The first one was a claims company that had stolen copy from 1stClaims, the second was perhaps more surprising; a marketing agency that had lifted the content from my home page of Samson Consulting. Really, a marketing agency stealing copy from a marketing consultant. And not just any marketing consultant by the way, a law firm marketing consultant who used to be a solicitor…. I was flabbergasted to say the least. To be fair to them, one email and the copy was instantly changed, but if I had not found it how long would it have remained there?

My blog earlier this week was all about how useless duplicate content is on a website, so the fact that a marketing agency stole my content makes me think they aren’t really very good at the online side of this marketing thingy that we do or they would know this.

Anyway, it is slightly flattering, but much more annoying and a waste of my time. If you want to see if people are stealing content from your website, visit copyscape.com and it will carry out a search for you.

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I also read a lot of books, from Richard Branson to Gerald Ratner (very informative), and other business growth books. Some business leaders suggest you have to be aggressive to win, in fact most of them do. However, I like to sleep at night and have to believe in what I sell. I know other people who feel the same way. We often discuss whether this stops us being more successful, and perhaps we should be more aggressive or ruthless, but it is just not me. I am not saying I am perfect, I have my flaws and make mistakes just like everyone else, but by and large I try and do things for the right reason. This is not just about making money, but about providing a good service or good advice. Nothing pleases me more than receiving an unsolicited email from one of my Marketing4Solicitors members who has tried one of my suggestions and seen instant results. Or someone on my free legal marketing tips email list who has done the same.

So I was delighted last night when seemingly the nicest, most genuine manager in English Football at the moment, Brian McDermott, won promotion for Reading Football Club from the Championship to the Premier League. He always praises his players, congratulates them for giving their all and when they talk about him there is genuine affection. He has created a unique and amazing team spirit within the team which is clear for all to see. When the players were interviewed after winning promotion last night they all mentioned Brian McDermott and the amazing team spirit he has created.

When you think that he has managed to achieve this in such a usually fickle and money orientated sport, it seems to me that you can be a good guy and win big too! Well done Brian and Reading and thanks for the life lesson too!

P.S. I declare my interest as a Reading fan – well done Brian and the whole team – amazing job!

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If this is happening to you, please let me reassure you that just like chain letter senders, nothing happens if you do leave these vagabond website dealers. You will still sleep soundly (actually far more soundly than you do now) and more importantly, if you start adding unique, relevant and informative content to your website, you will have more visitors and more instructions from your website than you have ever had before!

Google likes unique content, not content that is added to over 100 solicitor’s websites at the same time. Funnily enough, that is what us humanoids like too. Unique is good, duplicate is bad. It is as simple as that so please don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Sleep sound, and find yourself a new legal website designer for the sake of both yours and my sanity…

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You will usually only be offered a partnership these days if you are very useful to the firm, and useful in law firm terms generally means you are very good at billing. The assumption for you is that you will earn more as a partner than you can as a salaried fee earner or partner, but is that right if you are in a small to medium sized practice?

You see, whilst you might be generating fees of £200-500,000 per annum for your firm if you are a good fee earner, your salary is probably likely to be in the region of £35-60,000 (maybe pushing £80,000 if you are very lucky). Taking partnership should provide you with a major increase in your salary, or so you would hope. After all, the idea is that as a partner you can now take the cream off the top of the milk and enjoy the fees earned by all of the other fee earners, providing you with a much larger salary than you were able to generate on your own. However, that is where the problem lies. Generally in my experience of a small to medium sized partnership, there will be some very good fee earners, some mediocre fee earners, and some dreadful fee earners. If you have been in legal practice for any length of time, you will know the dreadful fee earners. They are the ones who have always got an excuse why they are only billing £70,000 per annum. More importantly, they will have a very convincing story why they will bill so much more next year and the year after. Let me share a secret with you; they never will!

The trouble for you is that if you take partnership, you suddenly have to carry these weaker fee earners, along with the mediocre ones. Smaller partnerships of three to eight partners generally can struggle to agree on decisions to remove poorer performers. Often the poor performer was one of the partner’s trainees and the partner is very loyal to them, which is nice, but not good business sense. What’s worse, it means that the partnership that you have courted so long is suddenly not so attractive. If you are lucky, you may earn slightly more than you were earning as a partner, but that is not guaranteed. So you wanted to become a partner in a law firm, and you got what you wanted. As they say, be careful what you wish for…

So do you have another option? Yes, of course, and thankfully now you have many more options available to you. You can take your hard earned fees somewhere else and keep most of the profits, by setting up your own law firm. This way, you can earn your £200-500,000 per annum and keep all of the profit once you have paid your expenses and costs. You should earn far more than you would as a partner in a small to medium sized practice and you can control your business. I see more and more people doing this, and the advantage now is that if the thought of the administration and accounting worries you, you can either outsource it to an organisation to do it all for you, or you can join a franchise that takes care of these parts for you. So you can carry on fee earning and keep the majority of your £200-500,000 per annum all for yourself. So do you still want to be a partner in a law firm?

If you would like some information of outsourced accounting facilities, or law firm franchises, simply sign up for my marketing guide below, and when you receive it, reply to the email and I will send you some very attractive offers to help get you started nice and quickly.

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So what else could you be doing right now to generate new instructions for your practice in the future?

Blogging?

A blog is simple. A blog allows you to add content to your existing website immediately without any need for a website designer or developer (i.e. for no external cost). Once you have paid for someone to add your blog to your website, it is then incredibly simple for you to add regular (or irregular) new content to your website. This is a huge advantage for you, for your prospects and for Google which devours blog content.

To give you an idea of how much Google likes blog posts, yesterday I added a short blog to my website and within seconds of publishing the article I could see from my live website tracking software that the Google robot came straight in and snaffled it up! It cannot have been more than 10 seconds so Google really does love Blog content, especially if you can add to it consistently.

However, with WordPress, my preferred blogging software, you can even make consistent addition of content simple, as it allows you to schedule content as far ahead as you like. So if you are a batch worker, and like to dictate or type several articles at once, you can tell WordPress to publish one a week for the next four or five weeks. Once Google realises that you are now a regular blogger, it rewards you with better search results. So that article you write today whilst everyone else is sunning themselves, called “Finding A Conveyancing Solicitor in Bristol”, could bring you new website visitors every week or month for the next five years.

Please think about this for a moment, as it is the secret to the future success of your website. If you write a blog post about “Finding A Conveyancing Solicitor in Bristol” or similar today, and because it is so very focused and your blog is working well with Google, you end up on the first page of Google (which happens consistently), you might attract another 10 visitors a month to your website (being conservative so that you stay with me).

However, if you add one blog a week for a year and each one attracts 10 new visitors a month, that is now 520 extra visitors a month in one years time, or 1040 if you add two blog posts per week. Bear in mind that the average conversion rate from visitors to new enquiries(and this varies hugely from website to website, and legal service to legal service) is around 2%, this means in one year just by blogging alone you could have an extra 10 enquiries a month, or 20 if you blog twice a week. When you add those results to your other website marketing results such as search engine marketing and google pay per click, you can see why so many solicitors I work with are receiving over 100 new enquiries a month from their websites, and how you could be too!

Blogging is a fantastic way of adding new content to your existing website, at the same time as winning you some new instructions!

You can find out more about blogging here: Solicitors Blogs:>>

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Follow this five step plan and see an immediate improvement.

1. What is your intention with your advertising?

This should be a simple response: – to win new clients. Most firms do not have the substantial budgets required to produce “brand advertising” like Coca Cola or Nike. The one response you want is to recruit new clients. If your advertising is not achieving this, change the advertisement, and if that does not work, stop doing it.

It really is that simple.

2. Who is your target audience?

Remember who you are writing your advertisement for at all times. I know that approximately 90% of all solicitors’ advertisements start with the name of the practice. This is not good advertising. If you are doing this you must change your advertisement immediately. We need people seeing a great headline and being compelled to read your advertisement and then at the end of the advertisement to take action. Write some headlines and then put yourself in your clients’ shoes. If you look at the headline and can say “so what”, you need to think again.

In the body of the advertisement, consider what is important to your clients. For example, if you are advertising conveyancing services, your prospective clients might want to know that you will be there to talk to them when the exchange breaks down. If you are offering wills, they want to know if you will visit them at home and why they should pay a premium for you over a will writing agency.

If you are advertising personal injury services you need to educate the public to use you instead of claims companies. Think carefully about what matters to your audience. If you currently have your practice name at the top of your advertisement, I beg of you, change it now, please!

3. Features not benefits

Talk in terms of benefits to the client of using your practice rather than the features of your firm. You can change a feature into a benefit by using the terms “which means that” in the middle of the sentence.

E.g. We were established in 1910, which means that our experience can ensure you have a trouble and stress free house purchase.

4. Monitoring Response Rates

Many solicitors I visit have no idea how much business each advertisement generates. If you are spending a significant amount of money advertising you must know if it is money well spent. I know that fee earners are not always quick to ask where the new business has come from, but you can make it easier for them. One method is to place a false name in the advertisement so that when the caller speaks to reception and asks for that name you immediately know it is in response to the advertisement. Obviously you need to forewarn the receptionist or she will send your new enquirers packing, but it is a very simple and effective way of measuring the success of your marketing (and remember there is ‘no treasure without measure’).

5. Tell Them What To Do!

At the end of every advertisement make it abundantly clear what you want the reader to do. If you are offering a free legal guide, tell them where to get it, if you want the instruction tell them how to arrange their free consultation. You must tell your reader what you want them to do and how to do it (phone, online or email).

Summary.

Following this simple 5 step plan will ensure that your advertisements provide you with some success.

If you would like more detailed and step by step instructions to generate more leads for your practice through advertising and other marketing methods, you must download my free guide now. 8 Ways To Instantly Attract Clients can transform your marketing activities overnight (and it’s free, did I mention that)?

Have any questions about this or any other blogs? Please “Leave A Reply” in the box below and I will reply to you.

I want to help you by providing you with a free mini course to provide you with more detail about one area of online legal marketing. To ensure I can help the majority of you, I have set up a simple one question survey. Simply answer which subject you would like to know more about, and I will go away and write a brand new and completely free mini course for you. The course will include a series of emails, some screen shots, and even a video tutorial or two.

As soon as the course is ready, I will send you the link for it.

Click to take the one question survey now:>>

Thank you.

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Thank you.

Most solicitors I meet prefer to spend their time helping their legal clients, so if they can find a form of marketing their legal services which produces new enquiries without them having to leave their desks, they are very happy! Solicitors online marketing should do exactly this for you. The huge additional benefit of using online marketing to generate new leads is that once you put in place systems and processes, you can outsource or automate all of your solicitors online marketing.

Different Forms Of Solicitors Online Marketing

There are two main forms of online marketing for solicitors, although in reality there are many variations on a theme. The most commonly used forms of solicitors online marketing are the following:

• Google Pay Per Click Advertising
• Search Engine Marketing Or Search Engine Optimisation

If I was running my own solicitors practice, I can assure you that I would be using both of these methods of online marketing to generate leads for my law firm. You should be using them both for your firm.

» Click to find out more about Pay Per Click Advertising For Solicitors.

» Click to find out more about Search Engine Marketing For Solicitors.

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Law firm marketing MOT part 1:>>

In this email, I want to ask you whether you are using two other forms of marketing to attract new clients to your practice, and if not, why not?

3. Google Advertising

Is your website appearing on Google using their Pay Per Click advertising platform? Whilst getting to the top of Google using search engine marketing methods takes a fair amount of time and energy, you could appear at the very top of the Google search results and on the right hand side of them within minutes of reading this article.

There are two reasons why I am a huge fan of this method of advertising for solicitors, and you should like both of them a lot:

1. People will find your website at the exact time that they are looking for your legal services. Unlike traditional advertising when you are promoting your services to people who may not be interested in them, if someone types into Google "Conveyancing Solicitor Reading" (or whatever your service and location is) and your website appears in front of them, your chances of winning an instruction from them are dramatically improved.
2. It brings clients to you with very little effort on your part. Most solicitors I meet entered the legal profession to practice law. They did not enter to become a marketing expert. Therefore, once you have set up your Google Pay Per Click advertising you can let it keep running for you and keep delivering new clients to you. Isn’t that a perfect type of marketing for a solicitor?

If you have never tried Google Advertising before, you should do now. If you have tried it and failed to make it work, unless you are in the most competitive field of personal injury law, you should try it again. Even if you practice personal injury law, you can still promote your business for local search terms and achieve good results.

To find out more about Pay Per Click advertising you can see more here:

View more information about Pay Per Click advertising:>>

4. Advertising?

Despite my comment above, traditional newspaper and magazine advertisements still work and produce leads for solicitors IF:

1. You choose the right publication for your target audience; and
2. You write the advertisement focused on generating instant instructions (not just listing your services with your logo at the top – if you are doing this you MUST make changes immediately – see below); and
3. You change your advertisement regularly!

Below is a full page advertisement from Google in a business magazine. Think about this for a moment. This is Google, controller of everything on the internet, able to put its own website and services at the top of every search result, yet choosing to promote its services in a printed business magazine.

If the King of the internet realises that there are still new clients to be won in printed papers and magazines, that should tell you that the same is true for you too!

Advertising is still an incredibly effective way to generate instant client instructions. Are you using it for your practice? If you have a regular advertisement running in your local newspaper are you changing it and following the vital rules of successful advertising?

To download some Advertising Precedents along with a foolproof method for writing new advertisements click here:>>

To find out more about writing a good advertisement click here:>>

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In fact, you have an advantage over the national advertisers, law groups and claims companies, in that you have a local presence in a local community. The question is; are you making the most of this local presence?

Are you keeping in touch with every single client or prospect that ever walks through your office doors? Are you taking their email address and sending them something, anything, at least once a month, and on every email reminding them of your full range of services, including personal injury claims? If you are not, then you are missing a huge opportunity to generate personal injury leads without any significant cost in this way.

Do you advertise your services locally? Are you making the most of your advertisements to ensure that they generate new instructions for you?

Do your team make the most of every new client enquiry that comes through your door, or are they letting some good claims slip through their fingers?

Finally, are you making the most of the free, local website traffic for people who are looking for your personal injury services right now? Whilst much of the personal injury online marketing is expensive, you can achieve some excellent results with local website marketing.

To find out how you can really start generating more of your own personal injury leads, you should read my free guide: 5 Methods To Attract Personal Injury Clients.

You can download it free here: Click to view and download:>>

Have any questions about this or any other blogs? Please enter a comment below and I will reply to you.