Let's face it: it's not an easy time to enter the legal profession.  Recent law school grads have faced unprecedented amounts of unemployment in the field—in some states, like California, as few as one third of law school grads have jobs a year after graduation.  If you've decided to hang a shingle in response to the sluggish economy, you already know you're facing an uphill battle.  This guide will help you put together a marketing plan that will get you a head start in the law firm game.  Plenty of attorneys can be successful at marketing their own firm—if they keep these simple rules in mind, they'll be well ahead of their competition.

#1: Know The Laws About Advertising In Your State

It's critical when you're getting started with a marketing plan to understand how the laws regarding legal marketing and advertising in your state will affect what you can and can't do.  You don't want to face a reprimand from the bar association because you've violated the law.  Most state bar associations publish guidelines about what kinds of advertising attorneys are allowed to use, and what kinds of statements can appear in those advertisements.

Because state laws can vary significantly, you may face additional issues if your practice straddles a state line and you're licensed to practice in multiple states.  If you're ever in doubt about an advertising issue, most bar associations offer free guidance to attorneys who have questions.  It's better to ask your bar association than to make a costly mistake that damages your bottom line and your professional reputation.

#2: Understand Your Location And How It Affects Marketing

Not all locations are the same when it comes to law firm marketing strategies.  In order to be a successful new attorney, you'll need to give some thought to how the unique features of your location will affect how you should market your practice.  For example, if you live in an economically depressed area and your law firm is in a low income neighborhood, you may want to base your marketing materials on price points.  In places where there are a lot of technologically inclined young people, online marketing is more important than in areas where the population is largely aging with low levels of computer literacy.

#3: Don't Be Afraid To Go Offline

If you're only working on online marketing, you're losing half the battle already.  Don't hinder yourself by staying too much in the virtual world.  It's critical to get into your community and actually interact with the people in it.  When you start to market in the offline world, whether by talking to people at seminars and in community groups, or by sponsoring local events or teams, you're making the kinds of connections that can lead to trusted referrals.

#4: Watch Court Cases and Successful Attorneys

One of the best things that you can do for your career as a new lawyer is to watch masters at work.  If your practice ever involves courtroom work—and if you're hanging your shingle, it should, at least some of the time—you need to understand how to interact with your local judges and who the best attorneys are in your area.  This kind of reconnaissance can ensure that you have the best possible chance of winning cases for your clients right off the bat.

There's no substitute for real courtroom experience, but watching trials is really the second best thing.  By watching, you can see what to do and what not to do in a way that will stick with you.  You may even be able to make connections with people in the legal industry who can advance your career.

#5: Take On Pro Bono Work

If you're not finding a lot of paying clients and you can afford to keep the lights on a while longer, try taking some work for free.  This can make it so that you have the kinds of client testimonials and experience that paying clients will take into account when choosing who to hire.  Make sure that you're not taking on so much pro bono work that you don't have time for paying clients if they happen to come along.  At the same time, don't be too proud to work for free—often, a client who has no money may still be able to give a referral to your firm to people who can pay.

#6: Don't Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

Whether you're being paid for your work or not, you should never take a case that you don't actually know how to handle.  Learning on the job is one thing, but making mistakes in the law can be incredibly serious for clients and attorneys alike.  Make sure that you have a good grasp on the law surrounding your client's case before deciding to take them on.  If you don't, you could find yourself overwhelmed and unable to continue representing your client.

#7: Find A Good Partner

While being a lone wolf may sound appealing, many attorneys find that they have more success starting out with one or more partners.  Having partners can mean an ability to specialize in a wider range of cases without sacrificing understanding of the law.  Make sure that if you find a partner, you clearly discuss your expectations for the partnership ahead of time—a bad partner can be significantly worse than none at all.

#8: Make Customer Service Your Top Priority

Even following every piece of marketing advice won't get you the kind of response that you want—unless you also follow good business practices.  Customer service is critical to keeping clients and finding new ones.  Make sure that you're putting your all into customer service on a daily basis.  Often, the little things, like making yourself available at more hours than your competition, can set you apart in a way that will help you get more clients in the future.

There's no single perfect marketing plan that will work for every single law firm in every specialty area.  However, there are many ways to create a marketing plan that will never—or almost never—work for your firm.  In this guide, we'll take a look at seven different ways that many law firms mess up their marketing plans.  These common pitfalls can bring down even an otherwise good marketing plan, so make sure you check this guide before deciding to implement a new strategy.

#1: Set Unrealistic Expectations

One of the worst things that attorneys can do in their marketing plans is to set expectations that they have no way of achieving.  Unrealistic expectations are almost always caused by attorneys who don't take the market into account.  This is 2013, not 2007—you can't expect to have the same business levels today that you might have had if your firm started out years ago.  Right now, many attorneys are competing for a limited number of clients, and you'll need to understand that to plan effectively.

Unrealistic expectations can also be reflected in attorneys who think that they can outcompete much more experienced competitors without anything value added.  You'll need to work extremely hard to build your business at the start—it's a very unrealistic expectation to think that you can implement a marketing plan at a new law firm without working long hours.

#2: Do It All Yourself

There's no need to do all of your marketing work on your own.  It can often be a good idea to consult with a marketing firm to help you implement your marketing plan.  If your firm is too small to hire a part or full time social media coordinator or marketing director, you should consider discussing your needs with marketing firms that specialize in helping attorneys market their services.

Doing everything on your own may seem like a good way to save money, but the truth is that it can often end up costing much more in the long run.  The difference is in lost business.  While you're still using trial and error to figure out how to make your marketing plan work, a firm that used a marketing firm to help them will already have taken off and will be well ahead of you in search rankings.

#3: Use Puffery and Overselling

New attorneys are often tempted to oversell their experience, making a few months of a law school clinical experience seem like a full time job with extensive experience.  In addition to being unethical, this kind of puffery is likely to lead to clients being dissatisfied.

There's nothing wrong with just starting out—you're better off being honest about being young and new than having it found out later.  You can't fool all of the people all of the time, and you're better off underselling yourself and impressing your clients beyond what they could have expected.

#4: Rely Exclusively on Paid Ads and Paid Search

When attorneys begin using online marketing techniques, they often initially rely on paid advertisements through search keywords.  However, if you rely completely on these methods for your marketing, you will soon find that they may not be as fruitful as you had hoped.  Only a small number of people actually click through paid search advertisements.  Organic search results are much more effective over the long haul.

However, they're also harder to get.  This means that the ideal strategy involves initially buying a larger number of paid ads, and then slowly ramping down your paid advertising keyword presence as your website becomes better in organic search results.

#5: Keep Your Website The Same

One of the ways that Google can evaluate a website for quality content is by checking when the website was most recently updated.  If your website is kept the same for a very long time, you'll have several problems.  For one thing, clients may see an older website without recent updates as being, for all intents and purposes, dead—they may wonder if you're even still available to call.  It's also important to make sure that you're updating any time the law changes, so that you're not giving potential clients outdated or possibly misleading information.

Second, when Google sees that someone has not updated their website in some time, it starts lowering your search rankings in favor of content that is more recently updated.  This means that you'll slowly decline in popularity compared to your competitors—and that's a surefire route toward a law firm that can't remain competitive in the increasingly tight legal market.

#6: Be Boring and Generic

The best way to have a marketing plan fail in 2013 is to look and sound exactly like everybody else.  Without any kind of brand presence that makes you unique, your marketing plan will be dead on arrival.  You need to focus on something that makes you who you are, whether that's your specific experience, a legal specialty that you focus on, or the great customer service and business practices at your firm.  Boring websites and boring marketing won't attract customers—don't waste your time or money creating something uncreative.

#7:  Bury Your Head in the Sand

You should routinely do analytics on your web marketing strategies so that you can see what's working and what isn't.  If you're burying your head in the sand, rather than trying to listen to the feedback you're getting both implicitly and explicitly, you'll be setting yourself up for a failing marketing plan.

Burying your head in the sand can often take the form of simply assuming that your fantastic marketing idea is working, even without any direct evidence that this is so.  Don't let your confirmation bias get in the way of the facts—the sooner your analytics prove something is or isn't working, the more confidence you'll have in the next decisions you make about your marketing plan.

It's become a much trickier world in just the last year for lawyers who want to build link popularity.  When 2012 started, it was still very possible to do link popularity building through automated services, which could get thousands of inbound links for your site in a matter of hours or days.  Now, Google has penalized over ten percent of websites for using these link popularity building techniques.  Today, if you want to build link popularity, you need a new strategy.  Here are seven strategies for building link popularity that are proven to get positive results without the risk of being sandboxed.

Building Link Popularity Tip #1: Networking Isn't Just For Computers

There's no reason that you shouldn't use your in person connections to help in your link popularity building efforts.  Your friends, neighbors, and relatives may be some of the best resources in helping you build link popularity when you have a brand new firm website.  

It tends to look suspicious to Google and other search engines when small, new, unknown websites suddenly start building link popularity at an incredibly fast rate.  If you work on link popularity building on this small, personal scale first, you'll learn a lot about building effective links and you won't tip Google off to the fact that you're using any artificial techniques.

Keep in mind that Google will penalize you if you build link popularity with too many reciprocal links, in which someone links to you and you link back.  However, as long as you're making sure at least some of your link popularity building is coming from one way links, you should be fine at this scale.  Usually, Google only punishes people who are found to be building link popularity through automated reciprocal linking schemes that generate many links every day.

Building Link Popularity Tip #2: Use Your Social Networks

Today, there are the friends you have in person and then there are the friends you have on Facebook and LinkedIn.  If you're already part of social networking websites, you need to use them as part of your strategy for link popularity building.  Because social networking websites tend to have a high Google PageRank, they are among the best ways to build link popularity.

Social networks can make building link popularity easier in several ways.  For one thing, you can use your social networks to do link popularity building of the same type that you'd do with in-person friends and relatives.  For another, you can actually create your own links back to your website using Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.  Try not to build link popularity too quickly using these sites, because if Google notices that all your links come from the same sites it is likely to penalize you.

Building Link Popularity Tip #3: Branch Into New Websites

If your current link popularity building efforts aren't working as well as you had expected or hoped, it may be because you're using websites that aren't as popular as they once were.  You should continuously strive to branch into different sites as part of your effort to build link popularity.

Try checking out a list of the most popular websites in order to see which ones you should establish an account with next.  If you're not building link popularity on at least some high PageRank websites, Google tends to view this as a sign of artificial link building and may decide that your website is breaking the rules, leading to penalties.  

Building Link Popularity Tip #4: Check Out the Blogs

The blogosphere is a great place to find new websites to post on and to build link popularity for your site.  Don't just use your own blog for building link popularity.  Your link popularity building will go much more smoothly if you start building a list of blogs that you enjoy so that you can comment on them frequently.

Don't include a link back to your website on every comment you make.  Doing this is a surefire way to be identified as a spammer.  Instead, only build link popularity by posting links in comments when the link is actually relevant and can help the person find more needed information.

Building Link Popularity Tip #5: Answer Legal Questions

A common method of link popularity building for lawyers is to use websites like Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers, Reddit's AskReddit forums, or some other question and answer website to link their website through.  If you post an answer to a question and a link to your website would genuinely help, this is a great and beneficial way to build link popularity for your site.

Make sure if you're doing this type of link popularity building that you're not giving actual legal advice for specific cases.  You should keep your answers framed as a matter of law, rather than trying to advise someone about a decision they're making.

Building Link Popularity Tip #6: Make a New App

One of the best ways to get people to pay attention to your website and build link popularity is to make an app.  Several app builders now exist that can help you make a new app and put it into app stores as quickly as possible.  By making a useful app, you can attract reviews that will help you in link popularity building.

Building Link Popularity Tip #7: Design Links for Virality

Ideally, you want the link popularity building efforts you're engaging in to combine with a viral spread of your content all over the web by other people.  In order to make sure that your links have viral appeal, you may want to consult with a marketing firm that has experience with this type of marketing.  Overall, viral sensations tend to be unusual and relatively short—no one has time to read or watch and then circulate content that just takes too long to view.  You should also consider using humor in your videos and text content, which can be a key way to spread your message virally.

One aspect of law firm marketing that your firm may not have given much thought to is information security.  However, according to recent studies, hacking and other breaches of information security are actually costing companies over $1 billion every year.  You can't afford to be the next victim of information security leaks.  In this guide, we'll look at how you can implement an online marketing plan without risking an embarrassing or costly hacking incident.

#1: Have Longer, More Secure Passwords

This seems very easy, but when vast password leaks happen, it invariably turns out that the most common passwords are incredibly insecure—things like “12345,” “password,” and “Password.”  If you're not yet using very secure passwords, consider that even adding a few additional characters to the end of your password can make it substantially more difficult to break.

Many services today will actually limit your password choices, trying to ensure that you choose a password with enough special characters and numbers that it will be difficult for a hacker to guess.  However, you should also make sure that your longer password is something you can remember easily.  One of the best ways to make a password that is both secure and easy to remember is to abbreviate a sentence that you'll remember for a long time.  It can be a saying, a favorite movie quote, anything—just use the first initials of each word, perhaps substituting an occasional number or special character where you feel they'll be memorable (like 1 for I, and so on).  For example, “Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all,” becomes “l1f1jftdta.”

#2: Use Secure Software

How do you know if the software you're using is secure?  It's not always easy to tell.  In general, the more commonly used a piece of software is, the more likely it is to be secure—but the more likely it is that hackers are trying to find their way around its security systems.  The two ways that you can choose to deal with this issue are to use programs that are less common (a solution commonly called “security through obscurity”) or to only use programs from companies that have good track records of keeping data safe.

#3: Avoid “Social Engineering” Hacking

Even if you have fantastic passwords and great software, they might not be enough to save you from a breach if a social engineer comes to your workplace.  These are hackers who specialize in charming others and in some way misrepresenting themselves in order to gain access to your data.  The best way to avoid social engineering hackers is simply to be aware of their existence.  Make sure that any staff who have been given your social media passwords are aware of the existence of these hackers, and that they understand no passwords are to be given to anyone without authorization of specific people in your law firm.

A common guise for a social engineering hacker is as a tech support person from a company whose software you use.  The hacker comes in, says they need to do some software updates or fix a computer problem, and simply asks for the password you took so much time coming up with.

#4: Keep Hardware and Software Updated

Even the most secure software can have occasional vulnerabilities that are exposed by either hackers or people working internally at the company to fix bugs.  When breaches and vulnerabilities are discovered, companies develop software patches and driver fixes that can make them run better while being less vulnerable to hackers.

If you're not routinely updating your hardware and software, including both software applications and your operating system, you could be setting yourself up for a serious information security breach.  The higher the profile of your law firm, the more likely it is that a hacker could try to use a backdoor into your computer systems to try to obtain your data.

#5: Read Up on Information Security News

In order to know which software packages are most likely to remain secure and what the biggest topics in keeping your information safe are, you'll need to start looking into information security news.  It may not seem like the most exciting topic, but having this understanding will mean that you're able to plug security holes faster and get through major security weaknesses involving widely used programs without having your data compromised.

For example, let's say that you find out that a new critical security flaw has been found in Java.  You may choose to disable Java runtime environments on your computers until the breach has been fixed and Java can be updated on your machines.  While this kind of thing may seem like it takes time and hurts efficiency, the amount of productivity and money lost to a single information security breach is massive—keep in mind that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

#6: Own Up to Mistakes and Leaks Right Away

Uh oh.  The worst thing happened, in spite of all your efforts: you've been hacked.  Your website's a graffiti-covered mess and you're not sure how much of your clients' data was obtained by the hackers.  When something like this happens, there's a tendency in some companies to want to sweep it under the rug.  However, things like this tend to come out—and when they do, you'll want to have been transparent the entire time.  If you're seen as lying or trying to cover up the truth, you're going to risk losing a great deal of face and sacrificing a reputation for honesty and forthrightness.

#7: Use Different Passwords For Different Services

Too many people, once they have a password that “works” for most services, use that password over and over.  The problem with this way of thinking is that when you operate with just one password, it only takes people knowing one of your passwords to learn all the others.

Make sure that each of the social networks you're using, as well as your website, have different passwords.  This will help ensure that even if someone manages to get hold of a password for your social media accounts, they won't have passwords for your automated emailing program.

Not all material on Twitter has to be original.  In fact, of the over 100 million tweets sent on Twitter daily, a majority of them are actually re-tweets—copying something that someone else already said.  When you're new to Twitter, getting used to the etiquette and norms of re-tweeting can seem a bit daunting.  That's what this guide is for: helping marketing professionals understand when, how, and why to re-tweet and how to get the most out of copying and sharing the content of others.

#1: Use Retweets Sparingly

Keep in mind that as a business, you shouldn't be spending all of your Twitter time re-tweeting.  People do want original content, and that means that you should make sure that at least half the posts you tweet are actually completely original.

Overusing re-tweets can often be a sign of a law firm marketing professional who is feeling too overworked to create their own content consistently.  If you are unable to make new content, consider devoting more time to your Twitter account.  In general, you should only consider a few posts a day to be worth re-tweeting.  If you re-tweet too often, it's one of the fastest ways to watch your number of followers decline day after day.  Very few people want to read a Twitter account that is just a list of re-tweets related more or less to the law.

#2: Watch Whose Tweets You're Re-Posting

If you see a great idea in a tweet, you may want to immediately retweet it.  However, this would be ignoring some vital aspects of business and reputation management today.  Before you decide you're going to re-post someone else's tweet, make sure you know who that someone else is.  Even a seemingly innocuous tweet can turn into a big scandal if it turns out that it was originally from someone who was, in some way, media poison.

If your re-tweets are coming from sources that could potentially be offensive, you may wonder what to do.  The right idea?  Forget that tweet and come up with something new.  There's no reason to offend people with your law firm Twitter account.  It's just not worth it—the risk vastly outweighs the reward.  Stick to re-tweeting from safe sources when you decide to re-post the content of others.

#3: Do a Reality Check

One of the most embarrassing things you can do on Twitter as a company is to re-tweet a post with factual information, only to find out that the facts were wrong and the tweet was a hoax or prank.  This kind of thing happens in the online world all the time today—Twitter rumors have started about topics from celebrity deaths to presidential conspiracies.  In order to avoid being caught up in a rumor that turns out to be false, make sure that you're verifying the facts before you press “enter” and re-tweet the information.

One of the best websites for doing a quick fact check online is snopes.com.  If something you see being tweeted sounds like it could be an urban legend or hoax, Snopes is one of the best places you can go on the web to see whether it's true or false.  The site includes thousands of popular hoaxes, and can give you reassurance before you re-tweet factual information.  Snopes will tell you nbot only whether your content is true or false, but also where it comes from.

#4: Check Existing Responses

Even if a tweet sounds like a great idea initially, there may be some flaws you hadn't thought of.  To avoid looking silly, consider that you may want to check on whether people have already been responding to a tweet in both its original and re-tweeted forms.  If it seems like the responses are limited to agreement and re-tweets, you're probably good to re-tweet the content yourself.  On the other hand, if you're seeing a lot of disagreement and controversy, you have to consider whether it's the kind of disagreement you want to foster on your own Twitter feed.

#5: Re-Tweeting Up and Re-Tweeting Down

You'll have two types of connections on Twitter: people who have more connections and more social clout than you, and people who have less.  When you retweet, you should consider making your re-tweets a combination of re-tweeting up (repeating content said by someone with less social clout, so that more people can see what they have said) or re-tweeting down (repeating content by an already popular content producer for people with fewer connections and less social clout to see).

Giving yourself a mix of these kinds of re-tweets ensures that you keep the loyalty of your followers who aren't as well socially connected, while also giving you ways to re-tweet some of the biggest names in your field.

#6: Posting Re-Tweets on Other Social Media Sites

If you want to post a tweet to another social media website, like Facebook or LinkedIn, that's a great idea—ideas propagate across these networks today, and what starts on Twitter can easily end up on Youtube, LinkedIn, or anywhere else on the entire internet.  However, make sure that if you're posting re-tweets to another site, you're not doing it too often.  Once in a while is cross-pollination, but if people wanted to read re-tweet after re-tweet every day, they'd get their own Twitter account rather than reading your content on other social media sites instead.

#7: Follow Re-Tweeters

When you notice that your own original content is being picked up and re-tweeted, you should consider starting to follow the people who are re-tweeting your content.  Often, re-tweeters who find your content interesting enough to share are exactly the kinds of people who make the best brand ambassadors.

By following re-tweeters and making some kind of direct Twitter contact with them, you can make sure that they continue to read your Twitter feed and interact with other members of Twitter in a way that makes your tweets get more exposure.

Almost all technologically savvy law firms today engage in some kind of email marketing.  However, according to a 2012 study of over 8 million emails sent from law firms to potential or established clients, only 20 percent—just one in five—of those emails is ever even opened.  Once the email is opened, the numbers can be even more dire.  Only one in ten people who opens the email you send will make a call because of it.  With numbers like that, even small improvements can translate into big increases to your client base.  In this guide, we'll look at how to create email marketing that pops for your clients, lowering your bounce rate and increasing your open rate for law firm emails.

#1: Make Your Emails Look Good

It may seem a bit shallow, but people do like to have an email that is well formatted and looks competently designed.  This doesn't mean that you need to do your marketing emails with big photo backgrounds and desktop publishing programs.  Even an email that's almost exclusively text can still be put together in a way that conveys an attitude of professionalism.

Verify before sending any email to a large email list that it looks good in most or all browsers and operating systems.  You don't want to send an email to thousands of people, including hundreds who will open the email on their Android phones, only to find out that Android displays the email all wrong and you'll now need to send a corrected version.  Making sure that your emails are formatted correctly and look good the first time is key to avoiding embarrassing re-sends later on.

#2: Include Video When You Can

Many law firms forget that video can be one of the best tools for establishing client contact and making clients more at ease with talking to a lawyer.  Studies have shown that video has a significant impact on conversion and bounce rates.  Make sure that your video is hosted reliably—perhaps through YouTube or another free online video host—and that you keep it around 3-7 minutes.  Too short and people won't want to start your video—too long and they won't want to finish it.

Your videos shouldn't just be a longer version of your television advertising.  Instead, you should use the videos for different purposes: introducing yourself or other attorneys at your firm, discussing commonly asked legal questions, or giving information about legal consultations and current legal issues.

#3: Use Targeted Lists of Contacts

If you're sending all of your emails to the same one, big list of clients—stop!  What are you doing?  It's the 21st century, and today it's much easier to divide your emails into targeted lists of contacts that will be most likely to open and respond to them.

For example, you may want to divide your clients by type of case, so that you can target your emails to exactly the kinds of clients that you want to focus on with that email's copy.  This avoids other people on your list getting “ad fatigue.”  If you make sure that every email they receive from your firm is in some way targeted at them, readers will be more likely to open and respond to your email.

#4: Have a Sense of Humor

Sounding boring and like everybody else is a great way to get your email tossed into the trash with barely a second glance.  When people check their email in the morning, they often have many emails to look at and are already feeling overwhelmed.  By making your content quirky, funny, or otherwise relatable, you ensure that your clients will see something different in their inbox—and something different is much likely to get read than something that looks just the same as every other mass email.

#5: Don't Mislead With Headlines

Some consultants will actually advise law firms and other businesses to make “linkbait” headlines that do more than just tempt people with the actual content of the email.  Their advice is to mislead—leading to people opening the email, being disappointed, and bouncing right back out.  That's not the kind of email response you're looking for, so make the headline something that's real and gives a good idea of what's actually in your email.  This may decrease your open rate slightly, but it will also decrease your bounce rate.

#6: Give Something Away

Even if it's just something in electronic form, having something to give away to the people on your email list can be a great way to get your emails opened and read.  Consider creating a brief guide in .pdf format about how to deal with a common legal situation that clients of yours commonly find themselves in.  The sky's the limit—you can also give away real, physical goods with a consultation or appointment, if you so choose.

#7: Be Personal and Personable

Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because your emails come from a law firm, they need to sound like a stuffed shirt wrote them.  Being personable and telling stories in your emails is one of the best ways to keep people reading.  If you're using some personal narrative even when talking about current events, you're not being unprofessional—you're creating a great way for people to understand the underlying legal issues.  Personality matters when it comes to choosing a law firm, and by letting your personality shine through you'll be doing more to convert business.

#8: Don't Oversend Emails

The single biggest mistake you can make with your email marketing campaign is to flood people with so many emails that you start getting sent to spam or trash folders before you can even make a case for someone to open your new email.  That means no sending multiple emails every day.  In fact, usually you should try to keep your mass emails limited to just one per week.  This will minimize the chances that someone will consider your emails spam, while maximizing the quality of your content.

On the internet, trends come and go with a relentless pace.  What works one year will sink your marketing efforts the next, and keeping up can be tough.  What strategies are still working in 2013?  What should your law firm focus on, and what should it give up to adapt to new focus areas?  In this guide, we'll explore seven different trends that have been played out.  If you're still on board with one of these trends, it's time to transition out and find new ways of marketing your firm.

#1: Traditional SEO

Not too long ago, the best way by far to get your law firm ahead in search rankings was to very carefully monitor keyword counts and do traditional search engine optimization.  However, keyword density has become almost irrelevant to the new search engine marketing.  If you're still focused on it, you're not just wasting your time.  If Google detects that you're using any of the old SEO tricks, from links that come from spam comments on blogs to keyword spam website content, you can expect to have your website “sandboxed.”  

What does that mean for you?  It means that searches will no longer direct to your page, or that it will be significantly reduced in the results.  Since huge majorities of people don't look past page 1 of their search results, this means you'll lose out on almost all of your potential online business with even relatively minor penalties.

#2: Broad Spectrum Pay Per Click Ads

Many attorneys like to use pay per click ads online for a few different reasons—they're easy to start up and they can deliver immediate returns, unlike some types of online marketing.  However, if you're still using pay per click ads, you've probably also noticed some disadvantages.  High bounce rates, low conversions, and the worst part—as soon as you stop paying, the new business dries up immediately.

Generally, the reason that attorneys have bad luck with pay per click advertisements is that they're not taking enough care to target their ideal clients and the types of clients they most commonly get.  There's no need to waste your time advertising to people who are a long way from your office, or who are outside of the age ranges where you tend to do almost all of your business.

What's more, even if you want to target several different groups, you should be targeting them with specific pay per click ads for their target market.  These ads can take them to a microsite that specifically addresses the concerns of their demographic.

#3: Fake Followers

If you have blogs or business social media accounts, you've almost certainly gotten emails from people who say that they could get you new followers and friends.  While these offers may sound tempting—like an immediate big internet presence on the biggest social media networks—the truth is actually a lot more disappointing.  When you pay for followers, you're not paying for the kind of quality following that actually generates discussion and buzz.

The reason that people with a lot of followers are influential isn't because of a number on their screen.  It's because people like what they have to say, and find them interesting.  You won't gain influence with fake friends.

#4: Tagging Websites

Foursquare and other “tagging” sites seemed like one of the fastest growing trends in social media for a few years.  The problem that made these a trend on their way out is that they had relatively limited appeal.  Most of the web audience simply never made room in their browsing day to tag where they were.  Others had privacy concerns, which would have only magnified if any of these tagging services had ever caught on in a bigger way.

#5: Generalized Websites

If your website has something for everybody, that may be great for an overall firm site, but you need to understand that your main firm website may not be your best marketing tool site.  Instead, the big trend now is to create a large number of targeted microsites.  Microsites should be relatively conversational and informal compared to your main law firm site, and some firms have dozens of these websites.  You can often get very descriptive, long URLs for this kind of microsite.

#6: Flash Intros

A few years ago, many websites had big introductions made with Flash, which had functionalities that made websites more multimedia-oriented.  With the multimedia focus in today's marketing, you may think that a Flash intro would be a good idea for a contemporary law firm website.  However, Flash intros are cumbersome, take a long time for users to download, and runs into incompatibility problems on older computers and on smartphones.

Keep your website HTML, rather than Flash, based and you'll have much better luck getting people from mobile operating systems to use your website and become your clients.

#7: Parody Videos

It's one of the quickest and easiest ways to write something funny for the internet about just about any topic.  Themed parody videos might seem like a fun way to have your law firm do something different with its marketing, but at this point you have to ask: is whatever you're doing really that different?  At this point, so many legal parody videos exist—many created by law school students for an annual contest—that in order to stand out in a good way, you'll need to have polish, production values, and lyrics that aren't terrible and sound great with the original rhythms of the song.

If you're dead set on making a parody video, get professional production and make sure that you have people look at it before you make it live.  More often than not, parody videos today are perceived as more embarrassing than awesome.  You'll be more likely to go viral with something that is both funny and unique.