Take your LinkedIn marketing webinar and shove it

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Enough already!

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest. . . it never stops. Every day I am inundated with invitations and solicitations to webinars, courses, videos, books, reports, plug-ins, consulting offers. I don’t even have time to read the emails or web pages, let alone watch the videos or read the pdfs, let alone buy anything, let alone implement any of the stuff I bought.

And I’m in the marketing business. How on earth are you supposed to keep up with this stuff and still have time to practice law?

(Do I get an amen?)

Look, I love the Internet. I must love it. I spend all day in front of it. I can’t begin to enumerate the ways it has enhanced my life and I would never want to go back to the days before you could carry the world in your pocket. But there are times when you have to step away, take a breath, and put things in perspective.

You know you cannot ignore Internet marketing (even if it’s not your favorite thing), but you can’t keep up with everything everyone tells you is a “must do”. To maintain your sanity (is that an oxymoron–I’m talking to lawyers, right?) you have to be selective.

You need your own website. Not a page on your firm’s site or on M-H or a legal directory, your own hosted website that you control. Yourname.com

You can put it up yourself (it’s not difficult) or you can hire someone to set it up for you and show you how to update it yourself. I suggest a self-hosted wordpress site (not wordpress.com). You could set this up in about an hour, and that includes watching a couple of youtube videos that show you how.

You need some content that shows visitors what you do and why they should choose you. Add some articles you’ve written, a list of your practice areas, and an “about” page.

And that’s it. You can start with that. This is the most important part.

Now, you have something to show people who want to know about what you do.

Traffic? Don’t worry about it right now. There are lots of ways to get it. You can start by contacting your clients and everyone you know and tell them to “come see my new website!” Okay, you can leave out the exclamation point. They’ll come, they’ll read, they’ll share.

What about social media? What about it? It’ll drive you crazy, if you let it. Don’t let it. Set up accounts with the majors (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and G+), tell your clients and contacts, and when you post new content on your site, post a link to that content on your accounts.

That’s pretty much all I do, when I’m not deleting emails about the latest Facebook or LinkedIn marketing webinar.

Okay, that’s enough marketing for the day. Get back to work.

Make the Phone Ring is the Internet marketing bible for attorneys. Check it out here.

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Comments

  1. I know they are succeeding in selling these seminars… You can tell whose firm fell for the presentation when you get a request from a “big firm” friend who hasn’t spoken to you in years and see they added a pile of links at one time. It’s obvious some business development person put them up to it.