Some of the Best Free Affiliate Marketing Tools on the Web

Why do I need to Use Affiliate Marketing Tools?

If you chose to go through an affiliate marketing network, they may provide certain tools along with their service.  However, many networks provide limited affiliate marketing tools, and it’s a good idea to access free tools if you’re already spending money on the network.  Some of the best free affiliate marketing tools are listed throughout this article.

A Free Affiliate Marketing Tool for your Campaign

If you’ve chosen to pursue your affiliate campaign, an affiliate marketing tool listed within this section or several tools at a time can help you make your campaign as successful as possible:

Google AdWords Affiliate Marketing Tool

This service provided by Google is one of the most widely accessed tools by attorneys in the internet today.  The affiliate marketing tools within this program can give you an estimate for a keyword’s search volume for the last month, and it can provide other terms that may be a better choice for your campaign.  You can search for search trends, local search volume, and most importantly, keywords in connection to advertiser competition. 

Google Alerts Affiliate Marketing Tool

This is one of the best affiliate marketing tools you can use for your campaign.  You can establish alerts by day, week or month and see what people are saying about the legal products on other websites.  The same applies to your marketing campaign.  If you have a website or blog that is used for affiliated marketing, you can see what readers are saying about your website. 

Firefox SEO Affiliate Marketing Tool

If you use a Firefox browser, this a great free tool for your affiliate marketing campaign.  The toolbar is plug-in and only takes a couple of minutes to download.  With this tool, you can analyze your own legal website’s figure and you can also analyze the statistics on competitive websites.  You can track things such as backlinks, projections, and much more.  This is one of the most popular affiliate marketing tools offered for free. 

Tynt Affiliate Marketing Tool

This is one of the most helpful affiliate marketing tools if you have a large amount of original content on your legal website or blog—especially if you’re writing product reviews and similar articles.  This affiliate marketing tool allows you to see if your content or original pictures were copied.  If so, the tool can provide links to redirect readers back to your legal website. 

This affiliate marketing tool also provides other services such as reports on where your readers are coming from, content reports, and even help with your SEO. 

Tracking202.com

This is one of the best free tools for an attorney in affiliate marketing that relies heavily on pay per click advertising.  The affiliate marketing tools offered by this website allow you to note conversions, but you can track campaigns across several different networks at a time.  You can also use the website to track your return on investment (ROI), and you can find more services as well. 

Traffic Travis Affiliate Marketing Tool

This free tool is highly regarded according to multiple user reviews and provides results comparable to some of the costliest software for SEO.  The tool can give you close estimates for keywords across several different search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and more.  You can also plug in a keyword and see how similar keywords will perform. 

Pingler.com Affiliate Marketing Tool

These tools along with pingomatic.com are some of the best for getting your content indexed and getting it indexed quickly.  For example, if you’ve just launched a new legal website or even a new post on a legal blog, these affiliate marketing tools allow you to alert other blogs and search engines that you’re content has been updated.  These tools will increase how fast readers travel to your website, and the more you update the page, the more you should use these affiliate marketing tools. 

Dropbox Affiliate Marketing Tool

This is a great tool if you you’re constantly traveling and want a secure place to save the things you’re working on during travel.  The service provides several options to the legal affiliate marketer, and the tool even allows you to share your Dropbox with other people if you choose to do so, such as other partners in your firm.  Some versions of this affiliate marketing tool require a fee, but there is a free version as well. 

GoGodes Affiliate Marketing Tool

This is one of the greatest affiliate marketing tools/plug-ins for adjusting your domain names.  If you have a large domain name, you can use this plug-in to reduce the length of your link in order to perform more efficiently on a search engine and look more professional overall. 

Affilorama Affiliate Marketing Tool

This website also provides a large amount of free affiliate marketing tools.  You have access to tools for research and other tools such as a domain locator, an earning calculator, a URL redirect tool, and more.  This service also provides free educational material on affiliate marketing and other advanced affiliate marketing tools for a fee. 

Conclusion: Affiliate Marketing Tools

If you’ve started an affiliate marketing campaign, sometimes the best choice is to start with free affiliate marketing tools and progress to tools that charge a fee once you become accustomed to the practice of affiliate marketing for legal products and services.  You’ll want to start off slow and adjust your content along the way, and the free tools listed within this article will help. 

If you’re going through an affiliate marketing network, they will usually provide you with a large number of affiliate marketing tools—especially if they charge a fee for the service.  If you’re not using a network, you’ll have to decide  the level of your demands.  What kind of things do you need to track, and what are you planning to do with the results?

All the best technology forecasters agree: the future of the web is mobile.  Mobile advertising and marketing are changing the way businesses all over the world sell their products and services.  What's more, when people use their mobile devices, they're using the web differently: no longer confined to web browsers, most mobile users now spend more time using internet-connected apps than their mobile browser.  The time is right to change your mobile marketing and advertising strategy.  If you want to learn how, keep reading this guide.

Why Now is the Time to Learn About Apps

Even two years ago, it would have been pretty strange advice to tell a law firm that learning about apps needed to be part of its mobile advertising and marketing strategy.  In that time, however, smartphones have come to dominate the cellular phone market in the United States.  The two main operating systems for these revolutionary mobile devices, iOS and Android, are largely app based and give developers the opportunity to create purpose-built applications for nearly any business.

As apps have become more popular than traditional browsing, it can be a great time to learn how to use a mobile marketing and advertising strategy in other people's apps.  Ad networks allow you to put your mobile advertising and marketing campaigns into display banner ads that will be shown when people are using their apps.

If you're more ambitious, you might want to try a bigger mobile marketing and advertising project: building an app yourself!  The kind of app that will be most effective for your mobile advertising and marketing purposes will be based firmly in your law firm's niche.  Try to figure out how an app could make your typical client's life easier, and then use one of the easy app building programs available online to create it.

How Mobile Advertising and Marketing Networks Work

Not all apps use the same mobile marketing and advertising networks.  If you want to get in front of the best viewers for your ads, you need to ask some questions about any mobile marketing and advertising network you're planning to use.  

You should find out what their demographics look like, and what apps their ads are displayed on.  A mobile advertising and marketing network that primarily advertises on games played by teenagers probably isn't what you're looking for when it comes to your mobile strategy.  Instead, try to focus on the mobile marketing and advertising companies who are putting banner ads on applications used by adults in the age range your law firm caters to.

The New Trends In Mobile Marketing and Advertising: Social/Local

In addition to looking at mobile advertising and marketing in apps, you should consider advertising in the mobile Facebook app by posting “sponsored stories.”  You can target these stories based on demographics, geolocational boundaries, or even by people who already know the people who are your fans and friends.  Because sponsored stories appear directly in people's news feeds, they are already more than ten times more likely to be clicked on than a traditional sidebar Facebook advertisement on the desktop site.

Facebook is just one of several companies that is now offering better opportunities than ever for marketing to people who are very near to your location.  Local ads are very appealing from a mobile advertising and marketing perspective, because it puts ads right in front of the very people who are most likely to be able to act on them immediately.  As mobile marketing and advertising becomes integrated with smartphone GPS, it has finally become possible to target people specifically when they're close to your office right now.

QR Codes

Quick response (or QR) codes are everywhere today.  You've probably noticed them yourself: the little square boxes of black and white static that you can photograph with a smartphone to go to a website.  Using QR codes in your print advertisements can be an easy way to link your mobile website with your print advertising presence.

You might also consider having a QR code as part of a mobile marketing and advertising promotion.  For example, if your mobile advertising and marketing strategies include advertising a free consultation, the QR code could take potential clients to a website with a contact form to claim this consultation.

Mobile Marketing and Advertising Mistakes to Avoid

Because mobile advertising and marketing is still a young field, a lot of people are still making amateur mistakes—don't be one of them.  Make sure that your mobile marketing and advertising consistently directs to a website that has content that is completely readable for mobile viewers.  

Don't forget to leave your phone number off your mobile website, and make sure that the number appears in text form (which becomes clickable for smartphone users).  If your number is a graphic, smartphone users won't be able to click on it and will have a much more difficult time contacting your office for a consultation.

Finding Mobile Marketing and Advertising Tips

It's likely that this won't be the last article you read on mobile advertising and marketing.  You can find a wide range of other mobile marketing and advertising on lawfirms.laws.com or by doing some Google searches.  It's important to find information on mobile advertising and marketing that is relatively recent—because the mobile market is in a state of perpetual change, what works in 2012 might not be what works in 2015.

When you're looking for mobile advertising and marketing tips, take into account the source where the tips are coming from.  Some articles about mobile marketing and advertising are trying to get you to buy a specific piece of software or use a method you can read about in a certain book (which, of course, costs money to buy).  Those kinds of mobile advertising and marketing articles should always make you suspicious.  Only take advice on your mobile marketing and advertising campaigns from sources that don't have a financial stake in your strategy.

Statistics from 2012 show that nearly there are nearly twice as many attorneys graduating from law school as there are new positions.  That's a competitive legal market, and responding to it requires learning what is niche marketing. Whether you're just looking for a niche marketing definition or you really want to know how to use niche marketing for your law firm, keep reading this guide to find out more.  

What is Niche Marketing: a Niche Marketing Definition

When you're first beginning to learn about niche marketing, it's good to start with a basic niche marketing definition.  So, what is niche marketing?  In brief, niche marketing just describes a business that is narrowing down its focus in order to stand out more from a marketing perspective.

Niche marketing has become a huge factor for businesses in the age of web marketing.  While many businesses never really thought about what is niche marketing before, today the niche marketing definition is of great interest to tens of thousands of marketing professionals.

Narrow, Double Narrow, and Triple Narrow Niche Marketing Definition

For law firms, “what is niche marketing” is a question you need to be asking now.  The niche marketing definition has become of critical importance to attorneys in a pressed job market, and in order to have a sufficiently narrow niche marketing effort, you'll probably need to do some brainstorming.

Let's say that you've started as a criminal defense firm.  What is niche marketing going to look like for you?  Well, criminal defense is already a “single narrow” niche.  That means that it's narrower than a “general practice,” in which just attorneys will serve clients with just about any legal need at all.

The double narrow niche marketing definition is when a niche market has been made, well…”niche-ier.”  For example, let's say you took the same criminal defense practice and decided to make it double narrow.  According to this niche marketing definition, a double narrow practice would be a criminal defense practice that only took DUI cases.

Some attorneys, especially those in small to mid sized cities or rural areas, can stop there.  But if you're in a big city, what is niche marketing but a way to set yourself apart from the competition?  You may already have competitors in your double narrow field, so try narrowing your niche marketing definition even further.  Now you can be a DUI defense law firm that specializes in handling cases for Spanish speaking clients.

What is Niche Marketing Doing for Law Firms?

Understanding the niche marketing definition and how to apply it to your own firm can be a lifesaver in today's economic climate.  Niche marketing is especially important if you're planning to start a new firm or have recently begun a new firm and don't yet have a great deal of name recognition or an existing client base.

By understanding what is niche marketing, you get a head start on your competition whenever you advertise on the web.  The majority of the research people do for attorneys today is through search engines.  By applying the niche marketing definition, your website will become narrower and more likely to attract clients who are searching the web the way real clients search—with long keywords including a location and a specialty practice area.

Making Niche Marketing Work For You

Some attorneys are concerned when they hear the niche marketing definition, because they are worried about putting all their proverbial eggs in one basket.  While it's true that overspecialization can cause a niche marketing effort to backfire, nothing about the niche marketing definition says that you're required to have just one niche.

Try having several niches, which may or may not have significant overlap.  This way, even if one of the niche marketing areas you chose isn't a sustainable practice area, your firm can still thrive as long as the other niches are going strong.

You may want to avoid niche marketing if your advertising and marketing strategies are primarily based in the offline world, unless your niche marketing strategy is very specifically geared to attract people in your immediate area.

Expanding Your Niche Marketing

Maybe you've already known what is niche marketing for a long time, and have even successfully inserted yourself into a local niche.  That's great, but what's wonderful about niche marketing online is that you can actually expand these marketing efforts.

No matter what kind of niches you already have, software exists that can help you find new, similar niches.  Each of these niches can be developed into sections of your website, or even fully separate websites, that are search engine optimized to drive traffic to your website.

When you've begun to expand the niche markets you're working with, you'll want to keep track of which ones are generating more client conversions.  This helps you plan further niche marketing efforts and get rid of the campaigns that are persistently less successful than you had hoped.

What is Niche Marketing for the Future?

Niche marketing trends today include developing niches that take into account the current demographics of the United States.  For example, with a large number of people born during the Baby Boom beginning to retire, attorneys who are learning what is niche marketing may want to begin catering to that demographic.

Another niche marketing trend is marketing toward the increasingly mobile consumer.  In addition to making your website friendly for search engines, you need to have niche marketing landing pages that are easily viewable by mobile consumers.  You'll also want to think about mobile advertising options for your website.

You'll also want to look at hyperlocal niche marketing.  What is niche marketing at the hyperlocal level?  Well, advertising specifically to people who live in very small towns or suburbs that are often overlooked by the large firms can be a great way to do niche marketing online.  This can be a great way to pick up a new client base without even having to slightly alter the kind of law you're practicing.

So you think you want to start advertising on Facebook.  Good for you—only about half of firms have any Facebook presence at all.  Before you begin to advertise on Facebook, you probably want to know whether Facebook advertising really works, and why it's better than other forms of direct advertising.  Keep reading this guide to find out.  You'll learn why some firms have better luck advertising on Facebook than others, and how to advertise on Facebook for different types of potential clients.

Is Facebook Advertising a Good Fit For My Firm?

There are some Facebook marketing gurus who think that advertising on Facebook is the best marketing solution for nearly any company.  When it comes to these gurus, remember that Facebook advertising is their specialty—and that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The truth is that not all law firms will benefit from advertising on Facebook.  If you try to advertise on Facebook as a firm that works primarily on a B2B basis, you may be sorely disappointed in your results.  That's because while advertising on Facebook reaches a huge audience of consumers, it just isn't the venue where most professionals seek out new goods and services.  For these types of firms, LinkedIn may be a much better revenue source than Facebook advertising.

The firms that can advertise on Facebook and do well are usually consumer-focused firms.  Personal injury attorneys of just about any variety can use advertising on Facebook effectively, as can criminal defense attorneys across the United States.

What Should the Goal of My Facebook Advertising Be?

How you decide to advertise on Facebook will influence the kind of advertisements you should buy.  For example, let's say that your primary goal is to gain new clients directly.  If this is the case, you'll probably want to take advantage of the advanced targeting features Facebook offers to identify likely clients, and show them display ads that have direct calls to action for people in the situation that most often brings them to your law offices.

Sometimes, though, you want to advertise on Facebook not for direct client conversions, but to increase brand awareness and develop a referral network.  If this is the case, you may not want to put as many direct ads up.  The direct ads you do have should direct to your Facebook content, rather than offsite.  This kind of social media audience building can be incredibly useful when you want to distribute new content through Facebook and other social media channels.

Facebook Advertising On a Budget

Not all of your advertising on Facebook needs to be flashy sponsored content.  The brand awareness you build when you advertise on Facebook can also be built with basic social media strategies.  You should, at a very minimum, augment any Facebook advertising with additional social media work to encourage more interaction with your social media pages.

For example, instead of just looking at advertising polls, you may want to start using polls that are part of your news feed.  These polls will be seen by your friends and fans, and if they like the poll and answer it, it will show up in their friends' news feeds as well.

Another way to advertise on Facebook for little or no money is to make some videos.  While the initial camera setup may cost you some money, afterward you can make regular video updates that can help your friends and fans know what your firm is up to.  This type of Facebook advertising draws a lot of “likes” and can help increase brand awareness in your local community and beyond.

Targeting Your Facebook Advertising

When you run actual display advertising on Facebook, you'll have to pay money for every click made on your ads.  This means that it's really important to target your Facebook advertising well, so that the clicks are likely to lead to an actual new lawyer-client relationship.  If you advertise on Facebook with poor targeting, you'll be wasting money by paying for impressions and clicks that never really give you any additional value.

For many small firms, the best targeting options available on Facebook are geographic and demographic.  Try advertising to people one zip code at a time—this kind of hyperlocal advertising on Facebook will target only the people who are closest to your office and most able to visit for a consultation.

Demographics are sometimes underutilized by law firms that advertise on Facebook, especially the gender demographic.  There's no reason not to segment your advertising on Facebook for men and for women, especially if you're in an area like family law where gender differences lead to differing legal concerns.

Facebook Advertising for Mobile Users

One of the easiest ways to check up on what your friends, family, and colleagues are doing on Facebook is to use the mobile app.  Mobile web usage is soaring, and advertising on Facebook is one of the best ways to take advantage of app advertising without needing to join any new ad networks.

Recent studies have shown that people now spend more time using their smartphone apps than they do browsing the internet through a traditional mobile browser.  This means that when you advertise on Facebook mobile, you're reaching a crowd that uses traditional search methods less and less.  Because of this, it's often a great idea to do advertising on Facebook if you're already doing some search ads for desktop searches—you'll be reaching crowds that don't always overlap.

The Most Important Facebook Advertising Rule: Change

When you start to advertise on Facebook, it's probably a good idea not to get too comfortable with things the way they are.  Facebook's a new enough website, and its stock has had enough problems, that it's likely we'll continue to see changes to advertising on Facebook for the next several years.

One of the most crucial things you can keep in mind when you advertise on Facebook is that users and advertisers alike have been unable to stop unpopular changes.  You're much better off just learning about new features and advances as they're made, and rolling with the changes instead of clinging to the old way of doing your advertisements.
 

A recent study showed that behavioral targeting outperforms contextual ad targeting by 22 percent.  If your law firm has been looking for a new strategy to target only the people most likely to become conversions, behavioral ad targeting may be just what you need.  Keep reading to find out more about the data behind the transition to behavioral systems, and why behavioral ad targeting isn't just a fad.

Demographics vs. Behavioral Data: Which Works Best?

Today, many attorneys have been able to capitalize on two types of advertising.  The first, contextual ads, involve a user seeing ads that are based on the context of the website they're using.  Contextual ads have been used by many law firms for targeting clients who are likely to need legal assistance.

Lawyers have also relied on demographic data to decide who to show their message to.  Some services, like the direct ad services from both LinkedIn and Facebook, make advertising based on a desired client's demographic criteria easy and fast.

However, when compared to both of these methods for targeting clients, behavioral ad targeting outperforms them handily.  Studies have shown that behavioral advertising can actually be up to twice as effective as advertising based on demographics or context alone.  What's more, studies have shown that very few websites are actually taking advantage of behavioral targeting so far.  This means that you have an opportunity to use behavioral ad targeting before much of your competition.

Using Behavioral Ad Targeting for Segmentation

Today, great advertising campaigns rely on extensive segmentation.  You can't just use the same advertisement for everybody, because their idea of an appealing ad will be different.  What behavioral ad targeting allows you to do is segment how your ads act depending on how someone has behaved in the past.

Ideally, once a website uses sufficient behavioral targeting, two different potential clients will see very different things when they land on the home page.  For instance, someone who has been recently reviewing a lot of websites pertaining to divorce may be shown a deep link to part of your webpage where divorces are discussed thoroughly.

Now, not every website will be able to create totally different user experiences using behavioral ad targeting.  However, you should be thinking about ways in which you can differentiate experience with behavioral targeting to make your potential clients more likely to call.  Depending on a client's behavior, your “call to action” on a landing page may differ.  

You can be as creative as you want to with behavioral targeting: odds are, someone makes the software to help you make your targeting dreams a reality.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost: Behavioral Targeting and Remarketing

When someone looks at your website, more often than not they'll leave it rather than making a call right away.  One of the best ways to turn those hits into clients is to “remarket,” that is, to show them another ad for your law firm after they've already closed your website.

Remarketing is a form of behavioral ad targeting that Google now makes easy.  Using Google's tools, you can now ensure that potential clients see an ad for your firm whenever they search after visiting your website—even if their searches aren't necessarily related to their legal issue.

Science has proven why this method works: the short and long term memory.  Long term memory is best stimulated by repetition, so behavioral ad targeting relies on putting your images and information in front of people more than once.

Avoiding Privacy Invasion Issues

While studies show that behavioral targeting is effective, other studies indicate that Americans are wary about it.  Consumers tend to believe they aren't affected by behavioral targeting, with only 15 percent saying that they would be most likely to purchase a product or service because of behavioral ad targeting.

Because behavioral targeting typically relies upon “cookies” that track a person's internet behavior, there are some ethics concerns.  You should always make sure that people are informed about any cookies being used on your website.

You should also use only the most reputable behavioral targeting services.  If behavioral data leaks through any kind of invasion of privacy, you don't want your client base to be compromised.  The amount of behavioral data that is collected by behavioral targeting services could be a hacker's wildest dream.

It's also very important to avoid scaring off your clients with behavioral ad targeting on your website.  Differentiating user experiences is great, but if your website visitors feel like the amount of information you know is “creepy” or “spooky,” they're likely to leave and never come back, fearing a major invasion of privacy.

Could Behavioral Ad Targeting Land You In Hot Water?

Another cautionary tale comes in the form of a complaint against an attorney who used what he thought were clever behavioral targeting techniques.  He actually tried to capitalize on people who were searching for the services of his biggest competitor, underselling a larger law firm and meeting with some success.

The complaint alleges that this was unethical behavior that should be prohibited by the state bar association.  Because behavioral targeting is relatively new, this is a very rapidly developing field from a legal perspective and you should always check with your state or local bar before beginning a new behavioral ad campaign.

Final Thoughts: The Future of Behavioral Ad Targeting

As behavioral targeting matures, it's likely that the amount of data marketers will obtain will be even greater.  The range of behaviors that you will be able to target in the future will likely be much wider than it is today.

However, as an attorney, you'll have to decide what kind of targeting to use based not only on your bar association's recommendations.  Your own personal sense of ethics and fair play, as well as that of your clients, will be of paramount importance when you're trying to decide how far to go with tracking behavior.  If you're committed to finding a great behavioral targeting solution, you'll be able to find something that works without feeling like an invasion.

The Best Affiliate Marketing can Return Serious Results

Affiliate Marketing Statistics You Should Know

The best affiliate marketing websites, and blogs especially, can generate profits of six figures if they have a large audience and successful marketing strategies. 

According to the Marketing Resource Index, the average cost for every lead associated with marketers mainly focusing on outbound leads is as high as $346.  The cost for inbound markets is only around $135. 

How to: Affiliate Marketing Starting Tips

1. If you’re just starting a campaign, you need to do your research first of all.  The best affiliate marketing promotes the best products out there before they become widely accessed by the public.  Timing is the key, so you’ll want to look for trends for legal products and services in the future. 

2. After you’ve chosen what products or services you’re going to market, you’ll have to choose a domain and a webhost.  A blog is an easy way to start

the best legal affiliate marketing campaign, and according to the Marketing Research Index, budgets for blogging have increased from 9% in 2009 to as much as 21% in 2012.

3. One of the strongest recommendations in the “how to” of affiliate marketing is to create different pages or even set up several different websites or blogs, especially for legal marketing.  The best affiliate marketing campaigns will clump together similar products on the same website and devote another website or blog to other types of products or keep from starting a campaign on the other website.

How to: Affiliate Marketing Content Tips

1. One of the best affiliate marketing strategies is to include product reviews on your website—especially if you’ve used the products personally.  Be honest within the reviews, and focus on how you set up the reviews.  Make the headlines compelling in order to try and make the readers read further on.  Highlight and bold important facts for the readers who will always skim the articles. 

2. Another important point in the “how to” of affiliate marketing is to convince the readers that they need the product!  For example, have you used the

product or service yourself because you cannot offer similar services? If so, how has it made your life easier, added to your knowledge, and more?  Don’t be pushy though.  The best affiliate marketing will present truthful facts and testimony. 

3. The best affiliate marketing is updated a couple of times every week.  If you’re writing product reviews on a platform such as a blog, you’ll want to write AT LEAST 2 articles every week.  The articles don’t necessarily need to be long; they just need to get the information across in order to enhance your chances for a lead and a sale.  Because the majority of companies use PPS compensation, you need to generate as many leads as possible.

4. Another important point in the “how to” of affiliate marketing is adjusting your content to your audience.  If you find that readers are coming to your websites and they suggest products that they want you to cover, use the advice.  Offer readers a chance to give you feedback so you can adjust to their preferences.

How to: Affiliate Marketing and Tracking your Results

1. You’ll want to monitor the results of your campaign every single day.  Use tracking software such as AdSense or other similar tools to track the results on your webpage, but don’t change the content immediately—especially if you’ve just begun your campaign.  The best affiliate marketing campaign will make adjustments not only to content but the structure of the website in order to bring in more traffic. 

2. Track the amount of leads you’re creating.  The more leads you have, the more you increase your chances for a sale for the merchant’s product.  A general rule in the “how to” of affiliate marketing is that you’ll receive a sale for every 100 leads that you generate.  The content of your legal website can increase these figures, but the percentage is standard even within the largest and best affiliate marketing campaigns.

How to: Affiliate Marketing and the Keystone of Social Networking

Compared to even the largest companies, smaller firms are spending more on social media affiliate marketing in percentage.  There are several advantages and add-ons that social networking can add to even the best affiliate marketing campaigns, and some specific advantages are listed below:

1.       Trust: the most important rule in the “how to” of affiliate marketing is the trust factor.  With a social ad or even a product review that is posted to your wall, you automatically have the trust of your readers because they are your friends, coworkers, peers, etc.

2.       Simple: not only is setting up an ad on Facebook easy, it’s easier to promote than on a website.  A social ad or product review is perhaps the best affiliate marketing because you can reach a huge audience in a small amount of time. 

3.       Targeting: another reason why Facebook offers some of the best affiliate marketing is because you can target your ads based upon age, location, and most important, interests. 

4.       Related Content: Facebook will automatically adjust ads based upon content as well.  If Facebook users are reading certain pieces of material or searching for certain types of services, advertisements will appear that relate to those queries. 

How to: Affiliate Marketing Conclusion

The best affiliate marketing campaigns can take years to develop.  You need to be patient while starting the campaign because you don’t want to adjust your material too fast or you won’t develop a group of readers that are devoted to your website or your social network.  As mentioned above, the best affiliate marketing strategy will include new material on a frequent basis, and the material will be relevant to your readers and area of law. 

Social Media Marketing for your Lawfirm

Some law firms today already are engaging with social media and marketing in innovative, fresh ways.  However, many law firms are still left asking the question: “What is social media marketing?”  Over 90 percent of small law firms already use social media in some way—like having Facebook or LinkedIn profiles—but social media and marketing are currently only being combined by about half of firms.  

Social media marketing can project your firm's brand into people's homes in an authentic, participatory way.  This guide will show you how social media marketing can put your firm ahead of your competitors and answer your question of “what is social media marketing?” by familiarizing you with some of the basic social media plaforms available today.

What is Social Media Marketing on Facebook?

What do your 90 year old great aunt, your first crush from high school, your ex-colleague and his cat have in common?  Probably nothing—except that they all have Facebook profiles.  If you've hesitated to get a Facebook account for yourself or your law firm, it's time to realize that resistance is futile: you will be assimilated into the Facebook universe if you want to combine social media and marketing.  So what is social media marketing on Facebook?  What does it look like?

The simple answer is that there is no simple answer.  The presence you build using Facebook will depend completely on the kind of image that you want to project with your social media marketing.  “What is social media marketing?” can be answered for some firms with a steady stream of Facebook posts and occasional comments.  Others use their Facebook walls to link blog content, run polls, and interact with potential clients.

While 83 percent of lawyers today are using blogging, only 57 percent are using Facebook for their social media and marketing efforts.  If you have a blog already, adding a Facebook presence is one of the fastest ways to get people to read the social media marketing content on your blog.

One of the key answers to “what is social media on Facebook?” is this: it's incorporating yourself into a community.  What the nature of that community is depends entirely on your firm, but your social media marketing efforts on Facebook should always focus on participating and listening, not just spewing out content.

What is Social Media Marketing on Twitter?

140 characters may not sound like it's enough to communicate something useful, but maximizing your social media and marketing presence means starting to economize your words.  Short and to the point is the name of the game, and Twitter posts are confined to just a few characters more than a typical text message.

When lawyers ask what is a social media marketing strategy on Twitter that works, they are often surprised to find that the most effective tweets aren't the longest ones.  In order to have the best social media marketing, you'll want to try to keep your tweets under 100 characters.  Think of this aspect of social media and marketing as helping to hone your writing skills—after all, brevity and clarity are great qualities in writing offline as well.

Try to confine your Twitter posts to four or fewer per day.  Lawyers who start by asking “what is social media marketing?” often overextend themselves with social media marketing efforts once they get started.  Too many Twitter posts a day, though, will lead to your firm being followed by fewer people, and your social media and marketing efforts may go unnoticed.

What is Social Media Marketing on Blogs?

To have the best results from social media marketing, you'll need to strategize first.  This requires thinking hard about what your social media and marketing strengths are.  For example, let's say you're a solo practitioner, and also a great writer who can concisely explain legal topics for your clients.  A blog may be one of the best things you can do to drive your web traffic.

If you want to know what is a social media marketing strategy that works, you'll need to know one thing above all: the internet hates a fake.  If your content is perceived as being phony or too sales-oriented, it doesn't matter how great your other social media and marketing efforts are—they'll be doomed to fail.  It's important to make sure that your blog entries seem genuine, and that they're not too dry.  Giving your blog a real voice, a real character, can ensure that you seem different from your competition (a key part of social media marketing).

What is Social Media Marketing Analytics?

Once you've moved beyond asking “what is social media marketing?” you can start asking “how can I make sure my social media and marketing goals are being met?”  Because social media marketing has exploded in recent years, new analytics tools are being developed constantly to help you interpret the new web traffic you receive as a result of your marketing efforts.

A lot of small firms are not well equipped to analyze their social media and marketing results.  If you need help with figuring out what your data means, a number of social media marketing services today specialize in crunching numbers for law firms.

What is Social Media Marketing Reputation Management?

When your firm combines social media and marketing, you'll need to keep an eye on how you're perceived online.  Social media marketing can help you identify potential issues with client satisfaction.  For example, you can maintain consistent monitoring of client review websites, including Yelp, so that you know about any negative reviews you have received.

Many social media marketing firms sell full reputation management services that can help you build a great reputation online and minimize the consequences of negative reviews.  These services are a great alternative if you don't have the ability to hire someone to work full-time at your firm handling social media and marketing issues like reputation management.

Advertising with Facebook is one of the hottest trends in law firm marketing today. Less than ten percent of firms were doing any Facebook advertising whatsoever just 3 years ago (not even having a firm page!). Today, over half of lawyers have a Facebook presence and more are starting to use Facebook advertising every day. Keep reading to find out six different answers to the question “why advertise on Facebook?” that will make you think.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #1: Everybody's Doing It

For many lawyers, advertising with Facebook might have been a waste of money as recently as just a few years ago. The number of Facebook users has been soaring every year since the website began, and only now is it popular enough for it to become an advertising method for marketing to a wide range of demographics.

Today, it's not just college students who are using Facebook. With nearly a billion users looking at Facebook ads worldwide, Facebook advertising is now a way to reach out not only to young people, but to anyone looking to reconnect with old friends or talk to family members and colleagues.

In other words, the answer to the question “why advertise on Facebook?” has changed significantly for most law firms. Almost every forecaster sees Facebook advertising as likely to maintain its relevance for many years to come. As long as advertising with Facebook puts you in front of the biggest B2C audience in the world, you'll want to keep working with it.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #2: Why Facebook Beats Google AdWords

Maybe you already have a pay per click strategy on Google that seems to work. If so, you may be wondering—why advertise on Facebook instead of just continuing with business as usual on Google?

Business owners who are used to doing most of their web advertising with pay per click Google AdWords are often excited by the precision targeting abilities that Facebook advertising has. When you start advertising with Facebook, you don't need to think about what kinds of keywords your target market is looking for—all you have to know is who your target market is.

If you know, for example, that most of your clients come from your zip code and the six zip codes that surround it, you can narrow your focus so that your Facebook advertising is only displayed to people who live in those zip codes. You can also segment your advertising with Facebook by gender, age, and location.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #3: Your Advertising Generates Extra Buzz

When you start running direct ads with another advertising service, like Google AdWords, it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to show their friends your ad. But with Facebook advertising, this kind of thing happens all the time. Advertising with Facebook gives you the ability to have your ads seen not only by their initial viewers, but also by the people those viewers are connected with.

If your Facebook advertising starts generating “likes” and comments, its visibility will increase substantially. After you have been advertising with Facebook for some time, you'll be able to figure out which ads work best for generating the kind of buzz that your law firm needs in this competitive economic climate.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #4: Mobile Advertising Results

When you do Facebook advertising today, you have more options than ever. Because mobile traffic to Facebook doesn't look at sidebar ads, you can now start advertising with Facebook directly to mobile customers with organic-looking “sponsored stories.”

Why advertise on Facebook Mobile? When you pay for a sponsored story, your advertising with Facebook will get click through rates that are more than ten times better than rates for browser ads. What's more, when you design your landing pages to be conversion friendly, you can take people from Facebook advertising to consulting over the phone in just seconds.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #5: Easy Results Tracking

Not all Facebook advertising works. Why advertise on Facebook if you're not keeping track of the results that you're getting? As soon as you start advertising with Facebook, you need to start testing your ads and applying what you've learned.

The great part about Facebook advertising is that Facebook has simplified results tracking and is great at showing you the information you need to know. Not only can you easily track your key performance indicators when you start advertising with Facebook, you can also ask Facebook to do a lot of the work for you.

Facebook advertising even allows you to decide what your objective is, and can automate a great deal of your bidding if you don't want to outsource but don't have the time to babysit clicks and bids all day long. While this may not be the most cost effective method of advertising with Facebook, it takes a lot of the guesswork out and lets you get back to practicing law.

Why Advertise on Facebook, Reason #6: Beating Your Competition

Let's face it: most consumers only have room to “like” one or two law firms at most. That means that the best way to make sure your firm is liked better than your competitor is simple: get there first. Start advertising with Facebook sooner than your competition does, and you'll be the only game in town. If you delay your Facebook advertising campaign, your competitors will get to those potential clients first.

If your competition is already advertising with Facebook, you have a tougher road ahead of you but it's not impossible. Try to identify the weaknesses in your competitor's marketing strategy. Remember that just having a Facebook page isn't enough to really be strong marketing: is your competition doing all they can do in terms of creating new content, using polls, and asking open ended questions to fans and friends?

If not, there's still room for you to do something different. Different is what the internet notices, and you're better off trying to pick up where your competition left off than going head to head with similar marketing efforts.