The rewards that await you , if you’re willing to put in a little time and effort into understanding Internet and Emarketing, are enormous.

This is a vast area – but I want to give you 10 strategies that you can start using immediately. My one aim is to give you what you need to turn your practice around and increase your profits. These are very good starting points:

1. Get involved personally and actively in writing the text on your website
Web designers are certainly not lawyers and many of them have limited business skills. They are technical people who can put together a great website. However, the content must come from you and it must speak from the heart. The process of writing good text for your website requires you to sit down and seriously consider what you want to offer your clients. You know of the benefits and how to sell your business better than anybody else. Your passion about your firm should be evident from the text on your website.

In any event, learn at least the basics of how internet marketing works.

Open a Google account. All you need to do is fill out a form and follow the wizard. You will then be able to expand your knowledge and gradually by experimenting and testing different ways to get people to your webiste you will start gaining control over your marketing. Work on your website including marketing it in the evenings or at nights, instead of going to a police station or two. This will earn you far more money than any police station attendance. If from the outset you just give the task to an internet marketing company, you will never be able to tell whether or not they are doing their job properly and this could cost you thousands of pounds.

2. Work out what the purpose of your website is
Otherwise it can just end up a confusing mess. Is the purpose of your website to acquire new clients, provide existing clients with information, provide members of the public, who are not clients with information??? It’s up to you – but get clear from the start. For example, the purpose of this website is to give solicitors information that can help them make significant changes to their legal practice and help them overcome the practical barriers which stop them from progressing their practice. So get clear on what you want your website to be and focus on it.

3. Remember that your website should not be about you
It might be extremely surprising for you to hear this but the truth is your prospective clients aren’t that interested in you. They don’t really care about how long each of your solicitors has been qualified or that your switchboard consists of 5 lines. They’re interested in fulfilling their needs and in what you can do for them. There’s a deep-seated difference. Of course, you can have an ‘About us’ page where you might point out some of your achievements but beyond that, it should all be about your prospective clients. Put yourself in their place. Meet their needs. Address their fears and concerns. And most importantly, provide them with solutions and solve some of their problems. Then you’ll have a website that people will want to visit.

4. Give people free stuff
Don’t be stingy. If the aim of your business is to add real value to peoples’ lives – start now. Give visitors to your website information they can use that will make a real difference to them. If they sign up to a free document, you can use their details to start marketing to them by email.

5. Capture Email addresses
You must have heard this hundreds of times before, but believe it or not, most solicitors still do not have a system of collecting the email addresses of everyone who contacts them. You may as well take a suitcase full of money, go to the top of the tallest building you can find and throw it out of the window. Every time a law firm fails to capture someone’s email address they’re turning down the opportunity to contact them again at ZERO COST, for weeks, months and years ahead. This is crazy. It’s also crazy not to encourage the visitors to your website to leave their email address with you and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Even if you do not have a clue as of yet how you are going to use this extremely valuable information, still make every possible effort to collect it. Always collect business cards and start sorting them in a folder. Each email address represents a potential new client.

6. Once you have email addresses – make wise use of them!
Out of the few law firms which are good at collecting email addresses, hardly any of them follow up by effectively communicating regularly with their clients or prospective clients. You don’t even have to find ways to use email to sell your services. You can use email to thank clients, suppliers and business associates for their instructions or interest they expressed in your firm; make them a special or exclusive offer; send them a useful free article; a report on an interesting recent high court decision; recommend a product or service which may be of interest to them; ask for referrals; ask why they haven't done any business with you…the list is literally endless. The fact is that there is no reason why you shouldn’t grow your business by 10, 20 or 30% just by adopting an effective emarketing strategy.
Contact us directly if you need more help.

7. Test the internet and in particular 'Pay Per Click' advertising
How would you like your firm to be able to control the type, level, quality and quantity of the business it is getting. You can do this simply and rapidly with pay per click advertising. This enables you to get to the top of the search engines but you only pay when someone clicks to go onto your website. So unlike most internet advertising, you only pay when someone visits your site. How much you pay will depend on how much competition there is amongst other advertisers in your category and how specific you can be with the type of business that you want. You can increase, decrease, start and stop the traffic to your website which is coming through internet on a pay per click basis. You can, for example for a few pounds per day, research the demand for a particular type of lawyer or a particular area of law. The good news is that you can test this BEFORE you go to the expense of hiring a lawyer on a long term basis, just to discover that you cannot bring in any work for him to do.
As with all marketing, the secret rule is to TEST and MEASURE the results.

8. Stand out from your competition
The internet offers the opportunity for you to be different. You don’t have to conform to industry norms any longer and can express yourself and your message in your own special way. People are attracted to something which is different because it attracts their attention. If you can be different, people will at least want to ‘check you out’ and see what you are all about. Offer visitors a choice. Give them a reason to do business with you. Look at your competition’s website and do exactly the opposite. You always have to stand out from the crowd because this will instantly make you more attractive to your prospect clients.

9. Test offers and promotions regularly

Unlike expensive brochures and leaflets, the internent allows you to test different offers and promotions every month or even every week for free!. Your hourly rate does not have to be fixed. You can promote for a period of time your Will and Proate departments, you Business Clients depatments or your Employment department by offering a fixed discount or a gift. You can change the promotion regularly and give a clear deadline for your visitors to adhere to so that they feel a sense of urgency. Turn your firm's website into an intersting and exciting place for clients to visit and give them a reason to come back.

10. Stay ahead of the curve with Yair Cohen
These points just skim the surface of Internet and Marketing. In addition, it changes, literally by the month. To tackle this, Yair Cohen gives hundreds of solicitors the latest advance strategies on the use of Internet Marketing tools in his Practice Success newsletter. In the weeks and months ahead, the information you receive will be worth thousands to you and will keep you ahead of the competition. Simply fill out the form below to join Yair's FREE Newsletter.