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.

If you're still using a "framed" website, here's another reason to upgrade your site to our .NET website platform: we'll automatically create an XML sitemap for you to submit to search engines. XML site maps help search engines index a website, making it more likely to appear in search engine searches.

Advisor Products stopped building framed websites several years ago when it became clear that search engines were discriminating against them.
Web technology changed and we created an easy upgrade path.

Upgrading to our .NET website engine makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website and will give each page on your site a unique URL. You're even able to rewrite URLs using SEO-friendly keywords.

Advisor Products charges $250 to upgrade an old framed template website. The cost of upgrading a custom website depends on the number of pages and other factors and you'll need to contact us for a quote.

You’re probably not driving a car you bought in 2001. And, if you are, you probably don’t expect it to perform the same way as a 2011 model. Your website is not much different.

If you're still using an old framed site, now’s a good time to upgrade. Give us a call at (516) 333-0066 x224.

If you want a professionally-produced three-minute marketing video for your website, please schedule an appointment now.

Advisor Products will be shooting videos Friday, January 4 from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. PST at the Manchester Grand Hyatt.

We've got a professional TV crew coming and we'll be using studio-quality lighting and cameras .

We'll shoot five- to 10-minutes of you answering questions about your firm's value proposition.

Your video will be edited down to three one-minute segments and branded with your logo.

The file will be posted online for you to download and we will provide you with detailed instructions about how to post the video to YouTube and embed in in your website—all for $1,000.

If you have an Advisor Products Platinum website, we'll post the video on YouTube and embed it on your site for you.

If you were to hire your own crew and video editor, it could eaily cost you two or $2000 to make a video like this. 

Schedule your session at https://tungle.me/advisorvideos. Please give us your name, email address, and phone number in the subject line so we can contact you with detailed instructions.

If you have any questoins, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Financial economist Fritz Meyer, after 15 years as investment strategist at Invesco, recently left his post and launched his own firm to provide advisors with institutional-quality macro analysis at an affordable price. Advisor Products is distributing Meyer’s research.

A PowerPoint slide show for advisors to present at seminars, webinars, and client meetings is the first product of collaboration between Meyer and Advisor Products.


The monthly scripted and editable 45-minute presentations contain dozens of tables and charts. The slides guide advisors through illustrated analysis of key economic issues and their effect on investment strategy.

Meyer’s research is targeted to advisors utilizing broadly diversified portfolios and Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT).

While most advisors adhere to the precepts of MPT, it's difficult to produce a monthly presentation with the latest economic data and that concisely explains how fundamental trends affect a broadly diversified portfolio constructed for long-term investors.

Meyer’s research provides an advisory firm the benefits of a full-time investment strategist at a fraction of the cost.

Meyer is also blogging about the economy monthly on Advisors4Advisors.


Working with a great thinker of Fritz Meyer’s stature is an exciting partnership for Advisor Products. We're having fun.


Meyer spoke at a webinar entitled, Modern Portfolio Theory Is Alive And Well.

Modern Portfolio Theory Is Alive And Well And Here's How To Use It Right Now from Advisors4Advisors on Vimeo.

Unfortunately, a few members of the Advisor Products staff, who can sing really well, were out of town or camera shy, but we nonethless posted this holiday greetings to our friends.

Thanks for making 2010 great, and happy holiday!

AdvisorVault Desktop Connector, which enables financial advisors to drag and drop any file on their desktop to a client’s vault, is headed for testing shortly and we are seeking beta users.

AdvisorVault is a fully encrypted web-based system for financial advisors enabling secure sharing of personal financial documents with clients, estate planning attorneys, and accountants.

Desktop Connector enables advisors to drag and drop any file to a client’s vault from the desktop and eliminates the need to open a browser and upload files.  You can also drag and drop files from a client's vault to your computer locally.

Compatible with Windows and Mac operating systems, AdvisorVault Desktop Connector lets advisors view all of their clients’ vaults and drill down in each vault’s folders.

AdvisorVault  Desktop Connector simplifies secure document-sharing with clients. Just open Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, navigate to a document on a local drive or network, and drag and drop it from Explorer or Finder into a client folder in Desktop Connector.

You don’t need to open a browser, navigate to a client’s vault, browse your local drive to select the target document, and wait for the document to upload. All of those steps are eliminated.

Desktop Connector will be available at no additional charge to AdvisorVault users.

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

Desktop Connector allows advisors to quickly post reports one-by-one from any application—even those not integrated with AdvisorVault. For example, while AdvisorVault has no integration to post a batch of all your client reports from NaviPlan or Sungard financial planning applications, an advisor using Dektop Connector can individually drag and drop client reports from these apps into AdvisorVault.

If you would like to volunteer to be a beta tester, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Financial advisors can build their own video studio for $750 or less. We did it and it was easy.

You can buy a support system for a backdrop for $150.

For the backdrop, we wanted that clean, white look that is in vogue on the Web right now. So we bought a white blanket at Bed Bath & Beyond for $30 and draped t over the support system.

For lighting, we used a kit that costs about $500.

For the camera, we used a Creative Labs Vado that costs $65. We also used an $8,000 professional camcorder.

See below the difference beween the two camcorders.

I'm not happy with the lighting and will work on it in the weeks ahead. Should not be hard to make it look really good. Maybe I'll splurge and buy a better camcorder than the $65 Vado.

To see future posts on this topic, visit Advisors4Advisors.com.

An Advisor Products webinar about how financial advisors can produce video updates and optimize them for search engine rankings received a 4 1/2 star-rating from from attendees.

Here’s the video we made with the $65 camcorder.


Here’s the video we made with the $8000 professional unit.

Having a great client portal doesn’t only make your firm more efficient, it also helps you acquire new clients. When financial advisors buy Client Portals from Advisor Products, they can post two videos to their websites that demonstrate the benefits of these advisor technology platforms to clients and prospects. The videos are free for any financial advisor that purchases an Advisor Products website with AdvisorVault or Client Portals.

There’s an old saying in the financial services industry: insurance is not bought, it’s sold.

I’m seeing that with advisor websites.

Advisor websites are getting sold. Instances of price-gouging and sales hype have come across my desk more often lately in the sale of advisor websites.

Admittedly, my evidence is anecdotal, but in the 15 years since founding Advisors Products, I’ve only seen this level of hype once before—during the dotcom boom of 1999.

The rise in unsavory sales of advisor websites accompanies a shift in the industry in favor of local independent design shops. Advisors are using local designers and consultants more often, getting sold “branding packages.” In fact, local design firms and independent are now the main competitors to Advisor Products.

Advisor Products has focused in recent years on developing client portals for advisor websites, which shifted the company away from competing with traditional advisor website development companies. We often work with independent designer and marketing consultants because advisors utilize our “backend” tools—AdvisorVault, portfolio performance reporting, email newsletters, financial advisor content—while hiring  independent consultants for marketing and design assistance.

What I’m seeing is that a small number of these local design firms and independent consultants are using the technical mumbo-jumbo as an excuse to overcharge advisors, and sometimes problems are arising with misleading claims about search engine optimization or an advisor website.

This week, I worked with an advisor now on the hook for $27,000 for a website, logo, and SEO copywriting package that gives him far less than what Advisor Products provides for about a third of the cost. He’s switching to Advisor Products.

The site looks good, but it was built using an open-source content management system (CMS) template.

Open source CMS platforms are great. The big ones, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, are growing explosively, and local design shops have flocked to them, and for good reason.

Open-source platforms publish their source code, enabling programmers all over the world to develop plug-ins and overlays. So if you want to add a blog you your Joomla site, for example, Joomla has an app store and you choose from a long list of add-ons, called extensions, that are free or low cost.  

Cool features like blog moderation, integration with email newsletters, event calendars, news headline display, and other functionality can be added easily to a website using the extensions. Apps stores for Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla make it easy to display a Twitter-stream on a page of an advisor website, add and manage polls, or embed videos you post on YouTube.

Point is, the advisor who called this week was sold a template website built on Joomla plus a few website pages of copy that had been optimized for search engines, and a logo. Total cost: $27,000.

In addition to overcharging by a huge amount, the advisor is very limited in his ability to change content on his website because of an extremely restrictive configuration of the Joomla CMS platform.

Advisor Products works with many outside designers and marketing consultants and the vast majority are good and honest. We don’t have a monopoly on great graphic design and our development process enables advisors to use their favorite designers and consultants and leverage our specialized tools.

Advisor Products builds websites for firms using open source CMS when appropriate, depending on your circumstances. In fact, we’re in the process of integrating our proprietary financial advisor content and compliance tools for advisor websites with an open-source CMS platform.

But the growth of open source CMS platforms has allowed some greedy operators to take advantage of advisors who don’t know much about website development. So watch out.

If you want to work with a marketing consultant or design firm and also leverage AdvisorVault, Client Portals and other apps we provide to financial advisors, we welcome your business. And if you want us to evaluate the deal you are getting from a local designer or marketing consultant, we’ll give you an honest assessment.  

We’re transparent.

To financial advisors, search engine optimization (SEO) is arcane. As a result, financial advisors seeking SEO assistance are often sold on hype.

A couple of months ago, for example, an advisor who’s been a client of Advisor Products for years, told me that he was thinking of moving his website. A consultant, who is now making the rounds with advisors, had told him Advisor Products could not build a blog site for him with social media features to help boost his website’s search engine rankings. 

So I asked the advisor exactly what the consultant was offering him. The answer: a WordPress blog site. WordPress is a free open-source content management system. Anyone can use it! If he wanted a WordPress blog, we could build it for him. Any web developer can! (A WordPress blog can’t integrate the Advisor Products compliance engine used by broker/dealers—at least not now—but he this advisor is not affiliated with a B/D and did not need the compliance engine. So we added a WordPress blog to his website with all of the social media features he was looking for and saved him from rebuilding his site from scratch.

Still, the episode alerted me to the fact that Advisor Products needed to make social media and SEO more understandable and accessible to advisors. Although we had produced about 10 educational webinars for advisors over the last couple of years addressing social media and SEO for financial advisors, we needed to do something make it easier to get started with SEO and social media marketing—something that would  it less arcane and more affordable.  

After months of planning, Advisor Products last week began offering a comprehensive suite of practical SEO and social media services geared specifically to financial advisors.  

Our approach is modular. It allows a firm with a tight budget to get started with search engine optimization of their website for local listings and map listings. But we also allow an advisory firm that already has done some SEO work to improve their search engine rankings by adding a series of blog posts packed with their keywords, profiling their target clients in SEO-friendly write-ups, or utilizing social media marketing. The six SEO services are:

• SEO Copywriting For Advisor Websites


• Blog Writing For Financial Advisors


• Local SEO For Financial Advisor Websites


• SEO Advisor Process Maps


• SEO Target-Client Profiles For Advisors


• Social Media Copywriting For Financial Advisors

Advisor Products’ suite of SEO services is different from others because we have clearly defined a full range of SEO engagements for advisors, eliminating the mystery so you understand what you’re getting. We’re not hiding behind a bunch of jargon and making promises we can’t keep.

One other way our service is different is that we’re going to teach you SEO techniques that you can use every day. Simple tips, like telling you to post comments on consumer financial websites like Mint or Motley Fool with a back-link to related information on your website, can improve your search engine rankings. We’ve written blog entries and provided educational webinars about ideas like this for many months, and we are now going to provide educational content regularly to advisors using our SEO services.

SEO is no longer something you can outsource to a firm and let them handle. The growing popularity of blogs, status updates, and information sharing on social means advisors and their staff must get involved in creating content to improve your search engine rankings.

What do you think? Are you mystified by SEO? Have the educational blog posts and webinars we’ve been conducting helping you? Are you going planning on using SEO techniques on 2011?

Advisors4Advisors has integrated with Twitter to enable financial advisors to “tweet” A4A content to clients, prospects, and referral sources in an instant.

Advisors4Advisors aggregates investment, industry, and technology news every business day.

Veteran financial reporters Mary Rowland, Bob Casey, and Andrew Gluck aggregate respectively the investment, industry, and tech news advisors need to read by scanning dozens of websites, blogs, and news releases daily. The reading list is emailed as The Daily Digest to members of Advisors4Advisors.

The Twitter aggregation allows you to tweet any of the content to everyone following you on Twitter.

To use the Advisor4Advisors Twitter integration:

1. Log in to Advisors4Advisors
2. From the home page, click on the headline of any article you want to Tweet
3. Click on the Twitter icon to automatically open Twitter and tweet the article

The Advisors4Advisors integration automatically opens a browser with your Twitter account, inserts the headline of the article as a tweet, and creates a shortened bit.ly link to the article. You simply press “Tweet” to send the headline and link to all of your followers.

To try it, register for a free trial at Advisors4Advisors.com.

The Semantic Web automates activities that now require human intervention by structuring information on the Internet. In a few years, Semantic Web will enable your phone to alert you when you’re out of milk, locate a mobile grocery service cruising your neighborhood, and request a milk delivery to your door. The Semantic Web is a long way off from realizing its potential, but it is now powering search engines and that’s why advisors need to know about it.

The Semantic Web, a phrase coined in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, will utilize many computer languages and technologies to make machines talk to each other. One of the languages is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), the language of used to develop web pages.

In Web 2.0, standards are taking hold governing the use of HTML to program Web pages. For instance, the standard way of marking up text you want to emphasize on a Web page has been using <i> to format a font with italics or <b> boldface type. While tagging text with that code formats the typeface, it does not indicate how important the italicized or boldface information is.

Now, with the Semantic Web taking hold, the tag <em> (emphasis) is used instead of <i> or <b>. The <em> tag is one of many Semantic HTML tags that can be used by search engines to index information on the Web.

Web crawlers used by search engines to index information on the Internet now look for Semantic HTML tags to determine the most important ideas on a page. The Semantic Web thus automates a process that once could only be accomplished with human interaction and allows search engine algorithms to make information the Web more useable and seaerchable.

For advisors, understanding the Semantic Web is important because it enables creating a site that is easy to be indexed by search engines. The easier it is for search engines to index your website and understand the information it contains, the better your search engine results will be.

At Advisor Products, we now program websites using Semantic HTML. This makes it more likely that advisors with Advisor Products websites will be ranked higher by search engines.

In addition, our BackOffice content management system, which is packed with features for managing financial advisor websites, includes a user-friendly “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor that creates Semantic HTML.  

WYSIWYG Web-page editors allow advisors and their staff to changes on their website. These user-friendly editors are used throughout the Web to post text to blogs, status updates, profiles and other Web pages. But they are controversial because they often don’t produce clean, Semantic HTML.

Advisor Products’ BackOffice HTML editor is programmed to allow financial advisors to produce Semantic HTML and boost advisor search engine rankings.

Semantic HTML provides six levels of heading tags, tagged as H1 through H6.Search engines will give more weight to the text within these tags. But you must select Heading 1 through Heading 6 to use these Semantic HTML tags.

In addition to making it easy for you to post Semantic HTML, we are hand-coding HTML tags where needed when financial advisors purchase any of our search engine optimized (SEO) copywriting solutions.

I was just monitoring one of our employee’s phone calls with a client and came across a great use of AdvisorVault to work with 401(k) plans.

I routinely monitor our help desk and sales calls every day. We use a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone system that enables me to “barge” calls with neither the client nor the staff member knowing I am monitoring the call. It keeps me in touch with what advisors need and whether we are giving good service. All advisory firm owners should have this VOIP system feature. (I posted about this at Advisors4Advisors.com.)

I barged a call just now in which an advisory firm wanted to give AdvisorVault access to a 401(k) plan sponsor. This is a great idea for advisory firms working with 401(k) plans.

Say ABC Advisors is advising XYZ Manufacturing on its 401(k) Plan.

ABC Advisors can give XYZ employees their own client vaults with their 401(k) information.

ABC Advisors can also give XYZ’s HR Department access to certain folders of each XYZ employee’s vault.

That allows XYZ, the plan sponsor, to place documents about the 401(k) plan into each client’s vault, but ABC Advisors can limit XYZ’s HR Department from seeing all of the client’s/employee’s documents.

AdvisorVault enables collaboration with third-party professionals. We always envisioned advisors giving access to a client’s vault to the client’s attorney or accountant. AdvisorVault has very elaborate controls for collaboration with third parties and advisors are telling us it helps them build a referral network of tax and estate planning professionals.

The advisory firm can enable third parties to see a client’s entire vault, just a folder in a vault, or just a single document in a vault. The third parties can be enabled to upload documents and get all the features of AdvisorVault, and the advisory firm that pays us controls the system. Advisors love this.

But we never imagined using the third-party collaboration features to enable advisors to work more efficiently with 401(k) plan sponsors. This is a great idea!

If you are advising a 401(k) plan for a group of doctors, for instance, you can enable the plan sponsor to post tax-related documents, educational articles, required disclosures, plan amendments, and all sort of other required information. And if you hope to turn some of the plan participants into wealth management clients, this is a great way to get to know them.

Please let me know what you think. Are there any caveats or questions we need to consider as advisors start using AdvisorVault to serve documents securely to 401(k) plan participants?

MBA student Jonathan Poyer contacted me in late June for help with a research project on investment advisory marketing companies. I vaguely remembered Jonathan contacting me five years earlier when he had an internship at Orion Advisor Services, but don't know him. Advisor Products tries to be transparent and behave nicely, however, so  I directed him to our website and offered to connect him with our marketing and sales department.

A month later, after completing his research, Jonathan contacted me again to thank me. In an email, he told  me how difficult it was to get straightforward answers from marketing companies specializing in serving investment advisors but that  Advisor Products was different.

Because he was indpendent and unbiased, I asked Jonathan to summarize what he learned in doing his research. Here’s what he says.   

This summer, as an MBA intern at Brigham Young University, I chose to work for Gemini Fund Services; a company I worked for previous to business school.  I worked on a great project putting together a business plan for a new entity that Gemini has been looking into.

A major portion of my project this summer was to obtain market research on third party marketing firms in the investment advisory space; especially those that provide marketing services for mutual funds.  I spent over a month working on this project; speaking with over 30 firms as I wanted a comprehensive understanding of the industry.  Since I had been in the business a number of years, I obtained information through contacts at the major custodians.  In addition, I found a number of firms through Google searches, marketing events, and others through references on marketing collateral or websites.  All told, I was able to interview almost 30 different people that focus on assisting investment professionals with their marketing initiatives.  The two major questions that I sought to answer included: what key services do you provide and what is the general pricing for those services. 

The bug fix to AdvisorVault that I mentioned in my blog entry on June 29  was made a couple of weeks ago, and I just realized I forgot to write an update about that.

Advisors who use AdvisorVault can now share a single file with an accountant or estate planning lawyer.

While you all along have been able to share a client entire vault or a single folder, the bug had prevented advisors from sharing a single file with an outside professional.  

For financial advisors, being able to share client documents securely with attorneys, accountants, consultants, and other allied professionals is an important feature in AdvisorVault.

It's one of those rare examples where a seemingly small technology feature  provides a big benefit.

Advisors say that collaboration with other professoinals is a natural way of creating a referral network of professionals.

In the course of sharing information about a client in AdvisorVault, allied professionals wind up communicating more efficiently and more frequently. And since secure file-sharing  in AdvisorVault is easy, the feedback I've gotten from advisors is that it's getting used a lot.

You can get 38 hours of CFP^â continuing education credit on Advisors4Advisors, a practice management portal for advisors. And if you sign up for a free six-month membership to A4A, you get it for free!

Simply register for our next webinar and you’ll receive an email with six-month free trial of A4A after the webinar.

Already a member of A4A? Just click on one of the webinar titles below and sign in to A4A to view the session. Watch the session for at least 50 minutes and take a 10-question quiz when it’s over to receive CFP® CE credit.

• Compliance Issues Posed By LinkedIn, Blogs, And Social Networking 


• Secure Solutions To Protect Client Data And Comply With New Privacy Laws


• Appointing A Trust Protector To Improve Estate Plans


• Deeper Client Connections Through The Power Of Story


• Financial Services Reform Update


• Trends In Family Offices And Multi-Family Offices


• Advisor Compliance Update


• Managing Portfolio Risk With Stock Collars


• Roth IRA: Beyond The Basics


• How To Talk To Clients In A Post-Crisis World


• Tactical Asset Allocation In Today's Market


• ETFs: The Good, Bad and Misunderstood


• Roth IRA Conversion Techniques


• The New Estate Planning Landscape


• Precious Metals: Can The Rally Continue?


• The 401k Upheaval And How It Affects Advisors


• Seizing The Roth IRA Opportunity With Clients And Prospects


• Privacy Law, Data Security And Financial Advisors


• 2010 Compliance Planning For RIAs


• Using Client Feedback To Drive Referrals


• One Year After The Global Financial Crisis


• A New Model For Life Planning


• Researching Your Prospects On The Web


• Regulatory Reform: Will You Be A Fiduciary?


• Navigating The Maze Of Exchange-Traded Products


• Advisor Self-Care: A Primer And Check-up


• Serving Middle Income Clients


• Actively Managing An ETF Portfolio


• After The Fall: Asset Allocation And Rebalancing


• Crucial Financial Conversations With Clients


• Restoring Investor Confidence


• Life Planning And The Financial Crisis


• Investment Tax Management: Turn Clients' Biggest Expense Into An Opportunity


• Preparing For The Worst: Managing Your Clients In A Bear Market 


• Conducting 401k Vendor Searches For Small Plan Sponsors


• Client Retention And Growth In Tough Times


• Asset Protection Planning


• Rational Expectations In Uncertain Markets

Advisor Products has implemented a unified threat management system to detect and prevent malicious activities on all of its web servers.

Adoption of the Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS) by Advisor Products had been requested by a large financial institution seeking to use AdvisorVault, a secure system that allows financial advisors to share documents with clients and allied professionals and that is integrated with several portfolio management software applications.

Hackers and malicious activities by rogue employees of tech vendors and advisory firms pose a growing risk, as more advisors are utilizing Web-based applications to communicate personal financial information to clients and improve efficiency.

Advisory firms are not only under pressure from cybercrime and insider abuse, but also face increasing compliance demands, as state and federal regulators tighten rules protecting client privacy and on establishing effective and measurable security.

The intrusion detection and prevention system implemented by Advisor Products adds a new layer to the company’s already elaborate security systems. The IDPS service monitors all Advisor Products servers 24/7 to identify malicious activity, log information about suspicious activity, attempt to block these activities, and automatically report them to technicians and engineers on the Advisor Products team. Some of the features include:

• Enterprise Grade Firewall. A sophisticated enterprise-grade firewall managed by certified security experts.


• Best In Class Intrusion Prevention. The system is carefully maintained and managed by a world leader in vulnerability and intrusion protection research and used by many of the world’s largest enterprise.


• Best Practices Management. Change management, incident management and all aspects of the service are monitored for compliance with times-tested management practices.


• 7x24 Incident Response. The service provider’s engineers monitor and respond to critical security events 7x24, 365 days per year and report critical issues to the Advisor Products tech team immediately.

Guidelines issued by FINRA yesterday governing how registered reps use social media websites are constructive but highlight the challenge regulators face in structuring advertising rules that keep up with technology.



One can only cheer the suddenly enlightened view of FINRA in releasing the Notice. FINRA has stood silent for several years while social networking exploded. As the FINRA release points out, 46% of American internet users logged on to a social networking site in 2009.



With FINRA issuing no guidance as social media exploded in popularity in recent years, registered reps were absent from the online scene out of fear that they would break undefined rules. So FINRA in to be commended for finally bringing some clarity to this issue.

Where the guidelines go wrong and muddle the rules, however, is in an effort to distinguish “static” and “non-static” content.

To read the rest of my post, please sign up for membership at Advisors4Advisors.

At a recent session of the Financial Advisor Webinar Series, Mike Williams of Schwab Performance Technologies (SPT) talked about what developments in PortfolioCenter and PortfolioServices.



While we usually don’t invite vendors to talk about their products at our webinars, we made an exception because Schwab is so influential; SPT is used by 3,300 advisory firms and its parent provides custodial services to 6,000 RIAs.



Despite allotting 25 minutes for questions, attendees at the session had more questions than Williams could answer. So we passed along to Williams the unanswered questions chatted in by attendees. In this post, Williams answers those questions.



Do you use ByAll Accounts to connect to custodians that you do not have direct interfaces with?

Yes. Both our PortfolioCenter and PortfolioServices products can leverage ByAllAccounts to acquire account information from financial institutions with which there is no available direct data feed.



When will the custom report enhancements you talked about at the webinar be available?

The first general release of the new report presentations will be in mid-2010. Subsequent releases will occur later this year and throughout 2011.



For the new graphical reporting: will a PortfolioCenter user need the Enhanced Reporting Module (ERM), and what is the cost of the ERM for a current PC user?

Yes, the new report presentations require a PortfolioCenter Enhanced license. The Enhanced Reporting Module is $1,500 year one and carries an annual maintenance fee of $500. Please contact SPT Sales at (800) 528-9595, option 2 for further information.



To see answers to 12 other questions, please sign into www.advisors4advisors.com.

For advisors going independent, producing monthly or quarterly performance reports is unfamiliar ground.



Without a documenting the process and choosing a technology platform to implement a system, performance reporting can be overwhelming.



Advisors4Advisors, a practice management portal for independent advisors that I started about six month ago, recently produced a webinar to help brokers making the transition to independence and who have never before had to use portfolio-reporting software and manage the delivery of performance reports to clients.



Two seasoned executives from Orion Advisor Services were our guest presenters for the session. Orion is a portfolio reporting services that is used by about 200 independent advisory firms. The firm got its start in 1999. Originally the system was built by CLS Investments, which manages about $3 billion in assets, to produce client performance reports and then it was offered as a product that could be used by other RIAs.



Bill Wostoupal, the head of business development, and Randy Lambert, who runs operations at Orion, did a great job of explaining the performance reporting process RIAs must go through without making it sound like a commercial for Orion.



They also came up with a template process and worksheet that new RIAs can use to develop reporting procedures internally. The template process and worksheet is useful to RIAs no matter what portfolio reporting system you use.



The process Orion provides is a template that you can adapt to your needs, and the worksheet makes it easy for you to document the process and embed it in your CRM system. If you embed your firm’s performance reporting process in your CRM system and assign staff to each step in the workflow, then your firm will be more efficient. Staff will be held accountable and reporting tasks will not be dropped or handled improperly.



Members of Advisors4Advisors can down download the Performance Reporting Workflow Worksheet for free.



You can view a replay of the session here.

Last Friday’s webinar with Charles Epstein, the 401(k) Coach, was a big hit, as you can see from the comments from attendees shown below.



Epstein is a financial advisor who achieved success in the 401(k) business, so much success that he started a coaching program that has trained about 1,200 advisors. He’s also one of our featured bloggers on Advisors4Advisors.



Epstein is a pragmatist and offered real world wisdom that advisors appreciated. GoToWebinar, the tool we use for running these sessions, indicated that every single one of the attendees was “highly interested” in Epstein’s presentation. I can’t recall any other speaker who was able to hold the interst of the audience as well as Epstein.



Epstein’s session is available for replay at Advisor Products and on Advisors4Advisors.



Epstein provided a handout that can be used by fiduciaries to conduct an meeting with a plan sponsor that is a prospect, and it can be downloaded by members of A4A in the Advisor Rewards section of your profile.



Epstein will be doing another webinar in April or May. What did you think of the webinar? How can we improve it?

• 
  
  
  Very good overview of the 401k market for advisors. I like it when speaker provides resources like he did. Would like to see more on how to market services to companies.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  More events with Mr. Epstein
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Outstanding. Short and to the point. Thank you for taking the questions.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  I thought it to be great information
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  It was good. I am interested in hearing from someone experienced in fiduciary plans the top shelf plans where advisors take on ERISA 3-38.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Interesting topic and completely new to me
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  A transcript, available upon request by an attendee, would help a great deal.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Good
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Excellent webinar.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Very good session...only complaint is he went a little fast, but the slides and a replay is available so it is no big deal. Thanks very much.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  It was excellent, and I especially appreciated your allowing download of slides. I wish I had known throughout the presentation however, because I was feverishly writing down each slide!
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  I really like your webinars. If I could change anything, it would be to keep them to an hour. I don't know how you do this because I don't think there is a lot of wasted time, but I personally struggle with the dual desires of wanting to continue learning and also moving on to the next, scheduled thing. This is fairly minor but I would prefer they be a little shorter.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Make a CD of the audio
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Great Information.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  I think it was very good. Thanks for coordinating and brininging important topics to us RIA's.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Excellent topic. Presenter moved a little fast and glossed over a few complex topics.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Sensational amount of information packed into an hour. Great job with the questions at the end of the program, Andy. They were delivered clearly, and you moved the answers right along without letting the speaker get bogged down.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  I liked it.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Very good webinar. Good topic!
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  I liked it. It was helpful.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Very informative. Discussion included many topics I was not aware of especially fiduciary responsibility issues for the advisor to a plan.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Very good. Always like more take away, actionable items to implement. Not always just a sales pitch to sign up for a new program.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  I appreciated the information. I would be interested in hearing the additional portions of the 401k Coach program on A4A.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Great timing for me since I am entering this service area.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Very informative
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Good info & resources. Would like to hear Part 2 from Charlie (the remaining 3 steps)
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  This was a great webinar. Moderation intro was a little too long and slow
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Very good and any process template or handouts would be appreciated
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Spectacular. Thank you so much.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Awesome good information. Sometimes it is helpful to identify those things that "you don't know you don't know" and then provide resources to fill in the gaps.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Bring back for steps 4,5,6
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Charlie is terrific!
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Terrific very informative insightful and useful
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Sometimes Charles moved onto a slide before giving the audience time to process what was on the slide. Being able to download the slides before the presentation would have been helpful
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  It moved very fast for me since I'm not active in this part of the business now, but it was a great presentation.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  There was a lot to cover. Better to sometimes just commit to a 90 minute program. Thanks.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  I thought it was informative. He had to fly through his slides, so I feel like I need to go back and look at them again.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Give and take questions
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  The audio was in and out and when I called the # the password was invalid it said.
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  Great questions Andy
  
  
  

Advisor Products has moved. Our new address is:



333 Jericho Turnpike

Suite 333

Jericho, NY 11753

Our phone number remains the same at (516) 333-0066 or (888) 274-5755.

To save money, some advisors are putting client data in jeopardy, and the trade press isn’t helping matters.

I’m talking about two incidents in the past few weeks, one involving Google Docs and the other involving a CRM called Zoho.



I was hosting a webinar on February 12 about CRM systems for advisors when the Google Docs platform came up during the Q&A period, and I mentioned that Google Docs was not secure. An advisor chatted telling me it indeed was secure.



Without verifying it myself, I hesitated telling attendees at the webinar that Google Docs was secure. But I felt obliged to report what he said. So I told attendees an advisor had chatted in to say Google Docs was indeed secure.



After the webinar, I emailed the advisor and asked if he had any substantiation that Google Docs was secure, and I also did some research. Within minutes, I found a Google forum post that said documents to Google Docs could not be protected with their own password. I sent another email to the advisor with that link. He never responded.



To get the facts, I asked two seasoned engineers from Advisor Products to check into Google Apps’ security.



Google Apps offers a Standard and Premier Edition. Their findings, which pertain to the Premier Edition targeted to businesses, show that it would be reckless for an advisor to store client data on Google Docs.



It may be okay for an advisor to use Google’s calendar and other features. But if you want secure document storage and sharing, be aware of the following limitations:

• You can’t force users to create “strong passwords.” Google has a tool that rates the strength of a password when you create it. The tool’s requirements are not up to professional standards. A strong password requires using non-alphanumeric characters (i.e., !, @, #,$, etc.). It is also at least eight characters and preferably 12. By default, Google Docs requires only six-character passwords, and it allows you to create a password as short as four characters. As long as your password contains a combination of four letters and numbers, Google’s password-strength rating tool will tell you your password is “strong.”
  
  
  
  


• Google does not automatically force expiration of passwords. Some broker/dealers now require that vendors automatically kill passwords after three months and require users to create new passwords.
  
  
  
  


• The way Google Docs passes access to documents via email is inherently flawed. If you use Google Docs to share a document with a client or another professional, Google enables you to send the link by email. Email is not secure. Moreover, anyone who receives the email with the link can open the document—without a password.
  
  
  
  


• Documents on Google’s servers are not stored encrypted. They’re encrypted when you upload them and when you download, but not stored encrypted. This could be an issue if a Google’s server storing your document is breached.
  
  
  
  


• Google Docs doesn’t accommodate the hierarchy of users with different permissions that advisors need. Document-sharing vendors in the financial services business enable different roles and rights for their staff, advisors, advisory firm staff, a B/D’s compliance department, outside professionals and advisor works with, and clients of advisors. Google Apps has just two levels of authorization.
  
  
  
  


• Google Docs does not have bulk upload capabilities, enabling you to upload performance reports, financial plans, rebalancing reports, and other documents in batches.
  
  
  
  


• Google Docs and Apps do not integrate with financial planning, portfolio management or other practice management apps used by advisors.

Google is a remarkable company and it could address these issues. But with its vast audience and potential, it has priorities other than serving the tiny independent financial advisor market.



Google Apps Marketplace enables third-party vendors to leverage web interfaces. Third-party apps are likely to address some of the security issues posed by Google Apps and provide features and integration needed by advisors. But it will take months—probably years—for an advisor to pull together an integrated suite of professional apps that leverages Google Apps. But it will require stitching together specialized components from different vendors in the App Store, which would complicate matters for advisors significantly. Anyone who tells you advisors can use Google Docs today is reckless.



Which brings me to Zoho CRM, the subject of a rave review in one of the trade magazines for independent advisors.



Zoho is a web-based CRM that is integrated with Outlook, Facebook, and several other popular consumer applications. In addition to CRM, Zoho also offers an extensive suite of web-based software for word processing, spreadsheets, invoicing, online meetings, calendaring, sharing documents and more.



“Combining Zoho CRM with Zoho email and Zoho Docs gives you robust CRM, integrated email that includes email storage, plus an integrated online entry-level document management solution at an unbeatable price,” the article says.



“Perhaps the greatest differentiator for many potential purchasers is security,” says the article. “Overall, the security capabilities of the application are impressive.”



Zoho is indeed an impressive application but documents are not stored in encrypted format. Zoho’s website says passwords are encrypted but says nothing about whether documents you save on its servers are stored encrypted.



Since the security information on Zoho’s site was vague, I called Zoho to ask about its encryption.



I could not understand everything the salesman said because of his thick Indian accent (despite the fact that I've grown pretty good at understanding Indian accents because my company outsources many development projects to India). Initially, the Zoho salesman told me all documents were indeed encrypted. But when I questioned him further, he suggested a security specialist call me back.



The security specialist called back the next day. While he was polite, I had difficulty understanding everything he, too, said because of his accent. He confirmed that documents stored on Zoho Docs are not encrypted.

An April 2007 post on a Zoho forum said the company “may consider encrypting the entire Zoho server.” Apparently, Zoho has not gotten to that yet.



Encrypting passwords is important but inadequate for most advisors who took the time to learn about security. Not encrypting the documents means a hacker who breaches Zoho’s servers would be unable to read the users’ passwords, but he could read the documents stored on its servers. It’s an obvious risk. In addition, some Zoho employees have access to the files stored on Zoho Docs and could read them. That would not meet the standard advisors should insist upon, standards that are now required in some states and that are likely to become federal law in the months ahead. Zoho Docs security may be fine for most businesses but not for financial advisors who are responsible for protecting client data.



Moreover, financial institutions are putting advisor vendors through security audits and requiring that they have documented security policies and procedures in place. One large B/D, for instance, requires documentation on 20 policies, and each policy is a multi-page document covering how a vendor handles passwords, back-ups, security incidents, and business continuity. Another requirement: All new hires at tech vendors must be given a criminal background check. Some B/Ds also now require vendor systems to detect and stop intrusions.



(Interestingly, RIAs shrewd enough to use the web-based apps approved by large BDs get all of these security benefits for free, while reps are paying for them.)



Like Google Apps, Zoho Docs doesn’t allow advisors the role-management and user hierarchy features that advisors need. Nor is it integrated with advisor systems. It would take months for Zoho to address these and other shortcomings, assuming Zoho wants to specialize in the independent advisor market.



To be sure, Zoho and Google Docs cost less than applications that are created for advisors. That’s because Google and Zoho are not specializing in advisors. If they did, you’d pay more for all the features. Advisors who move to these apps as they are constitute]d now are risking a lot more than they realize and are paying for it in the long run by not getting the right features to handle their needs.



In running a technology company that has served independent advisors since 1996 and that provides a secure document sharing between advisors and their clients, I’ve been humbled in trying to meet the demands of the profession. (Writing about technology for advisors is easy; making technology for advisors is difficult.)



While you may want to believe that some inexpensive application is going to be a panacea, use your common sense.



Be as skeptical as you are when you read an article in a consumer personal finance magazine about an investment that promises returns of 10% annually through good and bad times.



If an app for advisors sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a mysterious thing. There’s technical mumbo to know and it seems really powerful.



So I was really proud earlier this week when our Operations Director, Jim Voss, in a 45-minute presentation, made SEO pretty simple for advisors to understand and execute.



The point of the webinar was to show you how you can use the Advisor Products content management system, BackOffice, to help optimize your website for search engines. But the webinar contains so much information about SEO basics that the self-promotional part of the session is only incidental.



What makes me so happy is that this webinar demonstrates that Advisor Products is really trying to do the right thing. We’re not trying to hide behind technical complexity and charge you for SEO. We’re creating realistic expectations about SEO, educating you about it, and giving you the tools to do it yourself. (Of course, you can hire us to help you if you need it.)



Attendees on average rated this webinar with four out of five stars. Among the many favorable comments we received from attendees was this:



“Need to see it twice a year, every year. Best damn webinar you've ever done. We advisors forget this stuff. We don't work on our sites but once a year or so. Keep doing this one, we need it more than we can tell you.”



Check out the webinar.

Advisors are poor marketers in general, and one of the silliest things they do is fear targeting a niche. What are you thinking?



If I went into the website business in 1996 by making websites for any schnook, I would not have been able to compete with Intuit, Google, WordPress, and other giant technology companies aiming for a mass clientele. By specializing in advisors, I’m able to add content and technology tools that my niche group needs and values. I can provide solutions that the giants cannot afford to create because serving my niche is too much work for them.



To me, the case for specializing is so easy to see, and I just can’t understand why advisors have so much trouble with it. Yet over the years, advisors’ fear of niches has come up again and again.



Once, and I promise this is true, I was working with an advisor on the phone, reviewing marketing copy I had written that would move him into a niche. He yelled at me. “I don’t want to be different! I just want to sound like everyone else!”



Another time, I was on a conference call with a very high-powered firm whose chief investment officer told me in front of the firm’s executive leadership that he didn’t want to describe his process in detail to me. “You know a lot about the investment business and that’s why we hired you!” he barked. ”We do what everyone else does. Just write about that.”



Just this past Friday, at a webinar entitled, Successful Marketing For Advisors, John Anderson, of SEI this past Friday did an excellent job of telling advisors how to market their practices.



Sure enough, during the Q&A period, an advisor chatted in a question raising her fear that marketing to a small niche like divorcees might scare away other potential prospects. Such fear is totally misplaced.



Having marketing copy on your website that emphasizes your niche will gain you clients in the long run, assuming you are good at working with that niche. Here are some reasons why.



Commoditization Of Investment Advice. The Web is relentlessly commoditizing investment advice. Online brokers are better at serving the mass affluent. Segmenting the investor market to differentiate your services can be a source of competitive advantage. Specialized advice will command a premium price and make your clients more loyal.



The Web Favors Niche Marketers. If the keywords used in marketing copy on your website are terms like “financial planning” or fee-only financial advisors,” you stand little chance of gaining high rankings in search engines. However, if your marketing copy contains keywords like “financial advisors serving Indian hotel owners” or “estate planning for shopping center developers,” you have a far better chance of gaining favorable natural search results. If you want to learn more about this topic, see this recent webinar on Search Engine Optimization conducted by Advisor Products.



Professional Satisfaction. Serving a niche enables you to help people in more meaningful ways. If you are an expert in understanding the wealth management needs of layers, doctors, owners of bakeries, car dealers or other small business, or some other market segment, you will find yourself going far deeper into their financial lives and advising them on business issues as well as personal finance. Your advice becomes more meaningful because it is so targeted. The professional satisfaction you’ll gain can make your job more satisfying.



If you need some help thinking about a niche, start by considering whether the answer is obvious.



Three weeks ago, I was speaking with an advisor I’ve known for many years. When I asked him to tell me about his firm, he never mentioned that he had a niche. In an elevator speech that sounded a lot like many other wealth management firms, he told me he uses DFA Funds and provides financial planning.



He is from India, and I felt I was treading on delicate ground, but I asked him if he targeted Indian immigrants. That’s when he told me that 60% of his clients are doctors of Indian descent.



This advisor is not marketing to Indian doctors currently and did not realize that he can probably get a lot more Indian doctors as clients by sharing the specialized knowledge he has gained by working with this niche.



Many Indian doctors are first-generation Americans or emigrated here from India. They have common experiences and financial issues. For instance, they almost all had little money during their residency and are tempted to spend crazily when they start making money. Many of them have parents and siblings still living in India that they need to assist financially. Many accumulate great wealth and fear raising spoiled kids. The expertise of this advisor in dealing with financial issues of Indian doctors is valuable.



To me, creating marketing materials for this niche is a no brainer. Yet this advisor and others like, I suspect, don’t realize they already have a niche and can capitalize on it with just a bit of strategic marketing and planning.



To figure out your possible niches, download the market segmentation worksheet we have made available on A4A. In segmenting your clients, you may find some obvious commonalities among them. Are a few of your clients:

• working for the same local company?


• working in the same industry?


• of the same ethnic group?


• in the same profession?


• in the same socio-economic group?
  
  
  
  

“Please cancel my subscription immediately,” said the email message. “I am requesting a one-month refund due to the very poor service that I received. In fact, I sent emails and phone messages with no response and a one week delayed response to a phone call message that I sent.”



Advisor Products is not perfect. We can always do better. But this was over the top! What did we do?



Even though it was 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, I had to get to the bottom of this right away.



I checked our CRM and could find no notes about her calls this past week or anything about her company.



I called her right away and left a voicemail message.



“Whatever we did, I'm sorry,” I said on the voicemail. “I can’t find any record about this project we’re doing for you. So please call me back and let me know what happened.”



She called back thirty-minutes later.



“I’m sorry,” she said, “You don’t host my website. It’s a competitor of yours but I called you back because you sounded upset about my complaint.”



I thanked her for calling back and couldn’t resist:



“You can see the difference between us and our competitors," I said. "On a Friday night at 8 p.m., you have the owner of the company calling you back to respond to you.”



Advisor Products service is good. We're not perfect, but we return your calls promptly--almost always the same day that you call us.



We're the No. 1 choice for financial advisor websites and secure client communications that is integrated with your CRM, portfolio management and financial planning software.

To improve security, Advisor Products today killed passwords advisors use to access our content management system.



The next time your firm logs in, you'll be required to create a new password.



The new password requires a combination upper and lower case letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters. Such passwords are harder to remember, but they’re also harder to hack.



This change was not made in response to any incident. It is one of numerous new policies we have implemented company-wide.



When you log in, please read the new password requirements carefully. They’re just a few lines but you need to read them to understand what to do.



Here’s a post I wrote about creating strong passwords and another post about the password app I use. Chrome users may also want to consider LastPass.



Please call our help desk if you have any problems at (888) 274-5755.



We apologize for any inconvenience.

Advisors seeking to capitalize on post-financial crisis business development opportunities may want to attend a three-day conference produced by Advisor Solutions Network starting Thursday, November 5 and running through Sunday, November 8.

I'm one of the speakers along with PR guru Marie Swift, business devleopment coach Steve Saenz, and many others. You can listen to brief interviews of each of the speakers.

Quarterly portfolio reporting can be stressful enough for financial advisors — dealing with delivery of the reports electronically or in the mail is a major hassle — but the task is even more difficult when you must write a market commentary to accompany your quarterly client reports.



Next time you need a quarterly market update to send with your portfolio reports to clients, take a free trial of Quarterly Market Summary from Advisor Products.



Quarterly Portfolio Reporting

Quarterly portfolio reporting is a major hassle for RIAs. Printing, collating, and stuffing is time-consuming, and everything must be absolutely perfect.



When quarterly portfolio reporting is further complicated by having to research and write a quarterly commentary, the project becomes downright stressful.



Making matters worse, the trailing 10-year total return on the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index shows an annualized 1.6% loss! Long-term investors have been slammed!



Getting help with writing about what’s happening in the markets makes quarterly portfolio reporting easier.



Quarterly Market Update

There is no substitute for your own words in explaining portfolio performance to your clients. So Quarterly Market Summary enables you to personalize your message to your clients.



Most of the content you need to write to accompany your performance reports is comprised of facts about the economy and markets. Quarterly Market Summary provides you with that text. You simply personalize it.



Outsource To Financial Writers

Why reinvent the wheel? Is it smart to spend your time or assign staff to compile statistics summarizing performance of stocks, bonds, industries, interest rates, foreign markets, GDP, inflation, employment, currencies, and other key data? Are you professional writers? Will you proofread everything?



Quarterly Market Summary is written by a seasoned financial journalist. A financial editor with 30 years of experience re-works it. It’s then proofread by yet another financial writer and sent for review to several financial advisors.



Quarterly Market Summary is delivered in a Microsoft Word document so that you can rewrite and repurpose it easily.



Quarterly Market Summary Free Trial

To take advantage of our no risk, free trial offer, register with Advisor Products. Registration also gives you access to replays of our educational webinars and our MarketingSmart e-newsletter for advisors.



If you are already registered with Advisor Products, log in here for your free trial of Quarterly Market Summary.



To see a sample and get more information about Quarterly Market Summary, visit our site.

If we host your firm’s website and use our BackOffice content management system, you may have noticed a boost in speed.



That’s because we replaced the main server that powers Advisor Products’ websites and BackOffice last week.



Your website is loading faster for prospects and clients now.



In our drive for constant improvement, we’ve instituted a policy to replace aging web servers before they reach the end of their useful lives.



This means that if, Advisor Products hosts your website, the server housing your website gets replaced on a regular basis.



Your site, thus, is always running on the latest hardware and software.



We’ll keep you posted as we continue to upgrade hardware for other systems.

The 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar was posted for free distribution to members of Advisors4Advisors.com, a practice management portal site for independent financial advisors.



Advisors interested in getting a copy of the 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar can email me for a free six-month membership in advisors4advisors. It will take 10 minutes to register and fill in your profile and then you can download the 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar.



The RIA Compliance Calendar was created by Chris Winn of AdvisorAssist, a compliance consulting firm serving RIAs and B-Ds. It lists 27 key compliance activities for RIAs month-by-month, helping organize RIA compliance responsibilities on a timely basis.



Winn delivered a presentation entitled, “2010 Compliance Planning For RIAs” last Friday at the Financial Advisor Webinar Series. You can replay the session at advisorproducts.com. (Members of AdvisorsforAdvisors.com are eligible for free CFP CE credit on the replay.)



At the session, Winn answered about 15 questions from attendees. But we ran out of time and could not answer many questions chatted in by attendees. Winn, who writes a blog about RIA, B-D, and Registered Rep compliance issues at Advisors4Advisors.com, will be answering many questions that we did not have time to answer at the webinar.



Please join us at advisors4advisors.com to access Winn’s blog, obtain CE credit for the webinar, and download the 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar.

It's been just over a year since we started the Financial Advisor Webinar Series in the throes of the global financial crisis, and I have to say it's been one of the most fulfilling experiences in my career.



The Series started out as a way to support advisors at a time when it looked like the global economic system was about to collapse, and it was originally known as The Financial Crisis Webinar Series. Over the past year, as we backed away from the edge of the abyss, we've continued the webinars every Friday at 4 p.m.



We've been privileged to produce sessions that inform advisors about how to run their businesses better and cope with the upheaval of recent months. And advisors have responded.



About 200 advisors attend the live sessions and another 300 listen to replays every week. And more advisors steadily continue to participate.



Last week's session featured compliance specialist Chris Winn, of AdvisorAssist, offering tips on 2010 compliance planning for RIAs. He was great. (See comments from attendees below.)



We ask advisors to fill in a survey after each webinar. The average rating of attendees at this session was 4.4, putting it among the highest rated of the 49 sessions we've produced.



What amazes me is that from last February, when we started systematically tabulating the ratings of each session, through the end of August, only two sessions had better than a 4.4 average rating. However, five of the last eight sessions has a rating of 4.4 or better. (And we're getting these high scores despite my clumsy skills as a moderator!) Your feedback is genuinely appreciated.



Please remember that many of the sessions are eligible for continuing education credit from the CFP Board of Standards. Also, keep in mind that you can receive free CE credit by attending any of the live sessions, and you can get CE credit on replays of many sessions by becoming a member of our new advisor practice management portal, Advisors4Advisors.com.



Below is feedback from attendees of last Friday's session about RIA compliance. Please join us at an upcoming session or log in to A4A to discuss any webinar with other advisors.



Comments and feedback from advisors who attended 2010 RIA Compliance Planning with Chris Winn of AdvisorAssist:

• Thank you - just keep doing it.


• Very informative. My first look at Advisors for Advisors.


• Excellent


• Great timing for a compliance webinar. Thank you for the presentation.


• Good topic coverage


• It is refreshing to have someone who can speak compliance language in easily understandable terms. Chris obviously knows his stuff.


• Great session. One of your best yet.


• Terrific content! Wish we had time for more questions.


• Very informative, good supporting visuals, well presented.


• Really great info...too much for one hour!


• Great webinar. The best one that I've seen from Advisor Products


• This one was fantastic


• No complaints


• Excellent, Chris made the subject matter very understandable. Thank you


• Very informative


• Great webinar! Gets you started thinking about the different issues to address.


• This was truly a great webinar and I thank you so much for providing this to us. Great job!


• Excellent presentation. Very helpful.


• Excellent content


• Considering the amount of potential info and the time available it was very well done.


• I thought it was great, would love to get copies of the slides.


• Well done and useful


• Fantastic + extremely useful - one of the BEST you have ever hosted. full of very useful + actionable items.


• Great Webinar. Can't think of anything you could have done to improve it.


• Excellent - very good topic choice - obviously, a topic like this will have many basic components to it as well as some issue some just venturing into the fray may think are overwhelming, but the presenter did a nice job of balancing so there was something for everybody (more than likely) to take away


• It was helpful. thank you.


• Outstanding informative and very comforting.


• I learned a few new things such as the potential for the SEC to raise the minimum assets under management to $100,000,000 to be registered with them


• Important issues most advisors don't work with on a daily basis


• Nice outline of issues.


• Covered a lot of material I already knew but was good to be reminded anyway.


• Good overview for office manager, though went fast and I'll need to review the replay


• Good coverage of some of the basics of compliance. The idea of a Compliance Calendar is useful.


• Good information. Condense and do more frequently.


• I thought it was very well done. Chris is knowledgeable and shared that information well. I appreciated his willingness to spend extra time answering questions afterward.


• It is a dry subject, but overall it was packed with important info.

JasonV510 says Act! is “flexible for client tracking and management but not great for the true financial professional.”



TaylorF519 says MoneyGuide Pro “really takes its job seriously and wants to put the best and most innovative product out there!”



Of PortfolioCenter, TerryH770 says: “I was originally skeptical of Schwab owning the software, but to this point it has only been beneficial.



These comments aren’t quotes from a reporter’s interviews.



They’re comments from real advisors talking about software applications for advisors.



They’re not made up. They’re not filtered. And they’re as close you come to truth about an advisor’s practice management applications as you can get.



As a reporter who had to become an entrepreneur to do my job the way I wanted to, I’m excited to be living in the middle of the information revolution.



Most reporters aren’t so happy, however. With regular people reporting the news instead of professional reporters, man daily bites dogs and regular people cover it without journalists.



Sure journalists are still going to be needed to give us insight into big news stories. But much of the content once created by newspapers and magazines can be replaced and made better by empowering people to report the news.



JasonV510, TaylorF519, and TerryJ770 are more important than anything I can say as a reporter.



Sure, I’m pretty smart, and I write well. But what you say matters more, and the collective intelligence of a group of users of an advisor practice management application is more important than my assessment.



That’s what’s happening now at advisors4advisors.com. Advisors are logging in every day and rating the applications they use in their practices. That's why we called it advisors4advisors.



Members of advisors4advisors see the average rating of an advisor app from a group of advisors who use that app and they can also see each individual rating by an advisor for financial planning, customer relationship management (CRM) and portfolio management software (PMS) applications.



We cover just about every PMS, CRM and planning application, and we’re adding new categories of apps every week. Last week, we added rebalancing software and this week we’re adding account aggregation systems.



We also have asked all of the major providers of practice management apps to fill in detailed specifications checklists about their products in the advisors4advisors review section.



This allows advisors to compare different practice management apps feature-by-feature, side-by-side.



The independent advisory industry’s vendors have filled in their specifications on advisors4advisors so far, including EISI, E-Z Data, MoneyGuide Pro, Schwab Performance Technologies, SunGard, Morningstar, Orion and Redtail.



Just about every major vendor in the industry is participating or planning to do so in the next few weeks.



Please contribute to the discussion. Join us at advisors4advsors.com. Come feel the power of the Internet.

At this afternoon’s webinar at 4 p.m. ET, Blane Warrene, an operations consultant, is going to talk about how advisory firms can embed their processes in their CRM.



This is the single most important way to improve your efficiency, scalability, and client service.



To help Blane illustrate how you do this, I asked three of the leading CRM vendors specializing in the independent advisor market (Junxure, Redtail, and XLR8) to provide two-minute videos showing how you use theirn software to embed your workflows.



We’re going to show each of the two-minute videos at Blane’s presentation today and post them for members of advisors4advisors.



Register for today’s webinar here.

Empowering independent advisors to share ideas, Advisors4Advisors (A4A) today started allowing advisors to post links to articles, videos, and other online content.



The three news sections on the A4A home page—Market & Economy News, Industry News and Technology News—now accept advisor submissions.



To post news items, an advisor clicks on “Post An Article” and submits a headline, description, and link. The item must be approved by an editor before it is posted.



This is the latest integration on A4A of advisor-generated content. A4A recently enabled advisors to rate the industry’s practice management applications.



Advisors every day are adding new ratings and reviews of software applications for portfolio reporting, financial planning, and customer relationship management.



A4A also networks independent advisors who practice the same way. Advisors using the same three portfolio management, financial planning, and CRM applications they use in their practice are placed in groups.



In addition, A4A provides detailed reviews of dozens of advisor applications. All major vendors providing software to independent advisors have access to a site where they fill in matrixes detailing their specifications. The matrixes are displayed in the Review section of A4A and enable advisors to compare apps feature-by-feature, side-by-side. A4A is the first and only website to make this information easily accessible.



A4A has about 1,000 members and is in beta. Additional information and a 30-day trial membership are available at www.advisors4advisors.com. If you’re interested in becoming an A4A sponsor, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

While we normally average a 4.2 rating from attendees, last week’s session of the Financial Advisor Webinar Series received a 4.4.



The session offered ideas about how to advise clients on Roth IRA opportunities. While entitled, Seizing The Roth IRA Opportunity,” it was not so much about jumping on the marketing bandwagon for Roth IRA conversion as it was about the complexity of the conversion decision.



Featured presenter Ben Norquist of Convergent Retirement Plan Solutions illustrated the dynamics of the conversion decision using a tool he recently launched, the Roth IRA Conversion Optimizer.



Here are the unabridged comments attendees provided us in the exit survey:

· It was one of the best Roth seminars I have attended.