Financial Advisors Who Embrace Blogging Will Have a Competitive Advantage

Blogging can differentiate you from your competitors

What if you had the opportunity to present your financial ideas, insights, commentary, beliefs, and strategies in addition to your personal stories, personality, passions, hobbies, interests, and community involvement on a consistent basis, to hundreds, or even thousands of clients, prospects, and strategic alliances in your target markets who were interested in listening?

Now combine that with being able to easily publish your ideas in any format that you are comfortable with (articles, images, videos, screencasts, podcasts, documents, presentations), as often as you could commit to (and you would commit if it resulted in business growth), with the ability to syndicate your posts across the social web to your connections (and potentially their connections) on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and You Tube?

What if you could successfully build your digital identity through blogging?

Building a professional blog affords you all of these opportunities! A blog is not your core website and it’s not a social network.  A blog is a separate and distinct online digital asset designed to build community around your unique thought leadership.  It’s a place where you can showcase your personality, passions, interests, and areas of expertise.  Blogging is arguably one of the most powerful ways in the age of social networking to differentiate yourself and build your own community of qualified prospects.

Consider social media profiles on networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. They all look the same.  Why?  Because most of the social networks make frequent changes that make it difficult to “customize” your presence.  In fact, the only way to differentiate yourself on the social networks is through the content that you publish!  What is your message?  How are you adding value? Most importantly, where is your content originating from?

Your blog should exist as the hub of your social media presence where your unique content originates from.

Having a blog gives you a digital asset on the web that you own, and that you can direct prospects and clients to.  If installed on your own custom domain, you can customize the design and style of this digital asset, and you can customize your content that you syndicate out to your social profiles and connections.

Your blog, not your website, should be the first stop for prospective clients!  Why? Because your blog is where people can begin to know, like, and ultimately trust you. People don’t trust financial advisor websites which act as online marketing brochures.

Your blog is also “portable”.  What does this mean?  You can pull in the RSS feed from your blog into your social profiles to showcase and engage your connections with your content.  You can also post your RSS feed to your website, your Twitter profile, LinkedIn Groups, and even to aggregate article sites such as Tipd, for example.  Most importantly, you can easily format your blog to render on mobile smart phones.  Your subscribers can get your updated content on the go!

Having a blog as your central digital hub is the most effective way to get your unique thought leadership out to your target niche markets in the age of social media.  It is also an asset that grows in value over time.  As your content grows, the value of your blog will produce dividends for your business!

Financial advisors who commit to content marketing through blogging will undoubtedly have a competitive advantage in a wired world.

Learn more about the most effective way to create your own professional blog.

Tags: blogging, blogging for financial advisors, social networking, tipd