I am one of those wackos that likes being in the same room as my family. When I decide to write an article for a blog or surf the net, I have to isolate myself in my den. I finally decided to stop being cheap and buy myself a laptop.

I went to the Dell site and put together a laptop. This was going to be a desktop replacement so one of my my criteria was that the laptop should handle some of my games. I ended up putting together an Inspiron E1705. I upgraded the processor to the 2Ghz Intel dual core, the memory to the max of 2 Gigs of RAM and the video card to the 256 meg video card. I also made the unfortunate decision of putting Windows Vista on the laptop.

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The Problem: How can financial advisors attract more web site and blog visitors?

The Analysis: The rules for blogs are a bit different than those for web sites…especially blogs for financial advisors that are presumably looking for clients, so I’ll start with increasing traffic to blogs for client acquisition. I’ll assume you already have a web site or blog and that you are somewhat consistently updating it with new and original content. Here are some tips to get your readership up, and more importantly on how to turn a visitor to into a client.

#1 - Probably the biggest boost to capturing new traffic is to stay on top of current events and use those events as tag lines for your blog and make those tag lines *distinct*. Instead of “Greenspan,” for example, try “Greenspan and The Impact for Self Employed” — in other words, don’t be afraid to be specific about your target audience. The more your blog posts reflect high-interest current events the more incidental traffic you will receive from search engines. Google makes available their most popular search terms here: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends - it is great tool to be aware of if you want to ride the wave of current top Internet searches. You can type in search terms of your own to gauge how popular they are. Remember this though, quantity and popular terms do not necessarily mean business, and higher relevance for distinct search terms will get you better quality leads.

I hate to say it, but the crazier and more distinct your posts are, the better quality of traffic you will receive. Maybe a good way to think about it is to keep in mind that you are NOT writing for everyone, you are writing for one client. Want an example?
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Joel Bruckenstein previewed a beta version of Junxure 7.0 and wrote it up in Morningstar Advisor Edition. Junxure is one of two established advisor CRM software solutions (ProTracker is the other). It was sold by Schwab for a while as Relationship Manager, but recently Schwab stopped selling it and, instead, directs people to Junxure’s site.

Joel thinks highly of the new release:

Some have argued that Junxure 7.0 extends the concept of client relationship management to a whole new level termed total office management. Based upon what I’ve seen so far, I would have to agree. Junxure 7.0 allows you do document and report on everything that takes place in a financial service practice. It also takes the flexibility and usability of the program to new heights. I’m sure that there will be at least a few complaints and criticisms, but overall, Junxure 7.0 is a quantum leap forward. If you liked version 6, you are going to love version 7. If you are dissatisfied with your current client relationship management application, I’d suggest you test drive Junxure 7.0.

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Christian Ramsey could be considered our industry’s first blogger. He has maintained an interesting web site called Advisor Page for about eight years, where he tracks industry news and makes short posts. If blogs had existed back then, I’ll bet he would have called it Advisor Blog, because that’s exactly what it is. Advisor Page was targeted toward investment advisors, not clients, and for that reason I asked him if he’d like to do some “guest posts” here on WealthFly. Christian graciously agreed so look forward to seeing another viewpoint soon.

Christian has an investment advisory practice, and a new blog called Real Estate Strategies Network. (I noticed he uses PHP-Nuke to host the site, a content management system I talked about a few posts back.) He is also the author of the newly published Land Rich, Cash Poor.

He responded to our advisor questionnaire:

1. How would you describe your advisory practice and typical client?

Fee-based, 80% managed annuities, 20% managed money. Average client size 200k, 80% of assets belong to high net worth trusts.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

2000 or thereabouts- mostly not to the public, to other advisors. 2006 I started a real estate strategy website.

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ByAllAccounts provides data aggregation and reconciliation services to investment advisors; they were owned by State Street but State Street recently began seeking bids to purchase the ByAllAccounts unit. After reviewing offers from larger more established companies, State Street sold the business unit back to the ByAllAccounts management team, CEO James Carney, Martin Dickau and Ellen Dickau.

The team went to Commonwealth Capital Ventures to raise money for the buyback, coming away with $5 million–enough to purchase the company, and still leave ample funds to cover operating expenses. State Street remains a ByAllAccounts client.

Congratulations to the ByAllAccounts team, with a shout out to State Street for engineering a great solution. I’m sure they could have gotten more money selling to other buyers, but they took the best deal for ByAllAccounts’ clients.

Continuing my post from Friday on The Journal of Financial Planning’s article about building web sites… Ed McCarthy talks about outsourcing, but also spends some time discussing methods for advisors to build sites themselves, focusing mainly on Microsoft Expression Web, the replacement to Microsoft FrontPage. This is where I think he missed something–content management systems.

Microsoft Expression is a *great* product, but few people build web sites from scratch now. It’s much too complicated and there are better ways of doing it. A content management system is a framework for building web sites that allows you to “plug in” different modules. There are modules for blogging, for newsgroups, for a wiki, for document hosting, etc. It lets a tech-savvy person create a site with amazing functionality with little or no effort.

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The Journal of Financial Planning cover story, written by Ed McCarthy, is a high-level roundup of different methods for building client-centered advisor web sites. It explains the difference between having a “brochure” site and building a more interactive site that gives clients a reason to come back. It also discusses various methods advisors can use to create good web sites, ranging from outsourcing to doing it yourself.

The article is partly a review of Advisor Products‘ new feature set which includes numerous client-facing tools. But it also contains a lot of good general purpose information about building advisor web sites. He breaks out different advisor sites by “level” and talks about the different things advisors can accomplish by taking different approaches to creating their firm’s web site.

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The editorial staff at Investment News has written a scathing critique of Bush’s 2008 budget. This is the best critical analysis I’ve read yet, and it doesn’t shy away from calling the budget a Big Fat Lie. They estimate the deficit will be at least $550 billion.

In this election year, the country deserves a realistic budget, and President Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal 2009 isn’t it — even though it predicts a deficit of $407 billion.The budget document released last week is just plain dishonest. Let us count the ways.

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An amusing Investment News article, entitled “Sorry is the hardest word for TD exes,” talks about TD Ameritrade’s recent advisor conference, where the CEO overslept and was late to deliver the opening remarks. In the 90 minutes it took Moglia to arrive, the rest of his team spent their time “issuing a stream of apologies for the series of blunders in technology and service that beset the firm in 2007.”

But the speeches were not enough to keep several [advisors] from standing up with questions asked in an angry tone. “Still feel like the red-headed stepchild,” said one adviser who still has not been brought onto the TD platform from the old Ameritrade platform. “It will happen in the next quarter,” Mr. Bradley responded.

I’m not sure Tom’s going to get another quarter. Distraught TD Ameritrade advisors have another option; several people in TD Waterhouse’s senior management team didn’t make the jump to Ameritrade. Instead, they founded a San Diego startup called Shareholder Service Group (SSG). SSG founder Peter Mangan ran the financial advisor division at TD Waterhouse, and co-founder Bob Reed was a founding exec of Jack White & Co. They have been signing up disgruntled TD Ameritrade advisors since the acquisition in 2006. They passed $1 billion in assets last year and seem poised to be a major player in the realm of advisor custody.

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Mitt Romney exited the race today. Romney was the highest scoring candidate among investment advisors according to Investment News. The Investment News poll ranked the candidates:

• Romney, 29%
• Obama, 25.6%
• McCain 22.6%
• Clinton 12.4%
• Huckabee 6.4%