Digital Marketing

Here’s another question I just got: How much should I be spending when I start advertising on Facebook?

That’s an interesting question. First of all, it depends on your budget. It depends on a lot of different things. It depends on what types of cases you’re going after. As for the person that sent this in, I don’t know exactly what their budget is or what their practice area is.

How to Get Started

But what I would suggest, I would typically start with $30 a day. And when you’re doing Facebook, it’s really important to look at your cost per lead. And then, once you can figure out your cost per lead and what your close ratio is, then you start getting a pretty accurate idea of how much it costs you on Facebook to get a client.

And then, as long as your cost per acquisition is low and you know you’re making money on the clients, then you can scale up from there.

What I Do

So for me, if I’m trying to get people to watch a Webinar, I know that it will cost me about $30 to get a webinar registration. I also know that it costs me x amount of dollars to make a sale on a webinar. That’s because we know what our close rates are. And I have enough data that I can then say intelligently if I spend $1,000, I can expect to make x or if I spend $5,000, I can expect to make x.

And the reason that’s beneficial is that then, once your numbers are right and once you kind of figure all that out, then you don’t necessarily have a big marketing budget. Not if you’ve got your marketing dialed into where you know that when you spend $1,000, you’re going to make $5,000.

Scaling Up

Then it follows theoretically that if you spend $2,000, you should make $10,000. Now, it might not always work that way. Once you spend more, sometimes we’ll drop a little bit. But if you could spend $1,000 profitably, then you should be able to spend $2,000 profitably.

How (And Why) To Test Things

So for testing, I usually start with 30 a day and then I go from there. And as long as my ads are profitable, then I keep scaling up because that’s one of the cool things.

That’s also why I do the self-liquidating offers with ClickFunnels. I do my free Facebook guides, and I do my free book. I do all that type of stuff. And the reason I do that is that when I limit my ad costs, or if I can make my earnings per click or revenue per customer higher, then I can spend more per acquisition and I can spend more profitably.

So that’s a long answer to that question, but that’s what I would suggest. Start with 30 bucks a day. If you do personal injury, something like that, then maybe try closer to a hundred dollars a day, or at least $50 a day. Or maybe start at $50, then go to $100 a day and just see where that takes you.

Here’s a question I just got:

I Googled my name in quotation marks to see what came up. Then I followed that up with my name in quotation marks, followed by an attorney. When I do that, other attorneys’ ads pop up. Does anyone know if this is a violation of Google’s ad policy?

People Can Bid On Your Name

People are allowed to bid on your name. This typically doesn’t happen that often, but what’s triggering it is that people are saying anytime the word attorney pops up, show my ad. So that’s what’s happening there.

A Possible Scenario

But if you have a well-known name or a slightly well-known name it is definitely possible to bid on other attorneys’ names. So for example, it would be like Morgan and Morgan in Florida. On the entire East Coast, everyone knows who Morgan and Morgan are, for the most part.

So if someone’s looking for Morgan and Morgan, there is a good chance that they’re looking for a personal injury attorney, and they might not have even hired anybody yet.

Are There Laws About This?

So people will typically bid on those names. There are definitely laws about it. I don’t know exactly what they are. I know there are with brand names. So for example, if Coke was going to bid on the word Pepsi, I believe that they can’t just bid on it.

I don’t think they can say just anything about Pepsi. But what they can do is they can do a comparison. Like before you drink Pepsi, see how Coke compares. You can kind of do it like that.

Why You Shouldn’t Worry Too Much About It

If it’s just with the word attorney, then the reality is that most of the time when someone searches for your name, unless you’re a really big firm like John Morgan or something, they’re probably a client looking for you. And all that is happening is that the other people are wasting their time.

And if they do get phone calls, it’s people that are looking for you and they probably have a lot of wrong number hang-ups and waste a lot of money. So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Here’s a Question I Was Asked:

I’m thinking of using YouTube ads to market my law firm. What do you think about YouTube ads? Are they effective for lawyers?

My Answer:

I love YouTube ads. I actually don’t do enough YouTube ads for myself and I really need to. The cool thing about YouTube ads is that they have those pre-roll videos. I can’t remember what their exact name is, but they’re the ones where you can skip the ad after five seconds.

What’s Great About Youtube Ads

What’s cool is that you don’t get billed if people are skipping your ads. So if you want to do it just for branding, just get your name in the video in the first five seconds, and you’re basically getting free branded advertising.

Here’s How To Do It

Just say, Hey, I’m DUI Attorney Mike Jones and…  Or, Hey, I’m DUI Attorney Mike Smith. Or, If you’ve been arrested for DUI, you need to pay attention right now.

Why Video Ads Work

Video ads are not that expensive. In fact, I think video ads are pretty cheap. But they’re going to hear your name over and over again. And it works really well.

I think that YouTube ads are very underrated. I like them a lot. I actually need to put out some training on how to do YouTube ads, and I think that’ll be coming. Probably in the next four weeks, I’ll put out some training on YouTube advertising for lawyers.

Today, I’m going to answer a question I get over and over and over again. That question is, do you use Yext? Should I use Yext for my law firm’s marketing? In case you don’t know, Yext is a service that allows you to update all of your local business listings on one dashboard.

On the surface, it seems like a great idea. You go to one place, you enter your information one time, and you’re done.  Anyone who’s ever updated business listings can see the benefits of that, and when I say business listings, I mean any directory that your law firm is listed in. It could be Yelp, Yahoo, YP.com, Foursquare, etc.

When we used to use Yext, they allowed you to update all of those listings from one dashboard. There was something like 70 or 80 listings that you would get to update on one dashboard, and on the surface, this seems great and like a huge timesaver.  

However, one day I logged into my Yext account and started clicking around. And I immediately picked up my phone and told them they were fired. 

What I Discovered When I Looked More Closely

When I started looking at the actual listings, I was looking at whether the listings were indexed by Google. The way Google works is that they don’t return the search listings in real time. Instead, they crawl the web. They go on every single web page, and they put the pages that they feel are important in their index.

The index is the database from which the search results come. So, if you search for something and it’s not in Google’s index, then it won’t be returned in the search results. 

What I found was that most of the listings that Yext created were not indexed in Google. What that means is that Google does not see these listings as important enough to store in their search engine. If Google doesn’t think that the listings are important, then they’re not going to count towards your website.

The Reason For Building Citations

The reason that you’re building citations in the first place is twofold. One is so that people can find you, but most of the time people are not going to YP.com to find your business.  You’re not getting a lot of business that way. 

The main reason that my company builds citations or business listings for my clients is because when you’re listed in a lot of different places and have that prominence that Google is looking for, then you will rank higher. 

The Problem With Citations That Don’t Work

Now, the problem is that if your citations don’t index, and if Google doesn’t think your citations are so important that they should store them in their index, then they don’t count, and it’s like they don’t exist.

What I found when I looked at our dashboard was that 90% of the citations that we had created were not getting indexed. Google did not think they were important. So why were we paying a monthly fee? 

We were paying several thousand dollars per month to Yext so that all of our clients could stay up to date. But at the end of the day, it was hurting us more than it helped us. 

What Really Happened With Yext?

After a bit of investigation, we finally figured out why our listings were not getting indexed. So, here’s the problem with Yext. With Yext, you’re able to enter one business description, and that business description gets syndicated across all of your listings.

If you have 80, 90, or 100 listings that all have the same business description, then Google looks at that as duplicate content. There is no penalty for duplicate content. A lot of people think there is, but there isn’t.

What you get instead is that you just don’t get shown. Google doesn’t want to show the same thing over and over again. What it does is it doesn’t index the pages that have the duplicate content. If you have 100 listings with the same business description on it, Google doesn’t think that they’re as important and it doesn’t index them.

What We Do Now

What we do now is create citations manually, and it’s a pain in the ass, it’s a lot of work, but we use unique business descriptions for all of our stuff. Now, there are companies out there that will do this for you.

I’m not going to name any names in this video, but if you want, send me a message, and I’ll point you in the right direction. I’ll get you a recommendation for a company that I trust, the same company that we use for a lot of things and that we partner up with. 

Why I No Longer Recommend Yext

I’m not saying that Yext is cutting corners, but it’s taking the easy way. Rather than updating all of these citations, which is a huge pain, we’re just going to let you enter your information once and then we’ll keep it up. 

The problem with that is that it just doesn’t get you as good of a result. It’s unfortunate. The other problem with Yext was that we were paying thousands of dollars per month because we had a lot of listings, but you do have to pay a monthly fee to Yext. 

And there’s something else, though I’m not sure if this is correct or not, I didn’t check because we immediately went in and changed all of our citations once we fired Yext. 

But I believe once you leave Yext, all your citations revert to what they were before you joined Yext. So, they really have you by the you-know-what. 

At the end of the day, it’s just easier to get it done right the first time. This will really help your local SEO and your bank account. 

Last week, we took my 6-year-old daughter to Disney. She went on a rollercoaster for the first time. If I showed you the picture of her from the ride, you would see that she squeezed all of the blood out of both my wife and I’s arms because she was afraid.

She went on the rollercoaster, and she was terrified before we got on the rollercoaster. We’ve been trying to get her on a rollercoaster probably for six months now. She finally did it and it had me thinking.

She had been terrified of getting on and was almost crying before we got on the ride. Even in the middle of the ride, she was a little unsure of it, but then, after it was over, she was like, all right, let’s do it again.  

She was terrified in the beginning and then once, she did it, she realized how much fun it was. She realized that it was actually a pretty enjoyable experience and that she liked it, and then, she wanted to go ride again.

Don’t Let Fear Hold You Back

I see this happen with lawyers over and over again. I’ve talked to lawyers that are afraid to start creating content and start doing anything that’s going to put themselves out there for their marketing.

What I see is that once lawyers actually get the phone out and record a video, post it on Facebook, then record another one, and start sharing, they actually start getting some pretty good feedback.

What happens is they realize, “Oh wow, this is pretty cool. This isn’t nearly as scary as I thought it was going to be. This isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.” Then, they continue to create and share content.

That’s exactly how I was the first time that I was doing video content. I looked a lot like my daughter, terrified, sitting between my wife and me, because it’s scary. You don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know what people are going to think about you.

Unfortunately, people can be trolls and it’s not a fun thing. So, a lot of times I talk to lawyers who want to get more clients,  expand their law firm, and get their dream clients. They want to stop getting tire kickers and stop competing over price. Instead, they want to start creating video content, putting value out there, and helping people solve small problems.

What’s The Best Way To Start Creating Video Content?

A lot of times lawyers are just afraid to start creating content and get over that fear. You’ve got to get on the rollercoaster, and once you get on there, you’re going to realize it’s not that bad, scary, difficult, or hard.

It’s a little bit of a different type of video than what I normally do. It’s more instructional in any way. If you want to get more clients, then what you need to do is stop being afraid and stop doing what everyone else is doing. You’ve got to put yourself out there, start providing value and content.

Just look at what I do. Everything I do is all about providing value. It’s just providing free content out there, and people are contacting me all the time to help them with marketing for their law firms.

I don’t typically have a call to action out there. I don’t say, “Hey, if you’re interested in marketing your law firm, give me a call.”

All I do is provide value and people contact me. So, if you need some inspiration, just know that if my 6-year-old can tackle her fears, then you can absolutely tackle yours.

I recently received an email from a client about someone who was working on a mental health project. That is, the person that sent this email to my client is working on a mental health project.

Their goal is to educate more families and individuals about mental health, wellness topics, and blah, blah, blah. They’re trying to work with websites like my client’s. Then the email lists a specific blog post and says that I noticed it would be a great resource if you would link to our page psychcentral.com.

A lot of our clients will forward these to us and ask, should we link to this? Will this benefit us in any way? What is this email?

I realize that a lot of people don’t quite understand what these emails are or why they’re receiving these emails or what the benefit or the pros and the cons are.

What Are These Emails?

This email is probably from a search engine optimization company. You could tell because the website is psychcentral.com, but the email is sent from MariaMiguel746@gmail.com.

Usually, if it were a legitimate thing, it would come from a psychcentral.com email address. Now, it doesn’t mean it’s not legitimate, but it means that this is probably sent from a company that’s working for psychcentral.com to boost their rankings.

And what they’re trying to do is they’re sending out emails, and this is cool. This is a classic outreach campaign for search engine optimization. They’re trying to find websites that will add a link on their website to the psychcentral.com website.

Why Do These Companies Do That?

Now, why is that important? In Google, one of the most important factors that determine where you rank, how well you rank, and how many pages on your website rank on the first page of Google is how many backlinks and referring domains you have.

Now, the difference between the two is if you have a link on five different pages on a website that’s five links, but only one referring domain. So why is this important?

Well, Google looks at websites linking to you as if the websites are voting for you. They’re kind of vouching for you, giving you credibility.

How Other Companies Utilize This?

Let me give you a really easy example. Let’s say the New York Times links to your website. The New York Times is a pretty official website. Google understands that authoritative sites like the New York Times have lots of content.

They have lots of links that are going to them. They’ve been around for a long time. Google understands that typically sites these authoritative will not link to spam content. They won’t link to crappy websites.

If the New York Times links to your website, then Google looks at that and says, okay, we know the New York Times is pretty authoritative, so anyone that they link to has got to have some level of credibility. Because you get a link from the New York Times, that’s going to boost your rankings up a little bit.

This happens on many different levels. Obviously, the more powerful a website is, the more powerful the link juice, as they call it, will be. You’ll probably benefit more from a website like the New York Times than you would from Bob’s website.

How These Emails Work

What ends up happening is that these search engine optimization companies are trying to get links. My company does this as well, but it’s not a bad thing. I want you to understand what the purpose of this actually is.

What happens is their software that you have entered keywords into will scrape all the websites. They’ll find the email addresses of the website owners, and they have a template email that inserts the URL of your website and the URL of the website that they want you to link to.

It’s a numbers game. They know that maybe 2% or 3% of the people that they send this email to will link to the website.

What You Should Do When You Get This Email

Will, it hurt you to link to the website? No, it probably won’t. If it’s a spam website, it might. Obviously, you don’t want to link to anything that’s related to porn, gambling, pharmaceuticals, or anything like that. You typically want to stay away from linking to those sites.

Linking to them probably won’t benefit you either. With these types of things, I typically tell my clients, let’s pass on it because we don’t gain anything from linking to this website, but a lot of people don’t really know what these links are. They don’t know why people are doing it. They don’t know if it’s going to help them or hurt them.

If you get emails like this, and it’s typically a template saying, “I love your blog. I was reading this post, and I think that this link would be a really good resource to add to your blog post.” That’s all they’re trying to do. They’re trying to get you to add a link from your blog post to their post.

If you’ve added these links before, it’s probably not the end of the world, but it’s probably not going to help you either. We typically don’t do them on our clients’ websites, but if you want to, it’s up to you.