I’m a big fan of the Pareto Principle, which says that 80% (or more) of your outputs are generated by 20% (or less) of your inputs. The 80/20 rule is well known and has been demonstrated to be true across many arenas, from the income gap to agriculture to marketing results.

One area where I have long espoused an 80/20 rule viewpoint is in the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a marketing strategy in which you seek to be at the top of the Google search results for a particular search term. For example, this blog floats around the top five in the search results for keywords such as “tax resolution marketing”. Today, I’m at #2 for that term, and #1 is an article I wrote for Canopy.

This ranking is not an accident.

At one point, my tax practice site ranked in the top three on Google for many search terms related to tax relief, tax resolution, and the IRS Fresh Start program. I gave up those positions several years ago when I stopped doing the activities that maintained the position, but I’m confident I could reclaim them with a little bit of work.

SEO in particular is one of those marketing strategies that has a well defined Minimum Effective Dose (MED). This is a Tim Ferriss term, and describes the bare minimum work you need to do in order to see the majority of positive results. Note that this isn’t about being lazy, but rather about being efficient.

Now, while I encourage tax professionals to utilize a service such as TaxProMarketer… Continue reading

If you’re one of the few people that followed me on Twitter, you may have noticed that my Twitter profile has been wiped clean.

As in, totally obliterated.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

I can hear the collective gasp now. How could he do such a thing? This is bird abuse!

Let me outline five simple reasons why I decided to do this:

1. I hate social media, and always have. Since the dawn of MySpace, I have hated social media with a passion. I’ve always found it to be a complete waste of time, a false substitute for genuine human interaction, and an utter annoyance and intrusion into my life. I consider social media to be the worst thing to ever come out of the Internet boom. Thus, when I saw other simple indicators telling me that Twitter was no longer relevant for communication with the people I care about communicating with, it was easy to pull the plug.
2. I’ve been testing Twitter ads, and they suck. As a marketing guy first and foremost, I believe in testing extensively before making a decision about the utility of a marketing medium. I’ve been testing Twitter ads on and off for about 18 months, and despite my best testing, tweaking, and targeting, I just can’t get them to yield results. So, I’m done throwing good money after bad. No advertising, no need for a profile
3. Tweet engagement is super weak sauce. For the past 10 months, I’ve been “engaging” on the major social platforms — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. I bought a social media management software system, loaded it up with thousands of things to post, and monitored conversations. I replied where I could, tried to be helpful to folks, did the liking and retweeting. I followed the right people, and maintained a healthy ratio of

With the filing deadline just two weeks away, most tax professionals are gasping for air right now, barely able to keep their heads above the mountain of 1040 work that they’re drowning in.

Some practitioners, however, have made a choice not to live that way for the next couple weeks. You can make that choice, too, and all it takes are a couple very simple procedural changes in your business.

At our tax resolution boot camp last September, Chrisa Anderson, CPA shared a brilliant strategy for attenuating the April madness: Just stop taking on new returns. Anybody that doesn’t have their documents in by this week simply goes on extension. Problem solved.

Another Premium member, Dan Henn, CPA, has taken it a step further. Not only does he have a document cutoff, he also imposes a Rush Service fee for any returns that an individual absolutely insists on being completed between now and the filing deadline. And it’s not a small priority service fee, either. In fact, he charges the client an extra 50% of their regular tax prep fee.

So if you are normally scrambling like a crazy person to complete returns for the next two weeks, it’s time to make some policy changes. And this doesn’t need to be a “we’ll do that next year” sort of thing. No. Do it now. Today.

Anybody that calls in today or later… Anybody that sends you an email… They simply get told that they’re going on extension or need to pay a priority service surcharge. It’s as simple as that.

Have a nice, relaxing rest of your filing season!