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.

Over half of marketers think that creating content is the hardest part of their job duties.  That's even more true for attorneys, who often try to juggle marketing responsibilities at small firms and don't necessarily know how to produce effective social content.  In this guide, we'll go over some tips for making content that is interactive and projects a positive brand image.  You'll learn what social media and networking are really for, and how to make social content that shows you “get” what going social is all about.

#1: Think From a New Point of View

Remember that the things that you as an attorney find interesting about the law are probably not what most potential clients think are interesting.  Too many smaller law firms (and other small businesses) tend to post social content that is clearly all about what they find interesting.  In reality, social networking is a relationship building tool, and when you're only talking about what you find interesting, you're not in a two-way relationship.

Try to think about what your potential clients are looking for before you make your social content.  What are their concerns and misconceptions about the law?  What are things most people get wrong or seem misinformed about?  These are places where you have a chance to educate, inform, and generate discussion with potential clients on social media websites.  Your social content will have a chance to really shine when you consider your clients' desires ahead of your own.

#2: Get Creative In Integrating Social and Mobile

Social and mobile marketing are two concepts that work best when they're implemented in tandem.  Forward thinking law firms are already incorporating mobile marketing into their social content.  For example, sponsoring stories on Facebook and other social media websites can be a great way to get new people looking at some of the content you're offering.  Research shows that users of mobile Facebook apps are more likely than desktop users to click on this type of advertisement.

Making sure you have a presence on various web review sites is also a great way to ensure that you're integrating social content and mobile marketing.  Review websites are often checked by mobile users before they contact someone to provide them with a service, including legal services.  Asking satisfied clients to provide you with reviews on the websites where you're establishing a presence can significantly boost your rates of attracing new business.

#3: Show Yourself to the Social World

Too many companies make the mistake of thinking that they need to conform to some sort of marketing ideal rather than projecting a brand image that says something about who they really are.  Your branding efforts should always be focused on presenting a real side of yourself, and your social content should consistently work toward that goal.

If you've been making your social media updates sound generic or like sales pitches, you're not doing yourself any favors.  Instead, work on making your updates sound like your most friendly and professional self.  Don't be afraid to use a bit of humor or to use different tones in different types of posts.  Sounding too generic just makes it seem like you're only going through the motions of creating social content.

#4: Stay Updated About New Social Content Trends

The world of social media has been changing rapidly and isn't showing any signs of slowing down.  2012 brought us a new look for Facebook that caused a lot of complaints when it was first rolled out.  However, those complaints have since died down, leaving marketers with new ways to place social content on the networking giant.

In order to get on board with the next big thing in social media, you'll need to keep up with news and information about social marketing.  Social marketing blogs can help you stay on top of the scene and understand what types of social content are most likely to get results.

#5: Avoid Becoming an Annoyance

While it's great to advertise on social media, many people in surveys indicate that some businesses are being obnoxious with their social marketing campaigns.  Try to avoid creating social content that will oversaturate the friends of your Facebook friends with advertisements for your company—this type of content is best used in small doses.

You should also make sure that you're not inundating everyone who is connected to you on social media with messages and new posts.  Keep your post count lower, but create higher quality, higher value posts each time you do create one.

#6: Interact With People on Facebook

While typically only about 15 percent of people will be able to see any given Facebook Timeline post you make, there are two ways to make that number bigger.  One is to “sponsor” your social content and pay for it to be put in front of all your friends and connections.  However, the other way is to have your content reach the top of friends' feeds is to get a lively discussion going.

When a post receives more Facebook comments and likes on those comments, it becomes more likely to be seen by a larger number of people.  This is why you're likely to have better results with social content that tries to ask some questions and open up discussion than content that doesn't leave much room for commentary.

#7: Don't Ignore the Value of Video

One of the things that some attorneys forget is that social content featuring video is really popular—and more likely than other types of content to go viral.  Even if you're more used to blogging than Youtube, you should consider making some videos to augment your other forms of content.

Attorneys should make sure that any video they upload has reasonable production values and sound quality.  You won't improve your brand image online by uploading videos that are shaky, out of focus, or full of unintentional pauses and hesitations.

Everything About Social Media Marketing Plan

Marketing with social media can have a huge impact on your law firm website's effectiveness—which is probably why 90.9 percent of small firms already use social media for marketing purposes.  Making social media marketing plans can be intimidating if you don't have much experience with marketing on the internet, but an effective social media marketing plan can be critical to getting the clients you need.  In this guide, you'll learn great tips for marketing with social media so that you can move forward with your law firm's long term marketing plans.

Initiating a Social Media Marketing Plan

Maybe you already have a personal Facebook or LinkedIn account, but you don't know how to leverage those profiles for better marketing results.  Maybe you're trying to integrate your website with social media platforms or blogs.  Whatever your level of familiarity with social media, the first step of creating social media marketing plans is the same as creating any marketing plan: familiarizing yourself with your clients and their needs.

The next step is familiarizing yourself with various social media platforms.  You may want to do competitor research to figure out how they're marketing with social media, but be careful: duplicating a competitor's strategy just makes you look the same.  You'll want to develop social media marketing plans that set you apart from your competition, so look with a critical eye: what could they be doing better?  How could you make your firm seem not just different, but better than its closest competitors?

Developing Your Social Media Marketing Plan

It's important to go slow when you start marketing with social media.  Implementing social media marketing plans too quickly, creating a blitz of new content, can seem overwhelming to potential clients rather than inviting.  Make both short and long-term goals so that your plan can be implemented over time.

Unlike traditional marketing plans, a good social media marketing plan will include many opportunities for client interaction and feedback.  Successful marketing with social media requires, above all else, having the flexibility to respond positively to the feedback you receive.  Good social media marketing plans include consistent monitoring and analysis of feedback, so you should make sure that your social media marketing plan assigns these responsibilities to someone in your firm.

If your firm is busy and you think you don't have enough time for successful marketing with social media, you may want to consult with a social media marketing service.  Several of these services now cater specifically to law firms, and can help you to develop a winning social media marketing plan that can take your firm's web presence to the next level.

Do's and Don'ts of Social Media Marketing Plans

In the social media world, authenticity rules.  Clients can be easily turned off by a web presence that seems phony.  If your social media marketing plan includes a lot of content that looks very much like paid advertising, you may have the wrong idea.  The best social media marketing plans involve creating useful content—in fact, your goal should be to create content so useful that it's not even seen by your clients as marketing with social media, but as an interesting article or post worth sharing with their friends.

You should also make sure your social media marketing plans avoid trying to exercise too much control over the conversations that start on your social media pages.  While it is of course necessary to monitor and moderate (for example, you wouldn't want an abusive comment or one that broke confidentiality rules to stand), behaving like an internet dictator will hurt your reputation for marketing with social media.

It's important to remember that social media makes you part of a community, and you need to work within the established rules (both written and unwritten) of that community for your social media marketing plans to be successful.  This means that your social media marketing plan should include a great deal of listening, not just talking.  By listening to the other conversations that are going on in your chosen social media platforms, you'll be able to avoid sounding tone-deaf when you create your marketing copy.

Marketing With Social Media: Experimentation and Analytics

Creating an authentic social media presence takes a great social media marketing plan, but once you have that presence, how can you be sure you're getting a return on your investment?  You should always include web analytics in your social media marketing plans, so that you can fully understand how your marketing with social media affects the traffic to your website.

Today, a multitude of web analytics tools are available for anyone who wants to make sure that their social media marketing plan is working.  Make sure to identify the key performance indicators that you want to improve before starting to crunch the numbers on marketing with social media.  

If your social media marketing plans seem to be falling short, try to identify where you've reached the greatest number of clients and analyze why that part of the social media marketing plan has been successful.  As long as you keep experimenting with marketing with social media and don't come off as fake or overly “salesy,” you'll usually strike upon a strategy that works for your firm's unique brand voice.

Marketing With Social Media: Looking Ahead

The world of social media is in a state of constant reinvention.  That's why it's important to diversify your social media presence, rather than focusing your social media marketing plan on a single social media platform.  The best social media marketing plans don't rely on just one or two websites, but instead aim to create a comprehensive web presence for your law firm.

Continuing to investigate new avenues for social media participation can ensure that your law firm doesn't get left behind when clients online move to the next big thing.  You can't execute social media marketing plans while standing still—the web is moving faster than ever, and if you want the best web presence, you need to be willing to move with it.

New attorneys often have a hard time getting a handle on what the best marketing techniques are to get their firm in front of the competition.  If you're worried about your marketing plan as a new attorney, fear not—there are actually places where new lawyers have advantages over the old guard.  In this guide, we'll take a look at some marketing ideas that you should be implementing as soon as you can.  Because most new attorneys are working with a limited budget, every idea in this guide is designed with cost effectiveness in mind.

#1: Go Social—You Have Advantages

While attorneys who are older and have been in the profession a very long time have many advantages over you as a new lawyer, you have some places where you can far outshine them.  For example, many attorneys are basically dinosaurs when it comes to technology.  This means that adapting to how people use social networking websites has been exceedingly difficult for a lot of lawyers who are very good at the legal parts of their job and used to be very good at the marketing parts, too.

If you can build a successful social networking presence, you'll soon notice your website climbing search rankings and clients starting to come in from word of mouth referrals and web searches.  Because new attorneys today usually are younger and already have social networking experience, they understand what users expect of businesses online.  Keep it professional and make sure that you're attentive to the people who link to you and share your posts, and you'll have a great social media presence within a fairly short time.  What's more, doing marketing with your social media pages is completely free—it only costs time, not money, which is handy for attorneys who have more of the former than the latter on their hands.

#2: Use Social Bookmarking Sites

Another social venue that young attorneys often understand intuitively from previous use is the social bookmarking site.  Sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit can help your law firm get noticed by people online, and can help you build a backlink profile that is more favorable to your firm in search results.

While social bookmarking websites are great for younger attorneys to use if they understand them, use caution. If these sites think that you are contributing spam, they will often delete not only the post you've made but even your entire account.  Make sure that if you do post, you keep the marketing angle subtle—perhaps a link to an interesting blog entry, rather than a link to your main firm homepage—and don't make it your only post on the website.  Try to be an active participant generally, and it is much less likely that you will be suspected of posting links to your own content.  Alternately, be clear about it being your own content, and make sure that it stands on its own as something interesting enough to be worth viewing.

#3: Answer Legal Questions Online

While you may not know everything about the law, you should at least have a good grasp of a lot of the basics—and fortunately for you, that's a lot of what people ask questions about when they want to talk to attorneys online.  When you answer legal questions online, you show yourself to be a subject matter expert to people, as well as improving the profile of your backlinks and helping you to appear higher in web searches.

Be careful not to overstep your ethical boundaries when talking to people about their legal questions online.  However, done correctly, these kinds of answers show you to be a personable attorney who can answer tough questions in plain English—exactly the kind of thing potential clients want to know about you before they decide to pick up the phone and call.

#4: Start Your Own Blog

If you've already been an avid blog reader—and maybe have kept a personal blog of your own in the past—now's the time to start a law blog that will help the profile of your law firm.  Make sure that you're maintaining professionalism in your blog, and link back to the firm website so that you are generating additional backlinks and “link juice” to help your Google standing.

Make sure that your blog has some level of specificity—there are plenty of blogs already out there from young attorneys talking about life, the law, and everything.  If you make your blog more niche-focused, you'll be better positioned to draw in searchers.

#5: Give Talks in Your Community

Doing community outreach, like giving talks at community centers, senior centers, libraries, postsecondary educational institutions, and so on, can have a beneficial effect on your business.  By getting face to face interaction time with people, you're showing them your professional demeanor and improving your community reputation.

Typically, the topic of your talk should focus on a legal area you both know well and that you hope to get clients in.  For example, you might want to have a workshop that teaches people how to make a living will, and then make sure people know that your services are available for other estate planning needs.

#6: Find a Niche

The age of the generalist attorney, who didn't ever know what the next day would bring to his office door, are long gone now.  Today, the profession belongs to the specialists and subspecialists, who mine narrow groups of clients.  The reason niche marketing works has everything to do with how search engines work.

The longer a search term and the more unusual it is, the fewer people will be searching for it and the less it is likely to cost on Google.  Targeting these keywords can be really good for conversion rates—the people who are actually making these very specific searches are often quite likely to be looking for an attorney.  By niche marketing yourself, you're setting yourself apart from the competition and no longer need to be in the same rat race as hundreds or even thousands of other lawyers in your area.

Today's law firms have to think about reputation in more than one way.  Offline reputation, like how you're viewed in your community, is still important.  More and more, so is managing your online reputation.  If you want to manage your online reputation but aren't sure how, you could use a few pointers.  Here are 8 tips to get you on the right track today and help you avoid some of the mistakes that can wreck a firm's reputation for good.

Tip #1: Conduct Yourself Appropriately—Online And Off

It may seem obvious, but the best way to start managing your online reputation is to make sure you're conducting yourself in a way that makes a good reputation deserved.  If you're skating by with barely ethical practices and aren't particularly concerned with whether you're getting repeat business, you're setting yourself up for a major reputation failure.

On the other hand, if your firm is full of attorneys who are already working hard to maintain a highly visible and positive reputation in their communities, you'll have a much easier time managing your online reputation.  Your offline reputation definitely casts a light or a shadow on your online reputation, so make sure yours looks bright.

Tip #2: Monitor Your Online Reputation Consistently

If you're not checking to see what people are saying about you, you won't have much success managing your reputation online.  You can't know what to say in response unless you're taking a close look at what people are saying and where negative and positive thoughts are coming from.

You should consider having an online reputation firm help you with managing your reputation online if you're not able to devote time and energy to it.  This has become such an important part of how people view your law firm that it no longer makes good business sense to keep out of online reputation management.

Tip #3: Be Honest With Yourself And Others

You know that your law firm isn't perfect.  Part of managing your online reputation will be understanding what your law firm's true strengths and weaknesses are, and being able to portray the firm in a favorable light given both.  Don't try to be something that you're not, and if there's a problem with the culture at your law firm, don't think that managing your online reputation means you can just deny those issues.  You'll be much more successful at managing your online reputation when you're willing to change your company's habits in response to feedback.

Tip #4: Work to Remove False Reviews

Even if you've done a good job managing your online reputation, it's always possible that an unethical competitor will try to smear your hard-won rep.  That's when you need to take decisive action quickly.  If you see a negative review about your law firm that doesn't seem to be grounded in reality, you should notify the website where the review was posted.

Most of these websites have procedures for identifying and removing reviews that do not meet content standards or are created by competitors to slander a business.  However, you often have to do the work of notifying them of these reviews, so you may want to check these websites as much as once a day to be diligent about managing your online reputation.

Tip #5: Solicit Positive Reviews From Satisfied Clients

In addition to abolishing the false and bad reviews, you should also solicit their opposite—true excellent reviews from the people you know you've made happiest at your firm.  These clients are often glad to talk about their experiences with your firm if you ask them to review your firm on a reviews website.

Positive reviews tend to be worth more to people if they include at least some small amount of criticism—reviews that are too positive tend to be met with more skepticism.  Keep checking review sites to see if this method of managing your online reputation is generating new reviews consistently.

Tip #6: Don't Make a Bad Situation Worse

Unfortunately, a lot of law firms get this one wrong.  If you're caught up in some sort of mistake, faux pas, or just a moment you'd rather forget, don't defend your actions.  You'll have much better luck managing your online reputation if you apologize for mistakes right away instead of waiting for days—days that can lead to pressure heating up and a tempest in a teapot.  Delete things that offend people and move on.

Tip #7: The Internet Has a Short Memory

Remember that no matter how bad a week you're having at managing your online reputation, this, too, shall pass.  As long as you do some damage control, even if your law firm gets a negative mention on a major blog like Above the Law, you can salvage your reputation and you'll see the internet denizens move on quickly to a new target.  The worst thing you can do is continue to rise to the bait. Managing your online reputation sometimes means knowing when keeping your mouth shut is the only way to let things move on.

Tip #8: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

This is one of the biggest keys to managing your online reputation.  If you make a particular mistake once, most people won't hold it against you for long.  However, if you make the same kind of mistake twice, it starts to look much worse for your company.  You'll have a very hard time managing your online reputation, for example, if you have a tendency to write rude or sarcastic replies to people who criticize you.

Keep in mind that managing your online reputation is an ongoing process, not something you do all at once.  Mistakes and setbacks are bound to occur, but as long as you learn from each one, you'll get better with each successive effort.

Okay, let's face it: attorneys don't learn anything about creating or maintaining a website when they go to law school.  Many lawyers don't realize until they have their own firm how critical marketing is to law firm success, and lawyers in surveys list marketing as among their least favorite responsibilities.  The days when attorneys could make their website #1 in Google searches just by using a lot of keywords is at an end, so you need to learn how to market your content so searchers can find it.  Here are seven different types of creative website content that you can use when re-designing your website to take advantage of cutting edge marketing strategies.

#1: Social Media Status Updates

Social media is a place where many attorneys are doing something, but not really enough to be worth bothering with.  If your idea of website content on Facebook and Twitter is putting up an occasional status update and re-posting it to every social network you're part of, you're not really doing social media—you're just going through the motions.

Each of these websites is a community.  And like any communities, each has its own set of rules, both written and unwritten.  By re-posting content from one social media site to another too much, you're showing an unwillingness to really engage with the community.  Try making different posts for each different network you're part of—someone on LinkedIn will likely be interested in a very different aspect of your practice than consumers looking at your firm on Facebook.

#2: Attorney Biography Pages

Research shows that 85 percent of legal clients say that they call a law firm after reading its attorney biography pages—more than any other section on attorney websites.  This means that your website content for attorney biography pages needs to be terrific.  This isn't a place to skimp or to be generic.  Being yourself on your attorney biography page is the right idea: clients tended to respond most to website content that reflected individuality.

Try making your attorney biographies less a rehash of your curriculum vitae and more of a story of who you are and why you practice.  This kind of attorney biography is less likely to intimidate and more likely to captivate your audience.  You can and should still include relevant details from your educational and work experience, but make it part of a narrative that people reading your website can actually feel involved in.

#3: Online Directory Listings

Many people who are looking for attorneys online don't really know exactly what they're looking for.  That's why they turn to website content like online directory listings.  Some of these directories may be location based, like Google Places.  Others may be more specialized, and may be just for attorneys.  Making sure that your online profiles are complete is great, but you should also be prepared to spend some time on your web content on these pages.

Get nice photos of your offices, create good copy for the description of your firm and its attorneys, and try to be as helpful as possible about providing hours and contact information.  These online directories are also often used by people looking to validate attorneys who have been recommended by friends or family, which means that the web content you have on these directories can be critical to getting referral traffic in 2013.

#4: Legal FAQs

One area of website content that every attorney should have is a FAQ.  No matter what your legal specialty, there are some questions that you undoubtedly hear very often.  You can probably also think of a few misconceptions that most people have when they walk into your office for the first time.  Using your website content to help answer some of those questions can ensure that your initial visits with clients go more smoothly and people are more likely to call your office to schedule an appointment.

Make sure that you're writing your FAQ for your intended clients, not other attorneys.  Other lawyers know the law—clients, on the other hand, need it explained with a minimum of jargon and a maximum of clarity.  Try to make sure that you run your copy by someone who isn't a legal professional to make sure that it all makes sense.

#5: Splash Pages

Too many attorneys greet people with too much splash and not enough substance.  Today, great website content is the way to get clients to pay attention.  You should make sure that even the first page that people see is tailored to their needs.  Consider having different website content for the initial page visited by people depending on how they got to your website.  For example, if someone comes to your site from an advertisement about no-fault divorce, they can go straight to some basic information about no-fault divorce statutes in your state.

#6: Videos and Audio

Not all of your website content should be text.  Consider adding multimedia content to make your efforts at online marketing even more successful.  Sites that contain video website content have conversion rates that are up to 50 percent higher than those that don't, according to surveys.

Audio can also be useful.  Consider creating a mini audiobook that can help people understand the basics of what your practice is and how you go about solving a client's legal problem.  Make this audio available for either download or streaming for maximum effect.

#7: Press Releases

Every time you create a press release and put it on press release websites, you may be missing out on an opportunity to get this type of website content placed elsewhere.  Reputation of the websites where your press release is sent matters.  Instead of using press releases just for inbound linking, try using them to really get publicity.

One of the best ways to do this is to build in story hooks to your press release.  By giving some narrative structure to what you write, you'll be giving other people something to sink their teeth into and write blog posts or other website content about.  This is a fantastic way to get links that will really improve your reputation and your search rankings.

It seems like there's a new internet marketing trend just about every year, but 2012 has been a doozy: there are so many internet marketing trends that it's hard to keep track of them all.  As 2012 winds down, here are seven trends in internet marketing for attorneys and law firms that will help you develop a comprehensive marketing plan for 2013.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #1: The Dawn of the Local Web

One of the biggest changes for 2013 according to internet marketing trend watchers is that local's going to be more important than ever.  When people started using the internet, they were fascinated by their ability to connect with people all over the globe.  The idea that you could be sitting at a computer in Chicago, typing to a person who lived in Munich or Vladivostok or Canberra that you'd never met before, was one of the biggest changes that the internet brought into our lives.

However, as people have grown used to the internet, they've grown increasingly attached to local based searches and are forming geographically based groups.  There are a number of reasons for this, but the simplest is this: when you This means that more and more, you're better off following internet marketing trends that emphasize the local.  Consider getting a guest blog spot on a blog that talks about local issues, or be the interviewed guest on a local podcast if some aspect of your legal practice might be interesting to listeners.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #2: Everyone's a Social Butterfly

Some lawyers are still clinging to an idea that seemed reasonable enough a few years ago: that internet marketing trends toward social media sites are just fads.  Today, social media is finally big enough that holding onto that attitude may be what's holding you back.

There's no reason not to become part of social media sites today.  Social trends are the biggest internet marketing trends today for a reason.  Surveys show that the number of people who have obtained consumer information about attorneys from social websites has been doubling for each of the last two years.  By giving yourself a social presence, you're not just jumping on an internet marketing trend bandwagon.  You're giving yourself the best chance to build long term professional relationships with a much wider range of people in your community than you ever had access to before.

Learn how to really use technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Don't start by assuming you already know what internet marketing trends matter most on these sites—look for information that is recent, because what works at one time may not work six months later.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #3: Grassroots, Not Astroturf

Because internet marketing trends in 2011 and 2012 have tended to result in attorneys paying a lot of attention to review websites, some lawyers have gotten the same idea as other businesses: to either write the reviews themselves or have some other non-client write good reviews to keep out the bad.  However, most review websites have protocols that prevent this, and will stop you from using bogus reviews if any are detected.

Even if you're not caught automatically by the site, putting new fake reviews onto a review site ignores the real problem.  If someone's actually giving you an honest critique that you're failing to address, you're not going to cover up the problem for long with fake grassroots postings.  Instead, try responding to a person's negative review reasonably and without assigning blame to the other person.  You may also want to ask real clients you know have had a positive experience to write about your law firm on the same sites where you're currently having problems with negative reviews.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #4: Funny Business

Not every attorney is funny, and not every attorney has to be.  But if you honestly do have a good sense of humor, you can get on board with a lot more internet marketing trends.  The internet is often a funny kind of place, and if you understand its inside jokes and its memes, you'll be a lot more likely to succeed at placing funny content on the internet.

Just because a website is funny doesn't mean it's not informative.  A number of websites are devoted to lists of interesting events or people in history or pop culture (like cracked.com) and these sites are likely to have an educational as well as humorous tone.  You can give people valid legal information even if it's got some humor tied into the message too.  Stay away from jokes that could cause offense to oppressed groups or that could give you public relations problems later on.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #5: Ratings Matter More

Ratings really do make a difference for your law firm's success now.  Because it's one of the biggest internet marketing trends, you should put some effort into your strategy for building a good presence on these sites.  Most review websites, like yelp.com, allow businesses to include some information about themselves.  Keep this information updated consistently, and double check to make sure there are no typos.  No matter how many clients want to call your office after seeing your Google Places profile, if your phone number is a digit off, they'll be thwarted every time.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #6: Rise of the Mobile Machines

The shift toward mobile content distribution is one of the ongoing internet marketing trends that shows no sign of slowing.  All internet marketing trend predictions estimate that in less than 36 months, people will use mobile internet as much as traditional desktop or laptop internet.  Get to know mobile marketing and mobile internet marketing trends now, including things like QR codes (whether or not you decide to use them).  If you're not informed about the possibilities of mobile marketing, you may be leaving huge numbers of clients out of your strategy.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #7: Diversified Content

It's not enough any more to just have a blog, unless you're part of a very small firm, according to current internet marketing trends.  Consumers want videos and infographics.  The more that you diversify your content, the more you'll be ready to evolve toward whatever the next internet marketing trends will be.