Video Transcript

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Welcome to the GetNetSet website building video series for tax and accounting professionals where we cover all the essentials of creating a site that helps you grow your business. As part of our series on adding self-help resources to your site, we’re going to talk today about posting tax articles and tax tips. Educating site visitors is one of the most effective ways to build a bond with them.

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The Internet has trained people to expect quick answers to all kinds of questions. If your site has a library of articles and tips on common tax issues, it gives visitors a strong sense that they can count on you for simple matter of fact guidance. It’s a classic case of giving away just enough insight to persuade someone to reach out to you for more.

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So let’s talk about goals when posting tips and other articles. First, you want to convince readers that they can trust you as a go to source of accurate and useful tax information. So make sure to post about topics of interest to the clients you most often serve and always double check your facts. Second, never give specific tax advice in a self-help resource to avoid the appearance of giving specific advice,

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use hedge words and phrases like “in general,” “typically,” or “you might qualify” and so on. Think of the article as presenting possibilities, not conclusions. And then third, you, of course, want self-help materials to nudge visitors toward contacting you and setting up an appointment. However, they should never have the feeling that they’re getting a hard sell. One common strategy is to introduce enough information to give the reader an impression of both the importance and the complexity of the issue.

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Then you can simply point out how a tax professional can help. So let’s take a look at a few different articles and tips of different lengths and see these principles in action. First up, we have a brief tax tip style of article on cryptocurrency. It lays out a number of situations that carry some form of IRS reporting requirement.

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And then if we read down further, notice this sentence: “Other crypto transactions may involve a taxable capital gain.” So there is our hedge word right there. And then the article wraps up by noting that a tax pro can help you sort through all of these rules. Moving on, we come to this mid-length article on the Home Office deduction, a topic that has gained a lot of attention with the rise of the gig economy.

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Now, this article includes a higher level of detail. You can see that it describes some specific IRS rules for the deduction. And notice, again, the hedge phrase “in most cases” used here. The article also explains the difference between tracking actual expenses and using a simplified method to calculate the Home Office deduction, hinting at the extensive recordkeeping required in order to deduct actual expenses.

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And once again, the article gently points out how seeking help from a tax professional can help ensure that you comply with all the rules while claiming the largest deduction available to you. So in a subtle way, when you post articles like these, you’re not so much sending people off to handle all the computations on their own, as showing why you’re the right person to do it for them.

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Going one step further now we have this long form article for business taxpayers on depreciation. And this is, of course, a very involved topic. We can see that there’s a table explaining useful life. There are worked out examples, but we still get our hedge phrases like here “in most cases” and “for some property” and so on. And then again, peppered throughout the article is advice that you should probably work with a pro.

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So the big remaining question is where should these types of resources go on your site? At GetNetSet, we recommend a few different possible approaches. As you can see, we have a demo homepage here. And if you have a lot of self-help materials, you can have a menu heading for resources as we show here. You can also include self-help articles in a tax newsletter, which might look like this.

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And we have another video where we talk about a tax newsletter in more detail. In addition to these ideas or as an alternative, you can post tips or short articles on your social media pages. You can then link your social media profiles back to your website. In this way, you can use brief self-help content as sort of a funnel that guides people away from all the distractions of social media to the more focused space of your website.

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So that’s just a quick overview of how tax articles and tips can help you build a valuable self-help section for your website. To see more content examples, you can check out the other videos in this series or ask us about our tax content website packages. For now, thank you for watching and we will see you in the next video.