You market your law practice when you’re not busy. Then you get busy, and your law firm marketing gets kicked to the curb in favor of things that are bringing in the dollars.
You wake up one morning and realize … Holy *&$*%! I ain’t got no clients! (that’s a hat tip to Louis Prima and David Lee Roth, by the way)
So what do you do to get your law practice humming again? You brush off those business cards, fire up WordPress, and start running around like a snowman with his feet on fire.
Of course, those efforts at marketing your law firm will take anywhere from weeks to months to bear fruit. Ads must be run, websites indexed and updated, business cards passed around. Until someone walks in the door with money for you, your family’s eating ramen noodles (and not because you like them).
But what’s a poor lawyer to do? It’s feast or famine out in the real world, dog-eat-dog, cliché-vs-cliché.
Some productivity experts would tell you to set aside a few hours a week to concentrate on marketing your law firm, but I’m no Pollyanna. I know you’ve got enough pressures to deal with, and telling you to block off 4 or 5 hours every week to dedicate to your legal marketing efforts is just plain silly – not to mention unrealistic.
So here’s the challenge:
Take One Hour Per Week To Do One Thing To Make You Money
Marketing your law firm can be time-consuming, but the pay-off is in small yet consistent efforts.
One hour. 60 ticks of the clock. That’s it. Use it however you see fit. Launch a blog for your law firm. Write and submit an article. Record a video or podcast. Heck, take an existing video and strip out the audio so you can turn it into a podcast.
Surf the Internet for cool blogs to post comments on. Troll a forum to participate in the conversation.
And if all else fails, call your friend who happens to be a decent source of business when you take a cow prod to the seat of his pants. Catch up, ask about the family, and remind him that he hasn’t sent you anything new for awhile.
60 minutes per week.
Do it now. Do it for an hour before you go to bed at night. Is most television really that compelling anyway?
This is an awesome post, and not just because the phrase “running around like a snowman with his feet on fire” made me shoot coffee through my nose. ::wipes monitor::
This is true in any service business – I fall prey to the same thing in my own – work, work, work on existing bookings, and then head up – uh, “where’d ever’body GO?”
I accept the challenge. One hour a week.
I got a laugh out of the snowman too. Your cattle prod hit the seat of my pants. An hour a week should be easy enough.
Glad my turn of the phrase got a chuckle. My college writing professor would be proud!