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Is your current website still living in the “online brochure” days or even non-existent? Don’t dwell on what’s been holding you up. Let’s move your site – and you along with it – into the 21st century.
Why bother?
Early websites served as online duplicates of your company brochure, as flat as the paper they were replacing. The clever among us have developed far more powerful tools – blogs, newsfeeds, social media networking, apps and mobile displays – to build compelling virtual extensions of your personal relationships. These days, using your online presence as no more than a shelf on which to display your business cards is like hiring Arnold Schwarzenegger to open a tight jar for you.
A contemporary, well-built site enables you to interact more deeply and regularly with your clients, prospects and other important relationships. At the same time, we all know that the Internet can be a serious time drain. You must manage it, rather than the other way around.
It all begins with building or upgrading to a carefully planned, contemporary website to serve as the sun around which the rest of your social media universe orbits. Just as you start with a strong investment policy statement to guide your clients’ financial planning, you should design your site according to your goals and then proceed sensibly and deliberately from there. (A few deep breaths to calm yourself along the way couldn’t hurt, either.)
Considering costs
Because your website is so core to your communications platform, there’s no better place to spend a good chunk of your marketing budget. Investing in a good website is the equivalent of pouring a strong, quality foundation for your home. Go too cheap, and everything else you do winds up on shaky ground.
Web development services vary widely in terms of what you can achieve for what price. If your budget is modest, take heart! There are still some good services that, properly managed, can help you incorporate the most essential qualities of a contemporary website.
For example, for the budget-conscious, a couple of advisor-centric solutions include Advisor Websites and MIAGD. There are other advisor-centric services, and they may be equally up to the task. These are the two I’ve worked with the most, have had relatively good experiences with, and have heard others speak well of too. Costs range from several hundred to a few thousand dollars, plus modest monthly support and/or hosting fees in the range of $20-$60.
If your budget allows you to go with a high-end designer as part of your site development, it can be an excellent use of your resources. In this category, there are so many possibilities it’s hard to list just a couple. In general, reasonable pricing is in the range of $4,000-$6,000 for an initial build, plus the same modest monthly support and/or hosting fees as with an off-the-shelf development service. If a service costs more than that, you may want to closely explore whether you’re getting added value for the added cost.
Why spend more on a high-end service? To put it bluntly, a cheap site is going to look cheap. If you’re Berkshire Hathaway, or Phil Demuth, you can get away with a modest website. But most of us mere mortals will want to upgrade the polish of our online presence as we grow. In fact, if you’re a confident risk-taker, you may even want to adopt the Wayne Gretzky philosophy and expend the extra resources to “skate to where the puck is going to be.” By building a site that is a bit grander than the current reality of your firm’s business development, you may get there faster for real.
Additional components worth considering: A newsfeed and a blog
Whether you’re prepared to spend a lot or a little on your site build, don’t simply write a blank check and hurl it at the nearest website service. You want the bang to be audible, preferably even measurable. Two key interrelated elements can ramp up the impact of your firm’s contemporary web-based communications: your newsfeed and your blog.
What is a newsfeed?
Anyone who publishes web-based content regularly – whether that’s you, me or Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig – can set up his or her content so new postings auto-generate a new entry to a running list. That’s the newsfeed. The nearly universal symbol for a newsfeed looks like this:

Every newsfeed has a behind-the-scenes address of its own. Once you know that address, you (or, more likely, your web developer) can plug the feed into your website and voila, you can display article links that automatically refresh as new articles are added. There are even utilities that let you generate a single list from multiple feeds.
Here are a couple examples of advisor website newsfeeds:
Why a newsfeed?
By feeding a regular stream of automatically refreshing news on your home page, you can:
- Give your search engine optimization (SEO) an enormous leg up, as your home page will be regularly refreshed with current news for the web crawlers to munch on.
- Imbue a busy, vibrant feel to your online presence. Having an active newsfeed is the online equivalent of having an “Open” sign, with the lights on inside.
It’s true – you could instead set up manual links to your own or others’ news of interest and regularly update those links. But that’s a fair amount of additional ongoing work after set-up, and it requires you to be diligent about keeping things current. If there’s one thing that’s worse than having no newsfeed or blog action on your site, it’s having a news section with outdated entries that generate a cloud of dust whenever a site visitor clicks on them. I hate it when that happens.
Newsfeed considerations
Share the labor: Another way to keep your newsfeed fresh is to feed news from like-minded, nationally recognized bloggers. While you can also post to your own blog and feed that through your website, combining your own efforts with others can be a nice way to keep your feed fresh with less effort – and still get solid word out about the passive investment approach.
Be mindful of your message: Drawing on newsfeeds from other like-minded news sources is significantly preferable to linking to the latest market snapshot, ticker feeds or popular media headlines, as is often done on financial websites. These sorts of feeds do help out with your SEO by automatically keeping your home page regularly updated. But emphasizing a focus on near-term returns or hot market news conflicts with what most advisors strive to communicate to their audience. Since the actual message you’re delivering is of the highest priority, it’s a compromise I wouldn’t recommend you make.
Copyright, compliance and other legalities: In considering use of others’ newsfeeds, ensure that the author doesn’t represent a competitive threat and that you have obtained any necessary copyright permissions. Both of the aforementioned site samples belong to advisor firms who are members of the BAM ALLIANCE, which, among other benefits, gives them support and feed links to several like-minded, nationally recognized advisor-bloggers, including Larry Swedroe, Carl Richards and Dan Solin.
And of course, as always, there is compliance. Ensure that your site disclosures include the proper legal language describing links to third-party resources. Links should open in a new browser, distinct from your main site, to help give you an arm’s-length separation from them. This is also a good idea from a marketing perspective. To make it easier for visitors to remain on your site for as long as they please, set up your links so they can close a third-party link you’ve provided them without closing your site along with it.
Adding a blog
A blog of your own, with new articles posted at least monthly, will help you in several ways:
- As described above, you can feed your blog headlines on your home page for added oomph.
- It provides another regularly updating web presence for you, for enhanced SEO.
- It can be auto-blasted as a separate e-newsletter to a targeted client or prospect list, using a CAN-SPAM-compliant e-marketing service such as those built into your CRM software, or MailChimp, Constant Contact or iContact.
To give you an example, I post my articles to my website blog. The feed also appears in the lower right corner of my home page. Plus I’ve set up MailChimp (free!) to check my blog daily and automatically e-mail any new articles to my subscriber list. Sometimes, my articles get picked up and shared by others. Even one article can provide surprising raw marketing power.
But wait, there’s more
Whew, there are a few other important points I wanted to cover. These include how to mix in your social media activities (be they ever so humble) and sprinkle a few other components on top, to further enhance your contemporary website efforts. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for my next article to learn more.
Wendy J. Cook is owner of Wendy J. Cook Communications, LLC, offering writing, editing, presentation and related services expressly for the fee-only, passive/DFA, Registered Investment Advisor community. Wendy helps such firms communicate their distinct messaging to clients, prospects, media and the general public using traditional and leading edge communication resources ranging from print to social media/Web and e-newsletter forums. Visit www.wendyjcook.com or www.linkedin.com/in/wendyjcook.
Read more articles by Wendy Cook