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Is all law marketing doomed for failure? The author says YES.
Lawyers and attorneys are a dime a dozen. Especially when it comes to their legal marketing initiatives.
How many attorney based Yellow Pages ads exist that is simply incestuous? (“Incest-marketing” is the practice of copying other legal marketing ads, letters, brochures and more.)
Try this: Open the Yellow Pages. Turn to the legal/attorney sections and see for yourself. What is the difference between any of them?? They all look the same.
Who can you trust? Everybody says the same thing, pretty much. Everybody got suckered into advertising that doesn’t work.
What does the legal industry at large share as the perception from the public side? (Malpractice suits and cases like the Hammer don’t help a pervasive negative view.)
What reputation have lawyers created for themselves? Not great.
Questions to ask prospective local clients
As a local search marketing expert and business owner, you are attending to many duties.
And, while we must clearly distinguish between “busy work” and “actual work” (productivity), the lines may seem blurry at times. Your main job should be focused on revenue generating duties. Your own work around products/services, pricing, placements and promotions must be clear, ongoing and distinctive.
But, when the calls come in from your advertising and inbound marketing activities, it’s very clear that you must strategically align yourself – quickly – with the request. You should not be a sales-person, but a strategic partner.
This means, among other things, that you understand what their business is about, what their goals are, and much more.
When you ask or interview them after setting an appointment (yes, recommend that!) with superior intelligence, understanding and diagnostic-type questions, you’ll be able to offer them the right solution.
You’ll be seen as an authority and not a pushy sales person.
What are some of these questions that you should ask?
Here you go – the top interview questions for potential clients in the local online marketing space:
Great Domains Get Attention!
A great domain name by itself is powerful. It can and will create attention quickly, if you have selected and built it out well. And in social media environments (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) – the link and domain name (if seen) will give us a high click propensity if friendly, relevant and not spammy looking.
So, are you looking to buy a domain? Are you trying to sell an existing domain, or several?
We’ll cover 12 powerful tools for finding and selling domains for your search engine optimization benefit.
And yes, finding and building out the perfect domain for your business is key. Both for users and search engines.
There are ongoing conversations about the value of a domain for exact matching keywords for SEO.
I remember several years ago, there was an ‘outcry’ from the SEO experts that it should not be so easy to rank for an exact
matching domain.
The truth is – it works, and it will continue to play a big role going forward.
Let’s take a look at these domain tools to help your SEO efforts.
Here is why Google Banned 800,000 Advertiser Accounts in 2011
24 hours a day, when you are awake and sleeping – both software and humans at Google are working to figure out if you are scamming Google with your Adwords account(s). The results can be devastating.
The software and related systems scan information – from ads, webpages, links and much more — while hundreds of Google Adwords Spam/Scam Police watch (yes, humans) and monitor any red flags sent by the software agents.
This may and will have implications for you.
Even if you are legit.
You can get inadvertently get caught in it.
Here’s why. read more
Google New Teleport Product April 2012
Google creates and makes improvements to products all the time, and in the case of the search engine, pretty much every day.
In one of my Adwords accounts, I noticed a new feature which is sure to below many businesses away (literally). It’s the new “Click-To-Teleport” feature.
The benefits? While there are many, the one standing out is the “driving in-store sales”. Customers will literally simply appear.
Here’s how it works.
How To Become a Trusted Authority
How can you become an authority in your small business? And, perhaps more importantly, why should you?
I’ll break down the 3 strategies to consider on the process of starting in this post.
But first, why should you consider becoming an authority in the first place?
Let’s use an example.
Let’s say you had a bad knee and started to look for somebody to help you. Where would you begin? You’d probably start asking friends, family first. Then, you’d continue by searching online (search/social), visiting bookstores to read more about it. You might ask more questions in a social community (like Facebook). You’d search on Twitter to see others with similar symptoms, etc.
While waiting for answers, you’d also visit specific niche verticals and directories, forums, blogs – to find out more.
Next, you’d start by making some calls to various doctors and health institutions and find out more about their experience, perhaps cost and potential down-time issues, etc, etc.
After all information was compiled, you’d make a decision on which doctor or health expert to choose. Ultimately, your referrals from friends would come high on the list.
Experience matters?
But, nothing says “I do” more than “competence and character”. See, you would want to know that your final selection was based on knowledge, trust and authority. A smart medical professional who had leveraged the Internet, social media and his network of peers would likely get your business by a) getting your attention (being visible) and by b) showing experience and authority from books, videos, news releases, referrals, testimonials, trusted partner networks, endorsements, etc. It would be an easy choice for you, as compared to the other options available to you. His/her unique value proposition was so strong that you had no problem going to visit their office.
YOU want to create this level of authority and trust within your small business niche. And with social media and using a certain sales framework, you can do it too. How can you start? Take a look at these 3 options and read a recent social media sales book on the topic.
Outsourcing Search Engine Optimization? Read this.
We all know how important it is to have a well-established presence for our business on the Web.
SEO is a huge industry, and businesses regularly take advantage of it to boost their sales.
Well-done and well-maintained SEO will correlate to a direct increase in sales, visitors and fans of your brand.
The problem is, SEO takes time and effort. Some businesses can afford to keep their SEO in-house, while others prefer to outsource.
So what are the pros and cons of hiring an SEO agency?
Pro: It Saves Time
Outsourcing your SEO will save you a lot of time. You don’t have to deal with it yourself, if you run a small business. In larger businesses, you won’t have to go through the interview process and hire someone to do it in-house. You’ll still need to contract an SEO agency to do the work, but once they know what the goal is, you don’t have to monitor them. It’s largely a fire-and-forget method of search engine optimization.
Need More Web Traffic For Your Financial Services Web Site? Learn How To Start It Up!
When financial service firms, advisors and funds build websites and starting their online business, the focus is on offerings and not how to bring in more web traffic.
There is a quiet assumption that SEO is not important because people will automatically know the company by name and reputation.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
SEO (search engine optimization) for financial websites has resulted in a higher level playing field for brokers, hedge funds and other firms related to finance.
The following list outlines seven simple ways to increase site traffic. It’s easy to start building your online business and more quality web traffic.
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – Ogilvy
Are you promoting with products? Learn How.
No matter how well established a company is in its respected industry, there is always a need for new business. Larger corporations have expansive sales forces whose jobs revolve around convincing people to purchase a product or service, and brand-new capital can be quite challenging to obtain.
While traditional advertising campaigns on TV and radio are successful in their own way,
embarking on such a venture can often be quite expensive for a small business with limited
funds.
Luckily, there are a few cost-effective shortcuts that these companies can take to
improve sales and revenue.
An option that can result in an optimum return on investment is
promotional products, but there are many questions that a manager may ask when
following such a strategy.
Is your SEO too perfect?
There’s a lot of chatter in the SEO community right now about “over-optimization” of your search engine optimization strategies, or rather, tactics.
The “under the hood” details of search engines and websites (pages) that get the bots and search engine algorithms to take special liking to your online assets, that is. Google’s spam engineer Matt Cutts is in the news again. You can hear him speak at the recent SXSW conference.
But, truth be told – much commenting is typical anytime announcements appear from Google Camp. Sure, it’s exciting to talk about. But, just today, two clients called me – exclaiming excitement about this new announcement. (without them understanding it)
So, what does “over-optimization” really mean?
