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.

From the Madison Avenue “Mad Men” of the 1960s to contemporary thinkers on advertising, copywriting and design gurus can teach legal marketing departments a lot.  Often, legal marketing is—in a field known for how good it is at persuasion—rather disappointing and bland.  In this guide, we'll explore some lessons from the masters.  Each of these quotes comes from an advertising professional who succeeded by having a unique understanding of why and how humans are persuaded to do the things they do.  By incorporating their ideas into your legal marketing strategies for 2013, you'll be going beyond your competition and helping yourself to stand out in a crowded market.

#1: “What makes all the hysteria so silly and unwarranted is how quickly consumers digest and adjust to 'the future'–and how seamlessly it arrives.”  Bob Hoffman

Hoffman, in his book 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising, writes that marketers are always overly concerned with the idea that the future will represent a huge seismic shift, and that nothing will ever be the same.  Instead, he says, the truth is far more prosaic: generally, consumers accept the future much more easily than the marketers do, and in spite of all the conferences proclaiming huge changes to how business is done, not much actually changes.

Most of the same strategies—listening to your clients, keeping up with technological developments, monitoring your competition, and so on—work today in the same basic ways that they did a century ago.  The only real difference is that cultural changes have changed the ways in which you need to implement those strategies.

#2: “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” Howard Gossage

This is one of the most important maxims for online marketers to remember.  People don't read corporate Twitter posts, or Facebook status updates, or blog entries, or attorney biographies.  They read what interests them, and sometimes those are corporate Twitter posts, Facebook updates, blogs, or attorney bio pages.  The trick is to make sure that for every single piece of content you create—no matter how large or how small—there's a reason for your audience to listen to what you're saying.  Always give people a reason to be interested.  If you can't come up with one, keep working on your content until you've got one.  You're better off posting only a few interesting Facebook updates a week than five boring ones every day.

#3: “Never Write an Advertisement Which You Wouldn't Want Your Own Family To Read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by.” David Ogilvy

Perhaps the single most famous ad man of all time, Ogilvy's campaigns didn't work by insulting or lying to audiences.  Ogilvy believed advertising should go beyond slogans and into consumers' motivations for buying products.  This is great advice to keep in mind when you're thinking about your website content.  Don't use puffery and don't say anything that you'd be embarrassed to have even your closest friends or family members read.

#4: “Your ad begins as an interruption.  Make paying attention to it feel like a reward.” Lee Clow

This wisdom comes from a book of tweets by famous contemporary advertising guru Lee Clow.  Whenever you put up a pay per click advertisement for your law firm, you're interrupting someone's browsing space.  Give them something for that interruption.  Make sure that your website has good legal information and helps legal consumers understand your firm's practice areas and personality.

#5: “The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.” Leo Burnett

There's no reason for you to try to create whole new ways of thinking about the law in your content.  In fact, because consumers can be somewhat uncomfortable when they're looking for legal services, you should probably try to make sure that they're seeing content that doesn't add to their stress.  Keep your language relatively plain, and don't use too much legal jargon.

At the same time, try to use some of the more familiar language you're using to talk about seeing legal problems differently.  Giving people a new way to understand their issues will make them more comfortable with calling your firm and scheduling a consultation.

#6: “Radio gave birth to impertinent advertising. Never before the advent of radio did advertising have such a golden opportunity to make an ass out of itself.”  William J. Cameron

If Cameron's quote is right, then surely the internet has brought impertinent advertising into its full-fledged adulthood.  When you make mistakes in your marketing today, your faux pas can immediately be broadcast to the internet.  For many reasons, people have a greater tendency to share things with friends that are embarrassing or negative than they are to share positive things they hear about a company.  It's not fair, but that's life, and eventually it will probably catch up with your law firm—no one can be perfect all the time.

The only thing you can do if you make a mistake is to apologize for it and move on.  While it's a good idea to delete anything that was embarrassing you, this doesn't mean you should deny it was there or try to pretend it didn't happen.  Own up to anything embarrassing and keep going—people will forget as time goes by.

#7: “There is no such thing as too long. Only too boring.” Dan Kennedy

When trying to decide how long a particular piece of content should be, let the medium, the audience, and how interesting the writing is guide you.  A single sentence can be incredibly boring if it's poorly constructed, while a great writer can keep an audience captivated for pages and pages about topics that wouldn't usually be considered interesting at all.

Being boring is the biggest sin you can commit on the internet if you want to be a marketing success.  Make sure someone's taking a look at your marketing content to establish whether it will hold your readers' attention./

As Facebook tries to effectively monetize its social media platform and become sustainably profitable, it has tried several new tactics.  One of those tactics is allowing businesses and individuals to “promote” posts on Facebook so that everyone who is connected to you will see the post.  Another is graph search, which tries to pull business away from other search engines like Google, keeping people looking at Facebook's ads longer.  Is Facebook Graph Search actually being used, and what should you do to get good rankings in Graph Search?  This guide will give you the basics so that you can go in with all the information.

What Is Facebook Graph Search?

Facebook's Graph Search allows users to search based on information that Facebook knows about their friends, photos, and about locations near the user.  For example, if you indicated to Facebook that you wanted to find restaurants near a specific location, you could narrow the parameters further by telling it what kind of restaurant you were interested in and exactly where you wanted it to be located.

Facebook also lets people look through their friends for people who work for specific places, live in secific towns, or are friends with other friends.  This search functionality makes it easier for people to access the data that is being made public by people and businesses.

Getting Good Rankings in Graph Search

It's not yet clear exactly how Facebook's Graph Search decides which results to display first, when it comes to businesses.  It does, however, appear that there are at least a few things you can do to increase the chance that your result will show before your competitors.  First of all, you should make sure that all parts of your Facebook page are filled out, and that you haven't left any blank information sections.  You should ensure that your address is correct and that all the other contact information Facebook has for you is right.

It's also true that Facebook will tend to rank pages higher in the Graph Search if they are updated on a regular basis.  If you barely post to your Facebook page and don't comment or engage with your users often, you will likely see significantly lower results as part of Graph Search.  Of course, these kinds of interactions are also useful from an overall social media marketing perspective, so you should work on interacting more with your audience no matter what.

Are People Using Graph Search?

So far, this is one of the most difficult questions to answer, and also one that many marketers would love to know the answer to.  Graph Search is certainly not going to overtake Google, Yahoo, or Bing any time soon.  But for certain types of businesses, especially those that use a large number of word of mouth referrals, Graph Search is already being used and will probably be used more in the future once Facebook promotes the feature more.

The lack of overall promotion for Graph Search has hurt how many people use it.  Not all Facebook users are aware that Facebook has changed how its search algorithm and sorting works, and not everyone has felt that the changes are a net positive.  Some users feel that the Graph Search's reliance on information voluntarily given to Facebook can seem like an invasion of privacy.

Hiring Outside Help

If you want to make your Facebook page Graph Search ready but don't know how or don't want to risk doing it wrong, you might consider outsourcing this aspect of your social media marketing to an agency.  Some agencies will help a law firm develop their Facebook page for as little as a few hundred dollars, making it well worth it if it spares your firm frustration and several hours of work.

However, it's important not to have all of your social media content created by outside providers.  At the end of the day, you're the one who knows your specialty areas best.  Having outsiders try to talk with authority about your specialty topics could result in misinformation being distributed on your website.

Identifying Target Demographics With Graph Search

Graph Seach doesn't just have to be a way that people look for you.  By using Graph Search, you can successfully identify groups of your fans and friends, learning what demographics are most likely to add you to their friends and who is most likely to give you a call after becoming your Facebook friend.

Try looking at Graph Search to see how many of the people who have friended you are, for example, men versus women.  Do you have a fairly even ratio, or is it imbalanced in one direction or another?  Understanding this can help you target your Facebook posts, sponsored content, and pay per click advertisements to be most effective with the eyes that are actually reading your pages.

Keep An Eye On the Future

It's important to understand that Facebook Graph Search is new enough that nobody really knows yet whether it's going to work or not.  It may be that Facebook Graph Search will soon be abandoned, or that many users will find it more creepy and invasive than useful.  Make sure that you don't do anything that could compromise the privacy of your own clients in order to get ahead with Facebook graph search.

Make sure that you keep reading recent articles regarding Facebook Graph Search to make sure that the numbers keep showing steady growth in use.  If users simply refuse to adopt the new feature, you should stop sinking your time and money into making the feature work for you.  Don't throw good money after bad—if it starts to look like Graph Search will simply never be competitive, there's nothing wrong with trying new strategies instead.

With over 1 billion users, Facebook is clearly a social media site that's here to stay for the foreseeable future.  However, if you've got a limited law firm marketing budget (and who doesn't?), you need to know which other new online marketing methods are going to be around in the future and which ones have a short shelf life.  In this guide, we'll take a look at the bandwagons that your law firm should consider jumping on.  These methods all have tremendous applicability for most or all law firms, and can be expected to still be relevant for the foreseeable future.

Bandwagon #1: Quantitative Testing

For a long time, most law firm marketing and advertising depended not on quantitative A/B testing of different possibilities, but of what amounted to guessing with a good helping of talent and intuition.  While the old way of doing marketing could work passably well, today, you can augment any talent with quantitative testing that will help you identify exactly when your marketing is bringing in clients.

Internet technology has made it easier than ever for businesses to learn what clients are responding to.  Only a few decades ago, when advertisers wanted to see if consumers were reading, they'd have to include cut-out coupons to mail in.  These were somewhat inconvenient and couldn't be used effectively by many types of businesses.  Today, you can see exactly what ad made someone click on your website, and whether anyone clicking from that ad is actually calling pr emailing your firm to set up an appointment.

Bandwagon #2: Mobile Marketing

For the first time, in 2013 smartphone connections to the internet in the United States will actually exceed internet connections from desktop and laptop computers.  This means that even if your firm hasn't been great about interacting with mobile clients in the past, today is the day to start changing that.  As more and more people access the internet from their smartphones, it will become more difficult to stay competitive as a firm that is steadfastly against mobile marketing.

Begin your mobile marketing ventures by starting to make your content mobile friendly.  Having smartphones redirect to a mobile website is a good idea.  You should also make sure that any emails you plan to send are viewable not only on dekstop and laptop computers, but also smartphones with Android or iOS.

Bandwagon #3: Client-Responsive Websites

If your firm has several practice areas but someone came to your firm's website because of an advertisement for DUI defense services, you will be wasting your time telling them about all of your firm's other services.  Having websites that actually are based on how your clients got there, and that change based on how your clients interact with them, are the wave of the future when it comes to legal marketing on the web.

This kind of website specialization might not yet be feasible for some smaller firms, but keep an eye out.  As technology for creating client responsive sites improves, prices will drop, and you may be able to get the kind of site that will start converting 100-200% more viewers than the site you have today.

Bandwagon #4: The Rise of Agencies

Because online advertising and marketing is becoming increasingly important and, in some critical ways, increasingly complicated, more and more firms are considering having some or all of their marketing services outsourced to agencies.  In fact, the number of online marketing and branding agencies has doubled in the last year alone.

If you're having a difficult time understanding how to position your brand in your local market, or you're just not seeing a way to find enough time to maintain your website and create new content marketing materials on a regular basis, you should consult with one of these agencies.  They can help you to find a plan that will suit your firm's needs and budget, and that will provide the marketing assistance you need.  Whether you need someone to update your Facebook wall from time to time or just want someone to manage your PPC advertising budget, agencies can help you with whatever you're having the most difficulty with.

Bandwagon #5: Locally Based Marketing

Because it's very likely that the vast majority of your law firm's clients come from a 20 mile radius, what good does it do your firm to advertise to many, many people who will never be able to come to your office for a consultation?  Locally based marketing is a great way to save money over national marketing, all while making sure that you're targeting the potential clients who are most likely to convert.

Not all locally based marketing is actually online.  For example, sponsoring local events or teams can seriously improve your reputation in your community.  However, you should make sure that when you do locally based marketing in your community, you're also discussing it in your online marketing materials.  You can also make sure that you're being listed in local directories, including any online listings offered by your local chamber of commerce or bar association.

While locally based marketing with tagging services like Foursquare and Gowalla seemed promising in 2011 and 2012, today it appears that these services have actually become significantly less popular in recent months.  You should consider discontinuing your use of these services unless you're still seeing results from them.  It's possible that in your city or neighborhood, Foursquare could be going strong.  If so, keep up your use of it as long as it's still benefiting your firm.

Bandwagon #6: Relationship Building

Keep in mind that the real purpose of social media platforms isn't for you to use them as a bullhorn.  It's to build longer-term relationships with clients in a way that isn't inconvenient in the same way that continuous phone or email contact can be.  A brief post on Facebook linking to something and giving enough information about whether it will be interesting to click on won't offend anyone, as long as you're not making that kind of post more than once or twice a day and the content will genuinely interest a significant number of your friends or subscribers.

If you're already using Twitter as a tool for your law firm—as a little over a third of firms report they're already doing or plan to do in 2013—you may think that Twitter's primarily a way to get your marketing content out there.  But if you're looking at Twitter exclusively from a content marketing perspective, you're missing out on some of the best features of the service.  In this guide we'll look at seven different ways to use your Twitter account more effectively that are about much more than content marketing.

#1: Use Twitter As a Recruitment Tool

One aspect of Twitter that many law firms ignore is its potential to bring in new recruits.  Many bright law students and young attorneys are using Twitter in their daily lives, and you can use your account to start finding the right people and making your firm's strengths known.

Consider talking about some of your firm's best aspects from a recruitment standpoint—whether your office offers a superb work life balance, the kinds of cases associates can expect to work on—and discuss them in tweets.  You may also want to include links to firm recruiting videos or text on your website or on Youtube.

#2: Scope Out Potential Clients

So you know that someone's coming in for an initial consultation, and you have enough information about them to find their Twitter account.  What's great about Twitter is that you can actually use the service to learn some things about the person you're about to meet with.  From what sports team they're rooting for to what they think of political issues, clients will talk about many things very freely on Twitter that they might not discuss openly with an attorney.

The reason that you should do a little of this kind of friendly reconnaissance is easy—you really don't want to put your foot in your mouth at your first client meeting.  Understanding what your client thinks like can help you anticipate the best strategies to address their legal problems while providing a high degree of client satisfaction.

#3: Get Competitor Intelligence

Another way that you can use Twitter is to get a feel for how your competitors behave.  This can help you identify opportunities.  If there's something that your competition is falling short on, you can pounce and offer the services in the places they're missing. You can also figure out what kinds of hashtags your competitors are using and how they're marketing their services.  If they're doing anything particularly well, you can figure out whether their strategies could be incorporated into your own marketing.

If you're not getting competitor intelligence, you're ignoring half the battle when it comes to marketing.  Understanding your firm's own unique selling proposition will help you to get across your message, and the first step to knowing what makes you unique is seeing the public face of the people you're competing most directly with.

#4: Show Off Your Good Press

You should be doing more than just online marketing if you're in charge of publicity for your firm.  It's important to send out not just generic press releases, but press releases that give a good narrative “hook” to journalists.  Doing a little of a reporter's job for them—finding an angle for a story—is important in a world where print journalists are working on increasingly tight deadlines for lower pay.

When your press releases start resulting in stories in local publications, make sure that your Twitter readers know it.  It's not considered undue bragging to talk about your good press.  Many people on Twitter will post their own media mentions, and ignoring these on your firm's Twitter profile is a mistake.

#5: Watch For People Talking About You

You should also consider making sure that you're monitoring any hashtags that could pertain to your firm, as well as several search terms for your firm's name and the names of the attorneys at your firm.  If someone is making a complaint about your law firm, it's much better to find out quickly so you can react before any concerns go viral, which can deeply hurt your firm's reputation.

Sometimes, handling a complaint gracefully can lead to virality all its own—responsiveness to clients can get people using your firm's name in positive discussions online.  Even if it doesn't, swift and authentic client-focused responses will usually stop any negative publicity in its tracks.

#6: Consider Vine Videos

One of the newest features people are using on Twitter is the Vine service.  Vine allows people to upload videos to the internet, with one small catch.  Much like Twitter restricts the characters in a tweet, Vine videos restrict how long the video clip can be—to just six seconds.

What can you say in six seconds?  That depends entirely on you and your firm.  Consider having a firmwide contest to see who can make the best Vine video with their smartphone.  Since the videos are just six seconds long, they're not beyond anybody's ability to create.  This can be a funny and inclusive way to get people at your firm interested in the firm's marketing online.

#7: Understand Twitter Jargon and Notation

If you want to get the most out of your Twitter account, you'll need to communicate well with other users of the website.  Part of that will mean that you need to study up on your Twitter jargon.  Whether you don't know the difference between a trending hashtag and a trendy handbag or you've just used the service personally before, it's a good idea to read up on some Twitter 101 for businesses before you start trying to make a lot of tweets of your own.

If you don't know how to use hashtags, hat-tips, re-tweets, and other similar jargon, you won't be able to interact with Twitter users as someone who really cares about their community norms.  It's important to really try to be a part of any online social community you belong to, and Twitter is no exception.

If you're using a lot of reciprocal links, you may need to know whether they'll start having a negative impact on your SERPs.  After Google's Penguin and Panda updates, 15 percent of websites were penalized for having excessive optimization—and one of the biggest red flags for over optimization is having too many reciprocal links.  In this guide, you'll learn how to avoid these penalties and how to overcome them if you've already been penalized.

What is a Reciprocal Link URL?

Any time you type a web address into your browser bar (like www.google.com), this is called a URL.  A reciprocal links URL is a URL that goes to a website that also links back to your own website.  Usually, reciprocal links are set up deliberately by people from two different websites in order to help improve visibility, publicity, and search engine rankings.

Sources for Reciprocal Links

In order to get reciprocal links, you don't have to look very far.  You probably already know friends, family members, colleagues, and relatives who have websites.  You can start getting your first reciprocal links URL by just asking one of them if they would be willing to do an even exchange of links.  After you get the reciprocal link URL from them and have verified that the link to your website is up, you can link to their site.

You can also find a reciprocal link URL and code to include on your website using some reciprocal link exchange programs.  These reciprocal link URL codes will actually work to automate the process of creating reciprocal links.  When someone includes the reciprocal link URL and code on their website and then follows the reciprocal linking instructions, your website will automatically create a reciprocal links URL that directs to their site.

How Google Penguin Checks Your Reciprocal Link URL

Google monitors your website's inbound links constantly to see whether your reciprocal links appear to be too high a percentage of your overall inbound links.  There's no exact percentage number (if your PageRank is higher, for instance, you can get away with having more reciprocal links URL content, while lower PageRank sites will get flagged with much less), but you should always keep these penalties in mind when making a new reciprocal links URL.

If you're not already working on building one way links in addition to your reciprocal links, you need to start right away.  If your website is already heavily imbalanced in favor of reciprocal links, you should focus on one way link building before including a single additional reciprocal link URL on your website.

Why Your Reciprocal Link URL Anchor Text Matters

In addition to monitoring your reciprocal links URL statistics, Google is also looking at your anchor text.  The reason that your reciprocal link URL anchor text matters is that Google wants to be able to identify trends and patterns.  If you're using the exact same reciprocal links URL anchor text in every single link that you create on a reciprocal basis, Google will see this as a very solid indicator that your links have been built artificially, possibly with black hat methods.

To keep your reciprocal links generating link juice for your website, you'll need to vary your reciprocal link URL anchor text.  By varying the reciprocal links URL anchor text even slightly, you'll show that your links haven't been made using a totally automated system.  Try to make the level of variation fairly high: for instance, some of your reciprocal link URL anchor text should be a brand related term like your firm name, while others should be the kinds of exact keyword matches that you might use for search engine optimization.

Checking a Reciprocal Link URL from Your Linking Partners

If you've already worked hard to build a great reciprocal links URL on a website, you don't want to let it just disappear.  It's critical to make sure that any reciprocal link URL you've agreed upon still exists as long as you're still running a reciprocal link for that website.

In order to check on your reciprocal links URL and make sure that your partners are doing exactly what they said they'd do, you can run a reciprocal link checker program.  This program examines every reciprocal link URL you've set up and verifies that the link to your website still exists on every website you're linking to from your reciprocal links page.

If you find that one of your linking partners is no longer listing your reciprocal links URL where they should be, don't just delete their link right away.  Sometimes links can disappear during site redesigns or during problems with a website.  Instead, talk to the webmaster about the problem.  Many webmasters will be more than willing to re-list your reciprocal link URL as long as they can see that your link is still intact.

What if You Have Too Many Reciprocal Links?

It's every web marketer's worst nightmare in 2012: waking up to a message from Google that says your website has been overoptimized, or has suspicious links.  If you have used too many reciprocal links, especially from non-contextual sources or sources that are blacklisted as being potential sources of link buying, you'll face these penalties.  When you get an email from Google about your reciprocal links URL content being bad, you'll need to act fast in order to recover the lost search rankings.

First of all, find out which reciprocal link URL they believe to be from a bad source.  Then contact the webmaster who is running that website and ask for them to take your reciprocal links URL down.  If they do, you can notify Google that the offending link has been removed.  If not, you should keep all the documentation relating to your attempt to have it removed.  Google will take this documentation into account and may decide to lift the penalty even if the link isn't removed, as long as you made a good faith effort.

Millions of links are being added to the internet every day in 2012.  If you're looking to build links so that you can improve your search engine rankings, you may have started to consider reciprocal link exchange.  Reciprocal links exchange is one of the oldest ways of doing link building on the web, and can be done by just about anyone with even basic knowledge of internet issues.  If you're curious about the details of reciprocal link exchange and whether it would benefit your search engine marketing, keep reading this guide.

What are Reciprocal Links?

When a link is one way, Site A gives Site B a link on their website.  But when a link is reciprocal, Site B also gives a link back to Site A.  Why would two websites do this?  The answer is simple.  Every new inbound link that you receive makes it so that Google perceives your website as having more authority.  Therefore, every time you do a reciprocal links exchange, both websites that are linked will generally gain in the rankings.

Reciprocal link exchange in some form or another has been part of the web from its very beginning.  Even if you're just linking to a friend's website and they link yours back, you've done a basic form of reciprocal links exchange.  Of course, as technology has improved and become more sophisticated, the form that a reciprocal link exchange takes has changed as well.

How Does a Reciprocal Link Exchange Work?

The idea of a reciprocal links exchange has come a long way from friends swapping links in the mid-1990s.  Today, reciprocal link exchange is often done on a large scale, and has become big business.  A large number of websites are now devoted to creating a reciprocal links exchange for any websites that want to submit their URL to their directory.  Some of these reciprocal link exchange programs are completely free, while others cost money to join.

When you join a reciprocal links exchange, you'll give your URL, and in exchange, you'll have to host some other URLs on your own website.  Some of the reciprocal link exchange programs today actually do three way reciprocal links (in which Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links back to Site A) in order to obscure the fact that they are exchanging links.

Why Are Search Engines Suspicious About Reciprocal Link Exchange?

In the early part of the 2000s, it was very common for websites to try to build their search engine rankings through overuse and outright abuse of reciprocal links exchange.  Because of this, Google and other search engines have been working to discourage people from using too many reciprocal link exchange resources.

The problem that search engines were having with reciprocal links was that when companies got automated reciprocal links a hundred or a thousand at a time, these links were often to websites that had no relation to theirs.  It made it more difficult to navigate the web, and made it so that junk and spam websites were able to gain in the search rankings even ahead of legitimate businesses.  Since as a law firm your business is professional, you should actually be glad about these changes—you don't want a spammer to be able to exceed your rankings by using reciprocal links exchange too heavily.

What Websites Would My Reciprocal Links Be On?

Depending on what kind of reciprocal link exchange you're using, there are several different answers to this question.  Today, some reciprocal link exchanges are set up to allow webmasters to look through websites in particular categories that are hunting for reciprocal links.  If you see a website that is in a contextually relevant category for you, you can do a reciprocal links exchange with that website.

Other reciprocal link exchange websites don't allow people to be quite as picky.  You may be able to choose a basic category on which to get your reciprocal links, or you may just find a reciprocal links exchange site that automates the entire process.  Keep in mind if you use one of these latter types of reciprocal link exchange, you have less control over where your links are and what your reputation online becomes.

Are There Disadvantages to Reciprocal Link Exchange?

There are actually several different reasons that you might want to avoid reciprocal links exchange, at least as a primary link building method.  While it's fine to build some of your links using a reciprocal link exchange, Google actually penalizes websites that have a percentage of reciprocal links that is judged to be too high.

It's worth noting that no one knows exactly what that percentage is, or what other variables may be able to affect it.  Having most of your links come from a reciprocal links exchange resource will probably negatively impact your website, but there are no guarantees.

The other reason that you may want to avoid a reciprocal link exchange is that it can make your website look spammy.  If you don't want the appearance of link-grubbing on your professional website, you should try to get one way links instead of building reciprocal ones.

Fixing Overoptimization Penalties

If Google does say that your website has been over optimized (your webmaster will get an email), you may want to take your links off of some reciprocal link exchanges.  Remove the link from your own website and notify the webmaster of the reciprocating website that the link has been removed.  

This will generally lead them to stop listing the link on their website.  You may need to specifically request this removal if it isn't done within a few days or weeks.  If the link is now one way, you may not actually need to have it removed unless you really want to—so ask yourself whether you believe the link would be providing value as a one way link before deciding to email for a deletion.

One of the most common ways for businesses to get reciprocal links is through a reciprocal links directory.  If you're not already using a reciprocal links directory, though, you may have a lot of questions.  You may have heard (and rightly so) that Google can penalize websites that use too many reciprocal links, and you may wonder whether a reciprocal links directory would actually hurt your site's search engine optimization.  We'll talk about all that and more in this guide.

What Is a Reciprocal Link Directory?

Let's just start with the basics.  A reciprocal links directory includes a large number of reciprocal, or two way, links.  By putting them into directory form, they become easier for people to search through in order to build additional links.

Sometimes, a reciprocal link directory will be oriented toward just one category of product or service.  Other times, they will take anyone with a website, and may or may not organize websites into categories and subcategories.  When someone sees a link that they want to reciprocate on the reciprocal links directory, they can create the reciprocal link with some degree of automation.

What Are the Advantages of Reciprocal Links?

Reciprocal links, whether or not you use a reciprocal links directory, can offer some key advantages that make them very attractive to some law firm marketing pros.  For one thing, it can be very easy to start your reciprocal link building efforts.  By using a reciprocal link directory, you can ensure that your link is used by a number of other websites very quickly.

That link number is important, because your inbound links matter a great deal to search engine rankings.  The biggest reason that businesses start using a reciprocal link directory is that they want improved SERPs.  Especially if the links from your reciprocal links directory are contextual or have a high Google PageRank, they will add a great deal of link juice to your website and improve your rankings.

Another advantage of reciprocal links is that they connect you with other parts of the web.  In order to take advantage of this, you shouldn't just use a very generic reciprocal link directory.  If you use any kind of reciprocal links directory, it needs to be very firmly based in the context of your website.  Building contextual reciprocal links won't just make your website easier to find in search engines, it will make your website part of a larger community.

When your website is included in a reciprocal link directory that actually takes your area of practice into account, you'll fare much better.  This type of reciprocal link directory can help you build connections with other attorneys.  If you're being listed in a reciprocal links directory, for example, other attorneys who work in the same practice area but in different geographic locations might want to list your link.

What Are the Disadvantages of Reciprocal Links?

Because it's easy to get an almost unlimited quantity of reciprocal links by using a reciprocal links directory, Google will start to have problems with your website if you overuse these websites.  Google keeps track of how many of your links are reciprocal, and can penalize you if this percentage grows too high.

The reason that Google does this is that too many unethical webmasters used to build huge quantities of non-contextual reciprocal links.  You can help to mitigate this disadvantage of using a reciprocal links directory just by making sure that every link you build is in some way related to your law firm.

Reciprocal links are also somewhat problematic because unless you're checking up on them routinely, you don't know for certain whether someone has removed your link.  In order to put your mind at ease, you can run a reciprocal link checker program that will verify that all of your reciprocal links are still in order.

Problems with Using a Reciprocal Link Directory

If you're going to build reciprocal links, you don't necessarily need to use a reciprocal link directory.  In fact, there are several reasons that you might not want to.  For one thing, using this kind of directory can look unnatural.  Anyone can see which websites have been listed there, and with Google's longstanding animosity toward artificial link building, it may be only a matter of time before people using these services are penalized.

Another problem with a reciprocal link directory is that you may have a tough time finding really contextual reciprocal links to build.  Because not all law firms are yet using reciprocal link building as a technique, it can be quite difficult to find the right kind of attorney to swap links with.

Keeping Your One Way Link Count Up

Since you'll want to preserve your search engine rankings by making sure that you have a steady supply of one way links coming in, you should also work on these link building strategies in tandem with your use of a reciprocal links directory.

However, especially if you're already using a reciprocal link directory, you should not use any type of automation for creating one way links.  When Google identifies a website that is clearly using automation and link creation websites rather than building natural links by having great content, it penalizes it.  You won't be able to fool Google—at least, not in the long term—so even if your strategy works for now, it will probably be discovered and you'll lose huge amounts of web traffic.

Instead, decide on one type of link to automate.  If you're already automating with a reciprocal links directory, do your work the old fashioned way with one way link building.  Create profiles for law firm directories and attorney review websites, make the most of any social networks you use, and keep every one way link you build contextual and natural.  This will ensure that you're much less likely to be penalized—and if you are, you'll only have to clean up your reciprocal links, rather than every link you've built.