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.

When you start to use social media to help achieve your law firm marketing goals, you may be looking for how to create the most efficient social media schedule.  3 in 4 marketers say that creating content is their biggest scheduling concern today, and because social media requires consistent content generation it can be difficult to make time for.  In this guide, you'll learn 7 tips that can help you more effectively create social media schedules that work for your law firm, while avoiding some of the most common pitfalls for companies using a social media schedule.

#1: Be Realistic With Your Social Media Schedule

Some law firms believe that they can just spend an hour or two a week on social media and that their strategies will still generate new clients.  A quick, possibly misspelled tweet and a couple of Facebook updates that are rushed through aren't going to impress anybody.  Allow your marketing professionals enough time in their social media schedules to actually give you the kind of quality content that will make you stand out from the crowd.

Since a huge percentage of Americans now use social media, and since the vast majority of clients today research attorneys online before scheduling a consultation, you may want to dedicate a significant portion of your overall marketing time to your social media schedule.  Social media schedules are largely being underutilized by attorneys, and really learning to use social networks well will give you a huge edge in the modern marketplace.

#2: Break Your Social Media Schedule Into Chunks

Social media offers endless opportunities for distractions, no matter who's implementing your social media schedules.  The best way to make sure that your social media schedule doesn't start bleeding into your other scheduled marketing times is to break the schedule into small chunks.  Make sure that you've got all of your social media tasks for the day and the week built into your daily and weekly social media schedules, and allot specific amounts of time for each small task.  This will be much more productive than if you just divide the schedule into “half an hour for Twitter,” “an hour for Facebook,” and so on.

#3: Analyze Social Media Activity For Optimum Efficiency

Not all of the aspects of your social media schedule will work equally well when they're implemented in the real world.  Social media schedules should be adjusted once you have enough data to begin noticing trends in what works and what doesn't.  If you see that you're not able to attract many followers or achieve your goals with a particular social media platform, it shouldn't keep occupying part of your social media schedule.  

#4: Make Short, Medium, and Long Term Goals

Some law firms make the mistake of just deciding on their short or long term goals for social media and social networking.  However, you should consider making three different social media schedules: one for your daily responsibilities, and another two with your medium and long term goals and ways to achieve them.

By having these three sections of goals, you can help to remind yourself of the big picture when you're aggressively pursuing short term goals.  This can ensure that you don't take any steps that would be incompatible with your overall long term goals for a temporary gain.  However, keep in mind that your long term goals should have a great deal of flexibility—remember that social media services can come and go, and that you don't want to be the last person left who's using a particular app or website.

#5: Allow Flexibility in Your Social Media Schedule

Just because your short term social media schedules indicate you should only spend half an hour using a particular service today doesn't mean that you should always spend exactly that amount of time.  For instance, if there's any kind of major debate breaking out on your Facebook timeline, or you've got a disgruntled Twitter user trashing your firm, you need to put out the fire before you can consider pursuing other goals in your social media schedule.

This is why you should always consider your social media schedules to be guides rather than strict rules.  In some cases, if enough is going on with a particular social network on a particular day, you may want to let other social networks slide for a little while.

#6: Use Software to Create Social Media Schedules

If it's proving difficult to create a social media schedule for your law firm, you may want to download some type of social scheduling software.  These types of software help you to create social media schedules for a wide range of social apps and websites.  You can customize the messages that you want to be displayed on each different social site, and you can then automate your social media schedule so that messages are sent out at the time when they'll be most likely to be read by the largest number of people.  This takes a lot of the guesswork out of social media schedules, and ensures you're not confined to doing your social media work at specific times of day to maximize effectiveness.

#7: Monitor Your Automation Consistently

While it can be great to have a computer program take care of doing some of the social media schedule grunt work, you also need to know the social media schedules that your program is using.  Why?  Because you don't want to send out an automated update that could be perceived as insensitive or problematic.  If a recent news event has happened, like a natural disaster, it could make some types of messages seem offensive even if they would have been completely acceptable during a time that didn't involve a disaster.  For example, you wouldn't want to use any social media updates involving waves or floods after a well publicized hurricane or tsunami.  This kind of faux pas is one of the biggest reasons that no matter how much automation goes into your social media schedules, you'll still need a human overseeing the automated updates.

One of the most critically acclaimed fan favorite series of all time, Arrested Development recently came out of a several year hiatus for a brand new season.  The adventures of the chronically legally challenged Bluth family may even be continuing for a fifth season.  What can law firm marketers learn from the characters on Arrested Development?  We're glad you asked.  Here are lessons gathered from each of the show's main characters.

#1: Michael's Lesson: Clear Up Misunderstandings

Michael, the protagonist of Arrested Development, tends to make mistakes because he makes assumptions that lead to misunderstandings, and when a misunderstanding occurs, he tries to save face by perpetuating it, rather than clearing it up right away.

Misunderstandings and communication problems happen.  The most important thing to remember is that when you realize someone is operating under an incorrect assumption, you should correct that assumption right away instead of letting them continue to live in blissful ignorance.  Michael's failure to clarify and really learn what people are talking about—and his failure to listen to people when they're telling him things that he would prefer not to hear—are what lead to most of his problems in the show.  Attorneys who ignore things they don't want to hear will quickly find themselves running into financial and/or ethical problems.

#2: Maeby's Lesson: Lies Lead to More Lies

For Maeby Funke, daughter of Tobias and Lindsay, is an accomplished liar—like much of her family—but is in many ways smarter than the rest of them.  Because of this, she is able to parlay her lies further, and becomes a successful film executive before she has even graduated from high school.  However, Maeby lives a life that is extremely stressful, because she's always having to lie to most of the people in her life and never is really able to let anyone in.  What's more, telling just one lie never works: you have to tell more and more just to back up the initial lie.

Maeby's lesson to lawyers is simple: once you start lying, it's very tough to stop, so it's much better to simply be honest in the first place.  It's very hard to keep people believing all of your lies forever, and for attorneys, the consequences can be much more dire than for precocious teenage girls in film studios.

#3: Tobias's Lesson: Know What You Sound Like to the Outside World

One of Arrested Development's biggest running gags involves Tobias Funke, Lindsay's husband, being flamboyantly gay but unwilling to admit it to anyone—including himself.  However, he continually outs himself through puns and double entendres that become increasingly outrageous and comical.  At one point, Michael suggests that he start recording himself with a tape recorder just so he can tell how he sounds.

Many people act in denial of how the outside world perceives them.  However, denial won't change the perception, only your reaction to it.  In order to change how people perceive you, you need to change your behavior, and that means taking a hard, honest look at how you come off to others.

#4: Lindsay's Lesson: Be Authentic With Your Charity Activities

Lindsay Bluth, Michael's sister, is constantly involved in charitable activities.  However, her charity functions are just to show off, rather than being something she wants to involve herself in for the sake of the charity itself.  In the same way, some law firms involve themselves with charitable activities that aren't really things they believe in, just because they've heard that working for charity is a good way to market legal services.

Don't be a Lindsay: make sure that you're authentically involved in charitable activities.  Keep in mind that there are charities for a huge range of causes, and that you don't have to attach yourself to a cause you don't feel strongly about.

#5: George Michael's Lesson: Know How to Be Yourself

George Michael, Michael's son, has many awkward moments because he's too afraid of disappointing other people to really show them who he is.  He wants to please everyone so much that he forgets that he's allowed to have an opinion and personality of his own.  New attorneys are vulnerable to this, trying to be all things to all people in order to build up a client base.  While this might seem like the best way to get clients at first, it quickly becomes exhausting to try to contort yourself into the form others wish you had.  Don't be like George Michael: have enough confidence in yourself to show your clients who you are and what you value.

#6: Lucille and Buster's Lesson: Know When Times Have Changed

Lucille, Michael's mother, and Buster, his younger brother, are both stuck acting like the past has never changed.  Buster won't grow up and leave the family nest because he's too attached to his mother, and Lucille keeps spending the family's money as if they are still in a time of plenty, rather than having major legal difficulties.  Partners in law firms need to be realistic: if times have changed and your firm can no longer afford things it used to take for granted, it may be time for downsizing.  Boom times don't last forever, and you can't afford to bury your head in the sand.

#7: G.O.B.'s Lesson: Admit When You've Made a Mistake

George Oscar Bluth, or G.O.B., Michael's older brother, makes huge mistakes—often.  Unlike many of the show's other characters, though, G.O.B. knows to confess his mistakes and knows that he isn't smart enough to correct them all on his own.  In the same way, when lawyers make a mistake that can't be fixed easily—or even one that can—they need to talk about it with their clients and other people in their law firm.  Everybody makes mistakes, but compounding them by trying to deny them and cover them up will only lead to more problems in the long run.

#8: George Sr.'s Lesson: Know When To Turn Down Work

George Sr., Michael's father, is in trouble for a host of illegal activities, including “light treason” when he builds houses for the Iraqi government.  The Bluths run a construction company—they'd have been much smarter to have turned down the development in Iraq in favor of continuing less risky developments back at home.  Attorneys need to think about work that they accept and the clients they take.  Not all clients are worth it, not all cases will be profitable, and every lawyer needs to think about whether the business they're taking will be a net gain to their firm over the long term, with all consequences considered.

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.

The hit TV series Boardwalk Empire is set in the Prohibition Era of the 1920s, but the lessons that it teaches about leadership and entrepreneurship are timeless.  Nucky Thompson, the boss gangster of the series, has successes and failures that are directly attributable to following or failing to follow points of advice that are just as true for law firms—whether fledgling or well-established—as they are for bootleggers and mob bosses.

#1: Opportunities Can Come From Problems

In the opening scene of Boardwalk Empire, celebrants gather to celebrate a new year that will be different from any that came before, because with New Year's Day comes Prohibition.  While many American companies were put out of business by Prohibition, the series follows people who are celebrating because they know that the law will end up making Atlantic City—with all its attendant vices—more attractive than ever to tourists and more profitable than ever for its business owners.

Legal practices can take advantage of opportunities created by problems, as well.  Any time a new law or situation disadvantages a group of people, that group has just become a market for legal services.  For example, when the economy started having problems, real estate lawyers suddenly had much less business—but there were many more bankruptcy filings.

#2: Nobody is Invincible

One of the biggest lessons of Boardwalk Empire is that everyone is human, and that even the biggest bosses can be laid low.  Large firms would do well to take this lesson into consideration, especially if those firms are consumer oriented.  Today's consumers are often seeking legal information online and using discount practitioners instead of becoming clients of older and more respected firms.

By the same token, newer law firms should also keep in mind that by offering something new and different, you may in time be able to upset even the biggest players in your local market.  The sky is the limit, especially in a new era of legal services where technology is playing a bigger and bigger role in marketing and advertising.

#3: Understand Your Home Turf

In Boardwalk Empire, turf matters, and the local area right around where you're from is always your home base.  Too many attorneys try hard to market their firm in too wide a radius, even when the vast majority of their client base comes from within just a few miles of their firm's office location.

It's important to understand not just the city you're in, but even your own neighborhood when it comes time to advertising and marketing locally.  Using the demographics of your neighborhood can help you decide on marketing strategies and ways to target.  From there, you can use A/B testing—something more advanced than Nucky Thompson and his crew ever had—to figure out which of your strategies is giving you the best name recognition on your home turf.

#4: Make Connections In Other Organizations

One of the most valuable things that Nucky Thompson has is ability to connect with people who are different from him and belong to different organizations—even rival ones.  Having this ability to talk to people, even people you don't like, will get your law firm a long way in an ultra-competitive market.  Many legal clients today still come not from web searches, but from referrals made by other attorneys.  When you make connections with other law firms in your area, putting aside petty rivalries and extending a hand in friendship, you're really investing in the future.

#5: Know How Far You're Willing to Go

Nucky Thompson says toward the beginning of Boardwalk Empire that everyone has to decide for themselves how much sin they're willing to live with.  For attorneys, that means that you need to know how far your firm will go and what you're willing to do in order to represent clients.  Are there some types of cases you just don't feel morally right taking?  If so, know that, and make that a proud part of your firm rather than trying to hide it or be ashamed of it.
Law firm partners need to make these parts of your ethical commitments clear to your attorneys and other staff members.  If you have ten attorneys with ten different ethical codes and standards, you're going to end up having significant conflicts.  Make your priorities clear to all personnel, and bring them into any new decisions.

#6: Cutthroat Competition Hurts Everyone

In the most recent season of Boardwalk Empire, Atlantic City was turned upside down by a massive gang war.  While the dirty and violent tactics of the gang war have changed a few fortunes, overall it's important to note that every organization involved in the gang war has lost men and merchandise.

If you realize that you and competitors are starting to have a real rivalry, try to see if there's any way to patch it up instead.  It can be hard to predict how a pitched battle will turn out, and it can be better to resolve differences before they start cutting into everybody's business.

#7: Trust Matters

In the world of Boardwalk Empire, the moment people stop trusting you is the moment you stop being a valuable asset to the organization.  The same is true in law firms.  If there are personnel in your firm that you simply don't feel can be trusted to keep your reputation intact, you shouldn't whack 'em, but you might want to give them fair severance instead.

In order to make sure that your reputation is the best that it can be, show your firm to be trustworthy in all its dealings.  Don't take work on that you're not equipped to handle, and don't overpromise to your clients in an effort to seem like you're more on top of things than you actually are.  Your reputation is your life as an attorney, and you should never squander it for a few short-term gains.

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.

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.

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.

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.