If you're keeping a blog as an attorney, odds are that your entries started off strong, but after a few months, you may not know what to talk about to keep your blog fresh.  Your law firm's blog thrives on new content, and blogs that have grown stale or unused won't attract fresh visitors.  In order to keep your blog current and helping your search engine rankings, you need a steady flow of new posts.  This guide will give you some good ideas for posts that you may not have made yet, but that almost every attorney can write in an interesting way.

#1: “How I Got My Start In Law”

While it's likely that your law firm website already has some information about how you got your start in the legal field, it's just as likely that this website version of the story is a scaled down, watered down version of how you really got there.  Consider telling the real stories of what made you become a lawyer.  Did people say that you should be an attorney even when you were very young?  Did you expect all your life that you'd be doing something else, only to suddenly find yourself receiving a J.D. at the end of three years of law school?

People like origin stories—it's why superhero movies keep going back to superhero origins.  People like knowing where you came from, it humanizes you in spite of the fact that you're in a profession that is often dehumanized in popular media portrayals.  By telling people about your earlier history, you ensure that it they can relate to you on a deeper and more real level than if you just tell the story of your academic history.

#2: Changes To Your Field Recently

While this topic can seem a bit like inside baseball, and it is, there's a good reason for taking the time to discuss some of the changes to your specific field of law and things you've observed recently.  One of the best of those reasons is that you can then share this post on LinkedIn, where it may find an audience of other attorneys.  Why does this matter?  Because that's how you get not only guest blogging spots, but also attorney referrals from lawyers who know that you can handle a specific type of case better than they can.

Cultivating an audience of both attorneys and potential clients is the holy grail for lawyers, so consider making your post understandable for regular people while still interesting and unique enough for attorneys to read without feeling like they've read the same thing ten thousand times before.

#3: Client Myths and Misconceptions

Every attorney knows about misconceptions that people have about their specific legal specialty area.  Myths and misconceptions are rampant in almost every legal area, and when you start hearing a large number of clients reciting those myths, it's a great time to dispel them via a blog post.

When you do this kind of blog post, make sure not to make fun of people who believe these myths and misconceptions.  After all, they're generally propagated by people who simply don't know any better, because they haven't been exposed to the law as much as you have.  Don't assume that people are stupid or uneducated just because they don't understand the law.  The law can be very confusing to laypeople, and potential clients value an attorney who can explain myths and misconceptions in a way that is clear without ever veering into condescension.

#4: Walkthrough of an Initial Consultation

One thing that scares many people—often to the point where they put off contacting an attorney for days, weeks, or even months—is that if they've never hired an attorney before, they don't know how the whole process works.  By having a blog entry that details what a typical first consultation with your law offices looks like, you can make sure that potential clients feel at ease.  Essentially, you're giving them a road map that tells them what to expect from the first moment that they start onto their attorney/client journey with your firm.  Any journey is a little bit easier with a map, so provide your clients with one and they'll start walking through your door with a little more spring in their step and less nervousness.

#5: Advice on Choosing a Lawyer

While this blog entry will undoubtedly be a little bit self-serving, it shouldn't read like an ad for your firm exclusively.  Try to keep in mind that many of the people reading your blog probably aren't from close enough, geographically, to pick your firm.  Consider when you write this entry how you'd tell your mother or sister to choose a lawyer, rather than thinking about what would serve your firm absolutely best.  People will trust you more when your blog entries about topics like this don't just push people into your firm, whether or not it's the best fit.

#6: Understanding Attorney Client Confidentiality

Many people who are hesitant to talk to an attorney wait because they are not sure about what a lawyer is and isn't required to keep confidential.  You can dispel some client fears ahead of time by discussing confidentiality issues on your blog.  It's a good idea to link an entry like this from some part of your main website, potentially the parts that talk about an initial consultation.  When people have a better grasp of the attorney/client relationship, they'll be more likely to come away from their experience satisfied.

#7: What to Do in the Worst Case Scenario

There's usually a worst case scenario that clients in your field worry about, if you're an attorney.  In criminal cases, it's being accused falsely of something that you don't have easy proof you didn't do.  In divorce cases, it might be a messy divorce in which a spouse is determined to go to trial even if it costs an arm and a leg.  Whatever the worst case scenario is, being able to talk about it lucidly and help people understand how to mitigate the damage is a great trait for an attorney to have.  When clients see a blog entry about the worst case scenario and how much you can help in those situations, they'll know that their situation isn't the worst you've seen and that you'll be able to help them, too.

The hit television show Mad Men just wrapped up its gripping fifth season, and the show has taught viewers a lot of lessons about life, love, and advertising along the way.  Those ideas can also translate to advice for lawyers looking for advice about how to run their law firm in a competitive market.  Keep reading to find out how Don Draper, Joan Harris, and Roger Sterling—among others—have given lessons in marketing that work for law firms in the 21^st century.

#1: Names and Brands Matter—A Lot

One of the things that Sterling Cooper knows is that brand names and brand images absolutely make a difference to consumers.  Consumers emotionally associate brands with particular feelings, memories, and sensations—something Don Draper knew in this season's finale, where he dropped a bombshell on executives from Hershey by telling them about what a Hershey candy bar meant to him during his difficult childhood.

In the law, this remains the same.  While not all attorneys are thinking about branding and making their firm name into a brand name, it's definitely something that every attorney should be considering.  Whether you want it to or not, a brand will start to develop that is associated with your firm—a brand based on the perceptions of clients and those who see your marketing materials.  It's better to develop your brand consciously than to let it develop completely on its own.

#2: Know Which Clients Aren't Worth It

In Season 4 of Mad Men, the newly formed Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency faces a dilemma many new law firms are familiar with: they have a beautiful office, but they don't yet have the client list to match it.  In their race to bring in new clients, the agency begins to court Jaguar.  Soon, though, they find that there's a catch: in order to make the sale to Jaguar, they'll need to get a “yes” from a man who is only interested in Joan, the firm's long-suffering and very buxom secretary.

After a round of tense negotiations, they end up agreeing to make Joan partner if she'll clinch the sale—which she does.  However, less than a year later, the client gets difficult again and the agency is forced to drop them from the client list.  This goes to show: when a client makes unreasonable demands at the beginning of your business relationship, even if you really need new business, it's often best to just let the client go.  Clients who are too demanding and unreasonable make your workplace worse to work at, and decrease morale across the board.  It's even worse when you need to rely on that demanding client's business at the risk of having to shut down.  Cut it off before you have to rely on a client who will be more trouble than he or she is worth.

#3: First Impressions Make All the Difference

The reason that SCDP got a big office in the first place is that they knew: you can't build a client base working out of a dingy basement.  While it's not a good idea for new attorneys to hock everything they own to get a big spacious office, it does pay to make a good first impression for clients.  Remember that your clients are paying a fairly high amount of money for legal services—they tend to want to see that their attorney's office is clearly professional and that some thought has been put into the décor and the general layout of your space.

#4: Maintain Long-Term Relationships

One of the things that the partners at Sterling Cooper have the hardest time with is fidelity—and that goes in their business lives as well as their love lives.  In several different situations throughout the five seasons of Mad Men, the firm's partners have not only cheated on their spouses, but have also been duplicitous about soliciting business from competing firms—business that would require them to end longstanding relationships with other companies.

While this has sometimes worked for the Mad Men, it's often a lot more trouble than it's worth.  Your longest term clients are the ones you want to keep around most: they're loyal, they clearly like your work, and they are very likely to recommend your firm to other people.  Courting new clients at the expense of your existing relationships is rarely a way to get ahead, and often a way to tank your reputation as a professional.

#5: Small Firms Can Do Big Work

Throughout the show, Sterling Cooper is never one of the biggest agencies on Madison Avenue—and they're not trying to be.  Sterling Cooper presents a great example of why you don't have to be a big firm to do work that matters and gets results, and why big clients might choose a relatively small and nimble firm as opposed to one of the older giants.

The lesson law firms should take from this is to think big, even when you're still fairly new and unestablished.  Don't limit yourself by thinking that your firm isn't yet large enough to get the kind of business that you want.  Make yourself into a specialist and do the research, pick a mentor, and start doing the kind of work that your firm wants to be doing.  Smaller firms are often preferred by legal clients because they can give a more personal touch and offer substantially more flexibility than larger firms.  You can also offer clients at a small firm the same attorney throughout the process of their case, while larger firms often have clients talking to several different people (some of whom they may get along with better or worse than others).

#6: Change the Conversation

Early in Mad Men, Don Draper gives one of the key rules of marketing in any industry: “If you don't like what they're saying about you, change the conversation.”  Too often, when marketing professionals try to respond to critique of their brand online or offline, they get too defensive and reactive.  Instead, you should consider talking about a different topic and highlighting your services in a creative, proactive way.

Branding and marketing usually aren't a lawyer's favorite tasks.  But to succeed in a legal market where almost 40 percent of newly graduated lawyers are without a job requiring a J.D., you'll need to get smart about brand marketing to stay competitive.  Why are branding and marketing so important today, and what does it take to implement a successful brand marketing strategy?  These are the questions we'll answer in today's guide.

Why You Need a Brand

Twenty years ago, it was possible for attorneys to compete in the market without using much branding and marketing strategy.  This is because at that time, the American Bar Association exercised much more control over the number of law school graduates entering the market each year.  Now, more law schools are open than ever before and huge numbers of new firms are starting up.

Clients today don't just find their lawyers based on an ad in the Yellow Pages.  Today, clients do research.  Over 90 percent of legal clients now do at least some online research while looking for an attorney.  With so much competition, the most successful law firms are those that show a consistent brand image.  If clients already feel like they can relate to your firm based on branding and marketing, they're less likely to keep looking and find another firm that suits them better.

The next four sections of this guide are about the fundamental questions you can use to shape the brand of your law firm.  There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, and different firms will answer them quite differently.  However, these answers will make it much easier for you to understand the right way to implement a brand marketing strategy.

Who Are You?

This is a very critical question for your firm to think about for brand marketing.  Whether you're a solo practitioner or have dozens of attorneys, what's at the core of your identity for branding and marketing?  What are the principles you refuse to compromise?  This question can set the tone for your other brand marketing answers, or, if you're not yet confident about who your firm is, you can come back to this question after answering a couple of the other questions posed here.

When you implement branding and marketing strategies, you need to make sure that you never compromise this part of your brand in exchange for a quick uptick to web traffic or new sales.  When people perceive a firm as going back on fundamental parts of their identity, they're less likely to see them as trustworthy advocates.

What Do You Want?

This question is critical for understanding the purpose of your branding and marketing goals.  Brand marketing will be different for a firm that wants to show continuous hiring growth versus a firm that wants to hold steady with a small number of attorneys.  Your clients will be different if you're an IP firm than if you're a tax firm, and different still if you're doing criminal defense cases.  That means your goals in terms of reaching clients and growing your firm should be different, and you should be realistic within the framework of the current legal market not just nationally but in your local area.

Law firms that don't know the answer to this question often present confused branding and marketing strategies.  Their brand marketing shows them trying to be all things to all people, having no goal more specific than getting more clients.  In 2012, you're more likely to have success with branding and marketing by focusing on a particular niche practice than by trying to represent clients with any and all legal concerns.  Once you make your goals realistic, you can narrow your niche so that you're getting more clients who are advancing your brand marketing goals.

Why Are You Here?

This question is one that every law firm has to answer eventually.  Are you just here to make money?  Or are you in business to genuinely help your clients?  You may find that by having the latter as your answer for branding and marketing purposes, you're actually helping yourself make more money as well.  Thinking about why you're here and what your purpose is in having a law firm is important for brand marketing.  But remember, it can't just be your branding and marketing slogan—you need to live your answer.  This means making it right if you make a mistake (which can be a great opportunity for brand marketing if you handle it well).

Where Are You Going?

Whenever you implement a new brand marketing strategy, you should ask whether it's compatible with the long term future you envision for your brand.  Branding and marketing that works only for the short term and isn't keeping long term goals in mind can distract your brand and make you do work that actually hurts your work on your overall brand image.

Many law firms think only about the immediate future, but consider making a 5, 10, and 20 year plan for your firm.  If everything goes realistically but well, where do you hope to be at each of these points?  Track your progress toward the goals, and change them as you need to, but always keep some long-term goals in mind.

Implementing Branding and Marketing Strategies

Once you have the four questions answered, it's time to think about creating a brand marketing strategy that uses your answers.  Make sure that your brand image is consistent across all platforms—you don't want your Facebook tone to be so different from your website's tone that it looks like two totally different brands.

If you can answer the questions with confidence and carry the answers into all of your branding and marketing materials, you'll be much less likely to make a misstep in your brand marketing.  Confidence in who you are shines through, and will help you differentiate your firm from those on shakier ground.

A recent report released by LexisNexis has revealed some amazing statistics about internet marketing in the digital age.  The report analyzed the results of a survey conducted in February of 2012.  4,000 total adults, weighted by demographics including age, sex, and race, were asked questions about how they use the internet and offline sources to seek information when they have a legal problem.  With 58 million Americans trying to find an attorney in just 2012, the stakes couldn't be higher.  Learning more about this report can help you tailor your legal practice to the ways people use the internet now.

Where Do Consumers Look For Lawyers?

Even a decade ago, people who weren't able to obtain the name of an attorney from friends or family were often confined to looking through the Yellow Pages.  Some more savvy consumers would use hotlines sponsored by state or local bar associations.  The new LexisNexis survey shows that these methods have fallen nearly completely out of favor.

In total, 76 percent of people seeking an attorney had looked for information on the internet.  Only 24 percent used exclusively offline methods to look for a lawyer.  For the first time in such a survey, LexisNexis found that slightly more people used the internet than referrals from friends and family.  Only 73 percent consult family or friends at any point during their legal search.  Over 60 percent of total internet users have looked for a lawyer online at some point during their adult lives—33 percent in just the last year.

What Do Consumers Use the Internet to Find?

The biggest reason that consumers start looking online for legal resources is that they want to gather information.  This is one of the greatest strengths of web searches, and many people initially simply want to know whether they might have a case that an attorney could help with.  At the next stage—finding attorneys who might be able to take their case—61 percent of internet users turn to online resources.

The next two stages involve narrowing down the field of potential attorneys.  53 percent of internet users have used online sources to validate an attorney—to make sure that they seem well qualified and are as experienced as they claim they are.  44 percent use websites to make their final decision about an attorney.

What Do Consumers Do With Information from the Internet?

One of the most surprising results of this survey is the number of consumers who converted after searching for attorneys online—in other words, how many people actually hired a lawyer as a result of their search.  The survey shows that a staggering 57 percent of consumers who had searched for an attorney online said they had actually hired a lawyer because of information they found during their online search process.

Of course, that still leaves 43 percent out—what did those consumers do?  Six percent of them ended up hiring a public defender, which means that they may not have been able to pay for the services of an attorney.  Eight percent decide, after looking at legal information online, that they would prefer not to pursue their case and they stop looking for any legal representation.  13 percent continue their search offline, and 15 percent decided to use online services to help them resolve their legal problems on their own (for instance, people who decided to self-file for divorce or print a legal form instead of consulting an attorney).

What Websites Do Consumers Use Most?

Search engines tend to be used most by consumers who are in the earlier phases of searching for legal information and representation.  Google is the most commonly used search engine among the adults surveyed, which is in keeping with findings about Americans' search engine use habits.  Smaller percentages use Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and MSN.

However, not all of the searching for attorneys happens on search engines.  Social media sites were used by just over 20 percent of overall internet users who searched for a lawyer.  If you're not already creating a social media presence to get these consumers, you need to act fast—these numbers were much lower just a few years ago, and in a few years social media could easily be the dominant way that people look for attorneys.  The most common social sites for people to look for legal information and lawyers were Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Twitter, and legal blogs.

The Importance of Ratings

A full 57 percent of the users surveyed also mentioned that they looked at one or more websites that contained ratings and reviews for attorneys.  28 percent of those who looked at these results said that they were extremely influential, while just 3 percent said they were extremely uninfluential.  Attorneys who have not yet created profiles on ratings websites may end up behind in their internet marketing.

The Mobile Web and the Desktop Web

While laptops and desktops were the most common way for people to do their legal research, smartphone devices are rapidly gaining ground, as are tablet PCs.  Over one fifth of consumers doing legal research already use these methods, and if current rates of growth continue, that could be over one half by the time 2014 comes to a close.

What this means for you is that as an attorney, you should be working on having a mobile presence.  If you're not already thinking about buying app advertising as part of your ad strategy, you should start thinking about it now.  Geo-based apps like Foursquare can help you get connected with the ultra local consumers most likely to be ready to schedule an appointment today.

You should also work on your law firm's website.  You don't want to have a website that is Flash-based any more (if, indeed, you ever had one), because Flash players won't work on iOS devices.  Making sure that your content is at least visible—preferably beautiful—to both desktop and mobile users is one of the biggest things that will set your firm apart from the competition in the rapidly-changing web world.

2012 has been a year of incredibly big changes for businesses involved in online marketing, including law firms.  Google Panda and Penguin are two of the code names for two of the biggest changes to how Google, the internet's most used search engine, ranks search engine results.  These changes only affected about 1 website out of every 6—but the shock waves they sent through the marketing community were much bigger.  In this guide, you'll learn everything you need to know about Google Penguin and Panda, including whether your website is affected and what steps you need to take to make yourself Penguin-proof.

Help!  I Don't Know Anything About Google Panda/Penguin.

Don't worry—even if you haven't kept up much with search engine marketing terms and techniques, Google Penguin and Panda are easy enough to understand with some basic explanations.  As marketers got to know what made websites rise higher in search rankings, updates like Google Panda and Penguin became necessary in order to ensure that people weren't getting a leg up on the competition by making websites that were great at attracting search engines but bad at having content people actually wanted to see.

Google Penguin was an update launched on April 24, 2012 that was designed to root out web spam techniques and stop aggressive over optimization of websites.  Having a lot of exact match anchor text and inbound links that come from blog spam can make it so that Penguin is affecting your website.

Only about 3 percent of websites were affected by Penguin.  It's much more likely for a website to have been affected by one of the several versions of Google Panda, released from February 2011 to April 2012.  Panda updates had a major effect on sites called content farms.  These websites often worked by duplicating content found elsewhere on the web, and often had low quality standards.  These sites were lowered in Google's rankings as being irrelevant to users' actual desires for content.

How Do I Know if Google Panda/Penguin is Affecting Me?

The best way to know whether Google Penguin or Panda has had an effect on your business is to check your traffic logs from 2011 and 2012.  Do you notice a very steep drop in your traffic levels after sometime in April 2011 or April 2012?  If so, you may have a problem with Google Panda or Penguin.  Panda problems happened on or around February 24 2011, April 11 2011, and April 19 2012. 

If you had a sudden decline in your traffic on or around those dates, it may be that Google identified your website as potentially having thin content without enough real information that consumers might care about.  However, if your website experienced a big reduction on or around April 24-25, 2012, it's very likely that you have been affected by Google Penguin.  You may need to stop using so many exact keyword matches, or stop using inbound links that come from spammy sources. 

My Site Is Affected—Is My Practice Doomed?

Some webmasters are still finding out that the changes of the last year are affecting their websites.  Because many smaller firms and solo practitioners contract out any work that needs to be done on their websites, not all attorneys are aware of what marketing techniques were being used by their web marketing contractors and haven't always checked on their own site's performance lately.

If you find that your referrals and calls have vanished because your website was affected by Google Panda or Penguin, you need to get a new web marketing company right away—not fixing the site by now has undoubtedly had significant consequences for your law firm.  However, you should also make sure that this is a lesson to your firm—always monitor what's going on.  Another web marketing firm can help you to re-design your site, get rid of old unwanted links from spam websites, and rebuild what you've lost as a result of Google Penguin or Panda.

Preventing Your Site From Becoming Affected

The best way to make sure that neither Google Penguin nor Panda will affect your website is to make sure that you're building high quality content.  Both Google Penguin and Panda tend to affect websites that use a great deal of bad content and bad links, so as long as your links come from legitimate sources and your content is actually of interest to users, you shouldn't have too much to worry about.

Keeping Up To Date About Google Updates

Of course, no one outside of Google's research laboratories knows exactly what the next Google algorithm update will look like.  That's why it's a good idea to keep track of what's going on with Google search updates—you don't want to be caught off guard when the next Google Panda or Penguin update is made, or another even more sweeping update with a still different codename gets turned on.

Content Guidelines for 2013 and Beyond

When building content that Google Panda and Penguin will consider okay, you want to take into account whether it's actually something that somebody will want to read.  Gramatically incorrect keywords, extensive exact keyword phrasing and links, and so on aren't just optimizing a website.  They're also making it look worse and making it harder for people to read through the content presented there.

The focus of your website in 2013 should always be content-based.  When you ground all of your marketing efforts in quality content, updates like Google Penguin and Panda will rarely, if ever, affect your website.

Building Enthusiasm for New Sites

If some of the most common ways to boost initial site visitors are stopped by Google Panda and Penguin, how can a new legal website make itself successful?  The best ways involve social media.  Social presences like on Twitter and Facebook are ranked quite highly by Google's ranking algorithm, and a good social media presence can lead to getting new clients from referrals as well as direct marketing.

Over 90 percent of small law firms are now using online campaigns of some type as part of their overall marketing strategy.  That means that if you're not already familiar with the basics of how to start an online campaign, there's no better time to learn than right now.  The world of online campaigns is significantly different than it was just a few years ago, so even if you think that you know everything there is to know, you'll want to read this guide.  You may be surprised at recent changes—some types of online campaigns that used to be successful are now considered off-limits for most businesses.

Online Campaign Basics: Who, What, Where, When, Why

Before you get started on creating online campaigns, you need to figure out what your goals are.  Without goals, it will be difficult to develop advertising that actually meets your needs and it will be easier to be distracted by trends and fads that won't really fit your mission or your business needs.  Start by thinking about the 5 W's: who, what, where, when, and why.  Only after you've got these down should you start contemplating the “how.”

Who will be reading this online campaign?  Some online campaigns are targeted at consumers, while others may be targeted at fellow attorneys in order to build a base for client referrals.
What do you want your marketing campaign to express?  Is your online campaign about your law firm's longevity, or its creativity?  Its experience, or its innovation?  Only you can decide what you want your online campaigns to say about you.
Where do most of your clients come from, and where do those clients go on the web? Online campaigns are only effective when your online marketing materials are displayed to people who are ready to seek out legal services.
When do you want your new business to start flowing in?  Some online campaigns, particularly those using free techniques, take quite a long time to really show results.  If you need a quick infusion of new business, your online campaign may need to use pay per click advertising instead.
Why are you starting an online campaign?  What are the goals you have for your online campaigns?  Are you hoping to see a 2 percent rise in new business?  10 percent?  Keeping your goals in mind will help you when it comes time to budget.

Incorporating Social in Your Online Campaign

In 2007, you wouldn't have been very likely to incorporate social media into your online campaigns unless you were ahead of the curve.  But in 2012 and 2013, it's impossible to have a truly comprehensive online campaign without paying at least some attention to major social networks.

Get familiar with LinkedIn, because it's the social network that most attorneys already belong to.  But also work on learning more about Facebook and Twitter, which are two social networks that are more consumer focused.  These networks can help you build your brand presence online and interact with members of the public in ways that you wouldn't have been able to just a few years ago.

Monitoring social media for mentions of your firm or your online campaigns should also be part of your plan.  If your online campaign is bombing, you need to know quickly.  Social media can help be a great early warning system helping you to identify when your online campaigns are offensive or just not particularly good.

Using Video in Your Online Campaign

Online marketing campaigns for lawyers should also incorporate video and direct consumers to video answers for questions and concerns.  The reason for this is that many consumers feel hesitant to ask questions of attorneys, but also feel uncomfortable reading an answer that may have jargon or technical terms.  By answering questions carefully through video and explaining any potentially unfamiliar terms, you make it much easier for people to understand their legal situation—and make it more likely that they'll come to you for more specific legal advice and representation.

Target the Right People

Don't make the mistake of advertising as broadly as possible in your area and hoping that you'll get clicks only from people ready to make a call to your office.  The truth is that it's very likely you'll waste money unless you're targeting people who are already likely to be part of your likely client base.  You can identify the demographics you should target in your online campaigns by doing a survey of your existing client base.  This will help you determine which websites typically attract consumers at the age and income level that your office specializes in.

Deploying Your Online Campaign

As you deploy your online campaigns, make sure you keep ad fatigue in mind.  Ad fatigue sets in after just a few impressions, so make sure that you're changing the copy of your ads on a daily or near daily basis.  You should also change the images that you're using with your advertisements.  Make sure that the ads you're displaying have a clear call to action, because this is one of the key rules for making people click on your online campaign.  Online campaigns without a call to action tend to have very low click through and conversion rates.

Analyzing and Changing Your Online Campaign

After you've had advertisements running for several weeks, it's time to analyze your various online campaigns to see which ones are working best and which ones are underperforming.  Ditch underperforming campaigns as quickly as possible, and when you see something in common between several different campaigns that are working, consider making it part of the standard in your advertisements from now on.

You should also keep an eye on any feedback you receive about your advertisements.  Even if the feedback is negative, this is good—it shows people are noticing and it gives you an opportunity to improve.  Be responsive and apologetic if you have caused offense with your online campaigns—trying to deny responsibility is likely to lead to a public relations problem.

There's nothing worse than having an ad that's good enough to be clicked on, but is targeted so poorly that most clickers never look past the first page.  For lawyers, geographic targeting can help to eliminate this problem, saving you up to 50 percent on all of your marketing and advertising campaigns online.  In this guide, we'll talk about why geographical targeting is so critically important for law firms, and how to successfully implement targeting that reaches the consumers most likely to pay you a visit.

The Distance Rule

For law firms in urban areas, the majority of your clients are likely to come from within a two mile radius of your firm.  In rural areas, the majority of clients come from an area within 10 miles.  This means that whenever you advertise to people who are outside of this distance, you're much less likely to get a new client—those clients are more likely to try to look in other directories to find an attorney who is closer to their home or office.

Do some research on your own client base.  Locate the addresses of your clients and see what radius draws in most of your clients.  If you can restrict your advertising to a radius just slightly beyond this, you'll be ensuring that you're able to reach the vast majority of people who are willing to go to your office, without wasting time and money on the clients who won't come to your office no matter what.

Options for Geographic Targeting

The options you'll have for geographic targeting depend completely on what platforms you're using to design your online marketing campaign.  For example, if you're on Facebook, you will have the option to put your advertisements in front of people from a particular city or state, and the smallest area you can broadcast an advertisement to is a zip code.  For many law firms, this will be a small enough area, but other firms may want to use a tool that allows them even more precision.

The leader in precise geographic targeting is Foursquare.  While this app started out as a way to check in to locations and show friends where you were hanging out, it has developed into a robust geolocational advertising platform for companies with and without physical locations.  Foursquare will only be useful in areas with a high number of Foursquare users—typically, this means urban areas with high numbers of young people, like New York City and Austin, Texas.

Getting Your Site Ready for Mobile Traffic

Because they're so good at identifying and broadcasting a user's location, it's often easiest to attract smartphone customers to your law firm with geographic targeting.  However, if your website is outdated, it may be hard to get those smartphone users to go from a click on your website to a phone call.  Make sure that your website displays correctly in both Android and iOS browsers, as well as older smartphone browsers.  You may want to accomplish this with a mobile-only version of your website, but if you do, make sure that you give mobile users the option of viewing your full site if they choose.

Niche Targeting in a Geographic Region

Once you've narrowed down your targets to a specific area, you should also consider making your niche more specific.  For example, do you want to put your ads in front of people in a particular age range?  Even if you want to target both men and women, should you be showing them the same advertisement?  Geographic niche targeting allows you to apply different ads to people in different demographics, making it even easier for you to address the most likely needs of potential clients before they even click on your ad.

Let's say that you want to get even more specific.  If you're trying to target other attorneys with your marketing, you should consider looking at LinkedIn, which allows you to advertise to people in a particular geographic area with a certain job title.  This can make it much easier to get access to people working at a particular job level or in an industry your law firm tends to interact with often.

Advanced Geographic Targeting Options

When you start using geographic targeting, you may even want to base your ads, landing pages, and so forth on the suburban market, while making sure that you're advertising with their specific suburb name at all times.  You can also use geographic targeting from services like Foursquare to draw a line around an area you want to target.  Whenever people enter the area that is targeted, they'll see your ad.  That's great when your firm's clients are typically coming from particular places—schools, businesses, and healthcare facilities.

When you are able to specifically geotarget the exact area that's most likely to produce clients for you, you'll have more budget left over for experimenting with new niche areas and new demographics.  This kind of growth is often ignored, because attorneys are trying so hard to find revenue growth in their existing marketing budget.  Consider allocating some of your savings toward really experimenting with the types of targeting available—doing this is likely to pay off in a big way in the long term.

Analyzing Your Geographic Targeting Results

You can start an analysis of your geographic targeting soon after your campaigns begin, but not too soon—give it a few weeks so that the statistical noise has a chance to even out a little bit.  Don't get too excited over small and unexplained fluctuations in your traffic, because this could represent normal seasonal changes unless you've been tracking your web traffic for multiple years.

When you discover that a particular geographic region is especially fruitful for generating new business, consider adding additional demographics to your targeting efforts.  If these new demographics are unsuccessful (even after you've tailored an ad specifically to the likely needs of that demographic), you may want to try a different demographic.

When you're looking for a new way to advertise for your firm, you may want to consider doing web video broadcasts, or video casts.  Video cast advertising is a great way to make sure that you're reaching as many people as possible with your marketing efforts, because research shows that having a video on a page can reduce its bounce rate by as much as 65 percent.  In this guide, we'll look at how to make and broadcast video advertising that will make your firm more competitive in 2013.

A Picture's Worth 1000 Words…

Videos are worth much more than text or pictures in terms of drawing people in to your website.  The vast expansion of broadband internet has made it so that consumers are watching more video files than ever.  Video cast advertising is worth a great deal because when people want to find out what an attorney or a law firm is really like, they're more likely to watch your video than to visit biography pages, an “About Us,” or even a review website.

By watching a video, potential clients see you as you are, and can imagine relating to you in a lawyer/client relationship.  Creating an image that is easy for people to relate to makes it much more likely that someone's next move will be to contact your firm by telephone or email.  

Who Should Your Video Cast Advertising Target?

At first glance, you may think that the answer to this question is obvious.  Consumers seem like the most obvious targets for video cast advertising, and this is definitely the route that most attorneys take when they're creating videos for the web.  However, what if you want to do something a little bit different?  Client-targeted and focused videos are a good idea, but you can also do well by marketing your videos to other attorneys.

When you talk to other attorneys with your videos, you increase the chances that you will receive referrals from these attorneys.  Consider talking about marketing topics relevant to other lawyers, or some aspect of what you do in the law that is often misunderstood by other lawyers.  When you talk about the legal industry and famous cases, you can also attract other attorneys to your video cast advertising.

What Makes Great Video Cast Advertising?

No one wants to watch just another lawyer ad.  If you want to make successful video cast advertising that puts you in a good light, you need to make sure that you don't just come off as yet another attorney with law books behind you, droning on in a monotone about the law or your firm.  The best types of video cast advertising are those that give people some real information about a topic that they might be really interested in.

For example, many criminal defense attorneys have had good luck creating video cast advertising series that pertain to criminal defendants' rights at the time of arrest, interrogation, and trial.  Helping people understand what to do during a traffic stop to avoid the potential of arrest and conviction is a valuable public service and makes a firm specializing in traffic tickets look great.

Think about the most common misconceptions that you see from clients about the area of law you practice.  Try to answer some of the commonly asked questions and reverse the myths and misconceptions that come up most in your practice, and you'll find that you're not only getting more clients—you're getting clients who have already been educated about what you do and how you work to achieve their legal goals.

Things to Avoid in Video Cast Advertising

While it's a great idea to use humor in videos, and humorous videos are the most likely to go viral, don't make your humor so over the top that you come across as unprofessional.  At the same time, if you're not usually known for your great jokes, don't force humor—that usually comes off looking more awkward than funny.

You should also avoid videos that are too generic or sound too much like an advertisement for your firm.  The most successful video cast advertising basically means that you're giving some information away.  Consumers on the internet are highly sophisticated and tend to ignore anything that is too much of a hard sell.

When you're creating your videos, avoid making anything that lasts longer than about 10 minutes.  Videos that are too long lose viewers before the end, and some viewers may immediately turn them off once they realize how long they are.

Uploading and Sharing Video Cast Advertising

Once you've got your video completed, it's time to actually share it with the rest of the internet.  Uploading videos no longer needs to take place on your website, and actually usually shouldn't.  If you host your own videos, it's your bandwidth being used every time someone watches.  Since video takes so much bandwidth, you could rapidly run into problems with hosting and uploads.

Video cast advertising is easily uploaded on Youtube, which is a free platform for hosting and sharing videos.  One of the advantages of using Youtube is that many people can actually find your video while searching on Youtube exclusively.  Make sure that your video title and description are accurate and have many keywords that would help people find the video, rather than being clever titles that don't really explain much about what the video contains.

You can use Youtube to quickly share your video on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.  You may find that video cast advertising has a significantly higher response rate than anything else you can do with social media.

The Future of Video Cast Advertising

It's likely that for the near term future, at least, video cast advertising will mostly stay on video hosting providers like Youtube.  If you're not yet familiar with how to use Youtube in conjunction with social media websites, you need to start learning so that you can effectively use video in the future.

If you're trying to get more people to visit your website, you have probably heard a lot about the pros and cons of free website traffic versus paid website traffic.  Some people have a very strong preference for one or the other, but the truth is that just like any decision, you should let your personal situation be the guide.  In this guide, we'll help you understand what some of the advantages and disadvantages of free traffic are, so that you can tell if free website traffic is right for your law firm.  You'll learn which commonly held ideas about free website traffic are true—and which ones don't hold water any more.

Myth: Paid Traffic is Always Better than Free Traffic

This is one of the most pervasive myths out there.  The truth is that even though every attorney would love to find a solution that just worked 100% of the time, there is no perfect way to get web traffic.  If there was, everyone would use it, and it wouldn't be useful to differentiate you from the competition any more.

While it's true that there are some elements of paid traffic that can be better than free website traffic (more on those in just a few minutes), free traffic also has a lot to offer.  Free traffic, especially if it's created through viral buzz, operates a lot like old-fashioned word of mouth referrals—just on a much bigger scale.  Links that get people into your site via paid traffic almost always look like exactly what they are: advertising.  There's nothing wrong with advertising, certainly, but many attorneys would prefer a campaign that is more about buzz and less about ads.

Myth: Free Traffic Is Always Hard To Get

This myth comes from a place of partial truth.  It's true that many sources for free traffic take a lot of work.  But what if you're just trying to get initial traffic numbers up so that you can better search engine optimize your website?  In that case, you may want to try a traffic exchange, which allows you to get traffic for almost no work—the only catch is that in exchange, you'll have to visit some other websites yourself.

Another way to get free website traffic is to start posting to a blog.  Blogs can be a great way to get your name out there, and while they may take some time to build, over half of attorneys with blogs say that they got at least some new business directly as a result of their blog writing.

Half-Myth: Free Traffic Can't Be Targeted Like Paid Traffic

While it's true that there are some ways to target free traffic—for instance, using free features on social networks can help you to target people you're connected to on those networks for marketing messages—this one isn't quite a myth.  The methods for getting targeted traffic using exclusively free services are usually not very robust, and don't have the potential to bring in a lot of new clients.

If you have a particular niche market that you'd like to pursue, you may do substantially better with paid traffic than with free website traffic.  Anyone seeking out paid web traffic building can find hundreds of ways to target exactly the customers you want, via keywords, locations, or demographics.  This kind of flexibility simply isn't available from free website traffic generating platforms.

Myth: Free Traffic Won't Bring In Paying Customers

One of the biggest myths about free website traffic is that because you get it for free, it won't come from people who are actually willing to buy legal services.  However, this objection stems from a misconception.  Keep in mind that usually, even when you bring in paid web traffic, no one's having to pay anything at all to click on your site or find out your number.  Free traffic can actually be some of the best traffic to bring in for conversions, especially if it comes from people you're connected to on social networks.  Social network referrals have become big business for attorneys in recent years, and this is a trend in free website traffic that shows no sign of slowing.

Fact: Free Traffic Can Go Away With Platform Changes

One of the biggest issues with free website traffic is that it's often brought in by search engines or social networks.  While you have absolute authority over how your own website works, you have no say whatsoever in how Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google conduct their business.  If Google makes changes to their search engine and it causes your website to fall from Page 1 to Page 20 for “immigration lawyers,” you don't really have any recourse at all other than to try to claw your way back up.  

With free traffic, it can be hard to know what you're getting in the future.  In 2012, Facebook decided to allow businesses to promote posts in order to make them visible to more people.  The problem?  When it did this, it also cut down the number of people who see a non-promoted post.  In this way, Facebook actually made the value of its free traffic boosting features less while increasing the value of its paid advertising.

Fact: Free Website Traffic Takes Time

No matter what kind of free traffic building platforms you're using, it's very unlikely that you'll generate a lot of free traffic in the first few days or weeks of your campaign.  Free website traffic tends to build up slowly.  If you want a fast start and a guarantee that thousands of people are reading your website who wouldn't otherwise, you're going to need to start looking at paid traffic programs.

Just because free website traffic takes time to build doesn't mean it's automatically not worth it.  Your law firm needs to make sure, though, that you're not spending so much time on building traffic for free that it's actually costing you more than you wanted in personnel expenses.

Americans today spend around 25 percent of their total online time on social networks.  Because social media has become so huge, social media dashboards have become an important part of helping marketing professionals keep up.  A social media dashboard is a piece of software that helps you to analyze or post to one or more social media websites.  In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the best social media dashboards for 2012 and 2013.  Not all of them will be right for your law firm—different social media dashboards have different strengths and would be best for firms with different social media marketing strategies.

TweetDeck: The Twitter Specialty Tool

TweetDeck is the leading social media dashboard application for Twitter.  While many social media dashboards allow users to post on many different social networks, TweetDeck specializes in just posting to Twitter and Facebook.  Tweetdeck allows you to view Twitter posts in just about any way you like.  You can have a column showing you responses to your tweets, one showing all of the tweets from a particular user, and others showing tweets that are using particular hash tags.

TweetDeck isn't really a social media dashboard that will be useful for attorneys who are only casual users of Twitter.  If you're only posting one or two total tweets a day, don't worry too much about downloading a specialty Twitter social media dashboard.  You may want to stick to one of the tools that is more general in purpose.

Hubblr: For Chinese and American Social Networks

If your law firm is among the many that are pursuing opportunities in both the United States and China, you may want to look into Hubblr.  Unlike most social media dashboards, which focus almost exclusively on English language sites with occasional forays into the most popular sites in Japan, Hubblr also includes Chinese language support and access to the biggest social networks in China.

While Hubblr is probably only the best tool for law firms that have a Chinese location, it also does offer the ability to use several different United States social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  It could be used as a primary social media dashboard even by law firms that don't have a presence in China at this time.

HootSuite: E-Mail Client Ease, Robust Abilities

Perhaps the gold standard of social media dashboards today is HootSuite.  Contributing to HootSuite's reputation as the social media dashboard app par excellence is its tendency to buy out companies that have competing products, incorporating their features into its ever-expanding, robust program.

If you're familiar with using email clients like Outlook, you'll probably be fairly quick to catch on to how to use HootSuite's social media dashboards for all the major (and many of the not-so-major) social networks.

ArgyleSocial: For the Number Cruncher

If you think that most social media dashboards are child's play and aren't giving you the information you need, ArgyleSocial may be for you.  While ArgyleSocial is not the easiest social media dashboard to learn how to use, it offers some of the best capabilities for social media professionals who want to be able to do intense analytics and side by side comparisons of different marketing techniques.  ArgyleSocial will let you see exactly what's working in your marketing campaigns so that you can take your most useful techniques to the other social media dashboards when you post.  Keep in mind that this isn't a tool for beginners—if you don't already know a lot about social media dashboard software and analytics, you may have a tough time with the steep learning curve.

Gremlin: Learn What People Are Saying

Wouldn't you like to have someone listening to every social network out there so you could know when people mention your law firm's name?  With the Gremlin social media dashboard, you can do just that.  Unlike most social media dashboards, which are focused primarily on helping you post and track direct replies to your post, Gremlin explores other social networks to see what people are saying about you.

If you're not happy with the framing of a story that you're finding on Gremlin, you can then use the tool's posting features to start interacting with critics and working your way back into the internet's good graces.  This is one of the most useful social media dashboards available if your work involves a fair number of controversial cases.

Cisco Social Miner: Respond Better to Concerns

If you're a larger law firm and want to make sure that you're able to prioritize your responses in social media, there's no better social media dashboard than Cisco SocialMiner.  This is one of the only social media dashboards that actually incorporates data learned from you to change what it shows you.  As Cisco SocialMiner learns more about your actual priorities, it will begin to intelligently prioritize your social media mentions so that you can respond fastest to the messages that are affecting your brand most.

Of course, this kind of functionality doesn't come cheap.  The Cisco SocialMiner tool is significantly more expensive than most other social media dashboards (around $1000), so it's only for firms that want to dedicate a large budget to their social media marketing strategy.

Netvibes: Easy on Beginners

Netvibes is a great way to get your feet wet in the social media dashboard pool.  While many social media dashboards require a bit of experience and know-how to get used to, Netvibes is designed for beginners to be able to use its features right off the bat.  Law firms just using the free version will be able to take a closer look at their social media presence and post to the networks that matter to their firm.  The Netvibes platform allows extensive customization even at the free software level, as well as real time monitoring of mentions of your brand.

The Netvibes premium service costs $499 per month, and includes access to analytics software as well as the ability to set alerts and tags.  While these features are certainly useful, this price may strike some firms as steep—you may prefer to use a less expensive tool once you understand the basics of how social media dashboards work.