How I Started Getting Published in Major Online Media Outlets

Editor’s note: In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor Peter Hafner, who has grown his business by writing financial articles for his blog and the wider Web. You can hear the full interview by clicking the audio file below. The following article includes edited excerpts of Peter’s comments.

I started in the business in 1992, with the bulk of my early career at A.G. Edwards. I went independent in 2007 with First Allied Securities, and just last year I switched to Next Financial because they have a much bigger presence here in Buffalo. I’m also stepping in to be someone’s succession plan there, and there is a younger advisor who could be my succession plan in 20 years or so. I also made a major change halfway through 2016, going fee-only. With all the change, it’s been pretty busy around here.

Starting to write

The idea to write articles came out of my interactions with Robert Middleton. He’s a marketing coach I found through Horsesmouth. We worked on my website together, and really revamped it. He told me the structure he wanted to use, and I did most of the writing. I consider myself a pretty good writer, and I got absorbed in it. Then I read an article of Robert’s called, “What is Your Marketing Superpower?” He used writing as an example, and I thought, “I’m a good writer, I can do this.” And with that, I decided to really start writing a blog—not just printing other people’s material.

The ideas for the first articles came to me when I was really irritated with a couple of clients for various reasons. I had some sleepless nights where my mind was racing at three or four in the morning. I like to journal to process my thoughts, and I took those stories and turned them into blogs—I changed all the names, of course. Robert had told me the first paragraph or two should be a human interest hook. I thought that was going to be the hardest part of writing the articles, but actually that’s what I enjoy the most. I find some sort of analogy or hook that really catches people’s attention. It’s been a fun process.

I find a provocative title—that helps search engine optimization—then talk about something and relate it to finance. For instance, I wrote, “How Landscaping Can Make You a Better Investor,” where I talk about landscaping, then say, “This is a lot like managing your investment portfolio. Like this and like that, and here’s why….” And I did another one about how speeding can destroy your retirement dreams—starting with an analogy about speeding and how it’s not good on the road. Other titles have included “The Top Three Benefits of Investing Early,” and “Will Social Security Be There for Me?”

My ideas come from various places. I have an app that I use to keep track of miscellaneous ideas, but I’ve never found myself really going back to look at what I’ve written there. Getting irritated with clients is often really good for an idea! I also work with HubSpot, an inbound marketing company focused on keywords. Believe it or not, duration of preferred stocks is something highly searched on the Internet. So I wrote an article about that. Some of my articles are contrived in such a way as to help me with the search engine optimization.

Getting to the big time

I listen to Steve Sanduski’s podcast, “Between Now and Success.” In one episode, he mentions that advisors should go to Investopedia and petition them to be a contributor. If you are approved, you can answer questions that investors post. I did that the next week. They reviewed my writing and approved me. So now every time I write an article, I submit it to Investopedia. On their website they have my bio, my picture, and a list of all my articles. I’ve submitted five articles to them so far, and they’ve posted everything.

I don’t get calls from prospects who find me on Investopedia, but I do think it has a powerful impact. It certainly helps my website SEO. I’m, like, No. 1 if you’re searching “financial planner in Buffalo, N.Y.” or “Williamsville, N.Y. investment advisor,” that kind of thing. So it helps me out in a tremendous way there.

I get a lot of people who find me on the web and then make an appointment to see me. I just finished up with a couple who paid me a $1,000 financial planning fee and are moving money over to my firm.

Also, now that I’m on Investopedia, I’m getting picked up by other major media outlets. They are looking for content all the time, so they comb through Investopedia to look for articles. My articles have been re-posted on CNBC, NASDAQ and Yahoo Finance. On my website I have “As seen in” and all the logos of the places I’ve been published. I’d always looked at other people and wondered, “How do you ever get published in these things?” And now suddenly I’m published in four of them!

The author’s process

It took me a while to settle into a pattern for writing. At first I tried to get up at five in the morning and do it, but that just didn’t work. So I started blocking out 8:45–9:45 Monday through Thursday and going to a Starbucks to write. I have a mash-up of old school and new school: I write in long-hand on my Surface tablet, then I print that and give it to my assistant, who types it into a Word Document. I was able to write one article a week for a while, and that’s my goal.

Website optimization and best practices

I have a blog page directly on my website—with the comments turned off to be FINRA-compliant. I use FMG with my website. They specialize in building websites for financial advisors, with tons of different templates that you can customize. Best of all, they hook right into my compliance department. I load the article to the appropriate page of the website and it instantly goes to compliance, and they pretty quickly approve it or suggest changes. We get it edited and cleaned up, and then it’s live on the website.

After that I submit it to Investopedia. I used to send articles to Medium also, but I never got much back from them, so I focused on Investopedia. You can’t post on both, you have to pick one or the other. But I can have word-for-word the same article on my blog and Investopedia. They are good in that they put all the important stuff like disclosures and links to my website with my articles. Some of the other media outlets strip out the links back to my website, but others don’t. That’s huge as far as SEO goes.

We also send articles out sort of like an email newsletter. Through FMG and HubSpot I can see who opens the email, who reads the article, things like that. I can’t say enough how much I like to see who is reading what I write. I can see prospects who open the email and give them a call. It’s very useful. We just stopped mailing a physical newsletter last summer. We are committed to sending something quarterly, but now with my blog articles that are going out anyway I’d say we send something to the email list about twice a month. My email list is somewhere between 300-600. It’s growing, but not as fast as I’d like.

Working with Robert Middleton helped me to create a great website, especially for when people reach me through search engines. I often go to the websites of people who write for Horsesmouth, and I really connected with his website. His formula is to have a section that says “Who we work with.” It’s written to describe prospects. What it doesn’t have is a section that says “About us” with a look at the financial advisor and his team. Instead, we talk about the people we serve. You want people to read this and say, “Yeah, that sounds just like me.” I have a bunch of questions about savings and feelings, then it leads to how we can help and the services we offer. Ultimately, if you follow the trail you get to a space where you can put in information to schedule a free “get-acquainted” meeting. I’m getting about two appointments a month from this process, and they transfer in from $700,000 to $1.2 million.

There are other “draws” on the website, too. When you scroll down, a box pops up to say, “Sign up for email updates.” And we have a giveaway, our free guide, “Six Steps to Your Dream Retirement.” I got the guide from Robert, but it hasn’t gotten a lot of downloads recently. I’m working on something new with HubSpot, a wealth management workbook that people can download from the website. It teaches them about net worth and assets, etc. The idea is that once they’ve gone through the workbook they’ll have an idea of whether or not they have a viable retirement.

HubSpot is a suite of tools that help us out with keywords and a bunch of other stuff, especially landing pages. They know how much information to ask for on a landing page. They’re helping us with our workshop marketing to build Facebook ads that drive people to effective landing pages. We want a significant amount of people to come to workshops from social media to reduce mailing postcards and other things. Unfortunately, HubSpot is not cheap—about $10,000 for the year, for everything. It was a big decision that took me a couple of years to finally bite the bullet. I haven’t been disappointed.

My advice

My advice to other advisors is to focus on the website. Who has a phone book anymore? What people are doing is Googling “financial advisor,” and if you’re not on the front page, you’re losing business. Also, it took me way too long to learn some of this stuff. I’m better off paying somebody else who has already figured it out—Robert Middleton, Steve Sanduski, Horsesmouth. Investing in the business is really important.