I scored a hat trick this morning, and I wanted to share the experience with you.
At the risk of sounding all lah dee dah and altruistic, I did not get into law for the money. If you read my profile page, you’ll see the motivation to go to law school was a conflation* of my entrepreneurial side with a desire to help people. I didn’t take a vow of poverty or anything, and the knowledge that I could make good money while helping people was probably firing in a few neurons when I chose this career path, but let’s stick with the helping people thing for now.
I’ve mentioned here before that one of the great things about using content-based, niche marketing is that it allows you reach far more people than you could ever reach one-on-one. According to Google Analytics, some of my niche sites receive thousands of unique** visitors every week. Those sites contain very good information, and since people are finding those sites using search terms relating to that information, I know I am providing answers to many of those thousands of visitors (excluding the spammers who are visiting only so they can send me spam).
“OK, Mother Theresa, what was so special about today?”, you ask. (Thank you for being engaged in the conversation, but I must say I find your attitude a little snarky.)
I had a court hearing this morning, so I didn’t get into the office until about 9:30. The case I appeared on has been very entertaining, because every time we go to court I beat the other side like a rented mule***, and they respond by bringing in more attorneys and more experts. Nonetheless, the case frustrates me because there is no great victory on the horizon. I’m just beating a government agency back into line, and the only result will be that the agency will eventually give up and go away, probably not having learned anything from the process. I hate that my client is having to spend so much money to wage war against a clueless government agency.
But I was soon distracted from the frustration of that case when I got to the office. The phones were of course ringing off the wall**** because we follow the great marketing techniques found here and in How to Create a Big, Fat Pipeline of New Clients for Your Law Firm in Just 10 Days. What made the day special was that, by noon, I had received three calls from individuals who were calling for no other reason than to thank me for information I had posted on line. I receive emails like this on a pretty regular basis, but people taking the time to call is far more rare, and receiving three such calls in a single morning is unprecedented.
If you want to make getting more clients and hence making more money your primary motivation for niche marketing, I’m cool with that, but when you reach the point that you feel like you just can’t write another article about your practice area, knowing that your articles are helping people can be very motivating.
Footnotes:
* A new word I learned this week. Conflate – the process or result of fusing two or more things or ideas into one. See? If you didn’t know the meaning of that word, I just helped you.
** “Unique visitors” does not mean that they are special or challenged. Unique visitors are visitors are those who have never visited the site before. The legions of readers who visit my sites over and over are not counted.
*** I don’t actually rent mules, and if I did I would never beat them. No mules were harmed during the writing of this article.
**** What a dated expression. Wall mounted phones are pretty rare these days I imagine, and would be really strange at a law firm in any event.
There are many ways to promote your law firm, including YouTube and via a podcast. In the next article, I’ll show you how easy and expensive it is to produce a podcast.