Speakeasy Authority Marketing

In 2014, the mobile traffic jumped up to more than 50 percent of the overall traffic and it is still growing fast. That's the reason why mobile friendly websites have become more important in 2015. Mobile friendly website does not only add to the users experience but it also helps your website to rank better on Google. If your website is not set up for mobile, Google is going to penalize you for that and would not rank your website. So, Google is gently encouraging people to make their websites mobile friendly.

There are potentially two ways of building a mobile friendly website. The first one is to build a separate mobile version for your website which is highly not recommended because Google sees it as a new website and you would have to do SEO for the separate mobile website and it becomes very difficult to manage two separate websites so it's not a smart thing to do. The best way to build a mobile friendly website is through Responsive Design which is also endorsed by Google as well. A responsive design coding changes and adjusts your website according to the size of the screen so it looks good and enhances user's experience. You don't need a separate mobile website, you don't need to optimize your website separately and a responsive website would accommodate almost every screen size.

In 2015, if your website is not responsive, you need to get it done to get more juice out of your website.

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When people want to hire an attorney, they look at the reviews to see how you've helped other people. They are focused on your experience, especially if you have answer to their specific problem. Now it's your job to give them an indicator to hire you versus someone else.

Other than your reviews, you can author a book in specific practice area because author is perceived as experts. You can offer different articles about different areas within a practice area. Another thing that can help your potential client is credentials with their badges like AVVO, Board Certified etc. So these are different things that can help you to craft a problem solution for you potential clients.

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Richard Jacobs, attorney marketing specialist talks about the use Radio in Attorney Advertising and how it can be used most efficiently. He highlights with the help of examples the common mistakes that most of the attorneys make in Radio Advertising.

It is then further elaborated that what are the right ways of doing Radio Advertising for Attorneys and how their Radio Ad can stand out from other ads. The emphasis is on making the ad 'A Question' to entice the audience to contact you rather than making it a simple common statement.

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Everyone who has even a little knowledge of SEO is running after the Google RANKINGS because they think if they have good rankings, they are going to get good business. When it comes to SEO for law firm websites, even the lawyers do the same. They get their site redone, SEO'd and right after few days, start checking their rankings and get disappointed if their ranking does not improve right away.

Instead of worrying about the rankings and getting dejected over and over, they should look at the traffic coming to their website and how many people got to your website everyday, because that is what really matters when it comes to law firm websites. No matter what your google rank is, if you are getting good number of visitors on your website, you have good chance of retaining clients.

There is a free tool offered by google itself called Google Anaytics which can give you a detailed overview of the traffic on your website regardless of your ranking. So don't waste your time, don't get worried because of ranking, look for the parameter that ACTUALLY matters.

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Richard Jacobs talks about 'why content is important in SEO and how content is the most important driver in succeeding with SEO and Attorney Advertising'.

The importance of generating content in accordance with the Google search algorithm must be understood because Google search algorithm is the primary criteria for your content.

The emphasis must be on regularly updating fresh, unique and relevant content to your website. It could be any blog, article, video or any transcription and it is important to update fresh content to facilitate Google to do specific matching because it increases the chances for the clients to land on your page.

Content is like a tree with a lot of branches, the more branches you have, the more Google would be able to match your website to the searches.

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Richard Jacobs talks about the importance of past experience with the present situation to solve most of the cases with ease. He has narrated a story about Chase Bank and related it to the formula to excel for attorneys.

Sharing the experiences with other attorneys is the key, it is called 'master minding' through which you would for sure be able to build up the bank of knowledge that you could use for assistance in your cases.

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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs from Speakeasy Marketing. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the ins and outs of sending a newsletter, a monthly newsletter to past clients. The whole goal of doing this is to stimulate referrals from your past clients and I'm sure you'll tell me, as most attorneys have told me, that referrals make the best clients.

They have the least resistance to paying your retainer fees; they have the least resistance to hiring you. In many cases they're pre-sold on hiring you because they've used you in the past or they were recommended by a friend, family member, church member, associate or someone at work. So again, they come pre-sold and your job is nothing but to convert them and it's easier than it would be with a cold person that may not know you and not feel like there's nothing special about you yet until you've spoken to them. So people are coming from a place of suspicion quite often.

How do you increase the number of referrals you're getting from past clients? The way most attorneys do it is just hope that they'll get referrals. If I do a good enough job, then I'll get referrals. Some attorneys, what they'll do is they'll take it a step further and they'll send out Christmas cards to their past client list, that's a great first step.

Let me show you how to make that a lot better. What you want to do is you want to send a monthly newsletter to your past clients. There's really two ways to do this, either it's through email or it's through physical paper mail. Now, there's tradeoffs in doing both, physical paper mail is going to cost you a lot more money and it'll probably cost about a dollar per person per month. If you send a regular standard envelope, it can be cheaper, maybe 50 cents with paper and everything, there may be 55 cents.

If you have a list of 2 to 300 past clients, then you're probably going to spend 200 bucks a month to mail them but if you did this for a whole year and you spend 12 times to 100, $2,400 and you got two referrals that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten, well then it starts to pay for itself in lump sum. A lot of times when attorneys do this over a period of months, six or seven months, they really build up a good presence in the mind of their past clients and they start to get far more referrals than just two a year. I've spoken to some attorneys, they get every month three or four people that are referred. If you get just two a month, let's say you get one a month, that's 12 referrals a year. If you charge $2,000 for an average case, that's $24,000 a year just by sending a newsletter.

Now, if you want to do it through email, it's going to be a lot cheaper. You still need an email program that'll orchestrate the email and go out to several hundred or several thousand people at once and you want to do this every month, so there'll be some minor cost associated with the email program. They can run anywhere from $50 to $200 a month for a program that'll do this for you but the problem with the email is they don't get opened nearly as much as letters get read. Typical open rates for email for a decent list are 10 to maybe as much as 20 per cent and that's about it.

For a direct mail, they can easily be as high as 70 or 80 per cent, sometimes it's more than that. So, you're going to get a lot more readership if you send direct mail vs. email but email in a lot of cases can be a lot cheaper and reach people. Then, there's always the case where you may not have physical addresses of your past clients or you may not have emails of your past clients, it depends on the practice area. Some practice areas, like criminal defense, people tend to move and not be as stable as other areas, maybe bankruptcy as well, so you just got to look and see what data do you have.

Your effort doing this, it's all going to be really upfront is to get your files out and have your secretary get your past list, let's say the past 2 or 3 years, that's probably the sweet spot. We wouldn't go back 5 or 10 years because the clients are so old, it's very likely that they've moved, changed email, changed physical address and all that. So 2 to 3 years back is really the sweet spot but an average attorney doing 80 cases a year, that's 160 to 240 people. Let's say 200 people on average, that's a pretty a good base to start with to get referrals.

I'm going to show you a trick on what to do to really get a great jump start on getting referrals but before that, I want to talk about some of the reasons why attorneys won't do this. So, sometimes they feel like they're bugging people to send them something once a month. Now, we've found through testing that once a month is a good sweet spot, more than that, yes, you could be bugging people, less than that, you're really not in their minds enough to make an impact. Quarterly is not enough, yearly is certainly not enough but you really want to be in their minds monthly.

Another misconception is that attorneys want to send out a newsletter that's based on their practice area, let's say DUI, bankruptcy, personal injury etc. You got to realize through no fault of your own, no matter how much your clients love you, they hope they never hear from you again because you were there to help them through a negative time in their life and they don't want to be reminded of that negative experience, divorce, bankruptcy, death, probate, criminal defense etc.

What do you do? Well, you send out a newsletter that doesn't talk about a law. Yes, it will have your masthead on it or your logo, your picture, your phone number or your email and all that stuff at the top. So they'll know it's you but the content of the newsletter won't be about the law.

What should it be about? It should resemble a reader's digest or you have an article that's a recipe for Wolfgang Puck for sweet short ribs this month, an article that talks about this state in the history. Einstein came out with this theory of relativity this month, you may even have a crossword puzzle. Some basic fun interesting content that people would like to read, an article about a star. Some new star got married or there's some scandal or some of these stars that was a man turns out to be gay or turns out to be a woman or whatever, that kind of stuff.

That will keep people entertained while they still have your information on it so they remember you. Over a period of time, you'll hear comments when referrals call you and you'll say, "How do you find me?", "Well, my friend so and so or my husband or my whoever, someone at Church, they get this newsletter from you, every month and they've been getting it for a bunch of months. So they just gave me a copy or they emailed me a copy, they said I should call you, so that's how I found you". That's a typical thing that you'll hear and that's how the newsletter works.

Let me show you this tweak on how to really boost it up. It's going to be combined with getting testimonials for you. So, the best way we found to start off a newsletter is to actually send out a survey to your past clients and you want to incentivize the survey. We're not asking for reviews but we're asking for a survey here. Typically what we'll do is offer a $10 Amazon gift card. When I've done this with some clients, with some attorneys, they'll send you about 150 of their past clients and they've gotten about a 35 per cent response rate. So, out of a 150, almost as much as 50 have responded to the survey and 90 some odd per cent of the survey results have been overwhelmingly positive because these good guys are good attorneys as I'm sure you are. So, mostly positive results and in the survey, we asked can we put your positive comments on the website and people, by default by doing the survey, they give their consent, "Yes".

Some of the attorney clients have done this before and they've gotten 30 or 40 new testimonials for their website because the survey question. One of them, says, "How would you rate your experience with this firm?" So that turns into a testimonial. So, first of all, their website gets a huge boost in terms of credibility, all right, that's one great thing. The next thing is once they complete the survey, we take them to a page that says, "Thanks for doing this survey. Your card is on the way", or, "By the way, just put in your address and we want to make sure we send this in the right place. Your card's on the way. If you have some good things to say in the survey, by the way, would you now mind posting a review on Google+, Yahoo, Yelp, Juniors Book, City Circle or any of those places that people like to go". We have links to your personal accounts on each of those platforms.

Now people just have to click the link, they go right to your profile and they can put in a review. I know not everybody does this but about 4 or 5 people out of the 40, so about 10 per cent of them will put a review. This is great because it just gives you some new reviews online, gives you a lot more credibility and boost you up. Plus you've reignited your list, you've some given them some more value, now they're much more willing to listen to you and pay attention. That's the number one way to start up a newsletter that I've found. So, I hope this helps you. Any questions or comments, we're going to be doing more videos and more audios on topics like these to help you. You're welcome to contact me, Richard Jacobs at speakeasymarketinginc.com or call 888 225 8594 and find out how to get this implemented in your practice and start boosting up your referral rate.

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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs from Speakeasy Marketing. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the importance of back links pointing to your website and how to get them, how to get good quality ones.

Now, this is a tough topic because Google is always fighting spam and there are always people out there that are trying to get hundreds and thousands of links and run things called link forms and try to spam Google to get their websites at the top of Google search. Everybody's trying to do it, it's a big old arms race and one of the major weapons in the arms race is links. A link is that clickable text, where you click on it and it takes you to another website or another page on a site. So, the reason why Google's algorithm, a search engine's algorithm looks for links is because it sees them as votes of confidence in your site. So, if you're a bankruptcy attorney in Minnesota and you've got links from the Minnesota State Bar and you've got links from NASCAR, the organization for bankruptcy attorneys, and you got links from other attorneys in your area, Google's going to see those links and say, "Wow, this site, these really powerful organizations the lawyers have voted for it because they link to that site, so I'm going to show it for more of my search results. I'm going to give it higher position, better ranking and I'm going to have it shown for more keywords". The net effect to you is that you'll get more visitors to your site and more calls and more clients which is the name of the game for everybody out there.

It sounds nice, it sounds easy to say but links are incredibly tough to get especially in today's environment. The reason is that Google has created a culture of fear, it says, "Oh, you better not pay for links or we'll penalize your site, and you better not spam our algorithm or we'll kick you out and we'll penalize your site and get rid of it". There's all these threats of losing all your traffic and I would bet a lot of SEO companies you've talked to have told you different things about it like, "Oh, we'll get you 500 links for 500 bucks", or, "You shouldn't bother to go for links, it's a bad idea. You shouldn't go for article links; you shouldn't go for this kind of link". There are a lot of misconceptions about this out there, so I want to dispel them.

I'm going to tell you some of the links that are not useful for you to get, one is reciprocal links where I link to you and you link back to me. This is one of the earliest ways in which people would get lots of links to their site, Google sees that now and they just don't give you any credit for it. One overarching thing actually is Google really punishes people for bad links. What they do is they just put a pillow over the face of the link and smother it, meaning it gives you no value. It looks like it would give you value but it gives you none. That's far easier than penalizing you because penalizing you will make you mad, it'll make you think about suing Google or calling them up and screaming at them. It's far better that they just smother the links that you have and have it give you no credit and therefore you get no results but you never really know if it's a bad link or not and what Google is doing or not.

That's how they like to operate, it's kind of covertly like that and not tell you what's going on. So, again, very rarely you'll get penalized unless you do things in-excess. Reciprocal link's not going to help you and won't hurt you. Some people will get really high page rankings; it's a metric that Google has that tells you the strength of a website. They'll go to places like China, Russia, India or anywhere overseas and they'll get links from these really powerful sites that pay a fee for them. These links are bad links and they're obvious to Google's reps that may look at your site, they're obvious to Google's algorithm. These kinds of links Google will penalize you for, they're not relevant, they make no sense; why would someone in Russia link to you? It makes no sense.

That's an obvious thing that can cause you a problem. So, other links that are out there, links from article directories, these article sites on the web, they used to be great. They would get you a lot of what's called link juice and link popularity. Now they do nothing for you, like easing articles, articles base, that kind of stuff. So those are pretty much worthless, again not going to hurt you unless you have hundreds and thousands of them.

Another bad thing is again, if you engage in one of those places that says, "Get me 500 links for 500 bucks", well, you know why it's bad because if you paid me 500 bucks to get your 500 links, my incentive is to get you the cheapest, crap, easiest links I can get you. It doesn't matter if they're relevant or not, so you're going to get a lot of garbage. One should think of getting links as a diet, if you eat all skittles and M&Ms and sugar, you're going to feel sick and you're going to be really unhealthy so the same thing with bad links, you're just going to feel sick, your site's going to be sick, it's not going to be healthy, not going to get you any traffic. You want to have really good stuff in your diet and good links.

What are good links? A good link is relevant, so you as an attorney want to get a link from legal related sites. Non-competing attorneys are a great source, it makes sense they'd link to you, legal directories, getting in the news for anything about the area of law you practice. State Bar Association if they're linked to you, other organizations in your practice area if they're linked to you or provide you a profile. There's the Yahoo directory and there's the bunch of legal sites where you can get links but you've got to go to all of them. It takes time and those links will help you and especially links from non-competing attorneys. It makes total sense for them.

Non-relevant links like a link from a flower shop, a link from a bakery, a link from China, Russia, India, it makes no sense to you as a human being looking at it. You can't figure out why this place links to that place, then it's irrelevant and it's not going to help you and in the long run will hurt you. That's the kind of stuff you want to avoid and the relevant stuff you want is the stuff I mentioned. The sites that are the most powerful will be obviously respected authoritative sites out there. So again State Bar Association, very respected high authority, almost impossible to get, new sites are great and that kind of thing, non-competing authorities.

How many links do you need? No one really knows but as you get more of them and a pace of two or three good ones a month is plenty. You can't stuff them in too fast because Google sees that and they'll penalize this. Why magically would this website get 100 links all of a sudden or a 1,000 links all of a sudden? It makes no sense, so you want to get them slowly over time but you want to get them. I've seen sites performing really well with as little as 20 or 30 really quality links. It may take more than that but it may not. If you've got a history of with thousands of really crappy links, it's like having a lot of fat, it takes time to get that fiber or to get that fat out of there. Good links will be against the backdrop of being diluted by a lot of bad ones. So, that's the story with links but again, don't let anyone tell you, you shouldn't get them, don't let anyone tell you that if you just write good content, magically people will link to you. That's what a lot of people would like to tell you. It's just not the truth.

You need links. You can have oodles of content, hundreds of pages but if you've got no back links, you're not going to get anywhere; it's like walking on one leg in a race. You can only hop so fast before you fall over, you need two legs so you need content links to do it. I hope this clarifies it for you and if you're looking for a system on how to get good quality links, relevant ones consistently month in and month out and to analyze your links to make sure they're good and to give you a plan on how to move forward, contact me Richard Jacobs at speakeasymarketinginc.com or call 888 225 8594.

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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs from Speakeasy Marketing and I am going to talk to you about content, how do you get content for your site and how much is enough and where should the content come from and what's the leverage way to do it that doesn't eat up all your time, that's what I'm going to cover in this recording.

So, content is very important. The only thing Google has to show to people searching is content. Content can be a video or an article on a website or a picture or an audio file or a slideshow but it's really not anything more than that and that's the whole heart of the web. Why do you search for the stuff on the web; because you're looking for answers to questions you have, you're looking for entertainment and you're looking for content. That's the medium for which everyone experiences the web. So, Google's job is to match people searching to the absolute best quality websites depending on what they search for.

If someone's searching for a Los Angeles divorce attorney, Google's got to sift through all the sites that fall under this category and pick which site is the best. Which one should I show to my searchers and which one should I not? Which one should I show first, second, third, fourth, 10th, 500th, 10,000th or not at all? So, content is a big thing. By being an attorney within a practice area, not everyone's the same. Let's take divorce, for example, a 24-year old guy that was married for two years, no kids and no assets is going to be a very different customer from someone that's 60 and that has owned a business for 15 years. One grown child and one child's 16 years old, they've been married for a very long time, lots of assets, completely different people. They're going to ask completely different questions. They're going to searching Google for completely different things.

And if you don't have content on your website that addresses either of those situations, then your site may not show up in the search results. Why? Because Google sees that your site doesn't have relevant content. It may have generic boilerplate stuff on divorce, you know, divorce is a stressful or you should hire an attorney, that's all great but it doesn't have content with divorce with lots of assets vs. divorce with no assets, long term marriage and perpetual alimony vs. short-term marriage and all that stuff.

So, you want to have a lot of content on your site and you want to have very diverse content on your site not just boilerplate articles of your practice areas. You ideally want to have eventually hundreds of different articles covering every minute permutation of the area of law you practice. It doesn't matter if it's DUI, auto accidents, divorce, estate planning or bankruptcy. Whatever it is, people have got questions, people search tens of thousands of different things in Google and they don't just search on Kentucky bankruptcy lawyer or a New York DWI lawyer. They search on all kinds of the strange things, self-employed? Can I keep my house in bankruptcy? They may search get pulled over, blew 0.13, will I go to jail? They may search on that.

You never know what they're going to search on and I've seen directly by running a site that got over 400,000 Google searches in one year that people had typed in over 330,000 different things to make up those 400,000 searches. So, people can type in a lot of different things into Google and they do. They type in all kinds of crazy stuff again not just a few keywords.

All right, so how do you generate this content? Well, you can write it yourself which what attorney has time for that nowadays? You're busy with cases and you're busy with marketing and all that, it's not even fun to write for most people, some it is and you got to think, "All right. What have I written about, what else can I write about? Okay, what can I say about this? How much is there to say?" So, that's one route but it's kind of a pain. You can have someone do it for you and write blogs for you. But the problem is unless they are a really good writer, you're not going to like what they write, you're going to feel like its unprofessional or it's uninformed or at best. It'll be some regurgitated articles that other attorneys have changed enough so that they're unique but not enough so that they really capture your voice and again they may not follow the law and they may not be compliant.

So, really the best way is for you to get the content done yourself. Well, I've found another way to get this done, that's a much more effortless way. The best way is to go real old school dictation but with a twist. What we do is we get on the phone with our attorneys once a month and we do a one hour Q&A recorded phone interview. This is great because the attorneys can relax and speak freely and answer questions, questions like "What are misconceptions people have about the estate planning process?", or, "What mistakes do people make once they've been arrested for a crime that make their situation worse?" or "My wife won't let me see the kids, will the court award me visitation or will there be a fight till the death because I'm the man?", and that kind of stuff.

So, we cover that in a one hour interview and the comment at the end of the interview I hear most often is, "Wow, that's a lot easier than I thought it would be". The great thing is the average person speaks about a 150 words a minute, so an hour or long interview is about 7 or 8,000 words, which breaks down into about 15 to 20 articles. All, you're going to do is do this once a month and it's pretty painless. So it's an hour to do the call and then maybe an hour editing it. Take out the ums and uhs and sentence fragments and things like that and then you're ready to go. You break up the content of the articles and then put it up on your site. You'll get a lot of content this way and you do this over a period of months. Now you're going to build up dozens and then hundreds of articles and you can cover all the questions that people ask.

In addition, the tone of an interview is a lot more interesting than just whetting out dry law facts which just comes across literally as conversational because it is a lot more interesting to read. We've heard from a lot of clients that their clients, the attorney's clients, really enjoy the content, they find it accessible, it's not boring, it's not dry, it's not intimidating, it's just a real great way to get that information at a view and onto your website. It's going to be unique, it's going to be legal because you spoke it and you're the one that knows about this stuff, it's your practice area. I really know of no better way to get this stuff onto your website. One month's not going to do it, you got to do it over a period of really a year in order to get a real substantial amount of content but that means like 200 plus articles.

What will happen as you do this is you'll start to get a lot more Google searches because now you'll have the answers to hundreds of thousands of different questions people could have and Google will say, "Oh, look at this site. It's got answers to any search question that people have in this area. I'm going to show that site for questions related to this and to that and to this and to that and to the other". So you'll show up in hundreds more places than you otherwise would. It's as if you had 500 signs pointing to your business and each sign answers a different specific question that people have about the law. What could be better than that, it's a great way to build up your website.

The pace of 15 to 20 articles a month is more than enough to satisfy Google. You could go at a slower pace but again no way near this type of leverage to do it and the ease in which you could do it. So, it's probably again the best way I know of to get content on your site. I'm going to give you a quick little trick at the end of this. So, here's something you can do, it's called re-purposing content. So, what we've done with a lot of these interviews is we've made them into a book. A one hour interview actually turns into a 40 or 50 page book and I won't go into it deeply here but a book can really position you as the expert in people's mind if you've authored one. What better way to author what you wanted to for years than to just speak it in one hour. So, we've got a Speak A Book process that does this.

Now, another thing we've done is we've taken the edited interview and we've had a person do a professional voice over of that same recorded content, that transcribed content, breaking it up question by question and answer by answer. Let's say your name is John Smith and we did an interview on divorce and the voice over would come on and say this, "Is it true that the woman also gets custody of the kids in Alabama?" Attorney John Smith says, "Bla, bla, bla, bla", and the answer is spoken based on the content. At the end, it says, "For more information on divorce cases, contact Attorney John Smith at bla, bla, bla, go to the website at Bla, bla, bla or send an email to bla, bla, bla". So, we take that voice over audio and we put a still image over it. Now, it becomes a video and now that same content that you spoke can go on to your website as articles, can become videos on YouTube, can turn into a book that you've authored, it can go to lots of different places. This is called re-purposing content and this is the little bonus I'm giving you on this call that you can do with your content and get 3 times the mileage out of the same content that you otherwise would. I hope this is helpful to you. If you want help in getting any of this done and using our system to do it, contact speakeasymarketinginc.com or call 888 225 8594.

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When we talk about lawyers and how they run their practice, a lot of questions come into our minds that how to make the practice successful and what can be done to contribute towards building trust and reputation of the law firms.

This depends on many factors like building good relationships with the clients, with community lawyers etc. When it comes to retaining clients, if a lawyer treats him just like a regular retail store owner treats his yet another walk-in customer, this is not really gonna help towards building the trust and goodwill of the law firm. Think about firm's reputation as an asset. If a client walks into your law office, you give him personalized attentions and deal with courtesy, he is gonna be very pleased and satisfied and in turn he would surely recommend you to others in need of help. That's an asset!

So, explore the perspective of long-term thinking rather than short one and work hard towards building good intangible assets as well. This will surely help your law firm in a very positive way.

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