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2009-06-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

We provide groundbreaking advertising opportunities for law firms: attorney directories within legal blogs.

The top two ways of getting your law firm noticed on the internet are legal blogs and attorney directories. We have combined the power of the two by creating attorney directory blogs. With our directory blogs, you get both powerful advertising tools in one place.

Ghost Blawger provides you with the most effective way of advertising on the internet. Our directory blogs are:

Divorce Law Resource

Personal Injury Resource

The Medical Malpractice Resource

High Value Online Legal Advertising On a Low Budget

2009-06-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

There are various strategies and methods to market legal services. They include online advertising, writing articles for trade magazines, yellow pages, the placement of ads in local bar associations publications, making presentations, placing signs on city buses or city benches, television and radio commercials, etc. Some areas of practice are better-suited for certain methods of marketing than others.

The areas of practice that have the best results with online legal advertising are those where the clients are individual consumers, rather than corporations, governments, and the like. This is because individuals are more likely to try to find a lawyer via the internet than are CEO's, inside general counsel, school boards, planning commissions, etc. Therefore, the areas of practice that typically benefit the most from online legal advertising are: family/divorce law, criminal defense, personal injury, bankruptcy, debtors' rights/consumer law, lemon law, asylum and family-based immigration, work-based immigration, medical malpractice, civil restraining orders, tenant law, and even home owners' associations.

There are various types of online legal advertising:
- Maintaining a website
- Authoring a legal blog
- Listing your law firm in an attorney directory
- Paying for placement of banner ads or text ads on other websites
- Sponsoring websites for events, organizations or charitable groups
- Launching a pay per click advertising campaign
- Writing articles for online publication
- Participating in online question and answer forums

This article discusses the value of these respective types of online advertising. We’ll tell you which tools offer high rewards at minimal cost.

Websites
First of all, you want to have a website. Consumers like to read about your firm on the internet first to get a general feeling for you and your work, and then decide whether to call you. You need a website so that you have a place on the internet to which your advertising can refer potential clients.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that will help you set up your website. The cheapest way to do it might be to do it yourself. There are many companies that offer do-it-yourself services. Do not be afraid of these. They make it very easy to set up a professional-looking website. What’s more, you can have your website up and running in a short amount of time.

Yahoo! is a great example of a service that offers low-cost, easy-to-use, do-it-yourself websites. They have plans that cost as little as $12 a month.

Legal Blogs
A legal blog is one of the most effective tools for internet advertising available. It can be a tremendous source of new clients if it is filled with informative and useful content, regularly updated. The best part of all is you can set up a blog for free at either blogspot.com or wordpress.com. Blogs place very well in search results because search engines favor websites that have fresh, unique, and relevant information.

Well-written blogs also give their authors credibility. A legal consumer who finds answers to his questions in your blog is more likely to be impressed enough with your legal ability to pick up the phone and call you for more help. A quality blog can be the best way to obtain new clients.

Your blog should focus on only one area of law, for two reasons. First, search engines will place your blog higher in search results if all of the blog’s content is relevant to the search terms. All else being equal, when a legal consumer searches for information on personal injury law, a blog focusing solely on personal injury will fare better than a blog that discusses personal injury, real estate, and patent law. Second, legal consumers want to hire attorneys that are expert in what they do. As legal specialization has become more and more common, consumers have become more and more desirous of attorneys with legal specialization.

Maintaining an informative legal blog is a high value internet legal advertising tool that every firm with the goal of increasing its client base should take make use of. However, there is an alternative. Ghost Blawger offers an advertising opportunity unavailable anywhere else. Law firms who advertise with Ghost Blawger do not need to maintain their own legal blog. With Ghost Blawger, law firms get the benefits of an expertly-crafted legal blog without putting the time, money, and energy into it—a high value advertising tool.

Attorney Directories
There are dozens of law firm directories available on the internet. When deciding whether or not to list your firm in an online legal directory, you should consider three factors: 1) visibility, 2) specificity, and 3) exclusivity.

Visibility refers to how easy it is to find the directory on the internet. There is little value in listing your law firm in a directory that no legal consumer can find. The directory must be found in the first two pages of search results to have much traffic. Placement in the top 10 results, which is typically the first page of results, is optimal.

Specificity refers to whether the directory focuses on a specific area of law. An attorney directory for any and all types of law firms is not helpful to the average legal consumer. Most consumers look for a lawyer who practices in a specific area of law. When they look for a lawyer in a legal directory, they prefer that the directory list attorneys who are successful in that area of law.

Exclusivity refers to the number of law firms listed in the directory. Most online law firm directories list as many firms as they possibly can in any given geographic region. This only serves to increase the competition among the listed firms and decrease the number of leads available to each firm. A directory that offers exclusivity, on the other hand, offers a limited number of listings in each geographic area. Exclusivity maximizes the value of the listing for each law firm by increasing each firm’s visibility within the directory and opportunity to obtain new leads.

An attorney directory that offers visibility, specificity, and exclusivity can be a high value internet advertising tool for lawyers, as long as the cost of the placement in the directory does not exceed the amount of revenue to the firm from the leads provided.

Ghost Blawger combines the two most effective online advertising tools by offering advertising in an attorney directory within a legal blog. What’s more, membership with Ghost Blawger is offered at such a low cost that any law firm can afford it. Ghost Blawger represents the very essence of high-value online legal advertising.

Ads
The best online legal advertising allows you to get your name and your message seen by: 1) your specific clientele 2) at the very moment they need you. This means your advertising must be tailored to your specific clientele. Paying for banner or text ads on just any website does little to tailor your marketing to your specific clientele.

Sponsoring a themed website can work. This is where you place a banner ad on a website dedicated to a specific industry, charitable organization, etc. For example, if you practice landlord/tenant, sponsoring a website dedicated to helping real estate investors and landlords with their problems might be a great idea, as long as your name is visible on the website and your ad's message is clear. If you can find a non-profit organization that serves your clientele, then sponsoring that organization's website could work.

The value of your banner or text ad on these types of websites will vary depending on the price of the ads, the amount of daily traffic the website enjoys, how much of the website’s traffic includes clientele from your jurisdiction, etc.

Pay Per Click
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is where you create an ad that is placed on the right side of, or just above, the results a person sees when he searches for something in a search engine. While there are dozens of search engine companies, the 3 most popular are Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. To participate in PPC, you must set up an account with each search engine company that you want showing your ads.

When you create a PPC ad, you tell the search engine when you want your ad to appear. You will choose the keywords that need to be searched to trigger the appearance of your ad. If you practice personal injury in Atlanta, you may want your ad to appear anytime someone searches for "atlanta personal injury lawyer." There is a tremendous amount of flexibility here. You can set up your ad so that it runs for hundreds of different keywords. You may also set it up so that your ad will run only for people in certain geographic locations. For example, if you want your ad to show only when the person who types in "atlanta personal injury lawyer" is actually located in Atlanta, as opposed to Miami or anywhere else, then you can make that happen.

With PPC, you only pay the search engine company when your ad is shown and someone actually clicks on it. Of course only the ads that are visible will ever be clicked, which means you may want your ad to be placed higher on the computer screen rather than lower. Of course, there are many other lawyers in Atlanta that want their PPC ad showing every time someone types into a Google search "atlanta personal injury lawyer." So with PPC, it is all about competing with every other law firm to get the best ad placement on the search results page. There are multiple factors that determine how high your ad is placed on the search results page, but the most important is the amount you are will to pay, per click, for ad’s placement. There are only 10 or so ads that can fit on one search results page. If you're paying less per click than those top 10, your ad will not be placed on the first page of search results. The problem with that is many internet searchers do not even bother looking past the first page of results. The price you'll have to pay per click to get your ad in the top ten placements will depend on the competition for your targeted keywords. It may be 20 cents or it may be $4.

The benefit of PPC is your ad is tailored to 1) your specific clientele 2) at the very moment he needs you. Plus, you only pay when you know someone sees you. By clicking on your ad, that person is immediately taken to whatever webpage you designate. When setting up your ad you'll choose which page on your website you want that person to be taken to.

There is a tremendous amount of flexibility with PPC and you have complete control of your campaign. You can decide how much you're willing to spend per month or per day. Although it may not be cheap, depending on your campaign and competition, it can be extremely effective and worth the money. PPC, done the right way, is a high value online advertising tool whether your advertising budget is sizable or miniscule.

Articles
Publishing articles on the internet can be an effective tool to get your message out that you are a knowledgeable attorney that has the solutions to other people’s problems. The more quality, informative articles you have published on the internet, the more visible your law firm will be to potential clients.

There are many websites dedicated exclusively to publishing other people’s articles. The benefit of submitting your articles to these websites is at the end of each your articles, you will write a short description of yourself and your law firm along with a link to your firm’s website. Not only will this information lead your articles’ readers to your website, which creates new client leads, but this also tends to help your law firm’s website in organic search results.

When it comes to search results, when Google has reason to believe that other websites trust your website, it will place your website higher in the search results page. The idea is that a website will only link to you if yours is a respectable website. Google also factors in the strength of the websites that link to you. The more high-quality websites you have linking to your website, the better. This means that the more quality websites there are out there that have links to your website, the stronger your website will appear to Google’s search engine. The quality of the websites is partly determined by their relevance to the search. If your website is dedicated to immigration law, and if you have 100 websites dedicated to blonde jokes linking to your website, all those links may not help you improve your placement in the search results. In the search engine marketing industry, we call these strategies “link building.”

There are various websites on which you might publish your own articles. Some are more visible, and thus more valuable, than others. The fact that the submission of articles to these websites is free makes them a high value advertising tool for a low budget.

Q & A Forums
There are a number of question and answer forums on the internet that focus on legal issues. These websites allow legal consumers to pose a question in the hopes that a qualified and knowledgeable attorney will provide the answer. These sites rate the various attorneys and the answers provided by the attorneys. The more quality answers you provide, the higher you will be rated.

Unfortunately, many legal consumers on these sites are just looking for pro bono legal services. Therefore, it is not recommended that an exorbitant amount of time be spent answering questions on these sites. If not for this fact, question and answer forums would be a high value advertising tool.

Articles

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High Value Online Legal Advertising On a Low Budget

Contact

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Pricing

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All membership fees are annual fees.

Fees vary on geographic location and area of legal practice. Please contact us for specifics.

We are in the initial phases of launching our attorney directory blogs. At this time, we are adding an additional four months onto your one-year membership, for free.

Contact us now to place your law firm in our attorney directory blogs.

Benefits

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Why Have An Attorney Directory Within a Legal Blog?
The benefit of having an attorney directory within a legal blog comes from the way the average legal consumer uses search engines. People frequently go to the internet to find answers to their questions. They type their question in the search field. The websites or blogs that best answer that question typically place higher in the search results.

By way of example, when we wrote a post about how adultery might affect a divorce on Divorce Law Resource, the very next day an internet user in Arizona typed that very question as his Google search terms. Divorce Law Resource was the first website he saw in his search results. Within just two weeks, individuals from the following states found the same blog post: Texas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Alaska, Massachusetts, California, Louisiana, Idaho, and Indiana.

When the blog reader reaches the end of the blog post, she is referred to a list of experienced and knowledgeable attorneys in her area that can answer any follow-up questions she might have. She can then check out your law firm's recent successes, client testimonials, and area of expertise--all within the blog. If she is interested in contacting your firm, she clicks on the link to your website or gives you a call.

We Sow, You Reap
Blogs are great, but there are three reasons why many firms do not benefit from a blog:

* time
* know-how
* expense

Ghost Blawger eliminates these concerns.

It takes time to write new information for your blog. Once you write the material, you then have to put it on the internet. You then have to update the html of the web page by applying your SEO strategies to your new post. While doing all this should help your blog and your internet presence, it also takes time away from your work. You avoid all that when you list your firm in our blogs.

One difficult aspect of maintaining a legal blog is knowing what to write. What you and other lawyers may find interesting may not be of interest to legal consumers who need your services. The trick is to write on the topics about which legal consumers are asking questions…and looking for answers. In order to give them the answers they’re looking for, you need to know which questions they’re asking. We do this by constantly searching the web for the best material. We have the tools at our fingertips to find the recently-searched terms and most-searched terms by legal consumers in your area of practice.

Maintaining a blog isn’t the cheapest endeavor in the world. Some firms pay others to write the content of their blogs. For high school kids to write your content, they might pay $15/hour. For licensed attorneys, they might pay $60/hour. Either way, it gets expensive. (By the way, we’ve seen many blogs written by non-lawyers. Law firms that go that route run the risk of having poor-quality content. Either that or they require that their attorneys in the firm edit all of the content submitted by non-lawyers.) The expenses skyrocket when you add to that the cost of advertising your blog through pay per click campaigns or paying an SEO firm to optimize your blog. With Ghost Blawger, the cost of maintaining the blog is spread out among all the law firms listed. This is the best way to take advantage of an informative legal blog at minimal cost.

Why Ghost Blawger? We write the blog content, research the marketplace, and run the advertising campaigns…you get the traffic to your website, take the calls from potential clients, and sign contracts for new clients. With Ghost Blawger, you do not need your own legal blog. We are your blog. We take the time to do it right.

Our attorney directory blogs can be a powerful advertising tool for your firm. Contact us today to learn how your law firm can be placed in our directory blogs.

Services

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Ghost Blawger's legal blogs/attorney directories offer innovative advertising opportunities previously unknown.

Reduced Competition
While other online attorney directories include up to 200 law firms all competing for the same potential clients, the nature of our directories allows us to limit the number of law firms listed in each geographic region, thus reducing the competition among the listed firms.

We limit our listings to three members in each geographic region.

Each law firm in the directory gets a detailed profile on the blog and a link to their own website.

Enhanced Web Presence
The most effective profiles include the following: a description of the law firm, a description of services, a description of what makes the law firm unique, a description of successful case results in the applicable area of law, and testimonials of happy previous clients.

We encourage every law firm to provide us with as much of the above information as possible for inclusion in their profiles. Every law firm will have its own profile on its own web page. This allows legal consumers to find your web page more easily.

In addition, each law firm can submit to Ghost Blawger its own original blog posts or articles to be posted on our blogs. The blog post/article will list the firm as the author with a link to the firm's profile. Each firm can submit as many blog posts or articles as it pleases.

About

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What is a Blawg?
A blawg is a legal blog, or a blog about the law.

What is a ghost blogger?
A ghost blogger is someone who writes blogs for the benefit of others.

Who Coined the Term "Blawg?"
It is said in various locations on the web that Denise Howell, a patent attorney, invented the word "blawg."

About Us
Ghost Blawger is based out of San Diego, CA and founded in early 2009. It is owned and operated by a California-licensed attorney whose goal was to provide helpful legal information to the general public. At the same time, he figured out a way to offer great value to law firms. By advertising in our directory blogs, law firms are sharing the costs of advertising and maintaining a legal blog with other attorneys.

About Our Legal Blogs/Attorney Directories
Each of our directory blogs deals with only one area of law. We only include in our directories attorneys with 1) experience in that area of law and 2) no history of discipline with their state bar.

About Our Results
We are constantly concerned with our blogs' results in the search engines--probably even more so than you are. We make sure to write our blog posts about the topics that are currently being searched by legal consumers. Our results prove it:

15% of our blogs' visitors find us as the first website in their organic search results.

62% of our blogs' visitors find us on the first page of their organic search results.

75% of our blogs' visitors find us in the top 15 websites of their organic search results.

81% of our blogs' visitors find us in the first two pages of their organic search results.

Whether you practice in San Diego, Portland, New York, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Baton Rouge, St. Louis, Lincoln, Dallas, you name the place, your future clients will find you in our directories. People from all over the country are finding our blogs. Our blogs attract hundreds of unique readers every month.

(last updated June 13, 2009)