1. Find an opportunity - Many organizations and business associations hold conferences, workshops and seminars for their members. Consider approaching the organization with a few potential speaking topics. Alternatively, you can network with influencers in the organization to potentially land a speaking gig.
2. Attend a few meetings - Before you speak in front of an audience, attend a few meetings to learn more about how that organization structures its talks. Some prefer individual keynote speakers while others offer panel discussions. Familiarize yourself with the proceedings and people who attend meetings regularly to learn how to structure your talk as well as which topics would be most beneficial to listeners.
3. Have a hook - Good speeches focus on solving a particular problem or avoiding pain. They aren’t a sales pitch for your services.
4. Know your time limit - Most organizations have scheduled time slots, so know how long you have to speak, and organize your content accordingly. Don’t speak too long, especially if another speaker will follow up. If you have an hour to talk, create enough material for a forty minute speech and leave twenty minutes for questions.
5. Prepare your talk - How you prepare your talk will depend on your personal style. Some people prefer to write out a script word-for-word to clarify their thoughts. Others use an outline to highlight the key points they will cover. If you will use slides or transparencies, make sure they highlight the main points of your talk and add to your presentation.
6. Practice your talk - A good rule of thumb is to practice your entire talk aloud at least three times. If you’ve written out a script, put it aside during the practice sessions. Good talks are conversational in nature, so if you want to connect with your audience, you must be focused on reading their body language and connecting with them through eye contact, not reading your script or trying to remember what comes next during your talk.
7. Arrive early - If you have the option to arrive at your event early, do so. This will allow you to talk with members of your audience in advance and uncover what they are most looking forward to learning during your talk.
8. Close with information about your services - Because generating leads is the purpose for your talk, make sure you include some way for people to contact you if they have additional questions. If you have published a book or offer a free report, tell the audience how they can get a copy. If you can provide presentation notes or slides, ask people to give you their business cards if they would like you to email copies to them.
9. Stay after the talk - Plan to stay after your talk in case audience members want to ask you specific questions. These casual discussions can build rapport and may translate into potential leads later.
10. Follow up - Most of your leads will come from interested prospects who stay to chat with you after your talk. Additional leads can come from people who give you their business card in exchange for your presentation materials or free report. You should follow up with prospects as soon as possible, preferably in the day or two after your talk when it is still fresh in their minds.

Public speaking can be one of the best ways to generate leads for your law firm because it demonstrates your expertise while building rapport with prospects in an informal setting. Though it can be time consuming to prepare a talk, it is usually well worth the effort.

One of the best ways to set yourself apart from other lawyers is to write articles for publications. If a magazine or newspaper publishes your piece, it gives you credibility in your readers’ eyes. If you publish a blog or write articles for the web, it gives readers a place to check out your expertise and learn more about you. Here is a step-by-step checklist for writing articles quickly.

1. Choose a Topic - Before you can start writing, you must have an idea of what you want to write about. Preferably, that topic should be structured around a frequently asked question or concern many of your prospects have. A good way to brainstorm for ideas is to keep track of all the questions you receive from prospects and clients over the course of a week.
2. Know Your Audience - Regardless of if you are writing for publication or to market your services on the web, learn more about your target audience. If you write for a publication, pick up a copy and read through the articles. If you write for the web, consider which visitors you would ideally want to read the article.
3. Create a Hook - Your hook or angle is a sentence or two that summarizes your article. It should be concise and provide a focus for the article, generate interest, and offer readers an incentive to keep reading. Common hooks can include “Top 10 Mistakes,” a focus on a current trend or event and how that affects your prospect, or an action step prospects should take that they might not have thought about (i.e. when should they consider rewriting their will or incorporating their business). Your hook is not your subject. It’s how you plan to make your subject interesting to readers. “Insurance and Auto Accidents” is a subject. “Ten Mistakes Car Crash Victims Make With Insurance Companies after an Accident” is a hook.
4. Decide on the Article’s Structure - The fastest and easiest way to create an article is to structure your content around a common article writing formula. Some examples include writing a list, setting up a premise or commonly held notion and then knocking it down (aka The Straw Man), how to do something which explains steps for doing something or achieving a goal, conducting an interview, or offering a mini-case study which poses a problem and offers a few brief examples of how real people solved their problem.
5. Write your Introduction - Your introductory paragraph should set the premise for your article and entice prospects to keep reading.
6. Write 3-5 Main Points - Once you have an idea for the structure of your article, it is time to create the main points, which will become the subjects for your next few paragraphs. What are the three to five take away points prospects should walk away with after reading your article? Make your article educational rather than self-promotional and keep it jargon-free if you are writing for non-lawyers.
7. Write your Body Copy - For each of your main points, write a few sentences clarifying each. This will become the main content for your article.
8. Write your Conclusion - Summarize your main points into a concise conclusion and offer readers the next step - what should they do if they are looking for more information?
9. Give your Article a Headline - Your headline is the most important part of your article, so take time with it. Ask yourself, “If I saw this headline while reading a publication, would I want to read the article? If I saw it while doing an internet search, would I click on it?” Your headline should ask a question or promise information and make readers curious enough to read the article.
10. Create an Author Bio - Many publications will allow you to publish a brief biography and short description of your services. Make sure to list your website address if the publication allows for it, along with any perks readers may find at your website - such as downloading a special report or joining your newsletter.
11. SEO Your Article - If you are publishing for the web, take time to format your article to get the most benefit from search engines. You should always write web content for your visitors, but afterwards, do keyword research to find popular keywords you would like your article to be found for in Google. A great place to look is Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Then, include those keywords within your article’s headline, sub-headlines and body copy. Focus on one main keyword or key phase, and add variations to that keyword or key phrase throughout your article - but don’t overdo it.

Writing articles can be an extremely affordable (and often free) way to generate leads for your firm. Look for publications that allow you to offer a free report or resource in your author’s description. You can measure the success of the article by how many people contact you for that free resource. By following these 11 steps, you can write educational and interesting articles quickly and effectively.

Step 1 - Planning Your SEO Strategy

The foundation for any SEO campaign involves planning for your campaign’s success by setting goals, defining your target market, and researching your competitors.

• Setting campaign goals - What specifically do you want visitors to do once they arrive at your website? Which pages are most important? Ideally, you would like to capture leads in some fashion, whether that is to download a free report, fill out an online form for a consultation, or join your newsletter. Increasing traffic, by itself, is not a good campaign goal. You want to increase targeted traffic and then have those visitors do something so you can measure your success.
• Understand your target audience - What types of people do you want to visit your website? What are their demographics and psychographics? What are their key problems, concerns and frustrations? What solutions are they looking for when they arrive at your website?
• Research your competitors - Which law firms are listed on the front page of Google in the organic and sponsored listings? Some great tools to research your competitors include Alexa and Spyfu. Alexa will show you how a website’s traffic is trending over time while Spyfu will show you which keywords your competitors are bidding on through Google Adwords and how they rank competitively for organic listings.

Step 2 - Keyword Research

Once you’ve decided on campaign goals, clarified your target market, and researched your competition, it’s time to start brainstorming keywords for your SEO campaign. What would your prospects type into Google to find you? Some keyword ideas include:

• Your company name, attorney names, and any brands or trademarks you own
• Words or phrases that describe your practice areas
• Words or phrases that describe your services and what you do
• Words or phrases that describe what problem you solve from your prospect’s perspective
• Any local or geographical words that apply to your firm

A great way to brainstorm keywords is through the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This will show you synonyms for keywords you’ve uncovered as well as give you an idea of search volume and how many advertisers are bidding on those keywords.

Step 3 - Website Architecture

How your website is designed plays a crucial role in your search engine optimization efforts. Your site architecture is the structure of how all your pages are interconnected. Think of your site architecture as a hierarchy with your home page being the “hub” or “doorway” page of your site that directs visitors to other parts of your website. Here are some things to consider when planning your site architecture.

• All pages should be no more than 3 clicks from your home page - Your home page will most likely be the page that gets the most traffic, so its primary job is to direct visitors to the inner pages of your website. Any pages that the home page links to are your “second tier” pages, meaning they are one click away from your home page. Any pages that your “second tier” pages link to are your “third tier” pages, meaning they are two clicks away from your home page. At the absolute maximum, you should be able to reach all pages of your website within three clicks of the home page.
• Optimize your home page for best converting key phrases - Your home page should be optimized for the highest traffic keywords that convert the best. Conversion means that visitors take a specific action when they arrive at your page like fill out a form or join your mailing list. There’s no point in optimizing your website for extremely high traffic keywords if they aren’t relevant to your law firm. For instance, trying to target a generic term like “law firm” or “personal injury lawyer” when you only practice law in Pennsylvania and New Jersey will not only be extremely time consuming and expensive, but most of the people coming to your site won’t find it relevant to them, so they will quickly leave.
• Use a keyword-based domain name - A domain name with your main keyword in the domain name could help you in search results. Try not to include any numbers or hyphens and make sure it is a “.com” domain name. Also, when you register your domain, do so for at least two years or longer as search engines take into consideration domain registration length.
• Use keyword-based URLs - Use short folder names for any directories you have and use keywords as URLs rather than variables - for instance, you want your URLs to look more like “www.mydomain.com/pa-trademark-lawyer/” than ” www.mydomain.com/page1.aspx?id=1234″
• Keep the site professional - Make your website look like an authority website by having a user-friendly design and great content. You don’t need bells-and-whistles, animated graphics, or flash to impress prospects. Rather, keep it simple, clean and easy-to-use.
• Use a sitemap - Sitemaps are files that contain links to every page on your website. They help search engines index your content faster. You can create a site map at xml-sitemaps.com. Once you have created your sitemap, register it at Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.

Step 4 - On-Page Optimization

Once you know what keywords your target audience is searching for, it’s time to evaluate your website for how well it ranks for those keywords. On-page optimization involves everything you can do to your website that will influence its rank in search engines. Some of the primary ways to optimize your pages include:

• Title tags - Your title tag is what shows up at the top left side of your internet browser above the “File” menu. This tag should start with the key phrase you want to rank for and briefly describe your page’s content. You only get 65 characters, so keep it concise. Think of this tag as the headline for your page - it is what shows up as the clickable link in organic search results. Make sure to give each page of your website its own unique title.
• Meta tags - While the “meta keyword” tag is virtually useless, the “meta description” tag is important because this is the description that shows up in search engines underneath the clickable title link. Keep your description limited to 155 characters and include a brief summary of the page’s content. Like the title tag, your pages’ description tags should be unique.
• Headline tags - Use your primary keyword in your H1 tag at the top of your page. Depending on how your web designer structures your page, the H1 tags are usually reserved for the largest text on the page - which is usually the page title.
• Keywords in anchor text - Your anchor text is the clickable portion of a link, so instead of saying “click here” or visit “lawyerbizcoach.com,” you would want to say read more “law firm marketing” articles. Be sure to use keywords when linking to both internal web pages and external sites.
• Focus on unique keywords - Each of your pages should focus on a different variation of your main keyword. Don’t optimize every page of your website for your primary keyword. For instance, if your high-traffic keyword is “Philadelphia DUI lawyer,” focus one or two pages on that keyword and use related keywords like “Philadelphia DWI attorney” or “Philadelphia DUI law firm” or “Philadelphia defense attorney” for the subpages of your website.
• Create content regularly - A site with minimal content will be extremely difficult to rank well. Search engines want to rank high-quality, authority websites at the top of search results, so the easiest way to get ranked is to continually create new content around your keywords.
• Write content for visitors - Realize that getting pages to rank well for search terms and getting pages to convert visitors into leads are two completely separate things. The end goal of SEO is to get visitors to your website and to take action. If your web pages don’t convert, your SEO campaign isn’t nearly as effective as it could be.

Step 5 - Linking Strategies

On-page SEO will get you pretty far, but if you are targeting highly competitive search terms, you will need to devote considerable effort to getting inbound links from relevant, high-quality websites. Search engines see inbound links as a “vote” for your website, meaning the site linking to yours is vouching for your website’s credibility and trustworthiness by linking to you. Here’s what to look for when building links back to your website.

• Keywords in anchor text - Using your keywords in the anchor text of inbound links plays a large role in how search engines rank your website. The anchor text is important because it tells visitors what they can expect when they click on that link.
• Number of high-quality links - One link from a high-quality website is worth more than thousands of links from questionable sites, so focus your link-building efforts on high-quality sites that will provide you a link in their editorial content rather than the footer or sidebar of a website. Search engines use high-quality links as a measure of how important of a resource your website is on the Internet.
• Diversity of link sources - The more links you can get from a variety of high-quality sources, the better your search rank.
• Topic-related links - Try to get links from websites that are topically related to your website’s subject.
• Be cautious of paid links - Search engines frown on paid links or links from known link brokers, so if you decide to buy links, be aware that Google might penalize you for it.
• Traffic - Ideally, you want the website linking to you to actually send you targeted traffic, not just give you a link. Look for high-traffic websites that would be a good source of potential prospects.

Step 6 - Measuring Results

Finally, once you’ve implemented your campaign, you must measure and tweak the results. Where does your site rank for your priority keywords? Are you getting more qualified traffic from those rankings? Are you getting good links from reputable and relevant sites? Are you getting the conversions you want? And specifically, are you getting a good return on your investment?

A great way to analyze your campaign’s successfulness is to install Google Analytics to keep track of your traffic, conversions, keywords, top content, and other features. Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful, free tool that anyone can add to their website to monitor results.

By following these six steps, you should start to see results within 30-90 days of implementation. Keep in mind, search engines change their ranking algorithm regularly, so just because you are able to achieve a high rank doesn’t mean you are entitled to keep it long-term. You must continually monitor your campaign’s success and make changes accordingly.

Yet, when done with the right mindset, networking can be one of the most effective and affordable ways to attract new business. People do business with those they know, like and trust, so the heart of networking is meeting new people and creating relationships that are mutually beneficial to both parties.

Networking is Relationship Building

Networking is the process of making specific contacts and building upon them by following up. Often, lawyers approach networking as a one-sided ordeal, where they must answer the question, “So what do you do?” and pitch their services a hundred times in exchange for someone else’s business card. Perhaps they meet one or two people who seem lukewarm about their services, but rarely do they meet a hot prospect, and lawyers often leave the event feeling as if they’ve wasted their time.

Instead of approaching networking as something you “should” be doing, approach it as a way to establish long-term relationships. Networking is not a hard sell. It’s about meeting new people and tapping into their vast network of resources. Each of us has a personal sphere of influence of roughly between 200-250 people. Most of these people aren’t close, personal contacts of yours. Rather, they are people you who would recognize you on the street, or who you might invite to your wedding or send college graduation announcements.

More importantly, everyone you know also has a sphere of influence of that size, so every new person you meet has the potential to add 200-250 more people to your own network. While many of them won’t be a good candidate for your services, chances are, someone in their network will be. If you’ve worked to build relationships and have a keep-in-touch strategy with the contacts you make, you will be a good candidate for any referrals if someone in their network does mention they need the type of legal service you provide.

7 Tips for Effective Networking

Here are seven tips on how to make your networking more effective.

1. Genuinely connect with others - Networking should be about making connections and sharing ideas, information, advice, recommendations and referrals with those in your personal network. Some of the bonds you form will be stronger than others, but you should genuinely care that those in your network succeed and be willing to help them if you can.
2. Network strategically - When you network to make business contacts, look for people who would be a good fit for your personal network and find ways to connect with them regularly. It’s important to define which types of people you want to meet and what you hope to get out of each interaction. Before you go into any networking interaction, be able to answer in a minute or less: who you are, what you do, and what you need from the group.
3. Be selective - Because you will actively refer business to those in your network, you must be selective with those you add to your personal network. Look for people who are well-regarded among their peers and who already demonstrate that they understand the value of networking. Focus on people who are good at what they do, have a large network they have cultivated, and who are able to actively refer you business.
4. Provide value first - Successful networking involves providing value to others. You must give before you receive. People won’t refer business to those they don’t know and can’t personally vouch for, so you must build rapport before you can expect anything in return. Things like a personal note, a referral, a thank you card, or an introduction go a long way towards establishing trust and credibility.
5. Recognize leads for others - The best way to build rapport with people in your network is to frequently provide leads and introductions to those within your network. To do this, you must understand your prospect’s business well enough to know who would make a good lead for them. Ask them “How would I know if someone would make a good client for you?” In addition, every lawyer will talk with a prospect who isn’t quite right for his services from time-to-time. Realize that if you turn down business, that person could be a good lead for someone else.
6. Don’t keep score - The best way to sabotage a relationship is to give something with the expectation of getting something in return. Building relationships takes time. If you provide a favor or referral to something and immediately expect something in return, there’s a good chance you’ll be disappointed. Focus on building good will and trust rather than that someone will immediately return the favor.
7. Develop trust - One of the biggest fears people have when referring business is that someone will embarrass them or let them down. Effective networkers have high ethical standards and are well respected among their peers. They are well-known for providing high-quality service and going the extra mile to clear up any client disagreements.

Networking isn’t something that just happens - you must actively pursue it and make relationship building a part of your marketing activities. Because you will likely meet far more people worth networking with than you have time for, be selective and focus your time on cultivating relationships where there is the greatest potential for mutual benefit.

You probably didn’t become a lawyer so you could do the same boring task repeatedly. The good news is, that’s not what specialization is about! Specialization is about doing work you love doing for clients you love working with. It’s about being able to choose which legal projects you accept, rather than taking any client who comes your way because you need the business.

The biggest myth about specialization is that you must focus on one particular type of client and only take on legal work specific to your practice area. The truth is that you can actually have several practice areas - but how you market each will be different.

The Psychology of Marketing

Marketing is primarily about psychology. It’s about understanding your clients’ biggest concerns, frustrations and problems, and then tailoring your marketing message to address those concerns. If you practice law in several unrelated areas, you position yourself as a jack-of-all-trades in your prospects’ minds.

For instance, let’s say you enjoy practicing family law and intellectual property law. When your prospects look at your list of practice areas, they seem unrelated. Now, you may be a great lawyer in each area - but if someone is about to divorce, they won’t be impressed that you practice intellectual property law.

Rather, they will be focused on what you can do for them as their divorce proceedings move forward. Can you negotiate a good settlement for them? Can you make the procedure go as smoothly as possible? Can you empathize with the pain they are going through? Can you make sense of what their crazy spouse is asking? Can you help them gain custody of the kids?

If you want to attract divorce clients, you will have to address their specific concerns in your marketing. If you want to attract intellectual property clients, you must address their concerns, which will be completely different from divorce clients, in your marketing. For each practice area you specialize in, you will need an entirely separate marketing campaign with different ads, a different website, and different marketing materials for it to be most effective. As you can see, this can get expensive, which is why it is best to focus on no more than two or three practice areas.

How to Choose a Specialization

When choosing a specialization, look at the practice areas that you enjoy and wish you had more work in. Here are seven questions to consider.

1. Which areas of law do you enjoy most? To specialize, you must enjoy practicing in a particular area of law. Which areas do you keep up-to-date with? Which would you love to have more work in?
2. What strengths and expertise do you have? What knowledge and skills do you have? Is there a particular area of law that you know better than the rest? Do you have a background in a particular area?
3. Who are your competitors? How many other lawyers are competing for business? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Are there one or two lawyers or law firms who dominate the market? It is extremely difficult to compete with more-established attorneys who have a larger marketing budget and have built their reputation as a specialist in a particular area - though that doesn’t mean you can’t form a strategic alliance with them or find a way to differentiate your legal services.
4. What are your prospects’ demographics? Demographics include characteristics like age, income, marital status, gender, level of education and job position. Do any major events trigger their decision to hire you? Demographics give you an idea of where your prospects are in life and what major life events might influence their decision to hire you.
5. What are their psychographics? Psychographics involve how your prospects view the world and what motivates them. Psychographics take into consideration your prospects’ interests, attitudes, opinions, values and lifestyles. For instance, your prospects may be optimistic or pessimistic. They may be the “take control of your destiny” type or they might be more inclined to play the victim of their circumstances and environment.
6. How will you reach prospects? Can you reach your audience easily through websites, online marketing, newspapers, trade associations, mailing lists, publications, or other media that targets this group?
7. What characteristics do your ideal clients have? Not every prospect makes a good client. You probably didn’t become a lawyer to work with people who don’t value your services, nitpick you fees, are indecisive, or don’t take your advice. Which types of clients do you wish you could work with all the time? What personality traits do they have?

Specializing in a practice area offers three key benefits. You can understand and address your prospects’ key motivations, concerns, fears and problems in your marketing materials, thus making your marketing far more effective at generating qualified leads. You can reach a select group of people affordably because you know which media they are likely to view. And because you are perceived as a specialist in your practice area, you can be choosier with the clients you work with - and even turn away or refer out prospects who might not be ideal for you.

Uncover Your Client’s Underlying Goals, Motivations and Concerns.

Knowing what motivates your client is essential to becoming a trusted legal adviser. Many clients only hire an attorney when they have an immediate need for legal services, and that need is often incredibly significant and urgent. Your client may be worried about the legal outcome or the future of his business or family life.

Listen to him explain his problems and concerns. By actively listening and empathizing with your client during this difficult time, you build rapport and trust, so that when you do offer legal advice, your client is more likely to act upon it.

If you work with businesses, rather than simply providing the legal work asked of you, get to know your client’s business objections and suggest ways he might safeguard his company against future legal issues. Help him prioritize any legal risks he may be having and provide a plan for mitigating those legal risks in the future. By taking an active role in his business, you demonstrate that you have his best interests at heart.

Stay Informed of New Laws and Current Events.

The law changes continuously, so be aware of any new legal or regulatory changes that may affect your client’s case or business and inform him of any possible opportunities or threats in the near future.

For corporate work, do you know how your client’s company is doing in the marketplace or his long-term goals and objectives? By uncovering your client’s motivations and goals, you will be able to better help him keep informed of any new legal issues that may impact his business and make the strategic choices that are right for his company.

Manage Client Expectations.

Most people didn’t attend law school, so they don’t understand how much work is involved with their legal matter. Clearly explain what you will do for them and be upfront and transparent about your fees and how you will communicate with them throughout your working relationship.

One of the biggest complaints clients have about lawyers is they don’t return phone calls or respond to inquiries in a timely fashion. Not returning calls promptly is disrespectful, so make your client a priority and respond accordingly.

In addition, keep clients up-to-date about the progress of their legal case. The more significant your client’s problem is, the more worried he will be about the outcome, so be supportive and inform him of any advancement.

Solicit Client Feedback.

Finally, uncover what clients are really saying about your firm. Take the time to survey or interview your clients to learn what they liked and disliked about doing business with you, what set your legal services apart from other attorneys, and where you can improve your services. Take new clients out for lunch or coffee and ask them why they chose your firm. Try to learn as much as you can about why they hired you, what they didn’t like about their previous lawyer, and what they value most about your services

By learning more about your clients, you will build client rapport and provide better service to your clients. Disappointed clients won’t give you more work or refer business to you, so once you understand your clients’ needs, concerns, and motivations, you can more easily manage their expectations.

Step 1: Create a lead generating website.

Having a nicely designed website isn’t enough to generate leads. A clean design with easy-to-use navigation is a good start, but the vast majority of people who visit your website won’t yet be ready to hire you, so putting a system in place to capture the prospect’s information and get permission to follow up is key.

The best way to capture leads from interested prospects is to offer something of value in exchange for their name and email address. Some great ways to capture your prospect’s information include: offering a free report or e-book, holding an event (either a live seminar or a teleseminar/webinar delivered over the web), or giving away a physical product like a CD/DVD.

Step 2: Create a follow up strategy with prospects to nurture leads.

It can take upwards of 7-10 contacts with prospects before they are ready to do business with you, so having a keep in touch strategy in place is crucial.

A great way to position yourself as a specialist in your primary practice area is to start a firm newsletter for your prospects. A newsletter doesn’t have to be a lot of work. Simply write one article around 500-750 words each month and send it out via an email service like Aweber or Infusionsoft. In the newsletter, you can also include any recent cases you’ve won, client case studies (if your ethics board allows that), and other firm news.

Step 3: Drive traffic to your website.

Unfortunately, just because you build a website doesn’t mean people will easily be able to find it, so it’s important to have a strategy in place to drive traffic to your website. Some ways to drive traffic to your website include:

1. Optimize your website for search engines - Use a service like SEOBook’s Keyword Research Tool to do some keyword research on what keywords prospects are using to search for your website. Then, make sure those keywords are included in your website’s title tags, headers, and copy. Don’t go overboard with the keywords or search engines might see your site as spam, but make sure the keywords you want to be found for are actually on your website somewhere. For more information on search engine optimization, check out my podcast on Introduction to Search Engine Optimization.
2. Create educational content worthy of links - If you want to be found in Google’s “organic” listings, you’ll need to get other high-quality websites to link back to your site. Ask partner organizations and trade groups if they’d be willing to exchange links with you. Another way to get links is to create content that people would be willing to link to. Start a blog and post about the latest news in your industry. Or create an educational section of your website devoted to your main practice area with great articles and resources. Then, get the word out about these sections with press releases, article marketing and social media. Check out my podcast on marketing your website with social media for how to do this.
3. Start a pay-per-click campaign - One of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your website is through Google Adwords. With pay-per-click advertising, you bid on keywords that your prospects search for. Then, you create short ads that show up on the right side of the page in the Google search results. You only pay when people click on your ad. You can set up an ad campaign in less than five minutes to generate traffic immediately.

By implementing these three steps, you’ll transform your website into a powerful lead generating tool that continually brings in new business for your law firm.

Most books on professional services marketing focus on how to advertise or put up a website to market your business. Consultants August Aquila and Bruce Marcus have written a book that goes a step further.

In the preface, they establish from the beginning what this book is not about - “The professional world doesn’t need another book on how to write a press release or write a brochure or run a seminar.” Instead, they choose to focus on what a professional services firm must do to create clients and survive in the modern, constantly changing marketplace.

Client service lies at the heart of every successful business, yet firms often struggle to obtain clients and fulfill their needs. Today’s clients demand greater sophistication and skill - and application of those skills - by professionals who understand their clients’ business needs. And because clients are more informed, they no longer accept a professional’s advice without question.

How can firms attract clients to develop a thriving practice? The authors mention that there are 2 options: either firms can randomly take on clients and build their services to fit those clients’ needs or they can meticulously define their market, focus their skill set around meeting the needs of that market, and then go after clients in that particular market. Only firms that structure themselves around the latter will succeed and grow. A jack-of-all-trades firm who tries to be everything to everyone will never achieve mastery in one area - and therefore will always lose out to those who specialize.

How do you become a specialized firm? The book blends just the right amount of strategy with practical, how-to implementation as it leads you through the process of defining your market, the prospects you want to do business with, your criteria for growth, your firm’s vision and objectives, and your marketing plan. Every firm out there would benefit by reading these sections.

For larger firms, one of the biggest challenges is getting everyone in the firm on the same page. This can be especially difficult because there isn’t much of a marketing tradition in law and accounting firms - marketing one’s services has only been legal since the Bates decision in 1977 - and even now, many professionals dislike the idea of prospecting, marketing and selling.

To make matters worse, it’s extremely difficult for someone other than the service provider to close the sale and convert prospects into clients - the professional must be involved so that he or she can establish a trusted working relationship before the project begins. So how can you gain support from your associates, partners, and other knowledge workers?

Aquila and Marcus propose a three step approach:
1) Each person in the firm must know the results you are looking for
2) Management must discuss with each person what they must do to achieve results
3) Individuals that achieve their results must be rewarded.

They also endorse Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s Balanced Scorecard to measure the firm’s overall performance and success. (If you’re not familiar with the Balanced Scorecard Approach, the authors explain the overall principles and provide working examples in Appendix A.)

Finally, the authors lay the groundwork for changing the firm’s governing structure from a partnership to a more corporate like entity, which should be helpful for medium and larger firms who are struggling with management and governance issues.

With this book, Aquila and Marcus have provided a jargon-free introduction to the business side of running a successful practice in 277 pages. While much of the book is geared towards medium to larger law, consulting and accounting firms, even solo practitioners can benefit from developing a strategic framework for growing their firms.

In fact, if solo professionals and small firms were to follow the business model presented, they’d likely realize that the key to business success is cash flow - it’s not enough to simply be great at what you do. You must also be great at finding and retaining clients in an ever-changing marketplace.

Marketing only works when you do it regularly. Plan - and make time - to do a set number of marketing tasks each week. Your tasks don’t have to be time consuming or elaborate, but you must do them. Here are some ideas to get you started today:

1. What information can you send to a contact in your network?
2. Which client can you visit at their business to learn more about them?
3. Who can you take to lunch, coffee, golf or an event? When?
4. What organization can you become more active in? How?
5. Which subject can you write an article about? Where can you publish it?
6. What topic can you speak about? For whom? Where?
7. What other types of activities might you do?

Make it a weekly practice to do at least a few of these tasks and you’ll start seeing more clients come in the door.

• Ask each prospect who contacts you where they found out about you.
• Whenever you meet a new prospect or referral partner, add them to your contact list as soon as you get back to the office along with any information you’ve discovered about them. Then, send them something they’d find valuable. Keep track of each interaction you have.
• Offer a free report on your website for anyone that joins your online newsletter so you can continue to keep in touch with them. Keep track of how many new subscribers you get each month.
• Include a different promotional code for free information in your each of your ads or direct mailings. Ask for it whenever your prospect requests that free information. You’ll soon learn which sources generate the best responses.

Analyze which marketing sources generate the most clients. Focus your resources on those that offer the highest return on investment.