I signed WealthFly up for Google AdWords today. If you search on anything having to do with financial advisor news, wealth management technology, finance blog, etc. then WealthFly should pop up as a “Sponsored Link”. (Please don’t actually click on our links because it costs us money every time somebody clicks it.) I set a max limit of $0.50 per click but the amounts I’m seeing so far are much less.

Its been running for less than an hour and we’re already starting to see people clicking through to us. So far, I’ve seen people click through from “magazine investment advisor”, “MoneyGuidePro”, and “Techfi”. I should probably give it a few weeks so I can give you detailed data, but I’m so excited I’ll say right now:

*Every* advisor should sign up for Google AdWords.

Here’s how it works.

Say you are Joe Investor who lives in Boulder, Colorado and you recently decided to hire an investment advisor. In today’s Internet age, the first thing you do is go to Google and type “boulder investment advisor“. This gives you the following screen:

On the left are the results of your search. And on the right are six AdWords links to various investment advisor-related services. Two of those look like they could be investment advisors that may interest Joe. So if you’re a Boulder-based investment advisor, signing up for AdWords is a sure-fire way to show up on Joe’s search.

Say your name is Rick Buttkiss and you have an advisory practice in Boulder, Colorado called Buttkiss Financial Advisors. you could sign up for the following AdWords:

• Rick Buttkiss
• Rick Butkiss (common typo)
• butkiss financial advisors
• butkiss financial advisers (alternate spelling)
• buttkiss advisor
• boulder advisor
• boulder adviser
• boulder investment advice
• boulder financial planner
• boulder investment planner
• Colorado advisor
• Colorado adviser
• Colorado investment advice
• Colorado financial planner
• Colorado investment planner
• Buttkiss Financial Planning
• Buttkiss Boulder
• Buttkiss Colorado
• etc.

Here’s where it gets fun. You can enter competitors as AdWords so his clients see your ad every time they Google their advisor:

• Rick Jones advisory
• Bob Smith advisory
• Schwab Boulder
• Fidelity Boulder
• Waterhouse Boulder
• Ameritrade Boulder
• etc.

Say Joe Investor sees a Schwab ad on TV and goggles “Charles Schwab Boulder” to find a local branch. He’ll find Schwab’s main site, and also your ad:

Buttkiss Financial Advisors
High net worth financial advisor in Boulder, CO.
A family practice with highly personalized service.
www.bkadvisor.com

Who wouldn’t check out the “family practice with highly personalized service” before a faceless corporation? (nothing personal, Chuck)  I’m so sneaky. Notice how I put “high net worth” and “Boulder, Colorado” in the description to avoid paying for clicks coming from people with “no money” and “not living in Boulder”. Make sure your account minimums are clearly displayed on your corporate web site so you don’t waste time on the phone with people trying to open $2,000 accounts.

Most quality leads come from referrals, and not everybody has had good experiences with AdWords. Advisor Products creates and hosts web sites for thousands of independent investment advisors. If anybody knows how to market advisors on the web, its them. Their president Andy Gluck said “We’ve done [AdWords advertising] but, to be honest, we get mixed results so we don’t push it.”

Fair enough. But I’m still having a great experience with it. Since I started writing this article, the WealthFly ad has been displayed on 1,061 searches, and four people have clicked through to WealthFly. it has cost me $0.65. Checking our stats tells me that two of the users actually clicked around the site, reading articles. Hopefully they’ll be back.

You have complete control over how much you want to spend with Google so you don’t get surprised by a huge bill at month end. You only pay when somebody clicks your ad and spends time on your company’s web site. The ad may display on a thousand screens, but if nobody clicks on it, you won’t get charged a cent. You can also set up a pre-pay account to limit your exposure. The minimum is $10 and I set WealthFly up with a $500 account, limited to $25 per day. I expect it to last us a couple months.

I can’t believe we didn’t do this a year ago.

You can sign up for AdWords here. The site has extensive information and tutorials. If you try it out, please let me know how it goes.