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.

Contextual Link Building: A Link Building Solution For Law Firms

As linking strategies have changed and become more complex, contextual link building has become one of the biggest trends of 2012.  Law firms, because their business is so context-dependent, are ideal users of contextual link building strategies.  Whether you want advice on finding a great contextual link building service or doing it yourself, keep reading this guide to find out exactly how to make your contextual linking dreams become a reality.

What is Contextual Link Building?

Traditional link building just refers to the process of getting other websites to link to yours.  Search engines, when trying to determine what website is the best source for a particular search string, consider these “backlinks” to be one of the biggest indicators of quality.  This means that if no one (or almost no one) is linking your website, you probably won't appear in the first few pages of search results—no matter how carefully you've search engine optimized your website's actual content.

Contextual link building is a particular form of link building that involves only building links to websites that share many similarities with your own site.  Why does this kind of link building work?  There are several reasons.  First of all, in order to combat the rise of backlink spam, many search engines now take context into consideration when deciding which links are “worth” more to the ranking algorithms.

Second, contextual link building is more likely to be seen as relevant by users.  This means that you're more likely to have your links shared by other people online.  Typically, a contextual link building service will advise having two or three links in a 250 to 500 word post, all of which link to keywords you're attempting to optimize.

Can My Firm Do Contextual Link Building On Its Own?

It's very possible to do this type of link building without hiring a contextual link building service.  You can build contextual links on many different types of websites.  Let's take reddit.com, which has been soaring in popularity throughout 2012 and looks to do the same in 2013, as an example.  Reddit allows anyone to post links to content, and users of the website can vote a link up if they decide it is high-quality, and down if it is low quality.  A contextual link building service may or may not post on websites like Reddit, but you can.

When you post to a website like Reddit or any other “Web 2.0” site as part of a contextual link building effort, you'll want to decide what your goals are ahead of time.  Try making the kind of post advised by a typical contextual link building service: 250-500 words (trying to keep on the shorter end—people prefer shorter, more concise content!), with two or three links to your website.

Is a Contextual Link Building Service Worth It?

If you're having trouble finding places to do your contextual link building, you may want to hire a service to handle it for you.  A contextual link building service will find the best websites to put your content on—websites that already have a similar context to your own site and will give you the best quality backlinks possible.

There are a few reasons that you may want to avoid doing contextual link building on your own.  If you don't have much SEO experience to begin with, it's probably true that even a mediocre contextual link building service will do a better job than you will—there's simply too much to learn for an amateur to become good at link building within days or weeks.

Contextual link building can also be tough because it involves knowing exactly the right kinds of websites and keeping up with the most up to date SEO trends.  Hiring a contextual link building service means that you'll never need to worry about reading search engine marketing blogs to keep up—they'll do it for you.

While every contextual link building service is different, in terms of both experience and price, ideally you shouldn't choose a service based on price points alone.  A cheap service may give you great results, or it might be using outdated contextual link building methods.  Ask to see not only case studies, but recent case studies from your contextual link building service so that you can be sure that your service is doing the kinds of link building you want.

What is Tiered Contextual Link Building?

While traditional contextual link building works fairly well to improve search results, there are ways to improve upon it.  For example, tiered link building is substantially more complex, but offers benefits for law firms.  Tiered contextual link building requires not just building a back link to your own website, but also building additional backlinks that link to the backlink.

Why does this work?  Because Google and other search engines are much more likely to believe that a contextual link occurred naturally when other websites are linking to it.  When not only your content, but your links and tiered backlinks are high quality, you'll shoot to the top of search engine rankings.

Having a two-tiered contextual link building effort is great, but if you hire an experienced enough contextual link building service they may actually advise you to do three or even four tiered link building.  This may seem like overkill, but some services have had great luck with this type of multi-tiered system.

Why Not Other Link Building Methods?

Because contextual link building can seem like such a challenge, you may be asking if there's a better way.  The answer—perhaps unfortunately for some law firms—is no.  Contextual link building offers unparalleled ability to control the message and keywords that your backlinks are using.  If it's done right, it will look completely natural, and like part of traditional web marketing efforts rather than straight-up search engine optimization. 

Other link building methods are often very obvious and are much easier for search engines not only to track, but also to shut down if too many websites begin using them.  Contextual link building, on the other hand, is here to stay—it's simply too hard to detect when it's done well.

How to Build Backlinks That Search Engines Will Notice

Three fifths of marketers believe that building backlinks is “somewhat difficult” or “very difficult.”  Have you had trouble learning how to build backlinks?  This guide can help.  In this guide, you'll learn the biggest principle for building backlinks—a principle that's used by the best search engine marketers and the search engines themselves.  You'll also find out how to build backlinks on a wide variety of different websites, so that you can diversify your web presence and prepare for whatever comes next in internet search trends.

The #1 How to Build Backlinks Principle: No Shortcuts

When people first learn about building backlinks, they start asking, well, how hard can it be?  After all, there are many guides online that show you how to build backlinks, and many of these guides suggest using article marketing services or press release websites that can give you dozens of backlinks within an hour or two.  Why not just use those?

It's true, those methods are easy.  What you may not know is that search engines have started to defend against websites using them.  Because so many websites trying to use these services were essentially spam sites, Google and other search engines have cracked down on websites that are building backlinks exclusively through low-quality websites like press release and article spinning sites.

Why the crackdown?  Because fundamentally, Google doesn't want you to know how to build backlinks easily.  In fact, Google would prefer that websites didn't focus on building backlinks at all as a search engine optimization strategy, and confined themselves only to organic backlinks generated because someone enjoys your content. 

As search engines have become more sophisticated, they've gotten better at identifying people who are using those old “how to build backlinks” guides.  Use their advice on building backlinks and you could find your website's ranking dropping rapidly.  There are no good shortcuts for how to build backlinks—nothing that will let you build hundreds or thousands of links in a day.  There are, however, ways to start building backlinks slowly and steadily that can make your website the top result in searches.

How to Build Backlinks: What Search Engines Like

Search engines are just computer programming, and search engine optimization marketers around the world work diligently to find out exactly what kind of backlink efforts work best with that programming.  They have found several common features of the types of backlink building that search engines seem to prefer.

Search engines tend to give better rankings to people who work on building backlinks that are contextual, rather than random.  If your link pattern is very random, search engines are likely to perceive this as spam.  Building backlinks to websites that are closely related to your site and are considered popular, high-quality websites will be much better.

You should make sure not to use the same keyword phrase every time for your links.  Search engines love variety—because variety is more common when building backlinks organically.  Try to vary your keywords, link text, and even just the types of websites that you're using.  Don't just use Facebook posts or blog comments, in other words—try something new!

How to Build Backlinks: What Search Engines Hate

In the process of building backlinks that work, many search engine marketers have also discovered strategies that do not work.  In some cases, these strategies rarely or never worked, while in others, they worked for a time until new algorithm updates accounted for people trying to game the system.

In brief, Google—and other search engines—don't like when people bring the quality of web results down by trying to improve their own search rankings.  This means that if you're spamming blogs, you're not building backlinks that are likely to be considered high quality by Google, Bing, or anyone else.  If you're using the same keywords over and over, or your copy is barely readable because the keywords are inserted so awkwardly, you've taken the wrong advice about how to build backlinks.

Just about any method that search engine marketers have developed to generate huge numbers of backlinks quickly will fail today.  Why?  Even if you find a new method for building backlinks fast, the sheer speed of it is likely to raise red flags about your content.  Google's algorithms know that websites don't engage in building backlinks of any reasonable quality at a rate of thousands a day.  You should ramp up your backlinking slowly, so that it's much harder to detect the artificial nature of your link building efforts.

This means that some of the most popular tools of search engine marketers in years past no longer work in 2012 and 2013.  Instead of using article spinning services that put the same content (or very similar versions of content, often edited by a computer program) into many different websites, today's search engine marketers are having to work harder for a smaller number of quality backlinks.

Building Backlinks Using High Quality Websites

If you want to get the most bang for your buck when building backlinks, you'll need to have your links on high quality websites.  One of the best things that you can do for yourself when starting to learn how to build backlinks is to learn what kinds of websites are considered the most trusted and highest quality—not only in general, but in your specific field of law.  Learning the big players in your specific field will help you target guest blogging opportunities and other chances for contextual link building.

When you build backlinks using these high quality websites, it may take a little more time to get each link in place.  However, each of them will be considered a high quality backlink that is worth much more than if you had inserted dozens of non-contextual backlinks on a wide variety of low-quality sites.  In other words, it only seems to take more time—you'll still get a better return on investment from link building on high quality sites.

7 Ways a Backlink Building Service Can Help Lawyers

New changes to Google's search ranking algorithms called Penguin have impacted about 65 percent of marketers worldwide.  In the post-Penguin era, quality backlink building services are among the best ways to improve where your law firm appears in search engine results.  A professional backlink building service can help your website become more visible in search rankings in several different ways—keep reading this guide to find out some of those ways, and how each one can change the way search engines see your law firm's website.

Finding New Places to Build Backlinks

Many of the online tools that used to be very effective in improving search rankings are no longer effective after Google's recent algorithm changes.  That's because those changes affect the listing status of some websites that were commonly used by backlink building services.  Instead of considering these websites' backlinks equal to those from other websites, Google now considers them to be worth very little or nothing.  In some cases, if a backlink building service has clearly abused these websites to improve search rankings, Google will de-list the website completely.

If your favorite backlink websites have been de-listed, it's time to talk to backlink building services.  Today, just about any backlink building service that is still in business has had to adapt to these changes.  Backlink building services will be able to identify places where your links will be quality content, rather than spam.

Building Backlinks with Directory Entries

It surprises some people that directory entries are still considered a valid way to build backlinks, but maybe it shouldn't.  After all, as long as a directory is high quality, directories serve to organize information in a very user-friendly way. 

Creating directory entries can be repetitive work that isn't very creative.  Backlink building services can take this boring chore off your hands, freeing you up to create new marketing content or otherwise attend to your law firm's other business needs.

Some of the directories that your backlink building service uses may be big, worldwide directories like DMOZ or Yahoo.  Smart backlink building services will also seek out local directories and specialized directories full of attorneys and law firms just like yours.  Local search results are getting bigger and bigger, and your backlink building service can take advantage of local by making sure that you're listed in all the right places.

Building Backlinks with Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking websites, like reddit.com and digg.com, have become increasingly popular over the last several years.  Even Barack Obama has become a user of Reddit, which is a website where any user can post a link and other users “upvote” or “downvote” it to decide on its level of popularity compared to other links on the site. 

Backlink building services can use Reddit and other similar websites to your advantage.  Because the content on these websites is user-generated, your backlink building service can start by posting a link to some of your most interesting content with a relevant headline.  If you're looking into backlink building services that offer this kind of linking, make sure that you take a look at the kinds of links they're offering.  Your backlink building service should be able to make links that fit in with the quality guidelines of the website and generate comments and discussion.

Creating Multi-Tiered Backlinks

Your backlink building service can increase the perceived quality of their backlinks even further by tiering them.  Tiering essentially means having not just backlinks, but backlinks that link to your backlinks.  That would be considered a two-tiered backlink—some backlink building services create three or even four tier backlinks for their clients.

This is one of the newest techniques for generating high backlink quality ratings, so you may have to do some searching to find a backlink building service that offers it.  Some backlink building services still work exclusively with single-tier backlinks and get good results, but the time is coming when that may just not be enough to compete with other law firms.

Guest Posting on Relevant Blogs

Backlink building services can also post your content on blogs by asking for guest blogging opportunities.  If this is a method that you want to use extensively, you should search for a backlink building service with a track record of getting great guest post leads.

If the backlink building services you're using don't have extensive knowledge of the legal field you specialize in, it may be a good idea for you to write the guest post content yourself.  However, your link building service may offer copywriting services as well, either as part of your package or for an extra fee.  Ask to see samples of copywriting from any link building services you are considering—you don't want to pick a service where the copywriters have poor grammar or stilted sentence structure.

Creating Press Releases

Not all press release websites are still considered legitimate by Google.  In fact, many websites which used to run press releases are now considered to be primarily vehicles for spam.  That's why when your backlink building service creates press releases today, they'll need to be careful about where exactly your press releases go.

Ideally, your link building service should avoid any press release websites that accept literally any type of content.  Take a look around the press release websites your service is considering using.  Do they look like they're full of legitimate press releases from companies you've heard of, or does it look like a website full of companies you'd rather not be affiliated with?

Generating Blog Comments

Not all approaches to link building are based in creating your own posts.  By using blog comments, your backlink building service can join in on the conversation for your law firm.  This means that you'll be able to put a link to your website in comments on legal blogs with high traffic.

Please note that creating legitimate blog comments is a very different method than what some backlink building services offer—blog comment spam.  Your law firm should never be involved in spamming any website for any reason, and should stop using any service that is clearly spamming blogs.