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.

 

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

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.

• 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.

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!

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.

 

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.

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!

 

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.



 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

“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.

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.

 

 

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.

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."

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

 

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.

With markets swooning, Advisor Products last week released nine articles for immediate use by advisors who subscribing to our website and client newsletter services. Breaking news coverage from our team of experienced financial reporters, along with interviews with investment strategist Fritz Meyer, were included in the special content release.

It was a week in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung 400-points up or down four days in a row. Whipsawed advisors began emailing us Wednesday requesting articles to distribute to their clients. The downgrade of the U.S. Government by Standard & Poor’s and worries about the debt crisis spreading to Europe had sparked uncertainty and panic selling.

Wednesday night, Advisor Products responded by providing an article based on research from investment strategist Fritz Meyer entitled, “Focus On Economic Fundamentals That Drive Securities Prices Long Term, And Don’t Succumb To The Hysteria In The Markets.”

On Friday evening, we released another eight articles:

• The U.S. Downgrade Was Bad, But Default Would’ve Been Worse


• Money Market Funds Should Shrug Off U.S. Downgrade


• Economic Measures Signal Solid Rebound Even As Stocks Fall


• Take Advantage Of Fed’s Low-Rate Pledge


• Don’t Panic: The Economy Is Signaling A Recovery


• European Politicians Can Still Come Back From Vacation And Save The Euro


• What Does The Downgrade Of U.S. Debt Really Mean?


• Short-Term Correction Creates Long-Term Buying Opportunity

The content release contained a note disclosing that the articles were not FINRA reviewed and advising advisors to consult their compliance officers before sending them to clients. The articles were for use in emails. They are now being submitted to FINRA.

Sending out breaking news articles is a departure from our usual editorial process. Advisor Products, which has produced client newsletters for advisors since 1996, has a team of financial editors and writers that produce our content. In addition, an Editorial Advisory Board comprised of leading financial advisors review content for technical accuracy, and then the articles are submitted to FINRA for regulatory review. With markets so erratic, however, we truncated our editorial process and released copy without FINRA review.

Would appreciate any feedback on how we did.

Advisors are often stumped about what to post to increase their social media and online presence. So here are some ideas about how you can use Advisor Products articles for status updates and tweets.

Not only will these ideas boost communication with clients and prospects, but they’ll also boost your search engine rankings.

Leverage Our Articles. Advisor Products content is FINRA-reviewed and top-quality. If you are a Platinum-level client with Financial Briefs or Featured News on your website, post status updates linked to those articles to bring traffic to your website.

Target It. Advisor Products content has three high-net-worth targets: retirees, pre-retired executives, and owners of business and professional corporations. Target updates to your prospects.

Comment. Find blogs and forums discussing topics related to wealth management and financial planning and link to articles on your website discussing those topics. For instance, a question about converting to a Roth IRA was posted on Mint.com recently. You could post a response and link to this article about Roth IRA conversion on your website. Since links to your website, link popularity, is the most important factor in search engine optimization, this can be powerful.

Distribute Market Data Bank. Advisor Products Platinum provides you with three quarterly FINRA-reviewed features: Market Data Bank, Economy Watch and Quarterly Market Summary. Post status updates referencing this content. Each of these features has a unique URL on your website that you should link to in your updates.

Tweet About Your Videos. Advisor Products Platinum also gives you access to our FINRA-reviewed video library. Just as you update your status using our articles, you can provide links in your status updates to videos like this one about Intentionally Defective Grantor Trusts, which we create for your website.

Fritz Meyer Slideshows. These slideshows include about 60 slides each month with the latest data about the economy and is based on research by investment strategist Fritz Meyer. You can post the entire slide show to your website. But it would be wiser to pick a one or two of the slides and post a blog about them with your analysis about the data. (The Fritz Meyer slides are not FINRA-reviewed.)

If you’re tweeting out headlines from the financial news, that’s not valuable. You’ll need original ideas and insightful content. We’re making that easy for advisors.

If you’re not regularly updating your social media, there’s less reason to follow you. Advisor Products Platinum provides you with more than enough content to update your status every day— a few times a day if you want.

With the downgrade of America’s credit rating by Standard & Poor’s, clients have yet another reason to be jittery. Telling clients to stay the course is no longer enough to prevent them  from abandoning long-term investment plans in difficult times. The financial crisis and subsequent market meltdown have made it more difficult to convince clients to stick with their investment policies.

Here's a brilliant solution: Fritz Meyer’s slideshows contain 60-plus slides filled with the latest economic data. Meyer presents the case for broad diversification and buy-and-hold investing based on analysis of economic data. Updated monthly, Meyer's slideshows explains key economic fundamentals driving investment markets, and is a voice of reason. Here are four ways to use Fritz Meyer’s slideshows to calm clients and assure prospects, who now more than ever value unemotional advice and analysis framed by a long-term perspective.

1. Webinars. The Fritz Meyer slideshows can be used by you to create your own webinars. Every month, Meyer conducts a webinar explaining the latest economic data and outlook, and the webinars are available for you to replay 24/7 if you are a member of Advisors4Advisors. After replaying the webinar and hearing Meyer explain the latest data, you can pretty easily use the research in the slides as a script for your own webinar. Post your webinar on YouTube and embed it in your website.


2. Blogs. People consumer information in different ways. Some prefer viewing a video, while others want to read ideas. The more ways you present information, the more likely your message will be heard. You can pull out a slide or two from any Fritz Meyer slideshow and use it to write a blog entry explaining a particular aspect of the economy or markets.


3. Newsletters. Your blog entry may not be read by clients who don’t use the Internet. For them, refashion a blog entry for use in a newsletter. A chart showing a recovery in manufacturing or autos, for example, could tell a story about hopeful signs, and your words of reassurance are thus backed by research grounded in facts.


4. 4. SlideShare. I’ve written previously about this social media application for sharing presentations. The quickest, easiest and coolest way to use the Fritz Meyer’s research with Slideshare is to  create your own “Slidecast.” Simply select three or five slides from the latest monthly installment. Then, create an MP3 recording explaining each slide. If you’re not technically inclined, buy an MP3 recorder that plugs into a USB port, or use your smartphone to make the recording. Then, email slides and recording to be uploaded by your staff or virtual assistant.

 

The Fritz Meyer slideshows are an inexpensive way for advisors to create their own content, which will help you with search engines and prospects as well as with clients. Fritz is beloved for the his common-sense approach and easy to understand analysis.

Fritz Meyer will be addressing the U.S. credit downgrade Tuesday at 4 EST in a free monthly webinar.  Please join us.

What if communicating personal information with each of your clients was effortless? That’s no longer a merely a philosophical question. It’s becoming a reality.

Integration of AdvisorVault with Cabinet NG’s document management system, which was announced last week, is a big step toward making communication with clients effortless.



It portends a world in which a financial advisor’s relationship with his clients is more transparent, a world in which communicating with clients about their most personal financial details is automated. It makes advisors more valuable to clients.

The integration allows an advisor to select files in CNG’s document management system—just hold down “Ctrl” and click—to push them into a designated client’s vault automatically. What’s coming next, however, is a game changer:

Advisors will designate “sync” folders in their document management system for automatic synchronization with a client’s vault. You folder for client “John Smith” in your document management system can automatically synchronize with John Smith’s client vault. Anything placed in John Smith’s folder in CNG will automatically be displayed in Mr. Smith’s vault.

The automatic synchronization means client brokerage statements, performance reports, trade confirmations, 1099s and other documents can be pushed to clients without an advisor lifting a finger. For instance, clearing firms typically provide advisors a batch file containing of all their clients’ monthly statements. Using CNG’s tool, each client’s statement can easily be parsed into a separate folder on CNG and then automatically ported to each client.

Document management systems like CNG provide a great way for advisors to organize documents, indexing and filing them so you can retrieve them quickly. It makes documents in advisor’s office accessible anywhere and enables you to back up your records.

Document management systems, however, typically are not made with the features advisors need to share documents with clients. Nor are document management systems typically meant for sharing documents with accountants, lawyers, and other allied professionals.

AdvisorVault, however, integrates a communication module that automatically notifies clients and allied professionals when documents are posted to their vaults and enables notifications to be templated, batched, and automated. AdvisorVault’s interface was built for clients, and it was architected for compatibility with all of the popular browsers used by consumers. In addition, it is integrated with apps advisors use to pull and push data that advisors want to share with clients.

All of this makes the integration of AdvisorVault client communication with Cabinet NG’s document management system a major advance for financial advisors.

Just want you to know that I am having a blast.

My wife, Mindy, who handles accounting here at Advisor Products, was asked by one of our clients yesterday if I still cared about Advisor Products.

He was concerned I might be neglecting Advisor Products.

Basically, he told Mindy that I was devoting so much attention to Advisors4Advisors that Advisor Products might suffer.

Fortunately, creativity is expansive.  Like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets.

I am on a roll. Ideas are springing forth daily about how to make this little tiny corner of the world a little bit better.

A4A makes me think about professional issues objectively, methodically, and daily.

It makes clear how to best help advisors help their clients.

I'm coming from a place rooted in history and knowledge about where this industry has been, and with an idea about where it should go to help people in the future.

Solutions from Advisor Products execute on those ideas.

I have no interest in merely reporting problems affecting you. I want to try to solve them.

I’m not fixing the budget deficit, but I’m doing what I can, and it feels good.

Thanks for caring about what I think. That is most satisfying above all.

 

Ratings on Advisors4Advisors for Fritz Meyer’s slide show earlier this week are fantastic. Advisors can actually love an investment strategist!

“Fritz is the most helpful webinar speaker I've heard. I can apply the information immediately in my practice,” says PeterK805.

“This ought to be mandatory listening/learning for the financial news media,” writes DTSDriver in his review. “PS: Congress, likewise!”

“Fritz Meyer is an American treasure,” says GeorgeS216. “He is concise, provides facts and charts that back up his thesis and provides his commentary with easy to understand logic. Bravo, Fritz and thank you!”

Those were not cherry-picked. They were just the first of 106 reviews by attendees who reviewed Fritz Meyer’s presentation earlier this week on the economic outlook.

By the way, we’re shortly going to announce a price reduction on Fritz Meyer’s Economy Slide Shows, pricing it so any advisor who wants to educate clients on economic fundamentals driving investment markets can afford it.

Cabinet NG, a leading document management system for financial advisors, has integrated with AdvisorVault, streamlining a financial advisor’s work and improving client service.

Cabinet NG has developed an interface to allow its users to automatically synch specified folders in its document management software to AdvisorVault, a secure platform for advisors to share documents with clients and allied professionals.

If an advisor designates a folder in CNG that contains documents to be shared with a client, the contents of that folder is ported over to AdvisorVault. The advisor does not need to open a browser and upload the documents to the client folder.

This simplifies and automates an advisor’s workflow dramatically. The integration of a document management system with a secure client vault will enable automation of client communications and makes it easy for advisors to provide clients with meaningful personal data regularly.

For example, an advisor can batch file all of clients monthly brokerage statements from Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing or TD Ameritrade using CNG. When statements coming from a brokerage are filed, they can be designated to be placed in a folder that can be synched with AdvisorVault.

The integration represents the only first phase of tasks advisors want to automate in using their document management system to share documents securely with clients.

CNG and Advisor Products are interested in working with advisors who want to automate the most common tasks in sharing documents with clients. Please let us know if you have an idea about how we can automate document management to make your client communications more meaningful and productive, and sign up for a webinar on the Cabinet NG integration with AdvisorVault.

Financial advisors who want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) can visit Advisor Products Learning Center, which features 18 videos about SEO techniques for private wealth managers, financial planners, and other independent financial advisors.

The 18 videos about SEO techniques for financial advisors are just one section of Advisor Products Learning Center, a free resource for independent financial advisors to learn about marketing.

The 18 videos cover key SEO concepts financial advisors need to know about including:

External Links Pointing to Your Website - SEO for Financial Advisors

Financial Advisors Can Go Local for Search Engine Optimization

Financial Advisors Can Use Videos To Improve Search Engine Rankings

Why Financial Advisors Should Develop a One Page Internet Strategy

Metadata for Search Engine Optimization for Financial Advisors

Optimize the Titles in the Title Bar - SEO Techniques for Financial Advisors

Optimizing URLs for Financial Advisor Websites

Semantic Markup for Search Engine Optimization for Financial Advisors

Submitting Your Site Map to Google - SEO Techniques For Advisors

Using Keywords and Website Writing Best Practices for Financial Advisors

Writing Social Media Profiles for Financial Advisors

 

Advisor Products is a leading marketing technology company serving financial planners, private wealth managers, and other independent financial advisors.

 

You’ve probably received an email from an SEO expert listing the mistakes preventing your website from ranking higher in search engines.  Problem is, the “expert” is mostly spewing half truths and distortions. Here are five top myths those snake oil SEO salesmen peddle:

5. W3C Validation errors will negatively affect your search engine ranking.
W3C validation compares the code of a website to strict rules about how the code is formatted.  Many of the rules have little or no affect on how a website is ranked by search engines or appears to visitors.  Matt Cutts, a prominent engineer from Google, confirms this. If you still don’t buy it, try the W3C validator on your favorite websites.  I tried it on amazon.com and got 505 errors.

4. Incompatibility with Opera will make you rank lower.
Of course, you want your site to work on all browsers, even the 0.56% using the Opera browser in the U.S. , according to StatCounter.  However, if your site doesn’t look quite right in Opera, it has no bearing on your search engine rankings. Search engines read through the source code, which has no connection with idiosyncrasies of the rarely-used Opera browser.

If you’re a financial advisor, here’s how to use a marketing funnel on the Web to create a path connecting you with your target clients or niches.

Maybe your target is 50- to 65-year old teachers with at least $500,000 of qualified plan assets, retired doctors in your locale, or retired military officers. Whoever it is, you create the marketing funnel by offering valuable content to them—videos, articles, and tweets.

Once a month or once a quarter, you create a video or article with helpful ideas for dealing with financial issues crucial to your target client—something like, “The Five Biggest Financial Mistakes Business Owners Make In The Decade Before Retiring.”

When a business owner stumbles upon one of your free reports, he can read it and submit his email address to sign up for your free email newsletter. Later, you market webinars to your target audience. Eventually, you become a trusted source of information and get hired by some of these people.

The funnel relies on search engines to bring you leads. That’s because videos and articles about your areas of expertise are indexed by search engines. The more intelligent content you post, the higher the likelihood of getting traffic from your target market.

When a pre-retired professor has made one of the five biggest mistakes addressed in your articles or wants to avoid those mistakes, he is going to search for a solution to his problem on Google. Your site stands a chance of coming up in his research. Your success largely depends on how trusted you are as a source of information.

The biggest factors establishing yourself as a trusted source are how many sites link to your videos and articles and the trustworthiness of those websites.

The number of external links to your website and the trustworthiness of those sites are measured by Google’s algorithm and determine your ranking in search engine results.

If The New York Times links to articles and videos you create about financial planning and wealth management for doctors, that’s better than if small town newspaper does it. And if 20 important sites like The New York Times link to you, that’s better than if just two do it.

Advisor Products helps financial advisors do this kind of marketing.

We can provide you the content on an ongoing basis. Or, if you’re on a tight budget, you can hire us only to establish the framework enabling you to easily post content that you create.

For more ideas, see videos we offer about search engine optimization in the Learning Center of the Support Section at www.AdvisorProducts.com or call 516 333 0066 #224.

AdvisorVault, a fully-encrypted online application enabling financial advisors to share files with clients, has been upgraded to a server with 64-bit dual processors and six cores.

Before the upgrade, AdvisorVault’s integrations with Schwab PortfolioCenter and Advent Axys could process two advisory firm uploads concurrently, and any additional advisory firms attempting to upload their data would be placed in a queue. As a result of the upgrade, AdvisorVault’s processes four uploads simultaneously in one-quarter the time.

The new server uses dual Intel XEON X5650 2.66GHz sixcore CPUs with 48GB of RAM. That’s a lot of processing power.

Moving AdvisorVault to new hardware enables a software upgrade to the 64-bit version of Microsoft SQL Server, the database powering AdvisorVault.

The hardware and software upgrades increase AdvisorVault’s speed 400%.

While AdvisorVault is much faster for advisors and clients—as well as lawyers and accountants granted access—the hardware upgrade is most noticeable to advisory firms using AdvisorVault’s integrations with desktop portfolio management software (PMS) applications, Advent Axys and Schwab PortfolioCenter. Data upload is four times faster than the previous hardware configuration.

Sixty-four bits is the size of the program instructions and memory addresses that can be used by a computer processor. A 64-bit processor can use more than 32 times the amount of physical memory of a 32-bit processor.

Portfolio reports are now processed at four times the speed because more data can be accessed from RAM instead of the server’s hard drive.

Process more than four uploads concurrently without slowing AdvisorVault will be simple now. We’re monitoring the throughput and will add services as needed. Software development now under way will improve AdvisorVault’s scalability across multiple enterprises.

AdvisorVault can be added to any advisory firm’s website for $1,000 a year or integrated into websites hosted by Advisor Products for $2,100 annually. Schwab PortfolioCenter or Advent Axys costs an additional $1,500 a year.

I look at all of the websites my company builds. Geier Financial Group drew me in and I called Tom Geier.

Tom, 57, told me his brother, Joe, started the firm 15 years ago.

Joe Geier is a CPA and Tom is a CPA/PFS, which is the AICPA's credential for a Personal Financial Specialist--which in some ways is actually better than a CFP designation.

Joe started the advisory firm 15 years ago and Tom joined about 11 years ago.

"Joe and I had always talked about working together and we took the opportunity when it came up," says Tom, who quit his job as a corporate VP of finance to work as an advisor.

I'm a sucker when it comes to family businesses. What caught my attention about the Geier brothers is that these two guys are doing a few things right.

The website that I looked at is for Geier Financial's newly founded mutual fund company, Geier Funds.

I noticed right away that the writing on the site is clear and concise. You just don't see good writing like that too often on advisor websites. (The copy unfortunately was not written by our writers, but was a team effort at Geier.) Bravo!

The site is one of Advisor Products Designer Websites, which costs just $1,500 to build. Geier got its money's worth by thinking through the information architecture of the site, organizing the site's structure logically. Kudos to Geier's marketing staffer, Melissa Jordan.

What really made me curious is that Geier has an advisory firm in addition to the mutual fund, and the advisory firm has a track record that can be advertised by the mutual fund. Few advisory firms have mutual fund. I'd guess that one in 500 advisory firms start a fund. So that makes Geier pretty unusual. It's about as rare to find an advisory firm with a track record, and Geier is also has a track record, and its performance is impressive.

The track record is GIPS® compliant. GIPS is short for Global Investment Performance Standards, a set of standards for reporting investment performance established by the CFA Institute.

It's wise for an advisory firm to maintain a track record that can be used in advertising, especially if you think you might want day start a mutual fund. While the up-front cost and hassle of establishing an accounting system to report portfolio returns properly are not trivial, the benefits can be significant. Geier is a good example of that.

From the start of 2002 through September 30, 2010, Geier's Strategic Capital Preservation Composite, which represents all of the performance on all fee-paying assets managed by Geier, showed an annualized return net of expenses of 6%.

The fund is actively managed using technical analysis and fundamental research, says Tom Geier, its portfolio manager. He uses a trend following strategy. As a flexible fund, GAMTX allocates its investments primarily among stocks, bonds, ETFs, REITs, and other investments that are selected mainly for their long-term growth potential. It's marketed as a conservative growth, absolute return fund.

In addition to the mutual fund, Geier Financial's advisory firm is actually two businesses. One on side of the company is a family office catering to athletes, mostly baseball players, like former Baltimore Orioles great Cal Ripken and Yankee first basemen and Baltimore-native Mark Teixeira, as well as other ultra-high–net-worth individuals. That part of the firm manages money for about 15 clients and provides full-service financial planning including bill paying.

The other part of the advisory firm, according to Tom Geier, consists of about 130 clients who are friends and relatives of the Geiers and Geier Financial's clients. Geier Financial has 15 employees, four of whom are advisors. In January, The Baltimore Sun published a flattering story about the firm.

I asked Tom Geier what his firm's minimum is and whether he and his brother should be working with the 130 smaller clients when working with UHNWi's in family office is more profitable and scalable. "They're friends and family," he says. "You can't say no to them."

Tom Geier says Geier Financial manages $150 million, and about $30 million of it is in the mutual fund. The smaller clients not getting family office services have been moved into the mutual fund, which Tom Geier says has reduced their fees.

Interesting advisory firm.

Financial Advisor Marketing Videos was launched on our website yesterday, and it is a powerful marketing presentation for knowledgeable, ethical, and open financial advisors.

At Advisor Products, we’ve been experimenting with different video techniques over the last year. We’ve learned that advisors need two types of videos: “update videos” targeted to clients and “marketing videos” targeting prospects.

Update videos don’t need special effects, expensive equipment, or professional talent. They are one-take videos, just two or three minutes in length, so you don’t have to edit them. You can produce them yourself in your office by creating an inexpensive video studio. If you need to edit videos, it’s going to complicate things and make it less likely you will use this medium.

Marketing videos are different. You don’t need music, a teleprompter, or actors, but you do need to edit marketing videos. Financial Advisor Marketing Videos from Advisor Products fill this need.

With Financial Advisor Marketing Videos, an advisor sitting in front of a plain white background is interviewed by me. I’m off-camera and my voice is removed in post-production editing, along with any awkward phrasing or words misspoken. What remains is a financial advisor speaking to the camera about how he practices—his compensation scheme, investment strategy, specialties and all-time favorite clients.

While the advisor is the star, my questions and direction helps keep the advisor focused, concise, and factual. The resulting video conveys the candor and credibility of a TV news interview. It’s honest.

For financial advisors who have studied wealth management, believe in themselves, care about their clients’ success, and practice with integrity and professionalism, Financial Advisor Marketing Videos are extremely effective. These attributes are capture under the glare of bright lights.

The three advisors who have used our approach were all so satisfied with the results that they agreed to allow us to use their videos as samples. Check them out.

Morgan Stone
Pat Jennerjohn
Glenn Mickelson

A library of FINRA-reviewed videos for advisor websites is now packaged with every Advisor Products Platinum website.

When you buy a website from Advisor Products, a library of videos can be personalized to your branding and posted to your website explaining the online tools you provide clients.

Crucial information about trusts, Roth IRAs, and wealth strategies is communicated to clients and prospects in the videos. How clients use AdvisorVault to access their portfolio reports and retirement plans is explained along with information about they can view their insurance and estate planning documents.

In addition to showing clients how to use your online advice platform, the videos market your services to prospects.

In showcasing features of the online platform that you make available to clients, the videos about AdvisorVault and Client Portals help you market your services to prospects.

The videos are part of our Video Library Dashboard.  With VLD, you get a selection of videos to choose from that can be posetd on ay page of your website, and your logo is automatically embedded in any video you post. VLD comes with a AdvisorSites Platinum, which costs $2,100 annually and comes with eight hours of service from our staff, automated website archiving, a databse of hundreds of financial articles, and AdvisorVault.    

 To see samples of the videos, you must be registered with Advisor Products. If you are already registered, log in here.

For advisors wise enough to be concerned about security of client data secure and privacy rules, AdvisorVault provides an excellent solution for sharing files with clients. But it enables you and your clients to share files with accountants and attorneys, and that’s really important.

AdvisorVault is a highly specialized file-sharing application created specifically for financial planners, wealth managers, investment consultants, and other financial advisors.

It’s not a document management system (DMS). Those systems lack features advisors needed to share documents with clients. For instance, AdvisorVault is integrated with a messaging system that automatically emails clients when you post a new document, and you can also post documents in batch for all your clients or a group or them and automatically notify them.

AdvisorVault is loaded with features and integrations that make client communications easier, providing a crucial component to an advisor’s online advice platform for clients.

In addition, AdvisorVault enables collaboration with attorneys, accountants, consultants, and other allied professionals. You can share a client’s entire vault with an attorney or accountant, or you can limit access to a single folder or a single file.

Your clients have a “Manage Professionals” feature in their vaults. When clients fill in the name and email address of their lawyer or accountant, it triggers an email to you requesting that you grant access to that professional to the client’s vault.  

AdvisorVault’s collaboration features thus make your website the hub for clients to manage all of their advice professionals.

Meanwhile, in the course of sharing information via AdvisorVault, you communicate build a new network of attorneys, accountants, consultants, and other professionals that can result in referrals.

Most advisors are jury-rigging systems for sharing documents with clients and allied professionals, or just ignoring privacy rules. However, security and privacy is likely to be an issue of interest to regulators in the months ahead, however.

For just $2,100, you can get AdvisorVault with a website—along with access to a database of hundreds of FINRA-reviewed articles, eight hours of service, automated website archiving. Or, for just $1,000 a year, you can add AdvisorVault to a website Advisor Products doesn’t host it.

Adopt this comprehensive client communication system with so many compelling benefits is sensible.