It’s getting so I can’t go into our local Ingle’s grocery store any more without embarrassing myself. One of my bad habits is to blurt out things that are totally out of place. At Ingle’s, I keep asking the cashiers the same half-dozen or so same pieces of trivia that I’ve been asking [...]

If you are serious about building your practice, you could take a few lessons from the internet marketing gurus, who took a few lessons from direct marketers, who are the kings of marketing as far as I am concerned.

Almost any internet marketing guru can talk to you about the marketing funnel. Dedicated outside sales reps will talk about filling their funnel. what do they mean?

Hot dang. You’re at a big networking get together at the local pub, handing out your cards and introducing yourself. Getting cards from everyone you meet, and promising them faithfully that you’ll be sharing referrals and leads with them.

Yeah, that’s really going to happen. Like when pigs fly.

I’m starting to become a blog-a-holic I think. Wandering around seeing what all the accounting guru’s are writing about. Yesterday I was reading Marty Koenig’s blog and it set me to thinking.

Marty is a freelance CFO for small firms who can’t afford a full-time CFO. He steps in and manages the in-house accounting duties, leaving the year-end work to the outside accountant. You know, the taxes and any legal reporting that require an attest function. All of his work is done on premises and with the firms tools and systems.

Sounds like a cool gig to me.

Yesterday in my post about What Do You Write Abut Part #2, I talked about a preacher by the name of Chuck Warnock at a small church in Chatham, Virginia., and his blog post “It’s Like Herding Pigs.”

In his post, Doug talks about a lady by the name of Mary Haugh who actually needed to herd pigs after her husband had suffered debilitating heart attacks and was no longer able to herd them into the barn.

Mary’s husband was a pig farmer, and like many other pig farmers, he used a “longboard” to squeeze the pigs in to the barn. Longboards were typically used by farmers in their neighborhood because pigs, being ornery and interested only in their self interests, didn’t react positively to things like cattle prods and other forms of aggressive manipulation.

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.