Jassen Bowman EA

At the very end of 2013, I made a significant change to how I sold my IRS Collection representation services.

It was a change that forever altered how I approached tax resolution clients.

In short, I stopped selling the service on a 1:1 basis, and started implementing what is called one to many selling.

Instead of scheduling one-on-one consultations that soaked up time I wasn’t getting paid for, I moved to a webinar-based sales process. I started doing weekly webinars for business owners that had tax debt problems. I was running Facebook ads, doing direct mail, and directing inbound leads from my book and other sources to a webinar registration page. Instead of a special report download, I started offering live education to consumers to make them aware of their options. On these webinars, I would offer attendees a low-cost research and analysis service, from which I would upsell them to full service representation. I called this the split sales model, since it split the process of account research and financial analysis away from the full representation process.

This is an example of a process that improves efficiency and profitability.

It’s also a process that I think tax resolution practitioners should all give a try.

This is a more complicated process than most of the things we’ve discussed over the course of this month, but it’s transformative if you start doing it.

To make it work, you simply need a webinar platform, a presentation, and to start directing your lead flow to the webinar registration.

For purposes of direct to consumer webinars, I recommend using Zoom. It’s affordable, simple to use, and for folks that are likely to attend a webinar, they’ve probably used the platform before.

So here’s your challenge for today:

1. Sign up for a basic webinar account with Zoom (or use whatever you already have if you have something else).
2. Pick an evening or a weekend afternoon about two weeks from now, and schedule a webinar.
3. Create your registration page with the webinar provider’s system.
4. Email your lead list, post on social media, post on your blog, post a video, etc — incorporating all the 941 marketing channels you’ve created over the past month — and get word out about your webinar.
5. Present a webinar on your scheduled date, educating attendees about the basic tax resolution options and offering them a low-cost Investigation of Liability (marketing term) service.

This … Continue reading

Now that you’ve had your hand at converting a written piece of content to video, let’s do the same thing but turn it into a podcast.

Yep, today I’m going to show you how to launch a podcast in under half an hour. It’s really not that hard, and you’ll be taking advantage of the growing trend in audio marketing content.

First, if you’re handy with certain software tools, like Audacity or VLC Media Player, you can simply open your video from yesterday and rip out the audio. The specific of how to do that are far beyond the scope of this post, but if you have either of those tools, amongst others, you can just open a video file and save it as audio.

Alternatively, just re-record the video you made yesterday, except do it with audio only. The voice memo app on your smart phone is perfectly adequate, but if you have a headset, you’ll get better audio quality using the default recording app on your computer.

Either way you go, you’ll wind up with an audio file that’s the same as what you recorded to video yesterday.

Now, what to do with it?

There a many ways to set up podcast feeds. You can do it with WordPress plugins, via Amazon Web Services, or a 3rd party podcast host. The latter option is the easiest, and the easiest of those that I have found is called Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout offers a free plan that is adequate for our needs, but their lowest price plan is only $12/mo, and is the plan I’m on.

Just create an account, fill in basic details, and upload your file.

They will then give you a podcast feed address, which you can then submit to Stitcher and iTunes (within Buzzsprout).

Boom, you’re a podcaster!

Of course, there’s more to building a podcast audience than this, but it’s a start. Be sure to post your new episode on your own blog, and email it out to your leads and prospects as a touch point.

As we wind down this challenge, and with Thanksgiving sale season coming to a close, don’t forget to take your 14-day trial of Gold membership.… Continue reading

Yesterday, we discussed a simple way to convert your audio and video marketing content into text. Easy peasy.

Today, we’re going to discuss the opposite direction. Maybe a bit less obvious.

Referring back to the content inventory you took a few days ago, consider your existing written content. This could be blog posts, lead magnets, books, etc.

Take something relatively short. E.g., not your entire book, just a couple pages. A sub-sub-topic. Single blog posts work great for this.

Then, whip out your smartphone, put on a smile, hit record, and start reading.

Yes, indeed. It’s that easy. And yes, you’re going to record yourself reading your own words.

Is this a bit more awkward than recording yourself reading out of Pub. 15 like we did a couple weeks ago? Maybe.

But it works.

Do one take. One and done. Post it to the YouTube channel you created a couple weeks ago. Be sure to make the appropriate settings to this video, as before.

This should all take less than 20 minutes. Other than creating the video itself, it’s also a simple task to hand off to a staff member.

Tomorrow, you’ll get to hop on the podcasting bandwagon, also in just 20 minutes.… Continue reading