Hopefully, if you are thinking about starting a law firm, you have considered what marketing techniques you plan on utilizing. From there, you should also have realized that marketing yourself online is imperative to the success of any business, especially if you are starting a small law firm. If you don’t know where to start on your internet marketing, here are three tools that are the cornerstone of any online campaign.
1) Establish a website.
The first weapon in your internet arsenal is the website. There really is not excuse not to have a website, especially with all the options out there in terms of cost, content, and simplicity. In other words, if you are an attorney starting a law firm, whether a Maryland criminal defense firm or a Virginia family law firm, you must have a website. It is the one place where people can always turn for information on you and your firm.
Your website should contain a lot of information, not just about you. It should also contain information about your practice areas and resources for your potential clients to review. However, your website should also be easy to navigate through, meaning visitors should be able to quickly find whatever they want very quickly.
Additionally, there should be a call to action. You need to answer the question of what you want people to do when they visit your site. Most likely, you want them to contact you in some fashion. On every page, there should be at least one call to action, and preferably several. You should also give people different ways to contact you – by telephone, by email, in person, through the website itself. Make it easy. That is theme here.
2) Utilize a blog.
You should also have a blog for your thoughts. Blogging is even easier than creating a website, especially because there are numerous free sites out there that let you sign up instantly and create one. All you need is an email address.
Customization is the key to your blog. You want to make it relevant to your practice areas (for example, if you practice Virginia traffic ticket defense, then you can you’re your blog all about the different kinds of traffic violations), but you also want to make it general enough that you can continually post without running out of ideas. You can also have more than one blog for different practice areas or different jurisdictions or for whatever else you want.
Blogs are trendy you say? Sphhh. Blogs are here to stay. Why? Because they provide an easy way to get information across the internet. Not only that, but you can link to your website from your blog, or to other blog entries. You can even optimize your blog for your main keywords or practice areas, so that eventually through posting you will move up the search engine rankings.
3) Create articles.
Lastly, you should publish as many articles as you can, and not in your local bar journal. A key to online marketing is getting published by article directories – places where you can submit quality articles that get published in the directory. Then other people can come in and copy your article to post to their site, as long as they give you credit for the article. It’s free advertising, and you need it for help with starting a law firm and your online strategy.
Of course, you need to have something to write about. That’s the easy part. Just think about your practice areas, or how to start a law firm, or anything else that you have come across in your legal career, and start writing about it. Eventually, you writing the articles will become almost second nature and you will be able to spit one out in only a few minutes. But for now, just start writing.
Look, you need to do a lot more than these three things to establish yourself online. In other words, just because you have a website, a blog, and a few articles, doesn’t mean you are going to get noticed and that your internet marketing is going to work. But if you are looking at how to start a law firm, and specifically how you are going to market, you have to start with these three things. Otherwise you have no chance.