While some states have relatively clear laws regarding attorney marketing and advertising, Florida is known for having some of the murkiest.  Attorneys often have a difficult time understanding the Florida laws, including whether certain types of advertisements are considered ethical.  On January 31, 2013, the Florida Supreme Court released its new rules on law firm advertising and marketing in the state of Florida.  Several of these changes are very important to any attorneys who are participating in online advertising, and several of the changes are still relatively confusing.  This guide will help you to understand the new regulations so that you can make sure your advertising and marketing are in compliance with state guidelines.

The Biggest Change: Websites Now Subject to Rules

For any attorneys interested in online marketing, there's no question what the biggest change from the Florida Supreme Court is.  In the past, Florida's attorney advertising regulations applied to television, print, and radio advertising, but for all intents and purposes, the internet was the Wild West—no regulations from the Florida Bar covered attorney websites and social media presences.  This policy was obviously developed prior to the development and success of the world wide web, but managed to persist until the recent Florida Supreme Court ruling.

According to new rules, websites and other online marketing tools are now subject to the same restrictions on content as other types of advertising.  For example, if you are going to include testimonials on your website or make claims regarding the quality of legal services you provide, the Florida Supreme Court's ruling requires that these claims be objectively verifiable.  Subjective claims, even on websites and other online marketing and promotional materials, are considered by the Florida Supreme Court to constitute misleading advertisements for attorneys.  Make sure that any content you include meets the new guidelines if you're already using testimonials or any opinions about your law firm.

Whither Social Media?

One place that many were hoping the Florida Supreme Court would provide better guidance is in the area of social media.  With so many people using social media platforms (over 1 billion on Facebook alone), understanding the rules and ethical problems that can come up with social media is critical for attorneys using the newest marketing techniques.  While some state bar associations have already released guidelines on the ethical and responsible use of social media in attorney marketing, Florida's ruling has stayed conspicuously silent on the subject.

In order to keep in the clear with your social media presence, it's good to make sure that it adheres generally to the quality standards required by a website.  If someone writes a very subjective testimonial on your Facebook wall, for example, you may want to delete the testimonial, writing the person who complimented you a nice note that lets them know you appreciate the sentiment but cannot include subjective assessments of law firm quality as part of your web presence.

Beware of Solicitation in Florida

Email solicitation is now also subject to the same kinds of rules as written communication with potential clients.  Both opt-in email lists as well as unsolicited direct email marketing are now subjected to the rules.  According to the Florida Supreme Court, the word “advertisement” must appear on every page in order to let consumers know that they are looking at attorney advertising rather than an objective report on a law firm.

Direct solicitation of clients in person is generally forbidden by Florida state ethics guidelines.  The Florida Supreme Court did not change this prohibition on direct in person solicitation in the new overhaul of the advertising ethics rules.

Solicitation through referral services must also be done in a transparent fashion. Any attorney referral services must state that attorneys using the service to take referrals are paying for their membership to the referral service.

Committees Decide Whose Ads Air

According to the new regulations, while websites do not need to be submitted to the bar for approval, all other types of attorney advertising, including print ads as well as radio and television commercials, must be submitted to the Florida State Bar at least 20 days before the ad is set to air.  This time allows the bar association to analyze the advertisement and make sure that it is in full compliance with regulations on attorneys.

While television, radio, and print advertising regulations have not been changed too much—so if you weren't having trouble with your ads before, they should still be fine with the bar association now—the bar association also recognizes that changes to website regulations may leave some law firms in need of guidance to make sure their online marketing campaigns follow ethics rules.  While firms cannot submit entire websites to the bar association, they are allowed to ask for guidance regarding specific aspects of their website—for instance, if there's a photograph, specific testimonial, or article you are worried may be a violation of current rules, you can submit it for the bar association's analysis and approval.

It costs $150 to have ads reviewed by the bar association if they are sent more than 20 days before publication, and $250 if they are late filed.

Non-Complying Websites

It's possible that with the new guidelines for websites for Florida attorneys, your firm could find itself in a state of noncompliance with the law.  If this happens to your firm, you will be sent a letter from the Florida Bar detailing the ways in which your website's advertising has failed to comply with ethics regulations.

Currently, the Florida Bar offers what is called a “take down period” for the 15 days after attorneys are notified that they are not in compliance with advertising regulations.  If you take down the offending portion of your website within 15 days of being notified by the bar association, you will not be subjected to any penalties from the bar.  However, you could be subject to fines or other disciplinary action for continuing to leave up content that the bar believes is not sufficiently objective or that may be regarded as misleading to consumers of legal services.

You went to the meetings, you brainstormed, you came up with great strategies for your social media plan in 2013.  The problem is, now that you're implementing the strategies you developed, they don't seem to be working the way you'd hoped.  While huge majorities of law firms are now using social media to some extent, only a very small fraction are getting the most out of their social networking endeavors.  Here are some signs that you may need to trash your current social media plan and start over from scratch.

#1: You Can't Get New Social Networking Connections

You've been trying for months, but the only people who will friend your solo practice on Facebook are your Aunt Emma and your college roommate from freshman year.  What gives?  Odds are, if you can't build initial social networking connections, it's for one of two reasons.

The first of these reasons is that your content just isn't good enough for people to start following you.  If you're never posting anything interesting, why would people choose to read your posts?  Start trying to actually inform and entertain with your posts, rather than just advertising your business.  Who wants to read a feed full of ads?  No one, that's who—stick to content that actually helps your audience.

The second reason that you may have a hard time building new social networking connections is that you're not putting sufficient time into talking to others.  You can't just ask people to listen to you without also being willing to listen to them.  By interacting with and befriending others on social networking sites, you make it much more likely that you'll be able to get the kinds of connections you hoped for when you were initially creating your social media strategy.

#2: You Can't Maintain Your Connections

Other firms have a different problem.  They have no issue initially getting social networking connections, but they notice a strange pattern: after someone is connected with them on a social network for a few weeks or months, they tend to disappear again.

This will always happen with some percentage of your followers—perhaps some of them only wanted to follow your firm for a brief time while deciding on who to hire for legal representation, for instance—but if you notice that it's happening more than usual, you may have an issue with posting too much or posting irrelevant content.  Social network users don't want their feeds to be full of your posts—odds are, they'd prefer for your posts to be somewhat infrequent, while reading more posts from their friends and family members.  Keep your posting numbers down and you'll see that people tend to stick with your feed longer.

#3: You Treat Social Media Like Traditional Advertising

If you've traditionally advertised with non-social media channels, you may be used to a very particular form of expressing yourself.  Usually, traditional advertising has as its goal expressing the biggest strengths of your law firm to people who are unfamiliar with it.

However, social networking has significantly different aims and goals, which means that you can't use the same techniques and expect the same results.  Social media doesn't want to hear you talk on and on about why your law firm is the best.  Instead, you should show why you're the best—responding to questions, helping people get more information about topics relating to your practice area, and so on.  This kind of activity will go much further toward establishing your credibility in social media spheres than any amount of advertising content.

#4: You Post Dozens of Times a Day

If you're posting all the time, it's probably going to start turning people off from your feed (see #2).  However, this kind of super-frequent posting is also an indicator that something isn't quite right with your social media strategy.  It suggests a certain degree of aimlessness in figuring out what topics you want to cover.  It may also suggest that you're taking a shotgun approach, unsure of what kinds of topics will interest your readers.  This “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” tactic is more likely to alienate your readers than to find you new ones.

#5: You Post Once a Week

After you've had your social media accounts for some time, it's easy to find yourself bored with them and unsure of what to post.  One post a day becomes a post every other day, which soon becomes two posts a week, then one.  Keep going that way and soon you won't have any social networking connections left—they'll think that you've abandoned the site and that you have no more interest in interacting with other users there.  If you're getting bored with your social media, mix it up!  Figure out a new platform to use or new things to talk about.  Consider joining groups and making comments—anything to get your posting frequency back up and you more excited about the possibilities of social networking for your law firm.

#6: You Spend All Your Time on Social Media

Sometimes social networking websites can start to feel like an incredible timesink.  If you find that you're putting way too much time into social media as compared to your other tasks, you may need to figure out ways to make your strategies more efficient.

Consider using tools including social media dashboards that can help you use your time more efficiently.  You should also consider keeping track of exactly what you're spending time on, so you can see where it is that you're losing productivity and efficiency.

#7: You're Using Strategies From Last Year

It's unfortunate, but your social networking strategies from even a year or two ago might not work today—even if they worked really well back then.  The ways that people use social networks are changing, as are the networks themselves.

Keep up to date about the latest ways to use social media websites, and you'll have strategies that work today, not ones that worked six months ago.  When you search for social media ideas on Google or other search engines, consider limiting your search for tips to just the last month or two.  These tips will be fresher and more helpful than older ones.

A few years ago, when less than a quarter of law firms were using any social media platforms at all, just being part of social media sites was an indicator that your law firm understood the technological landscape better than most.  Today, though, 9 in 10 law firms are using social media in some way, and 7 in 10 have specific social media plans for 2013.  If you're looking to go above and beyond in your approach today, you can't just sign up for accounts.  You need better, smarter ideas that will help you get ahead of the competition.  Here are seven ways that you can push your social media in 2013 beyond what you've done in the past.

#1: Get a Social Media Dashboard

If you're still actually logging into each social media website to make your updates and comments, stop!  While logging into individual websites is fine for individual users, law firms and other businesses need a more efficient way to handle their social media posting.  The easiest way to make sure that you're posting efficiently is to download a social media dashboard.

There are many of these dashboard programs, each allowing a different array of social media sites.  The programs are at a huge range of price points, from free to those that cost both an upfront purchase price and a monthly service fee.  Your law firm's needs and social media budget will determine which of these services is best.

When you use social media dashboard tools, you'll be able to monitor what people are saying about your brand on social networking sites.  You'll also be able to easily and seamlessly reply, ensuring that you always have a certain amount of control over the buzz surrounding your firm.

#2: Cross-Promote Blogs and Request Comments

When you write a blog—and most lawyers have one, today—you probably want to make sure as many people can read it as possible.  However, you may be promoting your blog on social media sites in a way that's likely to leave some people turned off.  A brief summary of a blog entry and a link won't get most people there.

Instead, try asking a question about your link.  Ask for comments, or stories, or anything—the main component of this strategy is to ask not just for a read, but for a response.  This keeps people reading actively and framing the issue in the way that you want.

#3: Start Conversations—Even Silly Ones!

Too many law firms think of social networking as a one way, outbound communication medium.  However, considering it a two-way communication medium will serve you much better.  Listen to the kinds of discussions and conversations your followers seem most likely to start.

Consider using laughter as part of your marketing arsenal.  Even if the conversation you're starting is a silly one—for instance, “name something you don't want to hear at your meeting with a personal injury lawyer,” with a few funny responses to get the ball rolling—this gets people to feel like they have a seat at your table and are honestly interacting with you.  This kind of genuine interaction is worth far more than yet another staid, professional post about your firm that gets no traction on anyone's social media feeds.

#4: Monitor Your Competition and Interact With Them

In the social media world, you can sometimes consider your competitors to be among your best friends.  Monitoring competitors to see how they're interacting with social media lets you see experiments performed—without you being the one to take the risk.  If you see something that your competition does that's successful, you can consider the best way to use similar strategies for your firm.  Don't copy too closely, but instead take a look at the underlying reasons that a competitor's strategy worked to gain new followers or spark a great discussion.

You should also consider actually talking to your competitors using social media.  There's no reason not to, and you can keep your interactions professional and aboveboard.

#5: Use Social Media Knowledge When Interacting

Before you start posting on any social networking site, you should make sure that you have a handle on the community norms and expectations.  One of the ways that law firms can truly go above and beyond in social media is making sure that they understand social networks well enough to look like regular users of the site, not just people there to make a quick marketing buck.  Consider having a personal account totally unattached to your real name, just so that you can start to learn the ways that people interact on each website.  This surveillance gives you a huge leg up on competitors who only know sites as marketing tools.

#6: Answer Questions With a Quick Turnaround

When someone asks a question on your Facebook wall or other social media feeds, how long does it usually take you to respond?  For most businesses, this turnaround time is anywhere from 12 to 48 hours on average, during business days. However, businesses that go above and beyond can do better.  Consider using your social media dashboard tools to make sure that you're answering all questions to the best of your ability within just a few hours.  This kind of fast turnaround will set you apart from your competition in a way almost nothing else can—people like when their attorneys are quick and responsive to their needs.

#7: Keep In Touch With Brand Ambassadors

If you know that one of your former clients or a social media connection is particularly good about evangelizing for your firm, that's a person that you need to stay in contact with.  Making sure that your brand ambassadors are informed about firm happenings is a great idea.  You can also ask brand ambassadors to help you by posting some of your best links.

An ideal brand ambassador is one who is connected to your firm voluntarily, rather than through bonds of employment or family.  Finding even a few former clients who can brag about your legal services is a great way to boost the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.

If your law firm doesn't consider marketing to be one of its strong suits—and studies show that nearly half of small firm partners consider marketing to be the most difficult part of their business—you may be considering asking an outside firm to handle some or all of your legal marketing work.  In today's marketing climate, though, not all elements of your marketing campaigns can be handled equally well by someone from outside your firm.  In this guide, we'll look at four distinct aspects of your marketing that you might be considering outsourcing: social media, reputation management, blogging, and advertising. 

Facebook/Social Media Marketing

Why You Might Want to Outsource It:

Let's face it, not every law office has someone who thinks that Facebook is the best and highest use of your firm's people and time.  Outsourcing your social media has an appeal, especially for attorneys who think they're above marketing to some extent—if you're afraid that your marketing efforts could come off as fake or desperate, it may be time to hire an outside firm.

You'll definitely want to outsource your social media marketing if you've found that you're unable to keep up with it.  If you're not posting regular updates and keeping up your web presence on social networks, you're going to lose followers and connections fast.  If you really need help and the alternatie is not having any social media presence, by all means, find a great professional company with experience helping law firms like yours.

Use Caution If:

Keep in mind that you get what you pay for when it comes to social media marketing—and most other outsourcing solutions.  If your firm uses a marketing firm that is inexpensive but hires people who don't understand the legal field, you're not going to be happy with your results.  In some cases, hiring a bad social media marketing firm could actually be disastrous.  Unethical conduct or just seeming impersonal, or having a bad command of the English language, could lead to your marketing company sinking your firm's reputation.  Think long and hard before hiring a bargain basement firm to do your social media.

Reputation Management

Why You Might Want to Outsource It:

It's stressful to worry about your firm's online reputation on a day to day basis, but it's also something that needs to be done.  Your online reputation can change in a heartbeat, and not always for reasons that are even your fault.  In some cases, a rival firm or disgruntled client could spread misinformation about your firm.  In other situations, you might find that you're getting criticism because of a specific policy or an interview you did with the media.

Knowing what people are saying about you is great—but finding out can be hard.  Outsourcing gives you the psychological distance to be able to deal constructively with critiques, instead of finding them and taking them personally.  Having a neutral third party looking at the criticisms of your firm can also help you to determine how to work on those criticisms and how best to respond.  In many situations, an online reputation management firm can help you have negative search results removed or pushed so low into the search results that it's unlikely anyone will ever find them again.

Use Caution If:

Online reputation management firms are really only something that your firm needs if you're relatively large.  Solo practitioners and very small firms don't generally need a team of people managing their online reputation, unless they handle very high profile cases that get a lot of media attention.  If you're working for a small firm, you may want to put your outsourcing dollars into an area where they'll get you more immediate benefits for marketing purposes.

Blogging

Why You Might Want to Outsource It:

You're busy!  Blogging—especially good blogging—takes a huge amount of time and energy.  There's not just the writing, there's also the research, and keeping up with the comments, and maybe even commenting on the blogs of others to help you network.  With all these responsibilities, it's no wonder that many attorneys just want to foist off the job.

Use Caution If:

Unfortunately, this is one where the answer is that you should ALWAYS proceed with extreme caution.  There's almost never a good reason to outsource your blogging.  Think about it: clients and other attorneys come to your blog looking for your original thoughts.  If they're getting the thoughts of a flunky at a marketing firm, and not a well-educated, articulate attorney who's been trained in argumentation and legal writing, they're going to feel cheated—and rightfully so.

Blogs simply can't be outsourced well.  A blog that is generic enough to be outsourced is a blog that is unlikely to bring your website a great deal of traffic anyhow.  Many of the SEO tricks that used to make low-quality blogs shine in search engine results no longer work, so even if you're willing to use tricks and gimmicks it's now very hard to succeed with an outsourced blog.

Online Advertising

Why You Might Want to Outsource It:

Pay per click and targeting and ROI, oh my!  Not all people at law offices want to spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how many pennies to spend on every click of the mouse that leads a person to your website.  For many attorneys, this kind of work feels nitpicky and trivial, and it's hard for them to really feel excited about starting new online advertising campaigns.

Use Caution If:

This is one area where many law firms would do well to bring in outside people, at least for some time.  Getting a handle on advertising online—which search terms you should advertise with, demographics research, and so on—is much easier when you've hired someone who already knows what they're doing to help you out.  Online advertising can be fairly confusing, so hiring some outside consultants to help you get a handle on things can ensure that you don't flush money down the drain on a campaign that had little or no chance of succeeding.

A majority of marketers today rank link building as being a difficult or very difficult search engine optimization task.  How can your law firm improve link popularity numbers without running into problems with Google?  How can you increase link popularity in a way that will make sure that you're getting closer to the front page of search results every day?  Here we'll learn 8 ways to improve link popularity that work without “black hat” techniques.

#1: Improve Link Popularity With Quality, Not Quantity

If you learned how to increase link popularity in the early part of the 21st century and haven't brushed up since, you may need to start relearning some things.  Today, quality matters much more than just how many links you have.  If you want to improve link popularity for your website, you'll need to focus on getting links from websites with high amounts of traffic and high levels of authority.

Google will increase link popularity for a website more when it receives links from pages with a high Google PageRank.  This is because these websites are viewed as being more likely to be authoritative.  Similarly, because they are perceived as more difficult to get, inbound links coming from .edu top level domains will improve link popularity more than a similar link coming from a .com address with equivalent PageRank.

#2: Increase Link Popularity By Monitoring the Competition

If you're not sure where your strategy to improve link popularity could use improvement, use your competitors to get your next ideas.  Use a link popularity checker tool to find out what kind of links your competition is building, and then use those results to find your own link sources.  Whenever you find a website that your competitors are using to increase link popularity, you can work to get a link built in that website as well.

Consistent monitoring of your competitors can generate valuable intelligence about their strategies to increase link popularity.  Don't be too beholden to their results: remember that you should also strive to improve link popularity in ways that your competition hasn't yet figured out, so that you can more easily defeat them in the search rankings.

#3: Improve Link Popularity Organically and Contextually

Google has recently started paying more attention to whether a website is working to really improve the quality of its results or just the quantity.  Because of new, stricter scrutiny that Google is applying to websites' inbound links, you should try to make sure that many of your links are contextually based.  When you improve link popularity with contextual links, each of your links will grant you more link juice than if they had come from a website with very little in common with yours.

The best way, bar none, to increase link popularity is to have other people post your content and provide inbound links organically.  This means that people are posting links to your website without being asked or prompted to.  However, it can be difficult to improve link popularity in this way.  If you can't, try to at least make it look like your links have been naturally built rather than artificially.

#4: Increase Link Popularity Slowly For Best Results

A sudden spike in the number of links to your website won't lead to a meteoric rise and thousands of new hits.  Instead, it's likely to set you back, because Google will penalize websites that are seen to improve link popularity too quickly.  If you're in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, it may not happen today or tomorrow but you will be found out—and it can be absolutely devastating to search rankings when you are.

Start with three or four links per day at most when you start to improve link popularity.  If you increase link popularity more rapidly in a month or two, this won't look nearly as suspicious as if your link building had happened all at once.

#5: Monitor Your Google PageRank To Check Your Progress

You should consistently check your PageRank to see if your efforts to improve link popularity have translated into a direct result for your website.  If you're seeing your PageRank number slowly increase, you're probably in very good shape for the future.  Keep in mind that because PageRank is a logarithmic scale, even if you are an amazing web marketer, it's very unlikely that your website will ever become a site with PageRank 8 or 9.

#6: Use Analytics to Increase Link Popularity Efficiently

If you're just shotgunning your approaches, you may not know which method for improving link popularity is actually working best.  You should instead try a single method to increase link popularity at a time, and see how it works using analytics tools.  If you find that a particular method is ineffective, you can improve link popularity using a different method and then use analytics again for a side by side comparison.

#7: Improve Link Popularity With One Way Links

If you're using too many links that are reciprocal (that is to say, two way between sites), Google will assume that you have just been trading links.  It's fine to have some casual reciprocity, just don't make it the entire focus of your campaign to increase link popularity.  It's easy enough to build one way links today that you shouldn't have any trouble finding sources.  Reciprocal linking should only account for a small percentage of your overall links.

If you're not able to get enough one way links using conventional means, you may consider using an automated one way linking service.  However, this is usually a bad way to increase link popularity.  When you improve link popularity with one of these services, you're automating the link building process in a way that Google disapproves of.  If you're caught, you can expect to face stiff penalties in the rankings or even see your website de-listed from Google searches—the search engine optimization equivalent of the death penalty.

2012 has made significant changes to how link popularity is tracked and measured by Google.  As link popularity has become important, more firms than ever want to know how to search link popularity.  In this guide, we'll look at some of the reasons that law firms find it in their best interest to perform a link popularity search.  We'll also find out how to search link popularity effectively, and why it isn't always your website that you should be searching for.

Why Should We Perform a Link Popularity Search?

No matter what you've done to build your links, it's a good thing to know how to search link popularity.  Understanding searching techniques will make it much easier for you to monitor and track your reputation online.  By doing a link popularity search, you'll learn what kind of websites are linking to you and where you might be able to create profitable advertisements.  You'll also find out what kind of linking is most effective in bringing clients to your website.

When you thoroughly understand what kind of links you're getting, you can begin to develop a comprehensive plan for expanding your link presence.  Identifying existing strengths and weaknesses can make it easier to develop a more well rounded approach to link building.  This versatile approach is often neglected by online marketers desperate to cut corners instead of providing the very best advice and service.

How to Search Link Popularity: Getting Started

Before you actually start to learn how to search link popularity, it's a good idea to have your goals in mind first.  What kind of results do you want from your link popularity search?  Are you learning how to search link popularity so that you can compete more easily with a rival firm?  Will a link popularity search be used by your firm to figure out where to post your links next?  Understanding what you want will help you make better decisions about what tools to download and how to use them.

How to Search Link Popularity: Free Web Tools

The most common way for people to search link popularity today is by using websites that have free online tools.  These free online tools are a good way to keep people coming to websites, so nearly every search engine optimization guru has his or her own link popularity calculator for people who want to know how to search link popularity.

These tools change locations online constantly, and you may want to check more than one of these tools before you decide that you have a hard and fast number for your law firm's link popularity.  Doing a double or triple check with multiple tools is always a good idea, because disagreement among the results may be an indicator that the websites you're using for your link popularity search aren't working as well as you had hoped.

How to Search Link Popularity: Your Website

The first website that you should do a link popularity search on is, of course, your own.  Start by running a link popularity search that gives you your results for Google popularity.  Different tools will give you different information.  For example, if you learn how to search link popularity using seoprofiler.com, you'll find out how many of the pages of your website are in Google's Top 50 search results, as well as seeing a list of websites in direct competition with yours.

Other tools can just list a large number of backlinks in whatever search engine you prefer.  Don't hesitate to do a link popularity search that involves several different search engines—you may find that you have much better search rankings on one than another, and exploring why can help you create your next strategy for improving your link presence.

How to Search Link Popularity: Competitor Websites

Once you've looked at some link popularity search reports for your website, it's time to turn your attention elsewhere.  Where are your competitors building their links?  Are they getting inbound links by getting directory entries, or by having social media link to their site regularly?  Analyzing where your competitors' links come from can give you fantastic ideas for helping out your own website.

After you learn how to search link popularity, you can do it for any website at all.  If there's a legal website that you're in awe of when it comes to search engine optimization, a link popularity search can take away the mystery and make it easier to imitate that site.

Tracking Your Link Popularity Search Results

It's great to know how to search link popularity and run a search, but just one search is of limited use.  You'll want to use consistent tracking of link popularity in order to make sure that you're seeing whenever a new inbound link appears for your website.

At least once every week or so, you should be looking at a link popularity search.  Tracking changes over time to these results can be helpful in identifying patterns of behavior.

What an Ideal Link Popularity Search Will Show

Google monitors link popularity because some patterns indicate that the popularity has been built artificially.  If your link popularity search reveals that almost all of your links come from the same few IP addresses, you are probably skating on very thin ice with Google and should watch out—your website could be sandboxed at any second.

What you want to do when you learn how to search link popularity is to generate a real variety of links.  You should make sure that you're cultivating links of several different types on many different websites.  Your link popularity search should indicate that you're using varied anchor text and that you don't use the same content over and over for all of your inbound links.

Maintaining link variety is the only way to ensure that Google doesn't identify your website as being too optimized.  What's more, when you have a wide variety of links, you'll be substantially more invulnerable to new spam detection techniques.

When you're looking for information on the specifics of today's online marketing, you'll want to have brand new information that keeps recent changes to social media and web searches in mind.  However, when it comes to strategizing for your online marketing plan and content, you might want to look to a different source: books on advertising and marketing.  Many of these books contain information and ideas that are timeless, and that too many online marketers forget.  In this guide, we'll take a look at seven of the best books about advertising and marketing that can help you develop content strategies for your online campaigns.

#1: Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! By Luke Sullivan

This book, by an advertising copywriter who worked on major campaigns for decades, is subtitled “a guide to creating great ads.”  Sullivan actually starts by talking about Mr. Whipple, the mascot for Charmin brand toilet paper, who was considered by most television audiences to be an annoyance—yet it seemed that having him as the company's mascot kept paying.

Sullivan isn't afraid in his book to talk not only about why some advertisements work better than others, he's also not afraid to talk about the kinds of advertising that he finds to be uninspiring, bland, and boring.  Sullivan's prose is light and entertaining, making this a great first book on copywriting for anyone who is just starting to create their own written content for a website or social media page.  Hand it to anyone who's considering writing copy for your website or advertisements, and you won't regret that you did.

#2: The Hero and the Outlaw, by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson

Legal marketing professionals today are always looking for a way to differentiate the brand of their law firm.  A great branding effort can make the difference between a firm that prospers, even in difficult times, and one that has to shut down.  In this book, Mark and Pearson look at some of the biggest brands in the country and find a common thread to their incredibly successful branding efforts: archetypes.

Archetypes are the basic personalities and stories that we've heard a million times since childhood.  If someone says “outlaw,” you probably already have a fairly large number of traits assigned in your head to what the outlaw is like and what is likely to happen to him or her.  The same goes for an explorer, or even just a regular guy or girl.  Our archetypes help us anticipate narratives and understand where a brand is coming from.

In The Hero and the Outlaw, Mark and Pearson give aspiring brand strategists tools to develop their own archetypal “personality” for their law firm.  If you're stuck when trying to come up with a good branding initiative, this is the right book for you.

#3: Fascinate, by Sally Hogshead

When you read advice about content on legal websites, you'll probably hear a lot about the need to captivate viewers with original content.  But how do you write content that actually gets people to click and read?  In this book, you'll learn seven different reasons that people become fascinated with content.  It includes ways to look at your fascination strengths and weaknesses, allowing your firm to get the most out of its content and draw in the most viewers.  

#4: Buyology, by Martin Lindstrom

Maybe reading about branding and fascination isn't your thing.  You want quantitative results, statistics that help you understand exactly what will generate conversions and give you lasting business relationships.  If that's the case, you want Lindstrom's Buyology.  Instead of just looking at the psychology of advertising and marketing, Lindstrom's book actually examines the neurobiology at work behind human motivations.

By looking at MRI brain scans of people who are thinking about advertising and marketing content, the book is able to explain why some types of branding and content work better than others.  What's more, the book is written at a level suitable for a lay person, so you don't need to have any special knowledge of science, math, or statistics to get a lot out of it.

#5: Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite, by Paul Arden

Arden, the former creative director from advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, brings this book that can help you get out of a creative rut.  If you know that your content strategy is failing but you don't know why and don't know how to get back on track, this book can help you think about your problems in new ways so that you can create real change.

#6: The Book of Gossage, by Howard Luck Gossage

One of the strangest advertising men of the 1960s, Howard Luck Gossage's advertisements are like nothing you've ever seen before.  The Book of Gossage gathers not only many of these advertisements, but also writings by Gossage himself, and assembles them into a book that is as timely today as when it was written.

Gossage's advertisements are particularly relevant for online content creators, because they tend to be very wordy and informative while still being quite fascinating.  Unlike many of the creators of advertising in his time, Gossage favored text—and lots of it.  A master of making even an ad with hundreds of words of copy a breeze to read, Gossage is worth a look if you want to know how to make your website's content uniquely readable.

#7: Winning the Story Wars, by Jonah Sachs

This brand new book came out just last year, and is great at discussing why, exactly, story and narrative matter when it comes to advertising and marketing.  Sachs is talking about up to the minute trends in this book, and understands that in today's marketing world, the biggest advantage that winning the story wars gives you is virality.

If you've ever wanted to know how to make your content go viral, and how to make sure that your stories are outshining the ones being told by your biggest competitors, you should pick up Sachs' book.

In today's legal marketing world online, it can be easy to think that the only strategies that will work are the ones developed this minute, for specific problems like a new Google search algorithm.  What might surprise you is how much legal marketing wisdom you can find in older sources.  Maybe the writer from the longest time ago who'd have something valuable to say about legal marketing is Sun Tzu.  This Chinese general, who lived about 2500 years ago, wrote the strategy classic The Art of War, which detailed his own strategies for winning conflicts.  Sun Tzu's writing applies not only to war, but also to business and marketing.  In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the oldest advice in the world—as relevant today as it was millenia ago.

#1:  “Know Thyself, Know Thy Enemy.”

One of the biggest things that Sun Tzu focused on when discussing battle strategies is the idea of knowledge.  When Sun Tzu was a general, not all other generals worked on reconnaisance before a battle, and those who failed to know their enemy or themselves well tended to fail on the field.

According to Sun Tzu, when you know either your enemy or yourself very well, you'll win about half the time—the key is knowing both.  This is great advice for legal marketers.  You need to know both your own brand and the brands of your competitors if you want to be able to play to your unique brand strengths.  Doing competition research isn't cheating—it's the quickest path to victory.  Keep in mind that just because you learn what your competition is doing doesn't mean you have to imitate it.

#2:  “Strategy Without Tactics is the Slowest Route to Victory.”

When Sun Tzu differentiated strategy and tactics, he was referring to the bigger picture and the little, everyday details.  When you have a great long-term strategy, but your tactics are haphazard, you may be able to succeed through sheer tenacity—but why not get where you're going faster?  Make sure you have the everyday details taken care of, not just your big picture strategy concerns.

This means doing the little things right, like downloading social media dashboard tools so that you can juggle all of your different social media websites without letting any balls drop.  It also means planning out your days and making sure that your schedules are realistic for accomplishing your goals.

#3: “Tactics Without Strategy Is the Noise Before Defeat.”

If you're doing all the little things right, Sun Tzu says that you'll still fail if you don't have a big picture view.  He's right: when you're just posting randomly to social media accounts, doing online marketing based on whatever the most recent fad you read about is, and ignore any kind of overall branding initiative, you won't be able to differentiate yourself from the crowd.  In the hyper-competitive legal services market today, that's a death knell.

Follow Sun Tzu's advice here: know that you've already lost if you're not looking at where you're going.  Set real goals for yourself and plan long-term as well as short-term.

#4: “To Be Prepared for Any Contingency Is the Greatest of Virtues.”

Contingency planning is something that a lot of legal marketing professionals don't think about when it comes to their primary ways of marketing services online.  Consider for a few moments what you would do if any of your main ways to communicate with your audience went down.  Strange things can happen in the world of the internet.  What if Facebook went belly-up all of a sudden?  What if Google changed its ad policies so that you could no longer use their services in the ways you had been?

Trying to think about what you'd do if any of your marketing tricks just stopped working one day.  Remember, it's happened before—some search updates for Google significantly changed the SEO landscape and put some search engine optimizers out of business promptly.

#5: “Do Not Repeat The Tactics Which Have Gained You One Victory.”

It can be tempting, once you find something that works, to just keep going with that idea until you hit a brick wall.  But keep in mind that the best way to stay in front of your competition is not to keep doing the same thing until it gets stale—you need to innovate and keep one move ahead.

At the same time, Sun Tzu obviously doesn't mean you should ignore what works.  Just don't become too reliant on something that you've only seen work for sure once or twice.  Shifting your marketing strategy significantly in response to a single good week of responses to a new tactic, for instance, is probably hasty.  Make sure it's not a fluke before you start investing too heavily in the next new thing.

#6: “We Cannot Enter Into Alliances Until We Are Acquainted With the Designs of Our Neighbors.”

When you start using any website to host or share content for you, from Facebook to Google Local, it's a good idea to first learn about the business models of these sites.  Knowing how these websites work can help you decide whether you actually want to do business with them.  In some cases, you may decide that a particular website is not likely to still be in business within the year—so why keep sinking marketing dollars into their site?  In others, you may decide that the current rate of growth makes marketing on a particular site a real bargain.

#7: “No Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy.”

People will never do quite what you'd expect with your content.  There's no sense in blaming your audience for not responding according to your plan.  Instead, you need to revise your plan with the new data.  Keep in mind that revising your plan isn't an indicator that you failed in your original planning—knowing what doesn't work is just as important as knowing what does.