Everything About Facebook Viral Marketing

While LinkedIn is the most common social media site for lawyers to have a profile on, Facebook is a close second.  Studies show that 68 percent of attorneys use Facebook at least once in a while.  If your firm wants to get into Facebook viral marketing to get clients, though, it won't necessarily be easy.  People interact with Facebook in very particular ways, and failing to pay attention to the prevailing norms can leave you with a worse reputation than before you got into the social media game.  In this guide, you'll learn four mistakes that a lot of law firms make when they begin Facebook viral marketing, and ways to avoid the mistake and get the clients or referrals you want.

Avoid This Mistake: Whoa, Text Overload!

One of the advantages the Facebook platform has over Twitter is that Facebook statuses can be significantly longer.  All the extra room may make you feel comfortable with writing long paragraphs of text, but be careful.  Studies show that Facebook users are much more likely to “Like” or otherwise interact with a post that is substantially shorter than the maximum length.

Remember that your updates aren't the only ones your readers are viewing.  People want to be able to scroll through their Facebook feeds relatively quickly, and if they get bogged down in text, they are likely to just keep moving instead of reading your Facebook viral marketing content.

Try This Instead: Short but Sweet

Keeping your Facebook status updates limited to the same character limit that Twitter uses—140 characters—can help you stay focused on maintaining brief messages that still hit hard.  If you want to link to a blog article, keep the text before your link very short and to the point.

The only time when you might want to have longer text for your Facebook viral marketing campaign is when you have something truly mind-blowing or unique to say.  If you can honestly say that a 250 character message is going to make people scrolling down their feed stop and say “wow,” and that you need that number of characters to convey the message, use it.  Just be aware that you may be losing out on the benefits of Facebook viral marketing if your content is too long too often.

Avoid This Mistake: Broadcasting Your Brand

Law firms that have done a great deal of advertising in the pre-social media days are often reluctant to adapt to the new norms of Facebook and the rest of the social media world.  Many of these firms think they're starting a Facebook viral marketing campaign, when in fact they're just dressing up the same old ad in more internet-savvy clothes.

You should never use a hard sell, or even use your Facebook statuses for directly advising people to contact your law office.  More than anything else, this is the mistake that can make you look like a Facebook viral marketing rookie, and will drive Facebook friends and fans away fast.

Try This Instead: Work on Your Conversation Skills

No one likes the person who spends every moment talking about themselves.  Remember that when your Facebook icon is being seen by viewers, it's being seen among the voices of many individual people—what personality do you want that icon to have?  If you don't want to be seen as self-centered, you need to learn to participate in the conversations that the people you're connected with are having.

When people comment on your status updates and links, keep the conversation going if you can.  You should also try to make at least some of your status updates questions, rather than statements.  People like to be asked what they think, and it's a great Facebook viral marketing strategy to use this kind of question to actually generate more content.  Ask people what they want to see you talk about next, and then follow through and deliver that content.

Avoid This Mistake: The Vanilla Firm—Hold the Vanilla

Horror stories about what happens when companies offend the social media universe abound.  That's why it's no wonder that some firms tone down their personality in an attempt to be all things to all people.  These firms may be trying to be professional, but they end up seeming like vanilla ice cream without the vanilla—a bland, boring glop.

Try This Instead: Spice it Up

You don't have to be boring to maintain your professional reputation.  While it would still be a bad idea to try raunchy or inappropriate Facebook viral marketing, there's nothing wrong with livening up your messages.  People prefer to read posts from people (and law firms) with a great personality.  You need to let yours shine through if you want your Facebook viral marketing to be as successful as it can be.

Avoid This Mistake: Shutting Down Negativity

Uh oh—now you've done it.  You've made a mistake online, a big one, and now an Angry Customer On the Internet is ready to start a nationwide boycott and probably burn your office down, for good measure.  These mistakes can be especially painful because they occur in public, where anyone can see that you did the wrong thing.

Of course, if the whole thing was in comments after a Facebook post, you could just delete the whole thing and never speak of it again, right?  Wrong.

Try This Instead: Talk It Out

Unless someone's actually harassing or threatening you, your Facebook viral marketing efforts will be best served by actually discussing the problem, instead of trying to make it go away.  Transparency through this process is key.  If you're perceived as having censored critics, you are unlikely to win new friends or further your Facebook viral marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that as long as you keep someone talking and manage to defuse the situation, it will generally go away very quickly.  Stay polite and upbeat in all communication with negative people on your Facebook page.  An internet mob has a short attention span, and as long as you don't add fuel to the fire with comebacks, defensiveness, or censorship, they'll find something else to be angry about soon enough.

Everything About LinkedIn Tips

Every new website you use has a learning curve, and LinkedIn is no exception.  With nearly 77 percent of LinkedIn users using the site to research people and companies, you can't afford not to know the best, most up to date LinkedIn tips.  Learning LinkedIn profile tips can make your profile more appealing at first glance, and other kinds of tips can make sure that you are getting the most out of your groups and network.  Keep reading to find some LinkedIn tips that can change the way you use social media to do business.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #1: Don't Hide

When you create your profile on LinkedIn, you'll be asked which privacy level you want your profile to be listed at—and that's where these LinkedIn profile tips begin.  One of the most important LinkedIn profile tips is to select “public” for this profile.  When you create a public profile, you're getting your face, name, and brand in front of a much wider audience than if you had been more selective about who can see it.

And speaking of photos, every list of LinkedIn profile tips will tell you to include one.  While these LinkedIn tips are right—every profile should have a photo, not just a logo—they aren't the whole story.  Go beyond those LinkedIn profile tips by using the same photograph on your LinkedIn profile that you use in your attorney bio.

Why?  Well, not all of your connections on LinkedIn will necessarily know you personally, especially if you're involved in groups.  It can be hard to recognize that someone is the same person from one picture to another.  By using these LinkedIn profile tips, create one image that is you for the sake of your internet presence.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #2: Be Original

Another place where a few LinkedIn profile tips can make a huge difference is your summary.  While your picture should be identical to your website photo, your summary should not be identical to your attorney bio.  Why?  Because let's face it: most attorney bios sound about the same, and you won't get anywhere with LinkedIn profile tips sounding like a robot.  Many of the best LinkedIn tips revolve around making yourself stand out, and your summary is a good place to do that.

For example, if you've already followed LinkedIn profile tips about filling in your whole profile and using a photo, you can make your summary more original by talking about yourself using “I” and “me” rather than maintaining a third-person, more objective sounding narrative.  A couple of quick additional LinkedIn tips for this section: talk about both the projects you're currently working on and what you're hoping to expand into doing in the future, and make sure that you always update your summary when those projects or goals change.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #3: Be Active

LinkedIn is a conference table, not a billboard.  You can't just walk away from your profile and expect it to do the marketing work for you.  In order to get the most out of any of these LinkedIn profile tips (and other LinkedIn tips), you'll need to make sure that your profile is routinely seen by other people.  That means you'll need to stay active and participate enthusiastically in your LinkedIn network.

Good LinkedIn tips about activity require you to do more than just providing an occasional status update.  Instead, you'll want to make posts to groups, start groups of your own (if you can think of a good topic), and share things that you've learned.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #4: Keep Current

One of the earlier LinkedIn profile tips was to make sure that you update your profile routinely.  That's one way of keeping current, but in order to make sure that you are getting the most out of the website, you should also follow news about any changes that are being made to LinkedIn itself.  These kinds of changes are common as LinkedIn figures out how people are using the website and how the internet itself is evolving.

When you keep current, you'll be able to take advantage of new features before your competitors do, giving you an advantage, even if only a temporary one.  Search for new LinkedIn profile tips and other tips on a regular basis, so that you can keep your LinkedIn presence updated and ensure that you're acting in accordance with best practices for marketing purposes.

If catching up on new LinkedIn features has been tough and you're already finding that you've fallen behind, make a list of which LinkedIn profile tips you'd like to follow, and create a calendar with deadlines for each different tip you're following.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #5: Get Connected

Today, people can access LinkedIn using more devices than ever.  If you have an iPad or a smartphone, you may already use LinkedIn through these devices, like an increasing number of users.  Using these devices to connect to LinkedIn during your commute or other downtime can really help you to engage with the website and your network on a daily basis.

You can also work to connect your LinkedIn marketing efforts with other marketing campaigns involving different social media websites or blogs.  By creating a consistent brand presence across several different social media networks, your visibility increases and you're more likely to get new business.

Easy LinkedIn Tips #6: Track Progress

There are a wide variety of analytics tools that you can use to see if your LinkedIn efforts are bringing in the new traffic you had hoped for, especially if you're using direct pay per click ads.  When you use analytics tools, you can do split testing to determine which of your advertisements is more effective at getting conversions from a particular audience.

Even if you're not using direct ads, you can keep track of how many contacts you've gained and how much new business you've gotten as a result of your LinkedIn efforts.  This can help you to see where your strengths are and what kinds of activities you should engage in more frequently.

It's not easy to admit when you've made an internet marketing mistake.  Sometimes, attorneys put thousands of dollars into a new advertising method before realizing that something just isn't going according to plan.  But what's actually preventing your internet marketing campaign from succeeding?  The answer may surprise you.  In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the most common marketing mistakes that attorneys make when they're using the web to advertise their services.

Mistake #1: Paying Before Your Website is Ready For Traffic

If you've just found out about a new web marketing technique, you may be enthusiastic about trying it out.  Sometimes, in fact, legal marketing professionals can get a little too enthusiastic about new methods.  If you're not making sure that your website is ready first, you may as well be lighting your money on fire—you're unlikely to gain any actual new clients no matter how much money you throw at your advertising project.

Signs that your website isn't ready for primetime include pieces of it that don't display or display incorrectly depending on what browser you're using.  If your website looks boring, dated, or simply like a thousand other attorney websites, you're also going to have a much harder time keeping potential clients on your website.  Optimize your user experience, and you'll have better luck with every internet marketing campaign you ever engage in.

Mistake #2: Buying Expensive Google Keywords

If particular keywords on Google are the most expensive ones to buy, they must be the best ones, right?  Wrong.  This is one of the mistakes many people who are new to buying direct ads on Google make.  However, most of the firms that are paying big bucks for big, heavily used search terms are very large firms with very large marketing budgets.  If that doesn't describe your firm, you don't need to be buying the most expensive keywords you can on Google.

Instead, focus on locally based, “long tail” keywords.  You should also consider using some negative keywords, so that you're not putting your advertisement up for searches that may not be relevant to what your firm does.

Mistake #3: Focusing on Search Engine Optimization Keywords

A few years ago, search engine optimization was all the rage, and it largely depended on having the right ratio of keywords in your internet marketing copy.  However, many different websites misused SEO and created low-quality websites that didn't really fulfill users' needs but did have a lot of keywords.

Today, Google and Bing/Yahoo have made their search engines substantially more difficult to fool with keyword counts and nonsense content.  If you're overusing search engine optimization keywords in your internet marketing, odds are that your website is or will become “sandboxed” by Google—artificially lowered in search rankings in order to discourage spammy techniques from internet marketers.

Mistake #4: Low Quality, Jargon-Filled Content

Attorneys may have gone to three years of law school, but usually their clients haven't.  That's why it's important to make sure that any content you create on your website avoids the pitfall of being written at a law school level.  In general, an average high school graduate should be able to read your website copy and come away from it with a good understanding of the material you've presented.

One of the best ways to make sure that your internet marketing content really is readable for lay people is to simply give a draft of some of your content to people you know who are less informed about the law than the people in your office.  These people can provide you with questions or pointers that can help you move in the right direction.

Mistake #5: Underbudgeting For Internet Marketing

Over 80 percent of Americans now have access to the internet, and about 60 million internet users in America will be looking online for an attorney in 2013.  That's a huge potential market, and what's more, over 50 percent of those potential clients will eventually contact an attorney about their case after researching lawyers online.

With this big an audience on the line, it's silly to make internet marketing a secondary marketing priority in 2013.  The internet has become the biggest way to shop for a lawyer, surpassing even the time-tested personal recommendation as the most common method for attorney research and selection.

Mistake #6: Shotgun Marketing

Many lawyers believe that their marketing materials should try to appeal to as many people as possible.  This kind of marketing is like a shotgun—when you fire it, it goes everywhere instead of being precisely targeted.  The kind of internet marketing you should want is like a rifle—targeted narrowly so that you have the best chance of hitting what you're aiming at.  Shotgun marketing costs more for a smaller return, and the best marketing principles for attorneys today all involve making sure that you're targeting the correct audience for your marketing materials.

Mistake #7: Putting All Your Eggs In One Basket

There's no reason to spend your entire internet marketing budget on just one or two websites, no matter how big those websites are.  Diversifying where your website appears in advertisements is a great idea.  If you put all your eggs in one basket, keep in mind that search engine algorithms change all the time.  You don't want to be just one Google update from losing a large number of clients because the site you advertise with is no longer popular.  Diversification shields you from changes large and small in internet marketing trends.

Mistake #8: Losing Flexibility

If you find an internet marketing strategy that genuinely works for your law firm, you may be tempted to keep simply using it without continuing to search for new techniques.  While this may work in the short term quite well, it's very likely that you can expect to see additional changes to internet marketing trends in the mid and long term.  The law firms that will do best at internet marketing in the future are those flexible enough to change and adapt their techniques to take those trends into account.

Everything About LinkedIn Statistics

In a country like the United States, where 90 percent of lawyers are already. Using LinkedIn, you can't afford to get left behind.  According to Alexa, LinkedIn became the 12th most visited website worldwide in 2012.  This popularity means that LinkedIn can and should be a vital component of your legal marketing strategy.  Keep reading to find out some shocking LinkedIn statistics so that you know why it's so important to maintain your networks on this site.

LinkedIn Statistics: Growth and Development

In 2002, LinkedIn was started by a single entrepreneur in his living room.  The month it began, LinkedIn statistics registered 4,500 unique users.  The next years saw the website grow exponentially, and by the time LinkedIn went public in May of 2011, it was already a place where over 100 million people were networking.

LinkedIn pre-dated Facebook and Twitter, and maintained its popularity throughout the explosion of these websites' user bases for one big reason: it wasn't trying to do the same things.  While LinkedIn, like Facebook and Twitter, was a social media website that gave people the opportunity to share content and follow the activity of others, it carved its own brand niche as the center of the web for professionals.  The business orientation of LinkedIn has meant that its popularity among lawyers has soared in recent years.  Over 80 percent of attorneys at all sizes of law firms currently have a LinkedIn profile.

The number of searches done on LinkedIn is truly staggering.  LinkedIn statistics today show that 4.2 billion searches were made last year, and this year's numbers are set to break that record by over a billion searches.

From a living room enterprise, LinkedIn has become a company with 25 offices worldwide from Milan to Melbourne.  Nearly 3,000 people are currently full time employees of LinkedIn, and they serve the site's 175 million users.  Every Fortune 500 company has executives using LinkedIn, and the site's users have formed more than one million groups.

Linkedin Statistics: Who's Using LinkedIn?

Because LinkedIn is business oriented, its user base differs significantly in several key ways from other social media websites.  Over half of LinkedIn users report having at least a bachelor's degree, with a sizeable percentage having graduate or post-graduate coursework.  LinkedIn users also have statistically higher income levels than users of other common social media websites, like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg.

The fastest growing groups on LinkedIn today are college students and recent graduates.  These students account for over 10 percent of LinkedIn's current traffic, and are increasingly looking to the website to help them secure networking opportunities, internships, and eventually jobs.  Many law school students also make profiles on LinkedIn to be able to connect with law firms and discuss opportunities or just build a network of other lawyers in their desired practice area.

It's not all individuals who are using LinkedIn.  Over 2 million companies also maintain Company Pages according to the most recent LinkedIn statistics.  Because LinkedIn tends to be a better place for business to business transactions, B2B companies are particularly likely to participate.  Companies selling products marketed toward affluent consumers also tend to prefer LinkedIn to its competitors.

LinkedIn Statistics: How People Use LinkedIn

The single most common way that LinkedIn users make use of the website is by researching people or companies that they have some sort of personal or business interest in.  77 percent of users report this kind of activity, while the next most common action is connecting with colleagues you've fallen out of touch with.

LinkedIn statistics reveal some other uses for the website as well, with nearly 50 percent of users building new relationships with key decision makers and influential people.  44.5 percent of LinkedIn users report that they've used the research functionality of the site to get a leg up in face to face networking opportunities, while for 38% of users, LinkedIn has been a springboard for finding new career opportunities.  38% of LinkedIn users also built relationships with potential customers using the site—mostly users who run B2B oriented companies.

The feature of LinkedIn that users are most likely to report as a favorite is the Groups feature, followed closely by people searching.  LinkedIn statistics also reveal that some features of the site are being underutilized, with only 5.9% of users reporting that they like using polling, while only 1.7% is using the presentation features LinkedIn makes available.

On average, LinkedIn statistics show that users spend about 17 minutes using the site every time they log in.  About half of users spend up to 2 hours a week using LinkedIn, while a quarter spends 3-4 and 12.2% spends 5-6.  10.5 percent of users are power users (or addicts?) spending at least 8 hours a week on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Statistics: Groups and Networks

Your number of first degree connections on LinkedIn can make a big difference to how well the site works to get new business for your firm.  Currently, 11.7 percent of LinkedIn users have fewer than 50 contacts, which will limit their opportunities for networking.  About 20 percent have 50-100 connections, while another 20 percent have between 100 and 200.  

Only five percent of users have more than 1000 first-level connections, and having this many connections can sometimes be an indicator that you are not being selective about allowing new connections to come in.  Allowing simply anyone to connect to you through a request can mean that you're more likely to be vulnerable to phishing attacks and other hacking, so be careful and make sure that you actually know anyone you are accepting as a first degree connection.

Because groups are one of people's favorite aspects of the LinkedIn platform, a huge majority of users report joining at least one group.  Only 3.7% of LinkedIn users have joined no groups at all, with a plurality of 41.6% belonging to between 1 and 9 total groups.  Over 30 percent of users belong to 10-29 groups, and it may surprise you to learn that over 10 percent use more than fifty groups.

Everything About PPC Management

So you've started using pay per click marketing for your law firm—but what now?  Do you want keywords that cost $50 or more, or to bid lower on keywords for just a few dollars?  PPC bid management software can cost hundreds of dollars, and PPC management services can cost thousands—are they worth it?  This guide will explore how you can best manage your pay per click advertising, with or without PPC management services.  You'll also learn about common PPC bid management mistakes to avoid when you begin working on your PPC management strategies.

PPC Bid Management Options

When you start learning about pay per click marketing, one of your first questions might be “how do I know what to bid?”  There are several different answers to this question, depending on your PPC management needs and your current pay per click advertising budget.  Usually, the search engines offering this type of advertising also offer PPC management services and options that can help you manage your bids.

While it's easy to use these services for your PPC bid management, you may know about your other options as well.  Some companies offer software that can help you make bids and learn more about PPC management in your pay per click campaigns.  Others offer full PPC management services that allow you to focus on your firm's business without thinking about your own pay per click advertising campaign.

When Should I Use Search Engine PPC Management Services?

If you're new to marketing with PPC, you may want to start doing PPC bid management with the tools offered by the search engines themselves.  These services have a few distinct advantages: they're easy to use, with effective tutorials that can help you learn how to do the basics of PPC management.  However, there's a reason that up to 70 percent of big businesses eventually hire specialized PPC management services to handle their pay per click campaigns: it's not easy to just use what you're given by search engines.

Keep in mind that any PPC bid management that you do with the services offered by Google or Yahoo will be run by them, and that they're more interested in their own profit than your law firm's.  When you use their tools, then, don't be surprised if the way they do PPC management seems hazy.  They simply don't make all the best analytical information available to consumers.

When Should I Use Third Party PPC Bid Management Software?

Once you've worked with PPC management tools from the search engines for a while, you may be ready to move on to tools that give you more control.  For this, you'll want to look for third party PPC management services software.  The quality of these tools can vary, and some can cost hundreds of dollars for a user license, so you'll want to make sure to look for online reviews of any software before you buy.

Of all of your PPC bid management options, using third party software can give you the most control over your bid strategies—if you know what you're doing.  Make sure that you understand the tools that you have, and consider sending an employee to a training that can help them get the most out of any PPC management tools that you've spent money on.  Remember that the tools you use are only as good as the people using them.  If you're not able to spend money on training someone to use PPC bid management software, you may want to hire PPC management services to handle your bids.

When Should I Use PPC Management Services?

Micromanaging pay per click bids isn't for everyone, and many law firms end up deciding that it would be better to leave PPC bid management in the hands of specialists.  There's nothing wrong with using one of these services for PPC management, but keep in mind that the cheapest service may not be the best.

PPC management services that keep your data may be cheaper in the short term, but make no mistake: when you lose data, you lose money and time. You may not think that your data means much, but think of PPC bid management as a series of experiments.  Some work, and some don't, and every time you find out one that works you'll save money and attract clients.  If your data doesn't belong to you and you switch PPC management services, you're back to square one: you won't know which of your PPC management strategies worked, and which were failures.  

The best companies that provide PPC bid management won't just make bids for you, they'll discuss your marketing strategies and help you build a website that converts clicks into clients.  This can be much more cost-effective than hiring bare bones PPC management services to handle your marketing on the web.

Common PPC Bid Management Mistakes

When you're new to PPC management, you can easily fall prey to common bidding mistakes.  One of the easiest traps to fall into is bidding too high.  Obviously you'll get more clicks when you bid high, but how many of those clicks become clients?  Experiment with bids that don't necessarily put you into the top position—you may find that you're getting just as many clients when you're spending a great deal less on your bids.

Law firms that are new to PPC management also tend to start by using keywords in their ad groups that are simply too general to get the kinds of clients they want.  Keywords that are too general hurt your PPC management in two different ways: they make conversion rates go down while causing your bid prices to go up.

It's also important not to keep changing your bids too often, too early.  While some PPC management strategies may require changing bids fairly frequently, smart PPC bid management relies on building historical data and using that data wisely.  Changing your bids too much when your campaign is new can result in bad data and bad PPC management.

Everything About PPC

In today's legal marketing world, the internet has begun to dominate the discussion, and pay per click is more popular than ever.  You may have heard that PPC pay per click advertising can raise your law firm's website traffic by as much as 66%, but have very little idea what else PPC can do for your firm.  This guide will help answer the most basic questions, from “what is PPC?” to “How do I manage my PPC bids?”  It doesn't have to be hard to set up a PPC pay per click campaign—you'll learn how to start from the basics here.

What is PPC?

Both new and old law firms need advertising that works on the web.  You have several options: you can manage keywords on your website or in blog entries, then use search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to get onto the first page of someone's web search.  However, this kind of search engine marketing requires a high level of skill with web writing to make sure that your content is relevant while keeping keyword density high enough to put your firm into the top few pages of results.

Instead of trying to get your website into the first few pages of results through a traditional search, you can instead use PPC pay per click marketing.  Even if you have little computer experience and are still asking “what is PPC?” you can still use Google AdWords or another PPC program to get your marketing campaign off the ground.  PPC pay per click advertising allows you to target your firm's advertising and only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

What is a PPC Keyword?

When you start to run a PPC pay per click advertising campaign, you'll need to think about what clients are typically looking for when they come to your website.  If your firm specializes in helping people to beat traffic tickets, for instance, your clients probably begin their web search by looking for keywords relating to traffic tickets.

When you advertise using PPC, you can decide which searches your PPC pay per click advertising is seen on.  You will choose the specific keywords that your firm will bid on.  If you're in the top several bidders for a keyword when someone searches for it, your website's ad will be seen by that person—meaning that your site is seen by the exact people you want to attract as clients.

What is PPC Going to Cost My Firm?

The cost of a PPC pay per click campaign depends largely on exactly what kinds of keywords you're bidding on and what your bid strategies are.  If you want to bid on very expensive keywords, like “mesothelioma,” the answer to “what is PPC going to cost” will be very steep indeed—often tens or even hundreds of dollars for a single click!  However, by narrowly tailoring your keywords, you can bring PPC costs down.

For example, you may want to include geographic terms in your searches.  You may also want to include very specific keywords that clients are likely to use, rather than using the kind of keywords that lawyers use.  Instead of using PPC pay per click keywords like “personal injury attorney,” consider terms like “rear end car accident lawyer.”  You can also choose some PPC keywords to exclude from searches—so if your firm doesn't handle a particular type of case, you can exclude clients searching for lawyers who can.

What is PPC Bid Management?

Because PPC pay per click advertising uses bidding, the cost you'll have to pay to get your advertisement displayed prominently will depend on what other firms have already bid.  While firms that are still trying to figure out “what is PPC?” may not be able to work out a great bid management strategy right away, as you continue to use pay per click services you'll learn how to maximize the profits from your bids.

For example, you may find that it might be much cheaper to appear early in search results with your PPC pay per click campaign when you're advertising at certain hours of the night.  If you still get the same conversion rates (the same percentage of people call your firm after clicking), you'll want to make sure your PPC bid isn't any higher than it needs to be.  You can use PPC pay per click bid management software to help you figure out what is PPC bid strategy that will work best for your law firm.

What is PPC Campaign Management?

“What is PPC?” is a more complex question than just what keywords to bid on.  If you're still not sure how to use PPC pay per click marketing, you may want to look into PPC campaign management.  Campaign management services can help you get beyond the initial difficulties of setting up your PPC campaign so you can move on to getting the clicks and conversions you're hoping for.

What is PPC Strategy?

Building a great strategy for your PPC pay per click ads requires knowing about your potential clients.  When your clients are looking for websites to answer their legal questions or find a lawyer, they want accurate information and contemporary web design that is aesthetically pleasing.  In order to have the best PPC results, you'll want to create strategic landing pages that contain the content your clients are searching for.

When you have done PPC pay per click advertising for some time, you can begin to look at changing and developing your strategy based on what works.  What is a PPC effective strategy can depend largely on the exact nature of your practice—you'll want to look at which pages are driving conversions and what those pages have in common.

What is PPC Going to Do for My Business?

Used effectively, PPC pay per click can help your business to grow—not just by getting eyes on your website, but by getting the right eyes.  When you use PPC, you're targeting only clients who specifically want exactly the kinds of services your firm is providing.  When you begin to develop your PPC pay per click strategy, you'll find that your conversion rates can steadily increase, making it cost less for each new client you're finding online.  While other forms of marketing require a great deal of computer knowledge, you can begin a campaign with pay per click advertising relatively quickly and easily.

Everything About PPC Campaigns

The internet has changed everything about finding a lawyer.  Today, 65 percent of potential legal clients look online for law firms before choosing which lawyer to call.  One of the fastest ways to get your website into the top pages of search results is to use PPC search engine advertising.  This kind of advertising is highly effective, and can increase the traffic to your website by 60 percent or more when you design your PPC campaign with your client in mind.

Starting Successful PPC Campaigns

One of the toughest things about designing a pay per click ad campaign is just knowing where to start.  You may have seen other law firms buy their way into sponsored web results, and wonder if there's a way to have your firm do the same thing.  PPC search engine advertising is available through most major search engines, and many of these search engines offer quick tutorials that can help you get PPC campaigns off the ground within days if you want to move fast.

While the speed of starting a pay per click campaign is one of the advantages of this form of advertising, it's important not to get too carried away.  Waiting to initiate your PPC campaigns until you are sure you know what you're doing can ensure that you get the maximum return on investment.  Before you start working with PPC search engine advertising, here are a few questions to consider:

• Do you know what your goals are for your advertising campaign?  Keep in mind that just generating more website traffic doesn't necessarily mean you'll get more clients—don't just have a goal like “we want to see a 50 percent increase in visitors to our website,” think about how many new clients you're hoping for.

• Are you familiar with the jargon and terminology of PPC campaigns?  You'll have a much easier time understanding best practices for PPC search engine advertising if you know enough of the vocabulary to do your research.

• Is your website attractive and well designed?  Even the best PPC campaigns won't work if your pay per click ads lead to a website with inaccurate information or broken links.  If your website is merely mediocre, up to 85% of clients will leave before they've even looked for 30 seconds—and they aren't likely to come back.

What to Do If Your PPC Campaigns Don't Work

Because PPC search engine advertising is still relatively new, it's easy for people designing new pay per click campaigns to run into some trouble when they first start designing their advertisements.  Here are a few common problems and how to fix them:

• If you're spending your PPC search engine advertising budget too quickly on too few clicks, you may want to focus your PPC campaigns on narrower, less prestigious keywords.  Hyperlocalization can help you to get the most out of each click made on your advertisements.

• If your ads aren't bringing in many clicks, the copy of your ads themselves may need fine-tuning.  Don't bother including a phone number in your PPC search engine advertising—save that for your landing page, where it isn't taking up such a high percentage of your space.

• If you're getting a lot of traffic with “broad match” keywords, consider adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns.  For example, you may want to make sure that your PPC search engine advertising doesn't involve paying for clicks from people seeking free legal aid.

• If you have plenty of clicks but no one's calling, take a long, hard look at your website. PPC campaigns can fail even when ad copy is brilliant if a website is messy or just plain boring. The more you can differentiate yourself from the competition with your website, the more likely it is that your PPC search engine advertising will be successful.

You may want to consider hiring a service to help you with your PPC campaigns if you have corrected what you believe to be the problem, but haven't seen any results.  A well-organized pay per click campaign should have a significant impact not only on your website traffic, but on your number of clients.  If it's not, you may want professionals to evaluate your PPC search engine advertising and your website.  Professional help may save you money and time when trying to design a new campaign—think of these services as an investment, rather than a cost.

Third Party Software and PPC Search Engine Advertising

When you want to step up your analysis of data from PPC campaigns, you don't just want to rely on Google or Yahoo services for bidders.  There are dozens of third party tools that can help you improve any aspect of your PPC search engine advertising.

In order to understand how to get the most out of any third party software tool, you'll need to know how to use it.  Some tools for PPC campaigns include enough tutorials and documentation that you'll understand the basic features right away.  However, if you're a power user or you want to be one, it's critical to seek out training.  Training seminars and webinars can make it easier to use the more complicated features on your software so that your analysis of your PPC search engine advertising is more robust.

Alternatives to PPC Search Engine Advertising

While PPC campaigns can be a great way to get your website in the spotlight quickly, it's important not to let pay per click be your only marketing strategy.  A more complete internet advertising campaign will also include search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that can help place your website higher in organic (non-sponsored) search results.  

You may want to work on your PPC search engine advertising at first, when your internet marketing campaign is new, and then gradually increase the effort your firm puts into SEO.  Then, once your organic search results are high enough, at least for some terms, you can scale back your PPC campaigns on those terms and work on different sets of keywords or simply reduce your pay per click budget.

Everything About PPC Advertising

Starting your PPC campaign can seem like a giant headache: how do you make sure that your PPC advertising works and doesn't cost more than you can afford?  This guide will help you sort out the basics of PPC advertising, including common pitfalls for your law firm to avoid as well as strategies to maximize your conversions and clicks.  You'll also learn how the best PPC campaign strategies can depend largely on the size of your firm and the amount that you can budget for your pay per click ads.

PPC Campaign Management: Common Pitfalls

When you begin working with PPC advertising, it can be tempting to start with just one ad group leading to a single landing page on your website.  While this is certainly the easiest way to begin your PPC campaign, it also takes many of your options for PPC campaign management away.  Without running multiple campaigns, it's very difficult to see what's working well for your firm and what is failing.  While it's possible to run a successful PPC campaign without multiple ad groups, it's very difficult—and why would you want to miss out on valuable information?

You may also want to avoid having your bids managed by the same company that is profiting from those bids.  While bid management tools from Google and Yahoo can be easy to use, they also take away some of your control, and work mostly to maximize the profit to the search engine, not to your law firm.  You may want to look into obtaining third party software to make sure that your PPC campaign is working for you, not for Google.

One of the other big mistakes made by beginners to PPC advertising is spending too much on bids.  This usually happens for one of two reasons: either your PPC campaign is not focused enough on a niche target, or your PPC campaign management strategy has involved bidding too high for keywords.  Expensive “prestige keywords” can cost a great deal of money without offering great conversion rates.  If you always have the top bid for a particular keyword, you may be overpaying for your PPC advertising without seeing the results you were hoping for.

PPC Campaign Management: Landing Pages

One of the most important aspects of your PPC advertising involves where your potential clients go when they click on one of your advertisements.  Many firms that are new to running a PPC campaign make the mistake of having advertisements go to their law firm home page.  However, especially if your firm handles several different types of cases and is using multiple ad groups, you should consider making separate landing pages to get the best conversion rates.

PPC advertising that goes just to your home page requires clients to go through multiple clicks just to find what they're looking for.  By creating targeted landing pages, your PPC campaign ad goes right to the information your client wants.  Today's internet depends on instant gratification: if your clients can't get the information they want within that first click or two, your PPC advertising is likely to fail.

PPC Campaign Management: Learning From Your Campaign

Every PPC campaign that you run can give you valuable information about how to run future campaigns.  You may want to get some third party PPC advertising tools to help you learn how an individual PPC campaign went and what you might be able to do in order to maximize future returns.  You may want to examine which niches have been generating the most clients for your firm and either strengthen your advertising for those niches or use the same PPC advertising techniques for your other niches.

Especially when you're buying very targeted, lower cost keywords, you can afford to experiment.  Remember that trying something new with your niche marketing won't always work, but you should be careful not to give up too quickly.  Sometimes a new PPC campaign strategy will take time to work, and your PPC advertising may be more effective at a certain time of day or even a certain time of year.

PPC Campaign Management Strategies

When you begin to experiment with PPC advertising, you should think of it as science.  Much like with any type of science, having a clear hypothesis in mind before you begin experimenting can help you to get the best results.  Instead of just saying “I want to try a bunch of PPC campaign strategies and see which ads stick,” think about a question that you have about PPC campaign management.  Do you want to see if “exact match” gets better results for your ads than “close match”?  Do you want to see how much your click rate increases when your bids are toward the top?

No matter what your hypothesis is, it's also important to be honest when looking at the results of your PPC advertising strategies.  If one PPC campaign didn't work, or your hypothesis was incorrect, remember that this information isn't bad—it's great!  Knowing what doesn't work can be as important as knowing what works when you're working with PPC campaign management.

Complete PPC Campaign Management Services

If your firm has a large budget for PPC advertising, you may want to look into having your PPC campaign managed by a specialized marketing firm.  Make sure that if you are using the services of one of these firms, they allow you access to any data that is generated from your PPC advertising.  Without this data, you will have to start over from scratch if you need to hire a new company to handle your PPC campaign management.

A good marketing service will be able to show you how your campaign is working and what ad groups are most profitable for your law firm.  Even if you can't afford dedicated PPC campaign management services, you may still want to purchase PPC advertising software.  This can help you to analyze the results of a PPC campaign so that you can maximize profits on future campaigns, without the costs of hiring professionals to do the analysis for you.

Everything About Social Media Marketing Tools

Using social media as a marketing tool can expand your client base and build your brand with businesses and consumers.  As of 2012, 20 percent of law firms have hired a full-time staffer to monitor and expand their social media presence.  Social media marketing tools can make it easier for your company to manage several different accounts, monitor your reputation, and make sure you're getting the return on investment you need.  What kind of social media marketing tool can help your law firm thrive?  Keep reading to find out.

Managing Social Media as a Marketing Tool

In order to get the most out of social media as a marketing tool, you'll need to diversify your social media presence across multiple websites.  One social media marketing tool that almost every social media specialist will use is a management system.  These social media marketing tools can log you in to a wide range of websites with just a single username and password, and help you aggregate recent activity from people and businesses you're following.

Some social media marketing tools of this type also include mobile and email marketing features, and will allow you to share your links in a wide variety of ways simultaneously.  When using this type of social media marketing tool, be careful not to share too often—the key rule of using social media as a marketing tool is getting new followers, not scaring them away.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Reputation Management

So you've used social media marketing tools that helped you put together great looking, well-functioning pages on major social media networks.  The next step to using social media as a marketing tool is finding out exactly how you're perceived in the online world.  Do people love your Twitter feed, or hate it?  Do people think your blog entries are fascinating or failures?  That's where a new kind of social media marketing tool comes in: the reputation management tool.

Tracking and monitoring programs for reputation management help you effectively use social media as a marketing tool by keeping track of what the rest of the web is saying about you.  If your other social media marketing tools have been successful, you may have generated comments and blog posts all over the web.  To make sure you're reaching the right people, you may want to use a social media marketing tool that also identifies Klout scores or other measures of online influence for those linking to you.

One of the best ways to use social media as a marketing tool is to engage with people when they talk about your brand online.  Some social media marketing tools offer integrated functionality that lets you comment and post with a single interface.  Because time can be of the essence, especially if you're dealing with a potential public relations headache, this type of social media marketing tool is a must-have when you're a legal professional.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Social Bookmarking

Using social media as a marketing tool is easier when you can spread your message far and wide.  Today, a large number of social bookmarking sites exist that base their content on user submissions.  If you use the right social media marketing tools, you can submit to a large number of these sites at once.

For example, you might want to use a social media marketing tool so that you can simultaneously post to Reddit, Digg, or StumbleUpon—all sites that can generate great web traffic.  However, if you use social media marketing tools in this way, make sure you're observing website rules.  If you try to use social media as a marketing tool without learning the etiquette for the websites you're using, your links will languish in obscurity or become the target of mockery.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Measurement

Even if your social media feeds are regularly updated, you can't just assume that your business is effectively using social media as a marketing tool.  To find out how effective your outreach efforts have been, you need to download a social media marketing tool that can measure how your web traffic is being affected by your social media presence.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Analytics

In some cases, you may find out that in spite of trying to use social media as a marketing tool, you aren't getting the measurement results you want.  Measurement tools can't always help you figure out why this is happening—for that, you need an analytical social media marketing tool.  Analytics can crunch the numbers so that you see exactly what parts of your social media strategy are succeeding and which may need revision.

This kind of social media marketing tool works best when you use it continuously and try to make repeated incremental improvements to your strategy.  Using analytics, not just measurement, ensures that you're able to fix mistakes promptly so that using social media as a marketing tool keeps being effective.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Campaign Creation

A final type of social media marketing tool is often underused by law firms, especially smaller firms and solo practitioners.  Campaign creation lets you use social media as a marketing tool by creating contests, quizzes, and other types of content that go beyond graphics, video, and blog entries.  The types of content you can create with many of these tools is interactive and designed to promote conversions—if you've ever wanted to make a video game about your law firm, now's the time to try it, and there are tools to get you started.

The type of social media marketing tool you'll need to create your campaign depends on what kind of content you're hoping to create.  Most of these tools also allow you to track the results of any campaign that you create, integrating measurement and analytics for specific campaign actions.  If your company thrives on cooperative work, you may want to choose a social media marketing tool for campaign creation that allows multiple authors to edit campaigns at the same time.