*Updated Below*

I’ve always been mystified there aren’t more advisors with blogs. It seems like a great way to communicate with clients. The advisor could post articles about company direction, new hires, and market/strategy commentary. Your operations head could post updates on quarterly reports, download delays, and changes to model portfolios.

A blog doubles as a marketing tool, giving prospective clients a taste of how nice it would be as a client of your firm. It’s cheap, convenient, and identifies your firm as a progressive company with fresh ideas. But in our industry virtually nobody has a blog, just a small handful of investment advisors.

That’s about to change.

Advisor Products is a company that creates newsletters and hosts web sites for thousands of independent investment advisors and brokers. I’m sure everybody in the industry has heard of them by now. They’re working on a new release that adds advisor blogging to their product. Overnight, 2,000+ advisors are going to have the ability to communicate with their clients (and prospects) using personal blogs. Advisor Products’s CEO Andy Gluck–a long-time pundit, well known for spotting industry technology trends–may be about to kickstart an advisor blogging revolution.

Advisor Products has been providing a private-label Newsletter service for years which allows advisors to re-brand Advisor Product’s content as their own. But the new big thing is letting advisors make their own original content, in the form of blog posts. This lets them instantaneously communicate with their entire client base with little effort, as often as they want.

I think this will ignite a wave of advisor blogging, sure to be read and appreciated by Internet-savvy advisor clients everywhere. In particular, advisors who have younger, high-tech clients should immediately embrace it. One big benefit of blogging is that your clients will be able to immediately give feedback:

Advisor Products is working on a some other interesting things on the tech side. They’re partnering with Albridge and several other portfolio management companies to get client account info up on the sites. They present it in-line with graphs, news feeds and advisor commentary, making this a one-stop spot for investors.

Interestingly, Advisor Products is *not* part of the new Your Silver Bullet group, they’re building relationships directly with partner companies, which means more work for them. The Albridge interface is already up and running. Soon to follow are MoneyGuidePro, Orion, Black Diamond, and AssetBook. And the payoff for going directly to the software providers comes next year, when Gluck says they will be adding Schwab PortfolioCenter and Advent Axys interfaces–Schwab and Advent have yet to join the Silver Bullet initiative. For historical positions, Advisor Products has a “Document Vault” that lets advisors upload quarterly reports in PDF format.

This will be an interesting product launch to watch. Gluck is attempting to grow his advisor newsletter and web site company into an integral cog of an advisor’s infrastructure. If he succeeds in making his advisor sites the sole front-end for all his advisor’s client interaction, then he’ll soon have custodians and software companies writing to *his* interface, not the other way around. He can turn his advisor sites into a true platform.

The new Advisor Products was released today as beta software.

UPDATE: I’ve been getting some feedback that Your Silver Bullet may not be working the way I thought. I’ve been assuming Your Silver Bullet has some sort of generic file spec that’s being used to pass data back and forth. Apparently that’s not true–the partner companies still go directly to each other and write to each other’s proprietary file specs. If so, I’m stumped about what it is SB actually does. I suppose I should ask someone.