Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. Now let’s do this thing.
It’s a fantastic time to be a lawyer. Starting your own firm and building it to success used to be a real roll of the dice. The avenues to promote your law firm were limited and usually very costly. I started my own firm more than 20 years ago, and back then the Yellow Pages were the core marketing strategy for many firms. But a firm’s placement in the Yellow Pages was dependent on the size of the ad and the length of time the firm had been advertising. A new solo practitioner could not hope to compete with the established firms that were paying $6,000 per month or more for double or even triple-truck ads. At best, the new attorney might be able to buy a dollar-sized ad (still expensive), and be content with the clients who somehow made it past all those huge ads.
Now, the playing field has been leveled by the Internet. Indeed, the big firms who used to spend thousands on large ads in the phone book are now the ones who spend even more money on SEO services, in a desperate attempt to get their firm’s website to show up on page one of Google. But the difference now is that solo and small firms don’t have to try and match the big boys dollar for advertising dollar. A new, nimble attorney with a little Internet savvy can easily surpass them, and can have potential clients lining up from day one. No more taking years to build a book of business.
I was actually very fortunate when I started my firm. A few things coalesced right at the beginning, and I never missed a meal or rent payment. But I always wanted to take my firm to the next level with a partner or partners, and associates. You must be able to leverage your time through others, or your income will always be limited to the number of hours in a day that you can work. The marketing technique that finally created a sufficient pipeline of new clients to take my firm to where I wanted it to be was content marketing on the Internet.
Incredibly, I still occasionally get push-back from some attorneys who are doing just fine with no Internet marketing whatsoever, and can’t imagine why I go down that road. I know one attorney in particular who is very involved with a local service organization. He relies almost entirely on work he gets from that group and referrals from other attorneys, and has no need for Internet marketing.
That’s great! The best form of law firm marketing is the one that works for you. But I can’t help others by touting the virtues of joining a service organization, because I have no experience with that form of marketing. Additionally, I don’t want to promote a technique that depends on the largess of others, in the form of referrals.
The one form of law firm marketing that I can successfully apply to any law firm, and the one that will yield reasonably predictable results, is content-based, niche marketing.
Early on I recognized the power of the Internet, and had some successes with my marketing efforts. But what I needed then (and what you probably need now) was some focused guidance so I wouldn’t be bouncing from pay-per-click ads to social media to blogs to YouTube videos to Facebook, etcetera, etcetera. This website can be that guidance for you, and at the same time, I’ll be your human guinea pig while I give some new techniques a try.
If you do it right, starting your own firm is so much better professionally and financially than working for someone else. I mostly handle very interesting and very cutting-edge First Amendment, free speech, defamation cases. I’m always on the right side because I turn down the case if I’m not, and therefore I can feel good about and enjoy what I am doing.
I love being a lawyer. How many lawyers do you know who can say that?
You’ve probably heard a dozen reasons why you should not go off on your own, and added a few yourself. I can tell you the reasons are either urban myths or factors that can be overcome. This site is here to help you do it.
There are a lot of great articles (if I do say so myself) on this site with information on how to market your law firm, and I hope you read them all, but may I suggest that you begin at the beginning? You need to build the foundation for your law office before you start implementing the other forms of law firm marketing discussed here, so you should begin with the article entitled Niche Marketing Overview and Roadmap. That is the starting line for my free course on how to implement content-based niche marketing. Start with that article, and each will lead you in turn to the next step in the process. At the end, if you follow the plan, you will have your first niche website up and running, and new clients at your door. I’ll show you how a single, effective niche website can add six figures to your bottom line. Let’s get a couple of those up and working for you, and then we can move to all the techniques that make them even more effective. Click on the large blue “NEXT” button to get started.