Financial advisor candidates will need to pay more to take securities licensing exams starting June 1, the North American Securities Administrators Association announced.

“To build online influence in the age of social media, you must build a powerful online presence and consistently publish your thought leadership insights through a professional blog site,” says Stephanie Sammons, founder of Wired Advisor, a company that helps advisors set up search engine optimized blogs.

Here's how one advisory firm is going after the at first glance less-than-obvious client – by targeting the most obvious client of all.

Wealth management, broadly speaking, is seeing impressive growth. But “broadly speaking” is a frustratingly vague term and most of your clients are not among the economic winners of late.

“As investor confidence grows and perceptions of wealth management firms improves, so do advisor perceptions of their firm, particularly among independent advisors,” the J.D. Power study reported.

“We have found that people in Gen Y not only said they are highly disciplined, they really are more highly disciplined than people in older generations,” Bill Taylor, vice president of financial planning at Northwestern Mutual, said in an interview. “It might be because they’ve seen their parents hurt badly when stocks fell in 2008, because of the decline of defined benefit plans, or just because young people have access to more information today.”

Beacon Pointe is actively looking for more advisory firms with a CPA tie-in as it plots an expansion strategy of reaching 35 to 40 offices around the country in the next 10 years, Cooper says.