David M. Ward, Author at The Attorney Marketing Center

Positioning yourself for the coming upswing

March 31, 2020 by David M. Ward

If you have some downtime right now, consider using some of that time to invest in the future of your practice or career.

Think about what’s next for you, make plans, research ideas, and do things you might not have time to do when everything gets back to normal.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Brainstorm additional ways to promote your services
Outline your book (or finish writing the thing)
Create a new lead magnet (or update an old one)
Clean up/organize your computer desktop and documents
Give your website a makeover
Research some new keywords
Learn how to use new software
Start your newsletter
Update your social media profiles
Add a new social media platform to your mix
Get ahead on CLE
Read books, take courses on personal development
Write content for your newsletter or blog
Research new target markets
Make a list of professionals you can approach to propose marketing alliances
Clean out your email inbox
Research new marketing or advertising platforms
Clean up your smart phone: delete unused apps, delete or download photos and documents
Update passwords, add 2-factor authorization
Clean up your “to read” list(s)
Brainstorm/research ways to build your email list
Work on a new presentation, speech, or video
Go over your budget and create plans to reduce spending and/or debt, or increase investment and retirement funds
Explore ways to give back to your community (run for office, promote a charity, donate, volunteer)
Revise/create a new campaign to stay in touch with your former clients

Before you know it, normal life will return and you’ll be glad you took care of some of these, instead of getting to a higher level in your favorite game or binge watching your latest guilty pleasure.

How to start a newsletter to build your practice

Filed Under: Marketing legal services, Productivity

Overwhelmed?

March 30, 2020 by David M. Ward

I’m not talking about the recent news, I’m talking about your practice.

Too much work to do, too much to read, too many projects in your pipeline that never get off the ground.

Every day, you get 50 emails about marketing and managing your practice, on top of emails relating to client work and emails from someone trying to sell you something.

You don’t want to miss something important. But sorting the wheat from the chaff takes mental energy. . . and time.

I get it. It’s daunting.

But you’re running a business with a lot of moving parts, people, and important issues, and details matter. So, in addition to the work, you have to stay on top of everything else.

Sometimes, a lot gets pushed to the side, or to the future. Sometimes, the work doesn’t get done on time. Sometimes, you finish the day exhausted.

And the emails continues to pile up.

Here’s the thing.

The lawyers who earn top dollar have as much work as you do and get just as much email as you do, but they don’t get overwhelmed.

Because they work LESS than most lawyers.

They’re able to do that because they’ve set up their practice so they only focus on the most important tasks.

The tasks that move the needle.

The tasks that bring in more clients and better clients and let them continually grow their income.

If you’d like to find out how to do it

Go here

Filed Under: Law office management, Marketing legal services, success

How often should you blog?

March 27, 2020 by David M. Ward

How often should you publish a new blog post?Â Often.

According to this infographic, “82% of marketers who blog daily acquired a customer using their blog as opposed to 57% of marketers who blog monthly”.

A few reasons:

The more you post, the more opportunities you have to get found by search engines or shared by visitors.Â
Uncle Google tends to see frequent publishers as authorities. Prospective clients who visit your blog are likely to do the same.
More content gives you more chances to keep visitors reading your content. The more time they spend on your blog, the more likely they are to take the next step.Â
More content and a more frequent publishing schedule helps others bloggers and influential sites see you as an authority, making them more likely to link to you
Once published, your content lives forever. Something you wrote two years ago can continue to create leads and produce clients for you.Â
Inbound marketing is more personalized in the sense that you can tailor your content to the interests and needs of your target market.Â

The infographic also shows that leads produced via inbound marketing have higher conversion rates. One reason is that prospective clients are more likely to trust you (because they found you).Â

Inbound marketing also has a lower cost-per-lead.

You don’t have to publish daily to realize most of these benefits. Just more often than once a month or once in a while.

Start with once a week. As you find yourself getting more leads and more new clients, you may suddenly find the time to publish more often.Â

How to use a blog to make the phone ring

Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing legal services, Online Marketing

Why you shouldn’t sell legal services

March 26, 2020 by David M. Ward

It may sound like I’m picking a nit but this is important.

When prospective clients search the Internet or ask their friends for a referral, they’re not looking to hire a lawyer or “buy” legal services.

Not really.

They’re looking for someone who can solve a problem for them.

They’re looking for relief from a failed marriage. They’re looking to collect money that is owed to them. They’re looking for protection from creditors, the tax man, or criminal authorities.

Your services are the solutions to these problems.

When you start marketing your services from this point of view, two things happen.

First, you’re now offering something people want to buy. Which means your marketing is much easier and more effective.

And second, because you’re solving painful problems and delivering valued benefits, you can charge more than if you were only selling your services.

Sometimes, a lot more than your competitors.

Because they’re selling a commodity, while you’re selling a way out of a seemingly hopeless situation, relief from pain, security, hope, and financial well-being.

So, the next time you run an ad, do a presentation, write a blog post, or talk to a decision maker, make sure you talk about the problems you solve and the results you deliver.

To learn how to do it right, check out my marketing course

Filed Under: Marketing legal services

Oh goody, another time management rule

March 25, 2020 by David M. Ward

Just when you thought you had things the way you want them, along comes another rule for managing your time.

This one is called “The 60-30-10 Rule”.

Basically, you allocate 60% of your time to “high value” activities, 30% to low-value tasks related to your goals and responsibilities, and 10% to other activities that support the first two categories.

High-value activities (60%) are those that advance your most important goals and long-term vision. These are your highest priorities and “MITs” (most important tasks).

In my view, high-value activities include client work, marketing and practice development, and personal development. It would also include projects that are important to you and your future.

Low-value activities (30%) may be necessary, urgent even, but aren’t necessarily important. They would include administrative and management tasks you have to do to keep your practice running.

The third category (10%) supports the first two categories and includes things like organizing and prioritizing your work, scheduling, planning your day or week, and doing a weekly review.

You can change the percentage of any of these categories to suit your responsibilities and style of working. You might go with 70% high-value activities, for example, by delegating more low-value (management) activities, and/or by reducing the third category from 10% to 5%.

What’s important about a system like this isn’t the actual percentages as much as it encourages you to think about what’s important so you can allocate more time to it.

And, if you track your time, it also allows you to see when you’re losing focus.

Do you use a rule like this to allocate your time?

If you’re ready to take a quantum leap in your practice. . .

Filed Under: Law office management, Productivity

Are legal services necessary during a pandemic?

March 24, 2020 by David M. Ward

Your services may be needed right now but many people who need them aren’t buying.

They’re watching their dollars and unless they have an urgent need to hire an attorney, those dollars are likely to be spent on something else–or on nothing at all.

So, right now, your marketing should primarily be focused on “after”.

After things get back to normal, after people are working again, after the kids are back in school, when people realize they need to talk to a lawyer, you want to be the one they choose.

What should you do now? Not much.

This is not the time to be making special offers or promoting anything.

Just be there.

Use email and social media to connect. Provide information, share stories, and let people know you’re around if they want to talk to you.

Don’t change who you always were and always will be–adviser, advocate, neighbor and friend.

If you ordinarily advertise or use direct mail, scale back for now but think twice before stopping completely. You may find there is still enough business available to cover your costs, allowing you to keep your name in front of your market.

Finally, now would be a good time to pick up the phone and call some of your clients and professional contacts.

Ask how they’re doing and wish them well.

Because personal connections are always the best kind of marketing, but especially now when everyone is hungry for human connection.

Start or build your newsletter

Filed Under: Marketing legal services

Don’t make this mistake with your clients and contacts

March 23, 2020 by David M. Ward

A few months ago I got an email from a guy I haven’t heard from in years. He is the developer of a piece of software I bought five or ten years ago and have long since forgotten.

He name sounded familiar–it’s unusual–so I read the first paragraph of his email and recognized the name of the software.

So, why was he writing? Yep, to sell me something. A new service he was offering, completely unrelated to software.

Haven’t heard from him in years, not even about his software, and now he wants me to fork over $500 for a one-time “coaching session” with him?

Not kidding.

How is he even qualified to offer this service? What’s he been doing all these years? Who are you again?

Yeah, don’t do this with your clients and contacts. Stay in touch with them, build or strengthen your relationship, and then you can offer them something. Even something new.

Otherwise, who are you again?

Now would be a good time to contact everyone. Update them on changes to your office schedule or policies, share your thoughts about social distancing and quarantining, and why you are hopeful that everything will be over soon.

And, if you did this already, send them another email, to update them again, or to share legal information or general consumer or business information they might find useful.

Keep your name in front of them, because some of your clients and contacts need your help right now, or know someone who does, and if they don’t, they may soon.

And you want them to feel warmly towards you when you contact them again, instead of asking, “Who are you?”

Email marketing for attorneys

Filed Under: Email, Newsletters

A small habit that yields big results

March 20, 2020 by David M. Ward

No doubt you understand the value of planning your day before it begins. You sit down at your workspace or pick up your phone, check your calendar, check your lists, and decide what you’re going to do that day.

You make a short list for the day and work from that list. Planning in advance frees up the rest of your day to focus on doing the work.

When I do this I get a lot more done, but more importantly, I get the most important work done because I am much less likely to get distracted by the multitude of tasks that are less important.

If something urgent comes up that needs my attention, I can do it and immediately return to my list. I may lose time doing the urgent task but I don’t lose additional time figuring out what to do next.

It’s on my list.

Keeping that list in front of me, which I do, also keeps me on task.

Planning my day before it begins has helped me and many others. If you’re not doing it, give it a try.

But that’s not the “small habit that yields big results” I promised.

The small habit is this: “plan your day the night before“.

Before you end your day, take a few minutes to create your list for the following day.

That small change can make a big difference because when tomorrow arrives you can get right to work. Most people have more energy early in the day so the work you do early is likely to be better and go more quickly.

The rest of your day may not be as productive, but your day is a success because you got your most important work done early.

Ready to take a quantum leap in your practice? Click here

Filed Under: Productivity

How To Come Up With a Yearâ€™s Worth of Content in One Day. Sort of.

March 19, 2020 by David M. Ward

If you have some downtime right now, a great use of that time might be to create a backlog of content for your blog or newsletter.

If you write a weekly post, you could knock out enough content for at least the next few weeks.

If that’s too much, the next best thing is to use the time to find ideas.

Look at your competition’s content. Look at blogs written by or for your target market. Look at general consumer or business publications for ideas that might be useful or interesting to your target market.

In a few hours, you could come up with hundreds of ideas.

All you need to do is write down a sentence or two, a quote or interesting fact, a few points you want to cover, and a link to the article or post that inspired you.

But don’t stop there. Once you have one idea, think about how you could expand it into ideas for additional content.

Let’s say you come across an article about legislative changes in your field and you want to write about those changes–what they are, what they mean, what you think about them, or what the reader needs to do to comply with or take advantage of them.

You could do a second article sharing feedback about the changes from some of your clients. Or comments about the changes from a fellow lawyer or allied expert.

Another article might be about additional changes you’d like to see that weren’t addressed in the legislation.

If you like this idea but don’t have enough time right now, spend an hour making a list of possible sources you can peruse later. Explore a legal blog directory, for example, and capture links to some that look promising.

Where do you start this process? On your hard drive. Find all of your old content and think about what you could do to reuse or re-purpose it.

You might have a paper or presentation you could republish in your newsletter. You might update an old blog post, expanding on something you wrote before, amending your opinion, or providing additional examples. If it’s been awhile since you first published it, you could even re-publish it as is.

Take some time to dig and find ideas. When things get back to normal, you’ll be glad you did.

For more ideas for content than you can shake a stick at, and advice on how to use them, my email marketing course has you covered.

Filed Under: Blogging, Email, Newsletters