Starting this week, we will be building out a new, improved advisor finder tool. While the FA map was great, the next iteration will allow visitors to delve deeper and create more accurate lists of advisors. The matching tool will show a list of all advisors sorted by geography and minimum account size. Visitors can whittle down this list by selecting from a set of filters. 

We will be testing this and gathering feedback in the next two months. Our goal is to launch it by March. 

The next issue of the directory will run Dec 2 in Barron's and the following week in WSJ. The theme is talking to your children about money. We'd like your input into topics for the upcoming February and May issues. If you have suggestions for what theme(s) we should focus on, email advisor.editors@barrons.com

Barron's is making a few tweaks the homepage to make the rankings and advisor directory more visible to Barron's readers. In two weeks the "advisor" module will now be "above the fold" – the term for content that doesn't require any scrolling. It is your direct input that helped sell this change to the development team, so keep the feedback flowing. 

The Hall of Fame is online. To see the full list visit: barrons.com/hall. The good news is that we've added this honor to your page for any visitors. Please let me know if we missed toggling this listing on your page and congrats. 

Everyone cares about ROI, but once in a while you get to do well by doing good. You may have seen our article in the May Directory on teacher annuities. The crusaders featured in the article, Tony and Dina Isola have credited it with helping jumpstart an investigation by the New York Department of Financial Services. Click here for the WSJ article.

Many of you are print traditionalists. But, we're pushing hard to upgrade our rankings online to expand the impact of our lists beyond the traditional readership. We've made some small improvements to rankings so it's easier for a serious investor to compile prospects across lists. We will be adding some new copy to flesh out these pages for visitors and make it easier to get to the rankings from the barrons.com homepage. 

Hopefully you've been able to check out the articles from the August Advisor Guide online. If so, you may have noticed that we're are promoting the directory in every article. This is another example of how we're doing our best to get you in front of readers on Barron's and beyond and associating our ranked advisors with high quality thought leadership on investing and wealth management. 

This year we had our design team redo out top advisor logo. Ive been seeing them used in email and logos and asked the team to go back and make some subtle revisions to the logos are cleaner in smaller sizes. 

The top Indie logo will be available for download after on Sept 19. All of the other logos are available at 
barrons-conferences.com/logos.html

As we're putting together the directory, I'm reminded about vanity links. In short, a vanity link is a shortcut url that substitutes for a more complicated one. For example, Barron's uses barrons.com/fa as a shortcut for barrons-conferences.com/guide.html.  

For those of you with onerous web addresses, it might be worth having a conversation with your marketing people to see if you can get something more succinct. For example, your actual url might be ubs.com/phoenix/fa_americas/hudsonwealthmanagement but it is possible to have them create ubs.com/hudson as a shortcut. This link can be used in your printed materials, and adds a little marketing polish.

The same is true for email addresses. Firms assign full-name emails by default, but is technically possible for you to have a shorter version. For example, david.m.hudson@ubs.com can be customized to david@ubs.com. It's a small thing in the grand scheme, but it does show some marketing savvy and adds a touch of humanity to an impersonal medium.

You may have seen our weekly FA newsletter. It features insights from top-ranked advisors and industry stand outs. Here are a few self-serving insights from those Q+As on marketing, promotion and growth. 

Invest in the business. I literally have, for 35 years, taken half of my earnings and put them back in the business. If we’ve got a 40% payout, I always lived on a 20% payout. We got a 50% payout? I live on 25%. And I made the business really valuable.
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The problem you have with people investing in their business is that they want instant gratification. We’ve probably spent $13 to $15 million just in marketing the last 10 years. It takes a while. But here’s the thing. If you go to college, it’s going to cost you a hundred thousand bucks for a state school. You’re working five or six years before you begin to recover the cost of that college education. It’s the same as marketing. You invest the money in marketing and after four or five years of this is exponential growth. (FULL ARTICLE)

In l953, the Ore-Ida potato company … had tons and tons of potato scraps and were wondering if there was anything that could be done with them. So they came up with an internal contest, in which folks came up with different concepts. The Tater Tot won the day. When they put the Tater Tots out on the market, they priced them as cheaply as they made them. And nobody bought them.

When they later re-launched the Tater Tots, all they did—literally all they did—was raise the price. They didn’t change the packaging, they didn’t change the name, they didn’t change the way they marketed it. They raised the price, and Tater Tots became their second-best selling item. Today those sales rival French fries, and you’re even seeing Tater Tots at Michelin 3-star restaurants.

We see our deep discounters at the firm gathering less assets than those who price close to the average. And we see the people who are priced in the average, but have great value, doing a better job of convincing clients to come join them. (FULL ARTICLE)