itself better than I can.” Jones sent data from his Google Analytics account showing that unique visitors to his website doubles on days when he uses the wealth management content stream provided by Advisor Products.


Advisor Products released Social Media Content Stream For Advisors to beta testers eight weeks ago. It automatically posts status updates (also called “tweets”) to an advisor’s social networks. The 140-character updates link to wealth management articles and videos created by Advisor Products and posted to an advisor’s website. When your social connections see a status update in which they’re interested, they can click on a link embedded in the status update and it takes them to your website to read the full article.

Social Media Content Stream For Advisors is administered using a social media dashboard. The dashboard lets you schedule your tweets. So you can long in once a week or once a month and schedule all your tweets to be posted once a day. You can also rewrite the tweets and target them to your local market or niches, which will help with search engine optimization. Alternatively, you can your dashboard settings can automatically post your status updates and run on “autopilot.”

If you are an Advisor Products Platinum client, Social Media Content Stream For Advisors is free. Please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to turn on your social media dashboard. You can add archiving of all your social media content for $348 annually by taking advantage of our partnership with Erado.

 

 
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Making Your Client Portal Compelling And Easy For Clients

Advisor Products has nearly five years of experience in developing client portals and provides secure portals to more than 45,000 clients of RIAs.

The key to success, we’ve learned, is in making it easy on clients.

By automatically notifying a client whenever their advisor uploads a document, AdvisorVault puts an unprecedented amount of personal financial information at your clients’ fingertips.

You’re not sending clients “canned” information. It’s about their accounts, their wealth. Clients care about that.

Your clients are not morons. They know AdvisorVault notifications provide important and personal financial information. Some clients check data daily, but most check it once a month or less.

Knowing the information is there is what’s important to clients.

Telling clients the information will always be there is good marketing for advisors.


Email Module


To notify clients when new personal information becomes available, AdvisorVault’s email communication module makes it easy to create “template emails.”

Template emails generated in AdvisorVault include your logo and come from your personal email address. They are captured by your email archive system.

The body of the text of template emails in AdvisorVault is personalized. John Smith gets a “Dear John Smith” email with a personalized URL to log into his personal portal.



The screenshot above shows 16 template emails included with AdvisorVault, covering the most common activities of advisors using client vaults. For example, when an advisor uploads a document, the email at the top of the list, “Advisor Document Upload,” can be sent automatically.



Setting up an automatic email notification is easy for an advisor. In the screenshot above, each of the email templates checked off will be sent automatically. Whenever you add a new client vault or reset a client’s password, for example, a template email can be sent automatically.

Template emails can be sent in batch or one at a time. If you change all of your clients’ passwords or upload a document for all of your clients, for instance, all of them can be sent an email notification.

Also you can create your own template emails. If you batch upload clients’ brokerage statements, for example, you can write an email and that will be automatically sent. The email is short but personal.

Marketing Advantage

While unbridled transparency may not fit your style currently, those who practice this way are likely to find the transparency a marketing advantage. Plus it’s the right thing to do.

This is where the world is headed. Full-disclosure is your friend. It’s what fiduciaries do.

You can be the guy who makes information available to clients over the Web. Or not.

If not, those who do embrace transparency this way will be happy to compete against you.

Client portals offered by advisors are not consumer apps. They’re made for advisor clients. Email templates is just one feature of many enabled by AdvisorVault that advisors won’t get from consumer apps like Dropbox and FileShare, which are being promoted by some consultants who don’t have our experience.

Data from portfolio management, CRM, and professional applications can’t be found in consumers apps. With 50 million users, integration with your PMS system is not a high priority to DropBox. It is a high priority in AdvisorVault.

Batch Process Any File

AdvisorVault recently launched an app that lets you batch process any file you get in a batch. If you get 1099s, brokerage statements, tax returns, or any other documents in batch, you can batch upload them to AdvisorVault.

For Methodical Advisors Only

AdvisorVault is not for everyone. Advisors who do not want to share information with clients won’t like it. Advisors who won’t follow through with setting up clients with vaults and using template emails are also not well suited for it. It’s only for advisors with an attention span long enough to facilitate following through with a plan.

Coming Soon

AdvisorVault is continuously evolving. New features we’re planning to deliver in the next 12 months will allow you to deliver clients your Form ADV, provide “star” reports on mutual funds, and enable clients to sign account documents digitally.  In addition, we plan to be enable delivery of personalized news in a client’s vault so you can address behavioral finance issues in times of volatility. We also plan to integrate with consumer vault systems like AdvisorVault so advisors can easily move documents from the most popular consumer apps to AdvisorVault’s app for professionals.
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How An RIA With $1.6 Billion AUM And Serving As A Multi-Family Office Uses Advisor Products Client Vault

After 25 years as a hand surgeon, Dr. Bob Tucker left his position as medical director of a large orthopedic group in St. Louis in 2006 to become a financial advisor. Tucker joined Plancorp, an RIA in St. Louis with $1.6 billion AUM founded by Jeff Buckner. Buckner, a co-founder of Zero Alpha Group, a network of nine RIAs managing about $9 billion, gave Tucker oversight of operations, drawing on his experience in running a medical practice.

In October 2010, Plancorp selected AdvisorVault as its client portal platform. Plancorp, which uses Schwab PortfolioCenter for portfolio management and reporting, uploads client data daily to AdvisorVault.

“There were some technology issues initially, but they’ve been resolved, says Tucker. “Our clients do like it and we like it.”

Tucker says it takes about 15 minutes a day for staffer to upload the portfolio data. “Every client’s vault is branded to Plancorp, and we like that,” says Tucker. “We also like the fact that we are presenting clients with HTML reports and not just PDFs.”

AdvisorVault, like many client portfolio reporting solutions, allows RIAs to prepare PDF reports. The HTML reports use the Web medium better, allowing an RIA to present links to securities with Podcasts, news and other data. In addition, HTML reports are interactive allowing clients to export tables to Excel, reorder a report by clicking on a column heading, drill down into links to individual tax lots, and more.

Plancorp inserts a disclosure that all its clients must view before accessing reports in AdvisorVault.

Tucker says the firm recently added AdvisorVault’s integration with TD Ameritrade Institutional, which is free with AdvisorVault. TD Ameritrade Institutional integration with AdvisorVault allows RIAs to provide their clients with access to TDAI account data daily from the RIA’s website instead of directing clients to the TDAI Veo advisor-client website.

RIAs can see reports on which clients are logging into AdvisorVault to check account values and which documents are viewed. In addition, RIAs can post content that all clients will see before accessing account statements, enabling advisors to address behavioral finance issues in times of volatility.

While an operations staffer is charged with uploads of daily performance data, Tucker says financial planning associates are responsible for uploading other wealth management documents for clients. As a service to clients, Plancorp offers to post estate documents, tax returns, health care proxies, passports and more. Tucker says that although not all clients “recognize the value of having those documents available from any internet connection, a number have posted their own documents.”

Tucker says use of the vault by client is not correlated with age. “It’s more highly correlated with how obsessive the client is and whether they see the value in having documents in a place where they are safe and accessible. I don’t know that they’re interested in technology as much as the benefit.”

Attorneys, accountants, and other allied professionals are provided vault access, Tucker says. “We have created vaults for key professionals with whom we share a lot of data.” Tucker says Plancorp has relationships with several accounting firms with mutual clients, and professionals at those firms are given access to their clients’ documents.

“Another situation is a family office, where we give the outside professionals access to certain parts of the vault,” he says. “Plancorp provides the family office, but if the family has attorneys and accountants, we’ve structured vault access so that those professionals can get access to some documents.”

Tucker cited the case of a family matriarch who gets access to everything in her family vault, but her children get access that is “somewhat limited.” “Anything we can do to strengthen the relationship with next generation is done” using AdvisorVault, says Tucker.

Advisor Products is proud to have Plancorp using its secure client portal systems.

 

 

 
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How A Sole Practitioner Is Scaling His RIA With Client Portals

With a background as an industrial engineer, CFP® Rick Epple says he realized in December 2008 that he needed to radically shift the way he managed his practice. “After the market crash in October 2008, I thought to myself that I could not do this anymore,” says the founder of Epple Financial in Wayzata, Minn. “With all the time it took to reassure clients, the fact that my technology systems did not talk to each other made it difficult to quickly get information and communicate.”

“I took a step back and asked myself what my vision was for my practice, and it was clear that I had to automate more,” Epple says, “I needed a system where I did not have to spend as much time accessing client data, where information would be at my fingertips and my clients’ fingertips.”

In early 2009, Epple decided to make the Client Portal his platform for secure client communication. He made the decision because of Client Portal’s interface with Redtail CRM. After further research, Epple selected AssetBook as his firm’s portfolio management accounting application, largely because of its integration with the Advisor Products Client Portal. He chose MoneyGuide Pro as his financial planning solution because it, too, was integrated with the Client Portal from Advisor Products.

“Changing everything was not an easy process,” says Epple. “You don’t have to be an industrial engineer to do it, but you need to make the time and financial commitment to transfer to new systems. You must be able to handle change and follow through on your plans.”

By July 2010, Epple says all of his practice management systems were running smoothly and he was ready to start marketing and scaling up.  “The benefit were not evident until early 2011,” he says. That year, Epple says his fee-only firm’s assets under management rose more than 40% from $26 million to $37 million. By the end of the first quarter of 2012, Epple Financial Advisors was at $42 million in AUM.

“It took me from working in the business to working on the business,” says Epple, who added 13 new clients and is now focused more on working with dentists and business owners in the Lake Minnetonka area near Minneapolis, Minn.

According to Epple, once AssetBook, MoneyGuide Pro, and Redtail were set up to feed client data into each client’s portal, the benefits of the automation kicks in. “The difficult part of the shift is not the Client Portal,” says Epple, “It’s switching over client data and then learning use new tools for performance reporting, financial planning and client relationship management.”

Epple says a virtual assistant sets up a portal and vault for each new client. The portal automatically generates email notifications to clients and forces them to create “strong” passwords. “It’s a user-friendly system and it does not take a lot of work to implement,” Epple says.

Some clients log into their portals daily to check their performance of their portfolios, which Epple says “does make me a bit nervous.” However, he says they are also looking at the same time at performance of their financial plan’s performance, which puts portfolio performance in perspective. On average, Epple says his 37 clients check their portal once a month.

A feature in the client portal that Epple is using extensively allows him to assign to-dos to clients. Epple creates a to-do in Redtail’s CRM and checks a box to automatically push it into a client’s portal. Clients receive an email telling them to log into their portals whenever they are assigned a to-do.

“I love the fact that my notes ion my CRM regarding a to-do for a client is exactly the same as what the client sees,” Epple says. “I don’t have copy and paste and it’s really easy.”

Epple says he meets with three times in the first four months of every new client-relationship. In that period, a series of “standard” to-dos are assigned to clients, such as getting their latest tax returns from their accountants. Other to-dos are more personalized. “Right now I am looking at whether a client should refinance the mortgage on a vacation home and communicating the personal information involved using the client portal and vault,” he says.

Epple says clients must have a “comfort level with technology” to use the portal. “But I have clients who are retirees and barely know how to use a computer but love the client portal and think it’s cool,” Epple says.

 
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Tooting Your Own Horn Versus Telling Stories About How You Help People

Bob Powell, in his post today on A4A about advisors using social media, says he does not like advisors tweeting about calling the last market top correctly. I agree. Apart from raising compliance issues, most investors would doubt your ability to call every market turn. However, it is good to tell stories about clients you help. For example, let me tell you about a client of mine that I just spoke with.

His name is Adam Wright. After graduating from Penn State with a degree in supply chain management and working in the field for five years, Adam joined his mother, Kathleen Wright, and her partner, Greg Lintner at Wright Associates. Kathleen and Greg are both Chartered Financial Analysts and manage about $100 million for wealthy individuals.

Adam says he was referred to Advisor Products by a Schwab Institutional relationship manager. Advisor Products was one of several firms Schwab mentioned that builds sites for RIAs, and Adam narrowed the list down to Advisor Products because of our online portfolio reporting solution that is integrated with Schwab PortfolioCenter.

Adam, who says he enjoys technology, says he wanted to start with a simple site. Nothing too fancy.

“Because this was our first foray into the Web, we wanted something cost-effective,” he says. “Advisor Products had the simple template we wanted, while other companies we looked at were much more expensive and complicated. This was easy.”

Adam started the site development process with Advisor Products on April 18 and the RIA’s website went live on May 18.

“Your staff was proactive and energetic about getting our site built,” Adam says, adding that his calls and emails were returned promptly. “But the most important thing that I appreciated about working with Advisor Products was that we were able to delegate design decisions to you. We are process and finance people and did not want to have to make graphic design decisions.”

While I personally would like to see every one of our website clients get the snazziest graphics and get involved with their firm's graphic design, the Wright solution was a simple one and the firm is happy with it, which is what counts. They address search engine optimization and copywriting and incorporating their processes into AdvisorVault in the months ahead.

Point is, advisors don’t need to claim to have called every market turn in their status updates or blog posts. Just tell stories  in your blog about how you help people in your practice every day.

 
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SlideShare Remains The No. 1 Content Marketing App For RIAs; Brainshark Overpriced

SlideShare is still the best slideshow app for small businesses. Brainshark has more features but it's too expensive for most RIAs.

If you’re an advisor and you want to generate sales leads online, the content marketing apps you use for posting should meet the following requirements:

  • Shareable. You want to post your content so it will be easy for people who see your ideas to share them with their social networks on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

  • Embeddable. You (and your connections) must be able to embed your content on their websites.

  • Displayed On All Devices. You want to post so can it to be viewed on all types of devices — smartphones, desktops, and tablets — and on all operating systems, iOS, Android, and Windows.

  • Trackable. You must be able to see how many hits you get.

  • Lead-Generating. You want to be able to generate sales leads from your content.


Before I tell you what to do with your marketing, please allow me to introduce myself. Unlike many “social media experts” giving advice to advisors on the Internet, I actually do this stuff. Advisor Products over the past three years posted 90 videos to its YouTube Channel and 25 “slidecasts” to its SlideShare channel. (Slidecasting is when you upload a PowerPoint slideshow and then an MP3 narration. SlideShare and Brainshark allow you to synchronize a narration with a slideshow.)

Amazingly, slidecasts have generated nine times as many views for Advisor Products as YouTube videos.

In fairness to YouTube, I put a lot more thought into the slidecasts than most of those videos. But I do believe slidecasting is a better online communication medium than video for advisors, or any business for that matter.

That’s because the focus of creating a slidecast is not lights, camera, and your actions. Slidecasting entails a deliberate act of communication of solely focused on explaining ideas — substance not form. To be sure, you could make a video that’s as compelling as a slidecast. In fact, video is a more personal medium because it shows you speaking into a camera and the camera doesn’t lie about you. However, making video that’s as effective as a slidecast requires expending the same effort at researching and explaining ideas, but it then adds the complexity of making a video, which is more complicated than making a narration.

Slidecasts are also better than video on the Web because the slides can contain links. As Marshal McLuhan would say, it is a “hot” medium — arguably hotter on the Internet than video.

SlideShare is not the only app for sharing PowerPoint presentations, of course. It’s biggest competitor in slidecasting is Brainshark.

Brainshark has more features. Brainshark’s main advantage over SlideShare is that you can view Brainshark presentations on the iPad. You can’t view slidecasts on an iPad or other mobile devices, which really is bad. But when you look at the cost of Brainshark, you’ll probably find the price difference unacceptable -- especially since its main advantage will be short-lived.

Aptly named, Brainshark shrewdly hides its pricing plans to sucker you into trying the app. You cannot see Brainshark’s pricing until after you sign up for a trial version. For a social media marketing tool to use such old school, hide-the-facts marketing indicates something is wrong at Brainshark. I posted a screenshot of Brainshark's pricing below.


Brainshark Pro lures you with by advertising a price plan starting at $9.99 monthly. But sign up for the demo, you learn that that’s $9.99 monthly per slideshow. In other words, if I posted my 25 slidecasts on SlideShare at Brainshark, it would cost $7.99 each per month — $199.75 monthly. With a price plan that’s paid once a year, Brainshark would cost me $1400 a year. At SlideShare, a Gold annual plan for $432.58 a year allows upload up to 20 presentations per month. Bottom line: SlideShare costs me $967.32 a year less than Brainshark!

In addition, HTML5 enables slidecasts to be played on iPads, so it’s only a matter of months before Slideshare crushes Brainshark  by converting all of its slidecasts to HTML5 to make them viewable on any mobile device. Slideshare was purchased recently by LinkedIn.

By the way, I tried contacting Brainshark's CEO and founder, Joe Gustafson, and Andy Zimmerman, Brainshark's CMO, two weeks before writing this post by connecting with  them on LinkedIn. Gustafson looked at my profile but never accepted the connection. Neither did Zimmerman. Again, not impressive for a social marketing company.

What's the bottom line?  Here are some practical tips, including a slidecast:


  • The Advisor Products BackOffice content management system allows you to embed any slide show you create on these platforms on your blog. In fact, you don’t need to write anything except a title for your slidecast and you can make one of these presentations a blog entry. Just call the service desk if you need help (888-274-5755).



  • For search engine optimization and niche marketing, it’s wise to target slidecasts to your ideal clients: doctors in Duluth, IBM employees Westchester, N.Y. with deferred compensation plans, retired professors at Arizona State University.



  • Keep slidecasts short, no more than three minutes. Write three to six sentences, five to 20 words in length, about each slide. I made a slidecast showing how you can use PowerPoint’s “Presenter View” to write your script for each slide.




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Timely Technology Questions And Answers For RIAs


  • Do you have a reliable way to archive and retrieve emails if you’re inspected?

  • Do you systematically archive all your firm’s social media content?

  • Is your practice using cloud-based vesions of Microsoft Office or Google Apps?

  • Can you batch process and deliver any type of document to clients securely?

  • Can you stream financial news to your social networks?


If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” please join us Thursday at 4 p.m. EST for a webinar with better answers.

Advisor Products has been in business since 1996 but solutions we’re launching now are more helpful than ever.

Our unrelenting focus on client communications for RIAs makes us unique and more valuable than ever to investment advisors.

What we are doing is high quality, priced well, and  good for RIAs.

Feedback from our clients is very positive these days because our service team is stronger, but these new solutions will add to our already-strong platform.
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Two Minute Video Shows Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors

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Erado, An Advisor Products Compliance Partner, Named To Gartner's "Cool Vendor" List

You just don’t see vendors to advisors get named to Gartner’s list of “cool vendors.” Sorry, I know RIAs think they are really a big deal but in the enterprise world covered by Gartner, the RIA segment of the financial services industry just does not matter much.

So when Craig Brauff, founder and CEO of Erado Message Control Solutions, an email and social media compliance solution, sent me a copy of Gartner’s research naming his company a “cool vendor” today, I was thrilled.

Erado was on my radar screen for the last few years but did not get on my personal list of “cool vendors” until about three months ago, when Brauff came to visit me here in Long Island.

Brauff is an economist who taught himself programming. In his early 50s now, he’s an entrepreneur with a track record of success.  He’s a hands on guy, totally obsessed with doing great work. For instance, Brauff built his own data center because he decided that was a requirement for building a world-class advisor compliance business.

With an intensity that matches my own, Brauff and I are kindred spirits. When we sat down together in my home office after dinner one evening and got to know each other, we almost immediately became excited about one another’s work.

Erado was making technology simpler for advisors. For example, other social media compliance vendors had created proxies for logging into social networks. Big social media vendors have been requiring that advisors log into a compliant version of Linkedin, Facebook, or Twitter and use that to post content to their social networks. That means those other vendors have to support software proxies for smartphones, desktops , tablets, Androids, Macs, and PCs. I have learned from personal experience that ths is a bad approach.

Erado’s approach is different. It does not create a proxy to log into social networks in order to enforce compliance. It rids advisors of the need to use a proxy. Erado capture what is posted and turns it into an email where it can be reviewed by compliance officers and archived. Brauff went in a different direction from most vendors gaining momentum with enterprises. And it has paid off.

Gartner’s recognition is fantastic but the real recognition that Erado is doing something better it that its systems are getting adopted by large institutions. Erado now provides email and social media archiving for tens of thousands of advisors, and it is the compliance vendor chosen by many large BDs, including LPL Financial.

When Brauff told me about his ideas for advisor email and social media compliance three months ago, I knew right away that Erado was a cool vendor. But what was really cool is that Brauff felt the same way about Advisor Products!

I showed Brauff how the Financial Advisor Social Media Content Stream from Advisor Products would work. (It just went live recently and we are looking for beta testers.) Brauff got it. While other vendors offered content, Brauff on the spot that evening validated that what Advisor Products is doing would be better.  Advisor Products, Brauff understood, was dong something really cool!

It was at that moment when we decided Erado and Advisor Products would work together.

In a few days, Advisor Products and Erado will start providing RIAs with Erado compliance solutions — email archiving and encryption as well as social media archiving.

The price will be 20% below what Erado charges RIAs for its compliance solutions. Erado is treating Advisor Products like a large enterprise buyer and Advisor Products is passing on the savings to RIAs.

RIAs will be able to buy cloud solutions for Office 365 and Google Apps bundled with email and social media compliance.

Advisor Products has been in search of a compliance vendor that could meet the needs of RIAs for about five years. But Erado really is a cool vendor and that’s why we chose Erado.

Congratulations Craig!
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Seeking Beta Testers For Financial Advisor Social Media Content Stream

Tonight, at long last, we’re going live with a financial advisor social media dashboard (SMD.

People who have seen SMD say it’s like HooteSuite for advisors.

We create content — articles and videos — and we write three status updates (tweets) about each topic. You use SMD to send your tweets.

SMD is an ingenuous way for a wealth manager to post updates to social networks once a day on topics high-net-worth individuals need to know about: how the improving financial condition of state governments might affect muni bonds, utilizing “stretch” IRAs, how not to spoil their kids, and asset protection strategies for doctors.

The beauty of the SMD is that Advisor Products does the heavy lifting by writing about these strategies authoritatively. All you do is rewrite the tweets we provide to target it to you social networks.

The SMD is included free with all Platinum-licensed websites. You can add the social media content stream and our content to any website for $1337 annually.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and let us know.

 
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RIA Best Practices In Using Consumer File Sharing Apps

The ease of use of consumer file sharing apps like Dropbox and Box makes them so convenient, but advisors must be thoughtful about using consumer file-sharing apps in their practice.

Dropbox and Box are best-in-class file sharing apps, but they are not built expressly for investment advisors.

I recently interviewed Chris Winn, founder of AdvisorAssist, a leading operations and compliance consultancy, about use of Dropbox and other consumer file-sharing apps by RIAs and registered reps. I honestly did not know where Winn was going to come out on this issue. His response is important because investment advisors are obliged legally to take care with a client’s personally identifiable information. Liability and regulatory issues are involved, and Winn is an independent expert.

To hear Winn advise against using Dropbox and other file sharing consumer apps with clients in favor of a system like AdvisorVault validated my thoughts in creating a secure client communications portal to meet the specific needs of RIAs.

Informed by Winn's comments, here are a few of the issues advisors must consider as consumer file-sharing apps grow in popularity with consumers:

Compliance-Configuration. Dropbox, Google Docs, and other file sharing apps may have the features necessary to enable a configuration that forces prudent practices by clients. For example, clients sharing documents with you should be forced to create create password at least eight characters in length (preferably 10) and that use at least one non-alphanumeric and one upper-case character. But you must configure consumer apps to enforce such policies.

Internal Versus External. Winn says using Dropbox and other consumer file-sharing apps are okay for use with staff but not with other professionals or clients. If a client is using his own Dropbox account with you, you do not control the security policies of the client or outside professional.

Fast And Easy But Not Carefree. The near-instant access ease of file sharing apps makes it easy to give little thought to security. Yet people are posting personally identifiable data in many places more often.
Supporting Consumer Apps. Advisors who do not create their own dedicated client portal will find that their clients have done so and that it is scattered across the World Wide Web, which means advisors will often find themselves supporting an array of file-sharing apps. Instead of spending quality time with clients, you spend time time supporting clients with tech problems.

One Client Portal. Unless you do it for them, your clients over the next few years are probably going to create their own online vaults. You’ll have lost the opportunity to organize your clients’ personal financial information on your firm’s website.

Winn and I have collaborated together on A4A webinars and other projects for nearly three years, but he never brings up solutions made by Advisor Products and I’ve never asked him to do so. In this instance, however, the growing popularity of online file-sharing apps made the question inevitable and his answer important.
The three-minute video below is actually a short snippet from a longer interview with Winn posted to Advisors4Advisors. Because Winn spoke about Dropbox versus a solution from Advisor Products — AdvisorVault — I removed this portion of the video from A4A and  posted it here because it’s basically an endorsement of AdvisorVault. However, getting an endorsement from an independent  compliance consultant I really respect makes me proud.
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AdvisorVault For iPad

With more advisors and their clients using the iPad to access to the Web, it’s good to know the popular tablet is compatible with AdvisorVault.

With an iPad you touch any folder icon to drill into a folder or touch any document to pop it open.

AdvisorVault's dynamic HTML reports, which work with Schwab PortfolioCenter, Advent Axyx, AssetBook, Orion, Albridge, TD Ameritrade VEO, and other systems, look great on the iPad. Ticker symbols in performance reports can be opened by touching them and you can navigate across the reports.

Clients and collaboration partners, whether they're on an iPad, iPhone, or Android device can view files securely in AdvisorVault.

With clients increasingly using Web-based file storage systems like DropBox, establishing a client financial portal that you can brand and control is wise. It will be compliant, integrated with professional systems, and include the security features needed investment advisors. And it's compatible with the latest mobile devices used by you and your clients.

AdvisorVault For iPad
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Naysayers “Stunned” By Strengthening American Economy, Says Investment Strategist Fritz Meyer

Financial economist Fritz Meyer yesterday showed RIAs evidence that the American economy is showing surprising signs of strength. “The naysayers are stunned,”  Meyer said yesterday in his monthly economic research release.

About 30% of the investment advisors who attended yesterday’s session rated Meyer’s presentation with 4.56 on A4A’s five-star review system.

I've produced more than 200 webinars over the past three years. For any speaker month after month to receive such high ratings from our audience of curmudgeons is unprecedented. Below are all of the comments from advisors who attended yesterday’s session.

You can subscribe to Fritz Meyer’s monthly slide presentations for $300 a year. After hearing Fritz deliver the presentation, you can use the slides to create your own webinars, seminars blog posts, newsletters, Slidecasts, and social media content.(If you are an A4A member, you can replay Fritz’s webinar 24/7 and get CFP CE credit for it for free.)

Using Fritz Meyer’s research as the basis for your own content can be crucial to successful search engine optimization and social networking. By writing a blog, posting a webinar or tweeting about Fritz’s slides, you can personalize and put your own unique spin on economic and investment topics, demonstrating your expertise. And you can target the content to your niches—doctors in Jacksonville, Florida, airline pilots, or other clients that would be “ideal” for you.

However, if you’re too busy to create your own content consistently, Advisor Products provides you with a social media content stream.

Articles we write about the highlights of Fritz’s monthly presentation are posted to your website along with two-minute videos of Fritz making a point. Those timely articles and videos are FINRA-reviewed and can be shown to clients and prospects.  We also write three tweets about each article, and you use our Social Media Dashboard to rewrite the tweets, and personalize to your target market, and distribute the tweets to your social networks on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can schedule personalized tweets to go out daily for the next month based on our articles or automate the entire process.

You can add our content to any existing website for $1,337 annually, and that includes the social media content stream. If you want AdvisorVault for secure client portals, eight hours of service from our help desk, website archiving, and additional content, it costs $2,337 annually.

In addition to Fritz Meyer’s research about the economy, we are offering the same content services for advisors who need content about tax and estate planning and IRAs for high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and ultra-HNWIs, via a partnership Keebler Tax And Wealth Education.

 

  • Excellent.  Will attend next month.

  • Good info, but lengthy.

  • Overall it was interesting and very worthwhile.  As a non-economist some of it made my head spin (just a little) but the content was something that we think we can use and adapt for our clients.

  • Some problems with the audio.

  • As usual; great data point checks from Fritz; puts economy in perspective

  • Fritz is incredible. Need to listen to again and again.

  • Good insights.  I like that Fritz shook it up a bit from the past few months. For the first time, I noticed some technical difficulties (besides the other voice on the call early on).  The audio froze for a second or two throughout the presentation, usually accompanied by a slight buzzing sound.  I don't think there was an issue on my end, so just an FYI.

  • great info as always; sound quality was a little iffy on this one (but may be an issue on my end)

  • Excellent as always.

  • As always: excellent. Very timely, pertinent and useful.

  • Thanks Andy.

  • Very glitchy this time around. Could just be my system, though.

  • Great timely information as usual!

  • Fritz is always on target and relevant. Thank you!

  • Another solid webinar. Paints an improving short term picture while cognizant of long term obstacles.

  • Excellent content for advisors.  I'm not sure that many clients would be interested in sitting through a one-hour presentation of this type, so it would clearly have to be condensed or, perhaps, broken into several 10 - 15 minute presentations.

  • Would like an expanded global orientation

  • Excellent presentation

  • Really great!  Confirms what we have been advising clients.

  • Very good.  Thank you.

  • My memory says I subscribed at a much higher price.  Can I receive a credit for this?  Thanks.  I will look up proof of purchase if needed.

  • Great update!


 
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Add Wealth Management Content And A Social Stream To Any Advisor Website

If you already have a website, you can now add Advisor Products articles and videos for high-net-worth individuals to it and get our stream of social media status updates for $1,337 annually, plus a set-up fee of $300.

Many advisors develop a website on WordPress or some other free or inexpensive content management and hosting service.

They do it figuring they don’t need wealth management content on their website or they are planning to create their own articles and videos. They learn that producing website content is not only important to a financial advisor but difficult to produce.

We provide a great solution.  Advisor Products content addresses issues that will help you retain clients and market to prospects. Here’s how:

Panic Protection. After the stock market declines by 10% or more, you receive a special edition of articles and videos. This content reinforces the need to retain a long-term investment perspective in times of market volatility.

Social. Our $1,337 content-only package includes our social media dashboard, which lets you send, edit, and schedule status updates (tweets) to your social networks. Each tweet links back to the full aticle.

Fritz Meyer. Financial economist Fritz Meyer gets rave reviews from investment advisors for his analysis of fundamentals driving investment markets. We write articles monthly explaining the latest trends Meyer is focusing on.

Bob Keebler. Bob Keebler is one of the nation’s leading experts on IRA, estate, and income tax strategies and we write articles monthly to introduce his ideas concisely and simply to clients and prospects.

Videos. Meyer and Keebler provide monthly webinars offering you professional continuing education credit that you can attend for free. We edit their webinars into two-minute highlight clips that accompany our articles.

Automated. Once you are set up to display our content on your website, your website can be automatically updated with new content monthly. (Or you can select your stories monthly.) The social media can also automate sending tweets.

FINRA-Reviewed. All of our articles, tweets, and videos are FINRA-reviewed before they are posted for use on your website. (However, panic protection articles are sent to you via email before review by FINRA for timeliness.)

Setting up your website to include Advisor Products articles and videos is simple. We provide documentation for our application programming interface with example code. A web developer can add our content to any website in two and six hours, depending on your site and developer.

If you want us to host your site, you get AdvisorVault, six hours of service from our help desk, and much more for $2,377 with our AdvisorSites Platinum.
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Retain Clients And Market To Prospects Using The Latest Technology And Content Marketing Techniques

Don’t let the low price fool you. Advisor Products technology and content marketing system is cutting-edge and very powerful, and enables advisors to create a stream of status updates about wealth management that can easily be personalized and shared on social networks.

Our system and our content is different from anything else out there and helps wealth managers retain clients and market to prospects. Here’s how:

Panic Protection. After the stock market declines by 10% or more, you receive a special edition of articles and videos. This content reinforces the need to retain a long-term investment perspective in times of market volatility.

Investment News. Financial economist Fritz Meyer gets rave reviews from investment advisors for his analysis of fundamentals driving investment markets. We provide articles monthly explaining the latest trends Meyer is focusing on.

Wealth Management News. Bob Keebler is one of the nation’s leading experts on IRA, estate, and income tax strategies. Based on his research, we write articles monthly to introduce his ideas concisely and simply to clients and prospects.

Videos. Meyer and Keebler provide monthly webinars offering you professional continuing education credit that you can attend for free. We edit their webinars into two-minute highlight clips that accompany our articles.

Easy. Once you are set up to display our content on your website, your website can be automatically updated with new content monthly. (Or you can select your stories monthly.)

FINRA-Reviewed. All of our articles and videos are FINRA-reviewed before they are posted for use on your website. (However, panic protection articles are sent to you via email before review by FINRA for timeliness.)

Social. You get a social stream about wealth management — status updates that we write and you can edit and share with your social networks — that link back to articles and videos on your website.

All of the features described here -- plus a lot more -- are are part of AdvisorSites Platinum, which costs $2,337 and includes AdvisorVault.

I’m hosting a webinar Thursday, March 8 at 4 p.m. ET to explain how wealth managers can use our innovative system for content marketing and secure client communications.

 

 
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AdvisorVault Desktop Connector In General Release

AdvisorVault Desktop Connector has moved to general release. Advisors and support staff at the 750 firms using AdvisorVault for secure client communications are invited to download the app.

To download AdvisorVault Desktop Connector, log in to the AdvisorSitesBackOffice and click on the “Get Desktop Connector” button on the left-side navigation menu.  You’ll find the download link as well as an FAQ and an AVDC manual.

AdvisorVault Desktop Connector puts all of your client vaults on your desktop in a familiar Windows Explorer-style interface.  You no longer need to open a browser, log in to AdvisorVault, and browse to client folders to upload documents to a client’s vault, enhancing usability significantly.

AdvisorVault Desktop Connector is similar to desktop apps from web-based document storage apps like DropBox. The big difference is AdvisorVault is created exclusively for financial advisors. It is integrated with popular portfolio management systems used by advisors and contains communication features and workflows advisors need to support communication with clients and collaboration with accountants and attorneys. Plus, it meets security and compliance requirements of major broker-dealers and custodians.

 
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Advisor Products Partners With Keebler & Associates

Bob Keebler’s explanation and analysis of income and estate tax law and IRA rules is now available to advisors in a monthly slide presentation series for $300 annually.

Advisors can use the slides to create webinars, seminars, blog posts, videos, or other content.

Using the slides as a basis for creating your own content should improve your search engine ranking and social media profile. Plus, you and your team will become more conversant in income and estate tax and IRA rules affecting high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and ultra-HNWIs.

In addition, Keebler's monthly tax presentation series for HNWIs is summarized in articles and videos available on advisor websites with AdvisorSites Platinum, which includes a social media content stream.

 
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Panic Protection For Investment Advisors

Remember the week of August 8, 2011? It was the week after Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. Government. Worries about European sovereign debt added to uncertainty. Stock prices convulsed, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung up and down 400-points four days in a row.

Advisor Products during that wild week in August 2011 provided 12 articles to help advisors calm clients. Now we've formalized that service.

Panic Protection combines Advisor Products content with AdvisorVault.

When your clients log in to AdvisorVault, the first page they always see is a list of unread documents, those posted since they last logged in.

During the next market panic, we'll again post panic-protection content. On a day when the market plunges, it will take a few minutes to pick a Panic Protection article and post it to a "Shared" folder. That will go into all of your client vaults. When nervous clients log in to view their accounts, they'll see the unread article first.

Panic Protection is educational content -- articles and videos -- about economic news and trends. Produced by Advisor Products, three articles a month are based on research from financial economist Fritz Meyer.

The content and delivery system ensure your clients are reminded that economic fundamentals drive investments. This educational content will be your ballast amid turbulence.

When the S&P 500 declines by 10%, Advisor Products provides a special edition of articles and videos.

In addition, when stocks  plunge, you can check a log-in report in AdvisorVault to see which clients viewed accounts in TD Ameritrade, PortfolioCenter, Advent Axys, Orion Advisor Services, or AssetBook. You can identity nervous clients and call them.

Panic Protection comes with Advisor Products Platinum, which costs $2,337 annually and includes AdvisorVault, wealth management content, a social media content stream, website archiving and eight hours of service from our website technicians. Call 516 333 0066  x224 for more information.
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Social Media Adoption By RIAs and Broker/Dealers

Investment advisers and independent broker/dealers are adopting social media as I expected they would: B/Ds are using crappy content and automation technology, while the large majority of RIAs mostly ignore social media marketing.

Broker-Dealer Social Media Adoption

The BD executives making the decisions have not themselves used social marketing successfully. Moreover, they are outsourcing to vendors that likewise have no record of success in social marketing.

Broker-dealers re striking enterprise deals with social media vendors for low-cost solutions. Little attention is paid to the quality of the content. Content is treated like a commodity, as if one vendor’s content is no different from another’s.

Broker-dealers made the same mistakes 15 years ago in adopting registered representative websites. They approached it as a compliance- technology issue. The BDs struck deals with vendors with almost no regard for content. To this day, most financial advisor websites read like reference books.

Just as they did in adopting websites 15 years ago, BDs now are ignoring the marketing needs of their advisors as they adopt social media solutions. No effort is being made by BDs to help their advisors differentiate themselves. It’s canned content and a cookie-cutter approach and it will fail.

Seeing the mistakes of the past repeated by broker-dealers does not surprise me. BDs generally have little interest in educating clients because they don’t see how anyone makes money from it. Meanwhile, marketing executives at most independent BDs have little clout in making decisions and business executives as well as compliance executives make the calls on social media adoption by reps, even though neither is truly qualified make these decisions.

Registered Investment Adviser Social Media Adoption

RIAs meanwhile are also behaving as expected. A large majority of RIAs are making no serious effort at social marketing.  RIAs are always very slow to adopt new ideas.

Most investment advisors know social media isn’t a fad but have other ideas about how to spend marketing dollars. Most IA reps laugh at the idea that anyone would give you $1 million to manage after meeting you on LinkedIn.

Perhaps 20% of RIAs have a social media marketing strategy and are executing on it. Maybe 5% of CEOs of private wealth advisory firms would say they have benefited from social media marketing.

Solutions For Social Media Marketing For RIAs And Broker-Dealers

For social media marketing to be effective, private wealth advisors and registered reps must create their own content. Your clients and referral sources need to hear from you.

Investment advisors need content that explains how they size up the investment markets. The content can be articles, videos, webinars, blog posts, slideshows, tweets or some other medium.

The content must be optimized for search engines. It must contain keywords that target clients would use to find you using a search engine. And those keywords must spring from your strategic marketing plan.

Creating your own content is not easy, however.

An excellent vehicle that can be the basis for creating content that explains your world-view is financial economist Fritz Meyer's research. Meyer's monthly analysis is contained in 70 PowerPoint slides advisors can utilize in seminars, webinars, and client meetings.

The monthly presentations contain dozens of tables and charts guiding an illustrated analysis of key economic data.

When the stock market drops 10% or more,  special editions are published.

IA reps have an advantage over FINRA-licensed reps  in social marketing because their content approval process is simpler.

Targeted to investment advisors utilizing strategic asset allocation, you can purchase Fritz Meyer's Slide Shows For Advisors for $300 a year.

While there is no replacing your own original content, the Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors comes closer than most "canned content" solutions. With the content stream, Advisor Products provides:

  • Article and video content for high-net-worth individuals

  • A dashboard to manage the content on your website

  • Tweets about the linking to your website

  • A dashboard to send or schedule tweets to social networks


Advisors can also get help with executing on strategic marketing plans. If you know who your target clients and if it is a true niche — retirees are not a niche, but retired professors are — Advisor products can write search engine optimized copy for you and write social media profiles and a social marketing campaign content for advisors.

 

 
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Intelligent Content Suddenly Matters In An Age Of Social Networking

“Canned content” — that’s how investment advisors often refer to articles Advisor Products posts on advisor websites. In an age of social networking, however, that’s changing.

The content Advisor Products makes available on over 1,100 investment advisor websites is valuable in a social media stream.

If you’ve been too preoccupied with client relations and investment research since 2008 to notice, social networking has become a useful way to communicate with clients and allied professionals. It’s a way for prospects to find out about you.

For example, let's take Bill, the owner of a small company that makes force-measurement gauges. You meet Bill through a friend.

Before giving you money to manage, Bill naturally would like to get to know you.

How can he do that?

The best way is to connect on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.

Social networking makes it easy for Bill to stay in touch, but it’s impersonal enough so that Bill won’t feel obligated to hire you or even respond to you. It’s safe socially.

One day two or three years from now, Bill gets an offer to sell his company. Bill needs professional advice.

The content you've been posting on LinkedIn about succession planning for business owners suddenly matters.

Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors, a new solution from Advisor Products, uses videos and articles created by Advisor Products and posted to your website as the basis for a social media content stream about wealth management.

Advisor Products writes 12 articles a month that you can post to your website and three tweets about each article. We make that accessible in the AdvisorSites BackOffice.

You can copy any tweet from the BackOffice and send it out to your connections, linking them back your your website.  (In March, we’re launching a dashboard to automate and schedule the tweets.)

Keep in mind, content written by Advisor Products won’t replace your own original tweets. Nothing replaces your ideas, your voice.

However, since creating content about wealth management is time consuming, it’s nice to be able to rely on the Social Media Content Stream For Advisors to augment content that you create.

I’ve written about wealth management for 29 years. I quit consumer journalism and founded Advisor Products in 1996, and I’ve been leading our effort to produce news about wealth management since then. Calling what Advisor Products content “canned” has bugged me for many years. But I’m feeling pretty good about the way things have changed.

Suddenly, the content Advisor Products produces about wealth management is valuable to advisors serving high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and ultra-HNWIs. Suddenly, intelligent content about best practices in wealth management for HNWIs is important.
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Price Increase And Upgrades On AdvisorSites Platinum

Advisor Products recently added powerful new client communication features to AdvisorSites Platinum, including:

  • Advanced Settings For Collaborating With Accountants And Attorneys

  • AdvisorVault Desktop Connector to access client vaults from your desktop

  • Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors

  • Articles monthly based on Fritz Meyer economic analysis and Bob Keebler income- and estate-tax tactics

  • Videos monthly based on Fritz Meyer economic analysis and Bob Keebler income- and estate-tax tactics

  • AdvisorVault Client View for TD Ameritrade Institutional Veo


Over the past few years, Advisor Products packed a lot of sophisticated new features in AdvisorSites Platinum at no cost, including:

  • AdvisorVault

  • Automated website archiving

  • Template Emails to personalize and automate notifications of a new post to a client’s vault

  • Referral Network Pages for attorneys, accountants and other partners

  • Event Calendar and Administration Tool for posting information on your website about events

  • Quarterly Market Summary

  • Economy Watch


In late 2011, our cost for developing software soared suddenly when one of our software development partners changed business strategy. So, after seven years without a price increase, Advisor Products is raising the cost of its Platinum website by about $20 a month, from $2,100 to $2,337 annually.  It's remains by far the best value in advisor websites for RIAs.

Please continue to support us because we are now great at making your communication with clients more meaningful, personal, efficient, and secure. After 16 years in the business, Advisor Products, at long last, is great and we are more focused than ever on advisors serving high-net-worth investors (HNWI) and ultra-HNWIs. Please feel free to call me directly about the price increase or any other questions or suggestions you have at (516) 333-0066.
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Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors Is Launched

Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors was launched recently by Advisor Products Inc., enabling thousands of financial advisors to provide a social media content about wealth management.

Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors is for advisors too busy to create all of their own content.

  • We create articles and videos for your website

  • We write tweets about our financial content

  • You send the tweets to your social network

  • The tweets link to your website


Advisor Products produces 12 articles a month that can be posted to your website. Many of the articles are based on ideas from subject matter experts like investment strategist Fritz Meyer and tax and estate planning expert Robert Keebler. The articles are usually reviewed on an expedited basis by FINRA to ensure timeliness, and many articles are accompanied by Meyer or Keebler narrating a two-minute slideshow about investment or tax strategy.

With each article, Advisor Products provides three tweets — 140-character status updates that you can post to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for distribution to your social network. Each tweet links to the article and video on your website, where information about your services are also displayed.

It's almost effortless but it's an effective content marketing tactic.

Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors is written and edited by financial journalists based on ideas and strategies from Advisor Products subject matter experts, recognized authorities in areas of private wealth management.

Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors simplifies distribution of social media content for advisors.  The tweets for each story are available in the AdvisorSites BackOffice content management system.

Currently, advisors copy tweets for each story and manually post them to social networks. In 1Q12, Advisor Products expects to launch a dashboard allowing advisors to choose and schedule each tweet or totally automate the social stream to send by sending out one tweet daily.

Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors is not meant to replace original content created by a financial advisor. Nothing replaces a personal message expressing your views in your words. But it's sensible to augment content you personally create with Advisor Products articles and videos, which are targeted to high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth investors.

Social Media Content Stream for Financial Advisors has been added to AdvisorSites Platinum, which costs $2,337 and includes AdvisorSites Content Management and compliance, AdvisorVault, eight hours of service, compliance tools, and much more.

You can add the Social Media Content Stream to any advisor website for $1,337 a year plus a $300 set-up fee. Call (888) 274-5755 for more information.

 

 

 
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Provide Clients TD Ameritrade Account Balances, Holdings, And Transactions From Your Website Instead Of TDAI’s

The TD Ameritrade-AdvisorVault integration is live. RIAs can now provide clients reports generated in TD Ameritrade Institutional’s (TDAI) Veo platform via their own websites. Using AdvisorVault, the TDAI account look-up becomes an opportunity to communicate with clients when they check balances is good for clients and you. Here's why.

The TDAI reports from VEO, which are updated daily, can be branded by an RIA.

Until now, RIAs using TDAI as a custodian could not brand Veo reports, which feature the TDAI’s branding. The client experience in AdvisorVault is totally different.

Your clients are going to your website — not to TDAI’s — to check their Account Balances, Holdings, and Transactions.

It’s under your brand, of course. More important, however, is that when client check account values, they see all the other posts to their vaults -- financial plans, wills, trusts, medical emergency details, LPOAs, newsletters, correspondence with other professionals, and more -- alongside TDAI account data.

The TDAI account statement is one just piece of the client view in AdvisorVault. The folders and documents show clients what you’ve done for them lately and remind them of their long-term goals. That's a much different presentation than what's currently available.

For example, after a sharp downturn you can post a newsletter article about the history of stock market volatility to all your client vaults. Next time clients log in to AdvisorVault to check their TDAI accounts, the first thing they see is a link to the unread newsletter article about volatility.

You can view a report showing who logged in and what they viewed. When you notice a client is checking his account frequently, you can call to see if all is well.

Clients can access their account balances online now anytime by going directly to TDAI’s website or using TDAI’s advisor-client website, but presenting TDAI account data through AdvisorVault better supports RIAs and, most importantly, their clients.

The fact that you can monitor client log-ins is disclosed to clients in the default user agreement clients must accept to log in to AdvisorVault for the first time. As long as you're helping clients stick to a long-term plan that you genuinely believe is in their best interest, and you make the prop[er disclosures, using log-in report is ethical and professional, and helping clients stick to a long-term plan is easier with AdvisorVault.

Embrace transparency and view the times that clients check their balances as opportunities to educate, communicate, and build client relationships.

For now, you can add the TDAI interface to any existing AdvisorVault for free by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Use subject line: "Add TDAI To My AdvisorVault."


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Price of Investment Advisor Research By Fritz Meyer Slashed By 50%

Fritz Meyer’s research is already very popular with investment advisors, but it’s about to become even more popular: We’ve slashed the price from $50 to $25 a month if you sign up for a one-year subscription.

Meyer’s research is updated monthly in a 70-slide PowerPoint. The content is well suited to investment advisors utilizing strategic asset allocation and broad diversification and who would benefit from continually educating, assuring, and reminding clients taking a long-term perspective on investing.

Every month, Meyer produces a presentation examining fundamentals driving investment markets. Hundreds of independent financial advisors view his monthly webinars and give Meyer rave reviews. The webinar is free.

If you purchase the slides makes after attending Meyer’s webinar and hearing his latest comments on the economy, it’s easy for you to create your own content using Fritz’s slides.

You can use any of Meyer’s slides in your client meetings, webinars, seminars, blog posts, or newsletters.

Leveraging Fritz Meyer’s research makes it far easier for financial advisors to generate a personal social media content stream that is based on economic facts and analysis and framed by a long-term perspective.

In addition to distributing Fritz Meyer’s slide shows, Advisor Products embeds Meyer’s research in websites and newsletters. Every month, the highlights of Meyer’s webinar are edited into one-minute videos and articles are written to accompany them and they are sold with Platinum advisor websites.
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New Advanced Configuration Settings In AdvisorVault’s Client View Aid Broker-Dealers And RIAs

As strange as it may seem to investment advisors, B/Ds are concerned about possible liability exposure arising when clients are able to upload documents to their advisor’s online vault. While the issue could be dealt with contractually, it is worth mentioning the concern of one B-D and the improved configuration settings recently added to AdvisorVault to address the issue.

 

AdvisorVault is a secure system for advisors to share documents with clients. It integrates client communications into your work flow and engages clients. It also enables advisors to collaborate online with a client’s attorney and accountant, thus helping advisors build a team approach to wealth management and building a referral network of allied professionals.

 

 

One large B-D that claims to be planning  implementation of AdvisorVault with hundreds of its affiliated advisors raised a concern about clients uploading documents to AdvisorVault. The B-D is worried that a client might upload information about his financial situation that the advisor is unaware of and that conflicts with the advice proffered by the advisor. For instance, what if the client posts a document declaring he is a conservative investor when the advisor has determined the client is a growth investor?

The advisor could add a sentence or two to the AdvisorVault user agreement, which must be approved by his clients before they enter their vault for the first time. Such language would help protect the advisor by saying that the advisor is not responsible for knowing about all the information clients upload to their vault. But we went a step further.

For B-Ds and RIAs concerned about client uploads, advanced configuration settings recently added to AdvisorVault now allow you to disable upload privileges by clients. You can also disable the upload privilege on attorneys, accountants, and other outside professionals.

Another new configuration setting added to AdvisorVault allows advisors to disable a client’s ability to request their advisor grant vault access to an outside professional.

The default configuration of AdvisorVault allows clients to request that you provide access to a lawyer or accountant. Transparency is the operative idea behind all of our default settings, in alignment with fiduciaries.

A small percentage of advisors did not want clients to be able to request that their advisor grant access to an accountant, attorney, or other professional. So we've made that doable  in a  few clicks.  The video shows you how it's done.

Released in 2007, AdvisorVault is used by 700 RIAs to share information with clients securely. Advanced features replete throughout AdvisorVault make it highly configurable, and a free desktop app puts your client vaults on your desktop, which makes it really easy to use. For $1,000 a year, AdvisorVault can be added to any advisor website. For $2,337 a year, a Platinum license provides financial news articles and videos reviewed by FINRA, automated website archiving, eight hours of service, and a content management system.

 
AdvisorVault's Client View
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PortfolioCenter And Advent Reporting Integration With AdvisorVault Is Improved

AdvisorVault Desktop Connector makes it much easier for RIAs to post documents to client vaults and streamlines batch uploading of performance reports from Schwab PortfolioCenter or Advent Axys.

With AdvisorVault Desktop Connector, sharing documents securely with clients has never been so easy. There’s no need to open a browser, log in to a vault application, browse to a client’s vault, and browse to the file you want to upload. The drag and drop capability means advisors can routinely share documents with clients and outside professionals throughout the business day as part of their routine workflow.

In addition to enabling drag and drop, Desktop Connector makes it much easier to upload a batch of client performance reports generated in Schwab PortfolioCenter or Advent Axys.

Till now, now advisory firms using AdvisorVault’s integration of Schwab PortfolioCenter and Advent Axys could use an FTP process to upload a batch of client reports. Now, advisors can simply drag and drop the batch of reports and they will automatically be placed in the correct client folders.

Desktop connector is a desktop application that displays all of your client vaults on your desktop, and it is similar to accessing folders on your computer using Windows Explorer. Desktop Explorer comes free with AdvisorVault.

This two-minute video shows you how it works.



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Albridge Custom Portfolio Performance Reports Now Integrated Into AdvisorVault

Custom portfolio reports in Abridge Solutions, the performance reporting system used by most independent broker/dealers and advisors, are now integrated into AdvisorVault.

Albridge custom reports are used by advisors for “householding” client accounts. Several individuals can be grouped and all their accounts displayed in a single report.

For example, an advisor managing the assets of parents as well as their three children and 10 grandchildren can create a custom report in Albridge to consolidate reporting on the family’s holdings, asset allocation, and portfolio performance into one statement.

AdvisorVault now enables 24/7 Albridge custom reports to clients of advisors.

Until now, AdvisorVault was able to pull in Albridge reports on individual clients but custom reports were unavailable.

AdvisorVault’s integration enables advisors to send clients to their firm’s website to view performance reports. That’s better for an advisor than sending clients to Albridge’s website because AdvisorVault brands the reports to your firm.

More important, however, is that in addition to Albridge portfolio reports, advisor clients can view their financial plans, tax returns, insurance policies, and other documents in AdvisorVault. Clients get a holistic view of their financial situation, reminding them that investment management is just one aspect of the services they receive from their advisor.

AdvisorVault gets rave reviews for its collaboration features. Advisors can easily share client folders with accountants and lawyers, which helps an advisor quarterback a team of professionals for a client and builds a financial advisor’s professional network.

 


AdvisorVault is used by about 700 private wealth RIAs. A growing number of independent broker/dealers, including American Portfolios, Cambridge Investment Research, and Raymond James Financial allow advisors they supervise to use AdvisorVault and it is becoming popular with top-tier of advisors at independent broker/dealers.

AdvisorVault comes as a standalone application that can be added to any advisor website for $1000 a year, or it comes free with a Platinum advisor website, which also content, service, and compliance tools for $2,337 annually.

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Content Based On Fritz Meyer’s Research Now Comes With Advisor Websites

Articles and videos based on research from financial economist Fritz Meyer will soon come with an Advisor Products Platinum website.

Meyer’s monthly analysis of the economy and investment markets is popular with advisors using strategic asset allocation and broad diversification.  Every month, Meyer produces a 70-slide PowerPoint presentation that examines key fundamental economic factors driving investment markets. Hundreds of independent financial advisors view his monthly webinars and give Fritz rave reviews.

Now, Advisor Products, a leading website platform for investment advisors, is using Meyer’s research to create content for advisor clients.

Advisor Products is integrating Meyer’s ideas into websites we host for investment advisors. We’ll create articles and videos monthly that can be posted to an advisor website automatically. The additional content will be available on all “Platinum” advisor websites hosted by Advisor Products. (See a sample of a video for clients below.)

Fritz Meyer’s valuable research is the latest improvement to be offered as part of the $2,100 annual Platinum license from Advisor Products. Additional Platinum website benefits include:

  • 256-bit encrypted AdvisorVault for secure document-sharing with clients and COIs

  • content management system for editing your website

  • automated website archiving

  • FINRA-reviewed personal finance article database

  • FINRA-reviewed video library branded to you

  • eight hours of support

  • 10 email accounts

  • stock market data streamed throughout the day

  • redundant infrastructure

  • SAS 70 Type II hosting facility

  • Social media content stream

  • Fritz Meyer content


Beginning January 1, 2012, the annual fee for Advisor Products Platinum will increase from $2,100 to $2,337. In the seven years since our last price increase, Advisor Products added the following to Platinum advisor websites:

  • AdvisorVault 2.0 secure document sharing

  • AdvisorVault Desktop Connector

  • Branded videos

  • Monthly Fritz Meyer content

  • Automated website archiving

  • Social media content stream

  • Event calendar

  • Five additional email accounts


For advisors who want to create their own blogs, articles, and slide shows, the full monthly PowerPoint Fritz Meyer Slide Show continues to be available monthly for $50.

 
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For BDs, Compliance Is Only A Start In Advisor Use Of Social Media

Erado, makers of social media compliance platform for independent BDs and investment advisors, today announced it has been tapped by Investacorp, Inc., an independent broker-dealer subsidiary of Ladenburg Thalmann Financial Services Inc.

Erado looks like it's a fine compliance app and I hope to get to work with Erado, but compliance apps do not get an advisor to change his behavior and suddenly become active on social media.

Maybe 1% of an independent broker/dealer’s advisors will actually figure out how to parlay a new social media compliance platform into client acquisition.

To it credit, Investacorp has now made it possible for its affiliated advisors to communicate and engage in business development using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Erado’s platform allows Investacorp to track and archive its advisors' social media activity. It's a good thing for sure.

FINRA regulatory notice 11-39 requires diligent record-keeping and supervision of social media content from mobile and other devices, and I’m sure Erado has a solution addressing that.

However, working with an app that ensures compliance when an advisor uses social media is totally different from getting an advisor to create his own engaging social media content that is consistent with a strategic marketing plan.

My guess is that the vast majority of advisors—probably 80%—will not in the next 12 months change their behavior enough to benefit from social media marketing. Maybe 20% of advisors will put in enough effort to benefit from social media in 2012, with an emphasis on “maybe.”

Advisor Products, which has been focused on helping advisors use social media for several years, is  launching an automated and integrated social media content stream for financial advisors in 2012. Details will be announced shortly. (If you’re responsible for helping groups of successful advisors market their services, give me a call to talk about this.)

Point is, for BDs, social media compliance is only part of the equation in helping advisors use social media for business development. I’m not sure BDs appreciate what’s needed beyond compliance.
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Advisors Can Share Any Document Securely With Clients With AdvisorVault Desktop Connector

Financial advisors can now drag and drop any file on their desktop to a client’s vault.

With the launch this week of AdvisorVault Desktop Connector, Sharing documents securely with clients has never been so easy.


There’s no need to open a browser, log in to a vault application, browse to a client's vault, and browse to the file you want to upload.


The drag and drop capability means advisors can routinely share documents with clients and outside professionals throughout the business day as part of their routine workflow.

DesktopConnector is the latest enhancement to AdvisorVault, which is a fully encrypted web-based system enabling secure sharing of personal financial documents with clients, estate planning attorneys, and accountants.

AdvisorVault Desktop Connector lets advisors view all of their clients’ vaults and drill down in each vault’s folders right on their desktop without opening a browser.

Compatible with Windows operating systems, is available at no additional charge to AdvisorVault users.

AdvisorVault integrations with Schwab PortfolioCenter, Advent Axys, Albridge Solutions, AssetBook, CabinetNG, MoneyGuide Pro, and other leading professional applications imports client reports in batches.

AdvisorVault is used by more than 400 advisory firms and offers features and workflows that make advisory firms more efficient and better able to communicate personal information to clients.

For more information, please contact us.
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Intermittent, Random Bug Affecting Some Sites; Testing And Maintenance Overnight

A recent upgrade of hardware and software is causing a random intermittent problem with websites.

We will be doing maintenance and testing overnight and your site may experience some down time.

Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if your site's loading slowly tomorrow.

We apologize for the inconvenience and are working hard to fix the problem.



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Make A Marketing Video At Schwab Impact Next Week

Here is a chance to reach prospects in a direct and personal way.

I will be off camera interviewing you, the questions are then edited out, and what remains are 6 one- to threee-minute videos that give prospects a great sense of who you are and what is important in your practice.

The videos can be posted to your website, to your LinkedIn profile, and to YouTube and other social media sites. You can then send links to the videos to prospects.

The cost of the videos is $1,750 includes videotaping with professional equipment and all post-production editing.

See samples and sign up now.
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Fritz Meyer’s Research Now Comes With Client-Facing Presentations

Fritz Meyer’s monthly investment research now comes with client-facing content for your website, blog or social media pages.

Meyer’s research is currently available as a PowerPoint presentation. Meyer updates his research monthly and advisors can buy it for $50 monthly.

Advisors use the slides in client meetings, webinars, and as the basis for blogs and newsletter articles.

To make it even easier for advisor to use Meyer’s research in client communications, we’re now providing Meyer’s research as ready-to-go videos--at no additional cost.

Each month, we’re creating three two-minute videos that summarize Fritz’s most important ideas for long-term investors.

In addition, advisors also receive scripts of what Fritz says in each of three short videos, which can be used as a basis for writing your blog posts.

You can also use the script to narrate your own Slidecast.  Then, your voice is what clients and prospects will hear.

Finally, we’re providing subscribers MP3 audio files of each of the three short presentations, so you can use Fritz’s narration on a Slidecast branded to your firm.

Making Meyer’s research accessible in so many formats makes it easy for advisors to create their own content, which is necessary for effective social media marketing.

Meyer’s research supports advisors with a long-term investment horizon who utilize a broadly diversified asset allocation strategy.

Please keep in mind that because of the timeliness, we do not submit the Fritz Meyer slides shows (or the videos) to FINRA for advertising review. While all of our other content is submitted to FINRA, you will need to ensure they meet your firm’s compliance requirements if you are making them available to clients.

Fritz provides a free webinar on the second Wednesday of every explaining his latest research and advisors give Firtz rave reviews. Sign up for Fritz's next webinar.
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How Is Document Management Software For Advisors Different From Client Vaulting?

Document management systems for advisors, which enable advisors to create a paperless office, are crucial for record keeping and efficiency. They're legally required for Registered Investment Advisers.

But they are not designed for client access.

To be sure, Document Management Software (DMS) is crucial technology to operating a financial advice business efficiently.

The way you file documents--the software interface the staff uses to file documents--is created by your DMS system. The information stored on your DMS must be logically structured, searchable, and scalable. Of course, security, redundancy, and your service agreement are important factors to evaluate. DMS solutions are complex systems that enable a paperless office.

But they are not designed for client access.

That's why the integration of Cabinet NG's document management software for advisors with AdvisorVault's client vault system for advisors is a big deal.

 

 

By working together, Cabinet NG and Advisor Products have taken the paperless office concept a step further than any other tech vendors serving advisors.

We've made it easy for advisors to post documents to a client vault from document management software.

The integration of Cabinet NG's document management software with AdvisorVault turns documents stored internally into external client communications.

To satisfy books and records rules, investment advisors must retain all documents relevant to servicing clients. Cabinet NG fulfills that requirement, using write once, read many (WORM) disk drives to fulfill Securities and Exchange Commission requirements that your records are tamper-proof.

But, like all other document management systems for advisors, Cabinet NG is not meant to be shared with your clients. So Cabinet NG partnered with Advisor Products to streamline an advisor's work.

Not all vendors are as enlightened as Cabinet NG.

Just about every practice management software app used by wealth managers, financial planners and other investment advisors offers a client online access point. Ebix SmartOffice, for instance, offers a client portal. So do Junxure, MoneyGuide Pro, Finance Logix, Black Diamond, AssetBook, PortfolioCenter, and just about every other app made for advisors. They all offer a way for you to give clients a view of their data online.

But none of those apps used by advisors is dedicated to creating the best client interface that integrates information from other systems.

Those apps provide ways for advisors to create financial plans, manage and report portfolio performance, and manage customer relationships. But none is made expressly to promote client communications.

While the client interface is a secondary goal for these apps, that is AdvisorVault’s sole mission: helping you create a great client experience by making communication secure and easy.

Every tech vendor that integrates with AdvisorVault acknowledges that the client interface it may provide is different from AdvisorVault, a solution dedicated solely to client communications. Not every tech vendor is willing to concede that their app will not be the client portal.

In integrating with AdvisorVault, Cabinet NG shows a commitment to doing what's best for advisors. Together, we can do great things for advisors.

For example, you can set up client folders in Cabinet NG to automatically synch with a client’s vault. Anytime you put a document into a client’s folder in your document management system, it will be automatically uploaded the client’s vault. And if the client does not have a vault, Cabinet NG sets one up on AdvisorVault.

Then, AdvisorVault notifies the client, who comes to your website to view the document. The clients sees that document along with others stored in his vault—portfolio reports, financial plans, brokerage statements as well as wills and trust documents, copies of passports, a medical proxy, and other personal information.

 
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Hurricane Recovery Of Advisor Products Can Serve As A Model For Advisory Firms

Advisor Products staff worked from their homes Monday, accessing company systems online, after Hurricane Irene knocked out power throughout Long Island and at the company's Jericho, N.Y. office.

Though Advisor Products is not an advisory firm, its recovery from the hurricane provides a model for advisory firms to prepare for a disaster.


An estimated half million Long Island residents—270,264 homes and businesses, according to Long Island Power Authority—remained without power as of noon Tuesday.  Advisor Products operations, however, were back to normal.

Advisor Products websites were unaffected by Hurricane Irene. Advisor Products hosts about 1,100 financial advisor websites as well as secure client communications systems, like AdvisorVault, at an SAS 70 datacenter. The hosting facility never lost power and did not even need to resort to using its backup power systems.

However, internal systems for managing the staff and tracking client service requests had to be reconfigured Monday morning as the company implemented its disaster recovery plan and went virtual to service customers.

The professionalism and dedication of the Advisor Products staff has been remarkable:

  • Nipun Manglik, an engineer on the advisor websites Help Desk, says that despite the disruption in power he has ensured all customer services requests made by Advisor Products are responded to within 24-hours by phone.

  • IT Manager Jason Fogelson, whose wife is expecting a baby imminently, provided a desk and electric power to three Advisor Products staffers who do not have power in their homes.


 


While Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it struck Long Island overnight Saturday, it hit the 125- by 25-mile swath of land in its power grid. By the time the wind and rain stopped on Sunday afternoon, widespread power outages had befallen the dense- populated suburban towns across the Island. Trees weakened by a rain-soaked August fell throughout Nassau and Suffolk County.

At 9 a.m., Monday, the company’s phone and email systems had been restored, enabling staff to answer client calls and emails, and the company’s CRM system was back online at 5 p.m., allowing project managers, HTML specialists, and technical support staff access notes about open cases and track client website development projects.

I’m proud of the way our team has performed.
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Hurricane Irene Battered East Coast, But Advisor Websites Hosted By Advisor Products Stayed Live

Hurricane Irene, the biggest storm to hit the New York metropolitan area in 25 years, battered Long Island with 65 mile an hour winds and gusts of 85, but service to Advisor Products websites and customers was uninterrupted.

Long Island, a peninsula-shaped stretch of land jutting east 125 miles from Manhattan into the Atlantic and the home of Advisor Products in Jericho, N.Y., was hit right in its power grid. On Monday morning, 24 hours after the rain and winded ended, a half-million Long Islanders reportedly remained without electric power (including the CEO’s home.)

At Advisor Products headquarters, where no advisor websites are hosted but internal management information systems are maintained, IT managers Steve Gordonson and Jason Fogelson elected late Saturday night in preparation for the hurricane to shut down all internal operations systems. The decision proved wise. Power to the Jericho area turned off and on many times overnight Saturday but by 9 a.m. power outages in the suburban hamlet of 13,045 were widespread.

Fallen trees and power poles can be seen all over Long Island  Monday morning. A map on the website of the local utility, Long Island Power Authority, on Monday morning showed widespread power-outages still affected almost every town on Long Island.

By 7 a.m. Monday, when it was clear the power would not be restored in time for business by 9.m., Advisor Products went virtual, relying solely on web-based apps to service advisory firms. By 9 a.m., Advisor Products VOIP phone system was relocated and restored, enabling customers to call the company.

Advisor Products’ 14 employees were all able to run internal company systems from their homes using the Internet and were available to help customers.

A senior member of the service staff  located in Florida and another staffer in California were unaffected by the hurricane. In addition, contractors worldwide work for the company by accessing Advisor Product’s internal applications online. For Advisor Products, "going virtual" and shutting down its Jericho office, takes a few hours.

While some disruption to daily operations was expected Monday morning, all systems supporting service to Advisor Products clients--including the company's CRM--are expected to be fully operational  by mid-afternoon Monday afternoon.

While the company’s engineering team was well-prepared and responded quickly to Hurricane Irene, Advisor Products recently made a significant new investment in new hardware configuration enabling virtual server technology. It's expected to be launched by the end of 2011 and will make disaster recovery simpler.
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A good content strategy is focused on developing and distributing consistent, valuable content to engage and retain prospective customers and target audience, via your website. Our content library provides financial advisors with fresh, high-quality financial content that is updated regularly, improving SEO along the way. And our automated e-newsletter and social media tools allow advisors to reach out to clients and prospects in an easy-to-use manner, providing frequent touch points for optimal brand building.

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