If you haven’t read yesterday’s post What Do You Write About? Part #1, then click here and read it first. We’ll be continuing from the point where that post ended.

Meaning, you’ll now have a listing of results that show all the blogs Google thinks you want to know about, who have recently written on the subject you entered in the search box. Your next step is to start going through them one by one and scanning them to see what is being written on your topic.

Article, report and whitepaper writing continue to lead the pack as things you can write to generate interest in your practice and establish your credentials as an authority figure. What is always hard is developing a list of topics to write on developing those ideas into a topic.

In either an earlier post or an email to the members of the Instant Practice Builder (http://instantpracticebuilder.com), I mentioned that one of the best ways to develop subject matter is to make a note of the question a client has when they call you and find an angle to turn that question and your answer into an article or report.

As most of my regular readers know, I’m an old, tired and ugly retired accountant. This internet blogging thing is sort of new to me, so I wander around looking for the wisdom of the gurus and try to distill some of it every now and then into something that will make me look brilliant and worthy of being listened to.

So, earlier today I was checking out the competition … you know, all the other blogs on how to market bookkeeping, accounting and tax services that I could find, and I stumbled across Ric Willmot’s blog ( http://www.ricwillmot.com/ ) and was struck by his quote from Ferrari President Luca di Montezemolo who said that he expected to find 6,000 people crazy enough to buy a Ferrari in 2009.

Have you ever stopped to think about where you make your money? Do you sell consulting services, or are you in the product business? Do you really know?

Of course you can look at your sales register and identify the categories your revenues are allocated to … X% here, Y% there, and so on. But stop for a moment and think about a couple of things. what does the man with the hot dog cart need? He needs a horde of hungry hot dog aficionados. What does the guy who goes into the store looking for a shovel want? He wants a hole. Have you ever thought that maybe there should be a way to categorize your sales by needs fulfilled rather than item or service?

“You can trust me.”

Famous last words from every con artist I’ve ever met, and a sure-fire way to lose my trust, and most anyone else’s.

Trust is so important and so misunderstood that there are over a half-million books on the subject on Amazon, over 300 million sites listed on Google, and the one-rhetorical phrase used by that con artist.

By virtue of it being a tangible product, something your prospect can see, feel and touch, a printed newsletter shows the prospect that you are willing to put some time and effort into your relationship with them.

But, because it is a tangible product, it takes production time, and it takes money to create. Something that most startup practitioners have very little of to spare.

So, how do you maximize your production, while minimizing your expenses? Ah, the eternal question, posed by all Practice Builders.

Okay, I think it’s about time I said something about newsletters.

Now, I’m not talking about email newsletters here. Those are important, but as a practitioner concentrating on your local market, I feel that you will be a lot more competitive if you do the majority of your prospecting using traditional offline methods. Print methods.

What does it take to be a successful practice builder?

After you have established your goals and laid out your plan of action for reaching your goals, one of your next steps is to take control of yourself.

Remember all those guys in school who were so proud of their imagination, and were so quick to deprecate the plodders and the planners? Well, let me bring you back to reality with a corollary to the story of the tortoise and the hare. Consistency trumps all.

I learned a very valuable lesson from my mentor the other day about repurposing content, one of her favorite habits.

Now, I’ve heard lots of chit-chat on the internet about repurposing content, and I have consistently thought of it as rewriting the same old article or report in forty or fifty different ways. Sort of what the online bunch call “spinning” an article.

As I have tried to make abundantly clear to the members of my practice building tools website, as an “old, tired and ugly” retiree, I don’t keep up with a lot of accounting or tax law these days. But this little tidbit just slid across the desk in front of me and I thought it bore some further comment.