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Message: Hi, I thought you might be interested in this article I found. Legal Marketing Is Not Your Ticket To Get Rich Quick Only about ten percent of the lawyers who come to me for help with legal marketing really understand the time and effort required to establish the systems that deliver clients on demand. Most lawyers want to read a book, go to sleep and wake up with lots of clients. Unfortunately, it does not work that way. In case you stumbled upon this article by searching for legal marketing and get rich quick, let me outline some of the marketing strategies attorneys employ and the amount of time they take to effectively source quality clients. Today we are going to examine three of the more popular marketing methods attorneys attempt to use to get rich quickly. Networking This is a broad term that is used to define everything from meeting people in line at the supermarket to attending events to joining a formalized group that meets specifically to pass new business leads. This is a highly effective way to develop business. The key to success with networking is to develop a relationship based upon trust with a person or group of people. Once they know what you do, and they trust you, if they come across someone who needs your services, they will refer you to them. If you join a formalized networking group like BNI or LeTip or something set up by your local chamber of commerce, it will likely take you at least six months to develop relationships that will deliver qualified referrals to your law firm. And that means six months of meeting with the individual members, learning what they do and referring them business FIRST. In networking, if you do not give you will not receive. Search Engine Optimization This is the big magic bullet out there today. Many lawyers think they can get an SEO expert to work on their site and it will immediately deliver great traffic and fantastic clients. This is not true. Good search engine optimization involves creating new content regularly. It also involves establishing relationships with other people who own websites and having them quote your content and link to your website. It also means writing about things people are searching for. You can hire someone in India or the Philippines to link your website to others in the hopes of boosting your search engine ranking. Many lawyers do this. Unfortunately Google recently changed their algorithm and it now puts weight more heavily on content freshness as well as links. This is not terrific news for outsourcing SEO. In the best case scenario, you are looking at eight months to one year before you start to see your website on the first or second page of Google IF YOU DO EVERYTHING CORRECTLY. Public Relations – Getting on Television, Radio or Quoted in the Paper This could be one of the most misleading forms of legal marketing out there. Yet you never hear anyone bash their PR person. Know why? Because the PR person delivers results but the media does not. What does this mean? I will explain. Typically, a public relations expert will charge a law firm about $2,000 per month to pitch them around (offer them as experts for commentary on the news). A good PR expert will get you on television, radio and in the press offering commentary as an expert. Unfortunately, in most cases, that does not get you any business. It will boost your credibility. It will feed your ego. But it will hardly ever result in business walking in the door. In terms of time it takes to work here is how I break down public relations: A good public relations professional can get you in the media immediately (within 10 days). However unless you have a way to make an offer to someone while you are being quoted or unless the media is targeted at a specific audience, new clients will hardly ever come directly from public relations. Summary Each of these forms of media can be used effectively to source new clients. There are three things you need to know before you employ them: 1). Systems must be developed for each of these forms of media. As standalone tools they are relatively ineffective for long term relationship development. If you plug each of these forms of client attraction into a system, they will work and they will deliver clients to your law firm. 2). Much trial and error is required in employing each of these strategies. If you have not successfully used them before and you are trying to use them on your own, you will have to be patient as you learn what works and what does not work. 3). None of these marketing methods works fast. You can get started quickly. You can begin doing things correctly immediately and you may get a few new clients as a result of increased activity. But there is a cumulative effect. If you use each of these forms of media as part of a system and you do so over the long term, your client attraction will begin to snowball. This happens because you are not only targeting your client base but you are also targeting your referral sources and you are doing so with a consistent message with great frequency. There is no get rich quick form of legal marketing. If you have patience and you are persistent and you get good advice you will succeed. The key lies in getting started and finding someone who is qualified to help you build systems. Link: http://www.rainmakerlawyer.com/site/permalink/legal_marketing_is_not_your_ticket_to_get_rich_quick/