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Marketing Executive Summary Example

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No. In fact some of these types of vendors that tell you how dozens, hundreds or thousands of lawyers have bought websites from them are probably the most expensive options in the marketplace for law firm Internet marketing with not nearly as much value delivered compared to what you can get from other vendors at a lower price. Remember that some of those “high end” vendors have high end overhead, stockholders, and come complete with sales reps that come to visit you in person even. That is all heavy overhead to bring to the law firm Internet marketing process. I have also found they want to sell you “marketing packages” (or tell you that you also need a blog with your website) that are pricy which usually include marketing on their heavily trafficked sites where they will list you with a group of your close competitors for the visitor to select from. I don't know about you, however, I want my prospective clients to come directly to me from the search engine. I want them to fall in love with me and not look at my competitors and hope they pick me out of the group on these sites. So I will spend my money getting the folks directly to my CTPM site thank you. Also remember the competition on the Internet is all about keywords and has little to nothing to do with if you are doctors, lawyers, plumbers, or roofers. Keywords are keywords, content is content and all of the other issues I wrote about are the same in Internet marketing in general as well as law firm Internet marketing in particular. I am more interested in if they know what I know as an educated consumer and how their own site ranks in Google Page Rank, how the sites they built look via Google Page Rank as well as how they look with Alexa before I spend my money. Having said all of the above if you think you need a vendor who has done a lot of lawyer sites I have found a vendor that is probably at the higher end of the price range that has done a lot of lawyer sites and has done them pretty well to very well in my opinion. This company is not of the types I spoke about at the very beginning which are parts of major corporations with stockholders and sales reps etc. It is http://ConsultWebs.com Inc. at http://www.consultwebs.com. If you use them do be sure once you negotiate your purchase from them that you ask them for a discount since I noticed they do give referral fees.

You keep talking about the number of pages on the site with respect to law firm Internet marketing. Why is that important?

One of the reasons I tell you that you need at least 20 keywords to write content to is because it is believed search engines consider 20 to 80 pages or so to be a medium size site. One of the more major factors search engines use to determine page ranking is the total number of pages on the site. Most attorneys have small sites (less then 20 pages). You will be out in front of the pack with law firm Internet marketing if you have a medium size site. Lastly, you want to have as part of your ongoing marketing plan of your site to add on average one new page per month to your site. Why? Because over time you would be adding 12 pages per year which will push you up the rankings each month and one day you will have a large size site which will make you virtually unassailable you your competitors. Finally, if you have selected your domain names correctly you will have a salable asset worth a large amount of money since it will be a mighty law firm Internet marketing machine for you by then.

Whoooo. You just said, “…selected you domain name correctly…”. Is YourLawFirm'sNameLaw.com a good domain name for law firm Internet marketing?

Sorry to say no. Most lawyers have poor domain names on several counts for law firm Internet marketing purposes. Your domain name does affect your page ranking. First the name does not include one of your main keywords, which is the ideal or at least the domain name describes what you do. Second, using the name of the firm is often not a salable brand. Third it does not fit the psychographics of most prospective clients. Fourth often it is not easily memorable and often difficult to spell if you can remember the name. In fact, some attorneys don't even own the domain name they do have since the vendor registered it they may own it. Lastly, some firms will need more than one website since you may need to have a website for each of your top two or three practice areas.

Is there anything else of an intellectual property nature I need to be aware of in this law firm Internet marketing process?

Yes. First be sure that you indeed own the copyright to the entire website including the code, graphics, text and photographs that created the website. It is all yours. If not then I would not go with that vendor. Also be sure the vendor warrants that it owns or has all permissions to use any copyrighted material that they use in building the website. Also if the vendor is hosting your website be sure they have in place in the agreement what they are to do should the hosting equipment go down (like transfer your site to another server) and what are the remedies for interruption of service for more than short periods of time (short meaning hours at the most). Frequent loss of service should enable you to leave that service with no penalties. Some of the attorneys I have coached have said they had to buy their own website again when they wanted to move. A no fun situation so don't let that happen to you.

OK, we have completed part three of law firm Internet marketing and we are on to part four that will complete the series. In part four we will cover what your marketing budget might look like for your law firm Internet marketing, what you need to know about blogs and blawgs, pay per click, where to learn more should you want to dig deeper than this executive briefing and more so read on to part four.

Marketing Executive Summary Example

This is an “it depends” question. It depends on your particular market place (are you in Peoria or Manhattan), your competitors (your keyword competitors I mean) and how fast you want to see results (slow build of traffic or faster build of traffic) with your law firm Internet marketing. I can say this definitely – don't buy an Internet marketing website unless you are prepared to market it at some decent monthly level right out of the gate. Lets move on to the “it depends” part a bit more in depth. If you want fast results out of the gate then you need to do Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This is a unique skill set in itself - people do this exclusively as a profession so it can get complex. That said being that complex is unlikely to be the case for a solo or small firm particularly in a less then major market (major being Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, etc.). If you are in a medium to small market you can handle this I am sure on your own with maybe a little coaching since once you set it up you can leave it alone for weeks or even months before tweaking it. Your keyword research tells you what keywords you will be bidding on with PPC law firm Internet marketing.. You can read a couple of books on the subject from http://Amazon.com and read all about it at Google, MSN, Yahoo and ASK that all have sections of their site to explain how PPC works on their site. You can begin ads at the either MSN, Yahoo or http://ASK.com to get an idea of what you are dealing with first since if you make mistakes there you won't lose much money like you can on Google. Google has almost half of the traffic so you want to be on Google with your PPC law firm Internet marketing but go to the minor leagues first is my advice then go to Google. You can learn how to do this yourself or give it to a trusted assistant to master. The only proviso is if you are billing over $100 per hour your time is better spent doing billable hours or better still managing other aspect of the marketing process since you almost certainly can farm this task out to someone with expertise for $100 per hour or less. Now there is more to law firm Internet marketing of course than doing PPC ads. You will need someone to submit your site to secondary search engines/directories with Google Page Ranks over 4. Never, ever buy a software package that promises to submit you to hundreds or thousands of secondary search engines – this can lead to the kiss of death from a search engine that bans you for doing that. You are not doing this primarily for the traffic but for high quality links to your site that raises your page rank. You will want to write articles and submit those to high page rank article sites - again for the high quality links. Lastly, you will want to put out press releases at press release sites as well for the quality links. Never, ever buy links or get into reciprocal link plans since this also can be the kiss of death for your site from search engines. So there is more you can do to market your site that would cost some time and/or money. It all depends on how fast you want to build your law firm Internet marketing systems is my take. Overall you need to take a long-term view and build consistently, persistently over time and you will reap the reward. Once you have built your page rank you can cut back or stop all of your PPC ads. Think like a manager and entrepreneur here since a website is an investment that will produce a return on that investment if you do it well over time plus pay you again when you sell it like a house is sold at a profit.

You said something about “…tell you that you also need a blog with your website”. What is a blog and do I need a blog in law firm Internet marketing?

A blog is defined by http://wikipedia.com as:

“A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a website where regular entries are made (such as in a journal or diary) and presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs often offer commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries.”

The ABA reports there are 70,000 new blogs posted online each day and that about 6% of lawyers have a blog. They do have advantages of course in law firm Internet marketing. They are cheap to build with little tech skills needed to write to a blog. They are even free or low fee to host. Free is available at http://blogger.com and a fee site is available at http://typepad.com for $5 to $15 per month. If you are going to have a blog you need to own the domain name, get a host and get blogging software. From a law firm Internet marketing perspective most blogs do not provide that much of a benefit in support of a website (the main support is having a link from your blog to your website – also you would not want a link from your blog to your website if the blog had a lower page rank than your website anyway) and they do not replace a website. Additionally, if you are going to have a blog that has high page rank be prepared to submit something of quality to it at least 2 or 3 times per week. Yes, per week. Blogging experts say you should expect to spend 2 to 4 hours per week on writing for the blog. I don't think this is marketing time well spent for most lawyers. You could do much better building your referral network with this time. Thus my answer is “no” to the blog idea unless you are in a larger firm where several attorneys are dividing the writing duties or you have associates who are good at this type of writing work and have no other way to contribute to the marketing process or even better still some talented paralegals who could do the major blog writing ghosting for you that you add the finishing touches. You will need to buy some books on blogging for business purposes to learn more about what is required in a successful business blog which I am sure you can find on http://Amazon.com. Additionally, blogs have more issues from an ethical perspective so do check your state bar rules. Finally, you might want to check out http://www.blawg.org. No I did not misspell “blog” I intended “blawg” that is a way of putting “law” inside “blog” to designate blogs that focus on lawyers and legal issues. This site is a “search engine” for blawgs and legal sites of all types. You could also check out http://www.blawgrepublic.com/ as well.

What do I need to be concerned about around websites/blogs with respect to bar rules and ethical considerations?

Yes indeed and it is all very confusing since it varies by state. One of the Internet's authorities (and an attorney) Dennis Kennedy at http://www.DennisKennedy.com says the rules for law firm Internet marketing are “impossibly confusing”. Mainly you need to find out from your bar if the advertising rules apply to websites or blogs and if there are specific rules for websites or blogs. Finally, some states might even require very specific disclaimers on the site. Bottom line you need to check in your state. If you want to see a specific disclaimer for a blog site go to Dennis's blog at http://DennisKennedy.com/blog/.

Where else can I read about implementing law firm Internet marketing?

One place to look to learn more about implementing law firm Internet marketing is at Google itself. Search engines do not tell us all of the factors or details (called their algorithm) they look at in determining page ranks on their search engine. This is proprietary information for them. Google does tell us in general what they are looking for in page ranking. If you read what they say at: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters you will see what I have been talking about is indeed what Google is looking for and if you do what Google wants you will be right with all of the others almost certainly with your law firm Internet marketing.

OK, we have made it to the end of our executive briefing. If you follow what you find here your law firm Internet marketing will get you new clients at a reasonable cost. Who could want more than that? If you want to know more I found the following books to be of value for “newbies” to the law firm Internet marketing game:

The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Marketing for Small Business by Tom Antion

Call To Action by Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg

Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing For Dummies by Peter Kent

Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos.

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