When you’re marketing your law firm online, you need to always look at maximizing the traffic to your website or blog.  The more people who visit, the better your raw conversion numbers will be.  I don’t take issue with those who say that it’s the quality of the visitor as opposed to the quantity, but if you’re optimizing your content to maximize search engine coverage then the quality thing tends to sort itself out over time.

The beauty of online legal marketing with a blog or website is that you can create valuable content once and let it act as your mouthpiece for months – if not years – to come without any additional investment of time.

So again, the question becomes one of quantity. Especially when your blog is so young it’s wet behind the ears, you need to generate as much traffic as possible.

Why?  Because writing great content is useless if you’re not getting anyone to read it.  The more people who read your pearls of wisdom, the more likely it is to get passed around.  And even if it isn’t getting passed from person to person, more readers yields a greater number of blog subscribers or opt-ins to your email list.

We’re not talking about long-term online legal marketing tactics, these are hacks – quick hits to get a little leverage.  Some cost a few bucks, and others are free.  But they’re all effective.

1. Tell your clients. Yes, your clients are already sold on your expertise – but how about their friends and family members who aren’t quite ready to talk with a lawyer?  Send a letter to your clients asking them to let people know you’ve got a great online resource for legal information and to tell them to visit it.  Totally old school offline referral marketing, but absolutely effective.
2. Ask a question and post to your social networks. You’re probably on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn – perhaps all of them.  Post a link to your blog post with a question, asking people to comment directly on the blog.  This social media traffic registers with the search engines – in fact, Google uses social media traffic as one of over 200 “signals” in ranking sites.  More social traffic translates into better long-term rankings for your site.  Better rankings translates into online legal marketing success.
3. Give away an ebook or special report. There’s value to putting an ebook behind an opt-in form and requiring people to give up their email address in exchange for your item of value.  But if you’re looking to create awareness of your website or blog, you’re looking to garner as much traffic as possible in the short run.  Consider removing the barriers by ditching the opt-in form and giving away the ebook or special report to all visitors.  Not only will more people come to your site, but that giveaway will get passed around and turn into a long-term client generation magnet.
4. Hitch your wagon to a star. Something going on locally that you can somehow tie into your practice area?  Sports hero busted for DWI?  Local business going belly-up?  If so, there’s a good chance people in your area are going to the search engines to read the news – and typing in the name of that sports hero or local business.  Creating content around that person or business and fitting it into your practice area will yield huge traffic spikes, which is exactly what this online legal marketing hack is all about.
5. Coffee shop postcards work – really, they do. If you’re a lawyer, you’re a local business.  So you’ve got an edge over the multi-national companies marketing online – you can go grassroots without breaking a sweat.  Go to your local printer or click over to VistaPrint and get a bunch of postcards printed up with a headline like, “Where Can You Find Answers To All Your Questions About Getting Out Of Debt?” (if you’re a bankruptcy lawyer, that is – if you do divorce work, this headline probably won’t work for you) and the URL for your website or blog.  Grab a stack and start putting them in every coffee shop in town.  Tack them up on community bulletin boards.  Anywhere you can go guerilla, go for it.

As you can see, online legal marketing need not start online – that’s just the platform.  Your information is online, so the goal is to drive traffic there.  But you need to take off the blinders and realize that people still live offline – they eat, sleep, meet, and communicate in the real world before going online for their information.

Your online legal marketing efforts will get a shot in the arm by looking to the technological edge as well as going old school (just not in the Will Ferrell way).

But remember – this is not a long-term fix for your efforts. It will not serve as a substitute for creating valuable content that keeps people coming back again and again.  It won’t fix poorly-converting copy, a bad user experience, or lack of optimization.

What it will do is provide a jolt of energy to your blog or website, exposing more people to the intelligence and information you provide.

Photo courtesy of grewlike.