If you had to make a list of some of the top techniques that tax and accounting professionals just aren't using enough, creating an incredible blog would undoubtedly be right at the top.

Success in the financial services field depends on your ability to establish yourself as an authority. People want to trust beyond the shadow of a doubt that you will take care of one of the most important aspects of their lives. They need you to show them, not tell them, that yours is a voice worth paying attention to. Putting together a terrific blog is a big part of how you do it.

It's also incredibly effective. According to one recent study content marketing campaigns (which blogging would undoubtedly be a part of) cost about 62% less to launch and execute than other types of campaigns. Not only that, but SEO-driven blogging tends to bring in an average of about 1,000% more traffic to your website than just social media sites like Facebook and Twitter alone.

Of course, it's equally important to acknowledge that not all blogs are created equally. It will be rare for someone to wake up in the morning, pour themselves a cup of coffee, head to their computer, and say "I can't wait to check out my favorite tax and accounting blog." Instead, they're likely going to find your content when they have an important question that needs to be answered or a concern that must be addressed. Because of that, the content you create needs to be shaped with this type of goal in mind.

Create a Content Strategy

Especially when you're talking about an inherently niche topic like financial services, you don't just want to start a blog for your business' website without a plan in place. Not only do you need to know who you're writing for, but what topics they're interested in and what they both want and need. Only then will you know which direction your new tax and accounting blog needs to be steered in.

This requires you to develop a content strategy, which itself has a number of essential components. Obviously, you'll want to make sure you have content on certain subjects ready-to-go at specific times of the year. As April begins to creep up on the calendar and people start to worry about their taxes, you'll want to have content related to this topic already published throughout March and even February. At the end of the year, you'll want to have content to help people with end of the year financial concerns like last minute charitable contributions.

Regardless, you should always know exactly what you're publishing, when, and why before you ever sit down to write your first paragraph. Is there a particularly interesting piece of legislation coming up that you have a unique perspective on? Be sure to have that article written before it either passes or fails.

You can also conduct keyword research using tools like the Google Keyword Planner (among others) to see which topics people in your industry are paying attention to so that you can weigh in at the right time.

Put Together Your Blog Posts

Next, you can work on putting together the blog posts themselves. After you have selected your topic, write an outline to make sure that your ideas flow naturally from one point to the next. You want people to be able to follow what you're saying and you also want to provide as much detail as possible.

Once you've thoroughly covered the topic, be sure to include a call-to-action at the end to direct people to take a desired next step. In your case, it's likely to pick up the phone and give you a call to make an appointment to discuss their financial situation or to take care of tax-related matters.

You'll also want to keep paragraphs as short as possible and use techniques like headings and bullet points to keep things easily readable. Likewise, make sure you invest in editing services (again, you're trying to come off as an authority and you can't do that with typos). 

Vary Up the Formats

Especially when it comes to a tax and accounting blog, you'll also want to vary up the formats you use as much as possible to keep things fresh. When most people think of a blog, they think of what are essentially "explainer" posts. You might write a blog about "What is the Earned Income Tax Credit?" and spend several hundred words explaining precisely that. Next, you move onto "What is the Home Office Deduction?" and explain that. Rinse, repeat.

While all of this information is invaluable, you also need to think outside the box if you want to attract the attention of as many people as possible. How-to blog posts are great for that, for example. Here, you'll go into detail about exactly how a reader can complete a simple task like e-filing their taxes for the first time or checking to see if they have a balance with their state comptroller.

You can also use list-based articles, which are great for compiling a list of related entries. You could include a helpful list of important deadlines and other tax and/or accounting-related dates that people are going to want to put on their calendars throughout the year.

Naturally, you'll want to include a healthy dose of news articles. You can do them in a straightforward journalistic style where you simply report on something like a tax code change, or an editorial style where you also let people know if you think it was a good thing or a bad thing.

Interviews, reviews, you name it and you should be putting the format to good use on your tax and accounting blog on a regular basis. 

Additional Considerations About Your Tax and Accounting Blog

Finally, you also need to understand that a successful blog will not be built in a day, regardless of what the topic is. Even if you've taken care of absolutely everything in terms of on-page SEO, it will still take a while for Google to index your domain and for people to find you.

Because of that, you'll want to take advantage of every opportunity you have to get the word out about your blog. Yes, the blog itself is supposed to be essentially a marketing tool for your business, and now you're creating marketing for your marketing, but it's still essential.

One way to do this is to guest post for other sites that the members of your target audience are paying attention to. Writing for TaxBuzz, for example, is a great way o both gain followers and improve SEO. With each successful guest post, you expose your message to TaxBuzz readers who may not have otherwise discovered it. You also earn high quality backlinks, which is a major contributing factor that engines like Google look to when determining rankings to begin with.

In the end, putting together an incredible tax and accounting pro blog is a lot of effort, but it is also more than worth it. Once your blog is populated with high quality, relevant content, it essentially becomes the best type of "employee." It doesn't eat, it doesn't go on vacation, and it is available to answer client questions and help them solve problems 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

If you'd like to find out more information about putting together the best possible tax and accounting pro blog that you can, or if you'd just like to find out more about topics like guest posting in a bit more detail, please don't hesitate to contact us today. You can also try out our platform for free here.

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