Andrew: This is Andrew Pototschnik with Lawn Care Marketing Experts. I’m here today with Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing and myduiattorney.org. His company focuses on online marketing, specifically, for attorneys throughout the United States. Welcome, Richard. It’s good to be talking to you today. So, why don’t you give the listeners a little background? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Interviewer: Thanks a lot, Andrew. I’ve been doing online marketing for probably three and half years and about two and half years ago I started working with attorneys by providing them leads, specifically, for DUI cases, (aka drunk driving cases).

Then, as I got deeper and more involved in the industry, and learned about the attorneys themselves, how they function and what their unique challenges are. More recently,
(the past year and a half), I’ve been providing many other lawyer-focused services such as SEO (search engine optimization), direct mail copyrighting, scripting incoming office calls, helping them retain a higher percentage of clients through improving their follow-up with potential clients, newsletters to past clients and more.

Andrew: That’s great. Why did you initially decide to start focusing on helping attorneys market their law practices?

Interviewer: Well, when I first considered working with attorneys, I had some reservations about it, but then I started providing leads to the DUI industry, because I rationalized that DUI wasn’t like a really ugly area of the law.

To me, family law, child custody or murder, areas like that, were unseemly, ugly things, so I figured DUI, since it affects a lot of people who never intended to commit the crime, and it’s not distasteful, was a middle of the road area. That’s how I got into the industry to begin with.

When I started helping attorneys market their practices by providing DUI leads, I saw, as I started working with a lot of them and getting into the backend of their websites, that most had websites that they put up years before. They hadn’t touched them. Google sent them maybe four or five visitors a day.

I started hearing complaints from a some attorneys, too, ‘Hey, don’t you guys have more leads,’ or, ‘Hey, I don’t have a lot of money this month. I’ll have to stop working with you. I’m barely getting by.’

I now have a very different perception of attorneys than the public does. Everyone else thinks they’re these rich guys who drive BMWs and have all this money. It’s not that case at all. The superstar lawyers do very well, but a lot of them struggle. They work very hard. There put in long weeks. The’re not appreciated. They need help with marketing. They’re busy being attorneys, not marketers. So that are some of the reasons I work with attorneys and why I enjoy helping them.

Andrew: Very good. What are some of the frustrating, yet common misconceptions that some of your attorney clients in general might have about marketing your practice online?

Interviewer: These guys get hit up, literally, every single day. Their administrative secretaries tell me SEO companies call every day from India. These companies say, ‘We’ll get you on page one of Google for 10 keywords for $1,000 per month.

We’ll drive tons of traffic to your website. We’ll redo your website to get you on Facebook and Twitter and social media, and that’s what you have to do to succeed in this economy,’ or ‘We’ll do pay-per-click.’ They’re not even asking what the attorneys need before they claim to have a solution.

Some attorneys are solo practitioners and they need to improve their practice and maybe they need to get a few more leads. Other attorneys may be getting plenty of leads, but they’re getting a lot of no-shows or a lot of their clients are falling out. Still other lawyers get plenty of leads, most are tire kickers. “No one has any money” they complain.

Other attorneys live in states where it’s become hard for them to make money doing whatever it is they do. Let’s say there’s been tort reform in Texas, and now personal injury lawyers there can’t charge enough to make that area of law worth it.

Attorneys are getting besieged by companies that assume, ‘This guy’s got money. I want to take that money, so I’m going to call and offer them this stuff and get it from them.’ I learned that’s huge misconception #1 in the legal industry.

On the attorney side, there are attorneys who are very good at what they do, but they don’t really enjoy dealing with marketing at all. These guys and gals are the potential victims of a lot of scams and problems.

I’ve seen a lot of them locked into 1,2 or 3-year contracts and the company that’s working for them is doing nothing for them, just collecting a check. These BS companies romanticize the situation, saying this, that and the other will happen, but they get no real results. Unfortunately, if the attorneys don’t understand what’s going on, they’re going to fall victim to these unscrupulous people.

Andrew: That’s a really good point and the one thing that you mentioned, and if I understand you correctly, is the different approach you take when you first approach attorneys. I think what you’re saying is your focus really isn’t on getting them on page 1 of google only, and that they get approached by a number of different companies, every single day.

Your focus is really about assisting them on a deeper level with all aspects of their marketing and it’s not just about getting on page 1 or getting that ranking. Obviously, that’s a byproduct of a good online marketing campaign, depending upon your goals.

But that’s a really interesting perspective that you take. So, focus really seems to be on assisting them in any way that can improve their marketing, whether they currently have a plan or if they don’t have a current marketing plan in play.

Interviewer: Yes. It also comes down to pricing. Let’s talk about Los Angeles. I’d say in Los Angeles, ‘Oh, everyone’s got money over there.’ You know, ‘If you get a DUI, for instance, it’s going to be $10,000.’ It’s not that way at all.

I’ve talked to attorneys in LA, for instance, where someone charged them $5,000 for a first time DUI. Others charge as low as $1,000, but, just like in any market, you’ve got guys who are ‘underbidding’ and ‘killing the market’ because they don’t know how to market themselves and they figure, ‘Oh, I’ll just go with the lowest price.’ They’re hurting the other attorneys who may have been around for 15, 20 years who are charging $3000+ and they should, because they do a lot of good work, but you’ll see that even within the same city.

So, if you talk to someone who charges $3,000 a case, they’ll have very different needs from someone who’s charging $1,000 a case. Again, they’re just a totally different animal, totally different creature.

One day, I may be talking to an attorney who’s been practicing for 20 years and they’ve always done Yellow Pages and things like that. Now, all of a sudden, they’re finally having to confront having an online presence. They have no clue what to do. They probably already have been burned.

This kind of lawyer has a very different mindset from a 31-year-old guy who’s been practicing for four years and is web savvy. So, you’ve got to be aware of that stuff. A big part of my job is education, i.e. getting away from the myths that they’ve been hooked on and the companies that may or may not be doing good jobs for them.

And there’s a lot more to say about the page one of Google. Let me give you a short story on it. This is something I hear, literally, every day.

Almost all attorneys I talk to, even current attorney clients on occasion, will say, Rich, I’m not showing up on page 1 for Dallas DWI lawyer… Why?”

I tell them, ‘You’re focusing on the wrong goal.’ Everyone’s chasing these few keywords (for instance is ‘New York DWI lawyer’ or ‘Orlando DUI attorney’) and this is not where the real benefit to you lies.

Here’s why, as a backstory: On my DUI site, I’ve got about 32,000 searches from Google earlier this year in 1 month’s time. If a few keywords only were responsible for all these searches, I would’ve seen that I have 400 different keywords responsible for 32,000 searches. What I saw was that I had 27,000 different searches responsible for all those searches.

Then I looked deeper and I saw in Google Maps and even in pay-per-click, what’s really getting people most of their traffic is what’s called ‘the long tail’, these weird long sentence-type phrases that people type in.

Here’s an example, ‘Driving in Miami Beach last night, got pulled over, blue a .13. What do I do?’ or they’ll type in, ‘My neighbor’s dog got out and bit my leg, tore my calf muscle. I need a lawyer,’ that kind of stuff. That’s typing in, again, ‘Miami DUI lawyer.’ And when you look at the website that’s successful, what you see is, again, people are searching for thousands of different things and you want to, essentially, create a net that captures thousands of different searches. So, your real goal which sounds impossible at first is to get on page one of Google for thousands of different keywords, not just a few. That’s where the results are. Now, that’s a real eye-opener to people. Then, they wonder, ‘How do you do that?’ There is an answer to that, but that’s one of the major misconceptions that I deal with.

Andrew: That’s a great answer. I think you know that, at my company, we get the same question a lot and I completely agree with you. That’s a very good approach today and I think that’s the complete opposite approach that probably your typical, you know, fly-by-night shady SEO company takes. You know, they’re not focused on any of the long tail phrases. All that they’re concerned about is fighting for the ten phrases in a particular market and, often times, they’re battling 100 different companies trying to target the same exact key phrases. I think that’s a great strategy to have. That’s really good. That’s really good.

Interviewer: Again, I’ll give you one more quick detail. Imagine the key word ‘DUI attorney’ or imagine the keyword ‘DUI lawyer.’ Well, a while back, I was number one for both of those terms. You think, ‘Wow, you’re going to get thousands of searches.’ No. You get about ten searches per day per keyword, for those two and those are probably the top terms you could ever rank for, let’s say, specifically, for DUI and it did me no good. So, I know, firsthand, this is just BS. That’s why this other way works. I lived it. I can show the data. That’s the reality out there.

Andrew: That’s great and I would think that having a sort of slightly different approach where you’re targeting long tail key phrases, which are very specific, unique phrases, that aren’t necessarily searched for a lot, but there’s a lot of different variations of them. I imagine that you’re getting maybe, somewhat warmer leads, maybe hotter leads. Do you think your leads are a little bit hotter when you get incoming leads from long tail searches?

Interviewer: Yes. Here’s the real heart of it. So, there’s people who talk about traffic to a website, which is, actually, kind of meaningless if it’s not good traffic. Then, there’s the key words I type in. Okay? So, that’s one thing. These long tail keywords is what you want. Then, if you drill down deeper, you want to see that if someone types in this long key phrase that they stayed on your site for more than 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes, who shows up there on your site doing something and looking around. Then, you look at the number of pages they visit on your site. If they visit two, three, four or five pages, these are really strong indicators of interest.

So, what people really should be looking for is how many visitors am I getting a month for the area of the practice that I want to get them for that are staying on the site for at least a minute or maybe more, who are visiting two or three more pages of my site. Then, if you want to go even deeper, this is where it hits the bottom line. Are they turning into phone calls?

So, what you need to be doing is looking at what people are typing in to get your site right now and then, we’ll get into this, to rank for different keywords and phrases. You have to decide what you want people to come to your site for. So, let’s say you’re a criminal defense attorney and you want more shoplifting cases. Okay? You’ve got to create some content and get some links based on shoplifting and you’ll see that you’ll start getting searches on those specific types of things. Then you’re heading in the right direction.

Then you look at what your keywords say, you know, what people are coming in on and you might see some snippets of other type areas and you say, ‘I didn’t know that people were interested in domestic violence. All right. Maybe I’ll put some content on my site about that,’ or ‘I didn’t know that a lot of people are searching for alternative resolutions to divorce versus just full-blown trials.’ So, you can tailor your approach to what you see is going on and you react to it instead of just being like a bull in a China shop and blasting your way through the market thinking, ‘I’m going to go after these keywords and that’s going to win the day.’ That’s not how it works.

Andrew: That’s great. Are you tying it into a blog on your attorneys’ different sites? How do you, generally, tying that content?

Interviewer: Originally, what I used to do is I had article writers write articles on all the different aspects of the practice area, let’s say DUI. There’s a couple problems with that. One, is that you have to make sure that it’s accurate, you know, when you’re dealing with the law. Obviously, if they’re not accurate, you could have big problems, big liability issues. Secondly, you have to constantly rack your brain on what to write about. You tend to run out of topics. Third, it’s very hard to get good quality writers who don’t write in a stilted way. Here’s what I mean by stilted. Okay? ‘DUI is a serious offense in Miami Florida. If you’re charged with a Miami, Florida DUI charge you should find a qualified Miami DUI lawyer.’ That’s how a lot of the articles sound. They sound just ridiculous.

What I started doing is, I started telling attorneys, ‘Hey, take a news item, you know, someone was arrested for something in your area and just editorialize on it. You know, just once a week, just 15 minutes a week, sit down and bang out a quick article on it. Well, that wasn’t working because people just don’t have time. They just don’t want to do it. They don’t see the value in it.

So, eventually, what I started doing is I will call the attorneys, and that’s what we’re doing now, and we do a recorded phone call and we talk for an hour about DUI or about, again, sex crimes or estate planning and what I realized is that the average person speaks 130, 140 words a minute. So, over an hour, you can get seven or 8,000 words of content that’s all good stuff because it’s the attorney speaking it. It’s not wrong. They obviously know what they’re doing, but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting because it’s conversational and you can have it transcribed and put right on their site.

So, for most businesses, even if they only do half an hour a month, that’s all they have to do, they would get 4,000 new words of content a month on their site. Then, they’re working with you or me and they see, all right, this is an area we want to target, you do the phone call specifically on that area. You get into all the minutia of that particular subtopics and, guess what, a few weeks later you’ll start to get searches on it. That’s just a million times better. It just works so much better. That’s what’s working out there. That’s what I’m having my guys do and that’s where it’s at.

Andrew: That’s a fantastic approach. Again, that’s something that you rarely hear a marketing agency doing. Again, you’re kind of taking the opposite approach, which is the norm in the industry that every other fly-by-night so-called SEO company is doing. That’s a great strategy. That’s a really good strategy.

Continuing down that road, something that I experience with my own business is that we get a lot of clients, new clients, who we’re not their first marketing agency. They’ve been burned by another SEO company. They been burned by somebody who took advantage of them and really were sort of victimized by unethical marketing companies. For attorneys that are out there listening to this, how do you recommend that they can avoid getting burned by all the shady companies that are calling them every day and spending all their money on their telemarketing department and about five dollars on their SEO department? How do attorneys avoid getting burned by these companies?

Interviewer: Well, they have to spend at least a little bit of time educating themselves about how to do marketing in general. Education, that’s the key. Attorneys, I know they’re busy. I know they’re seeing clients. I know they’re doing all this stuff. They don’t have a minute to breathe, but they’ve got to take time to do this because marketing is the lifeblood of your practice. If your phone stops ringing, if you stop getting referrals, if things slow down, you’re going to freak out.

You’re going to lay there in bed at night and say, ‘What do I do? What do I do? I’ve got to cover the office expense. I’ve got the cover my admin. I’ve got to cover all these expenses.’ So, you’ve got to think about it. You have to spend at least a little bit of time investigating. If you do that, you’ll be able to very quickly know what questions to ask, you know, how to screen people out real quick. Listening to calls like this [inaudible 18:39] to say to give you the information you’re looking for. I’m not the only one out there who is teaching people, you know, teaching attorneys how to market. You may want to go to other industries, too, where marketing is a huge thing and learn what they’re doing, you know, pull it into your industry. That’s really the best way.

You know, I’m not going to tell you like, ‘Oh, ask the company if they’re Google certified.’ I don’t tell you that they’re the right one to work with. You can see through that. Really, what you have to do, like I said, is just spend a little bit of time, learn what’s really going on. Another thing, too, is talk to other attorneys and have masterminds. If you don’t want to talk to anybody in your area because you’re afraid they’ll compete against you, well, you guys go to conferences. Talk to people in another state or in another faraway city, ‘Hey, Bob, what are you doing?’ ‘Hey, Joe, what are you doing? How’s it working out for you?’ That’s the best way. That’s the best way to arm yourself against this stuff and not be a victim.

Andrew: I think that’s really good. Your advice to really sort of team up with other noncompeting attorneys and turn to them for device and help and feedback, I think that’s a very powerful idea that can be applied to just about any business, you know, really having somebody you can bounce your ideas off of and ask people, ‘Am I crazy for doing this marketing? What are you doing that’s working ? What are you doing that’s not working?’ I think it’s very powerful having somebody to bounce off in a similar industry. That’s great advice.

So, we already kind of touched on two of your really unique approaches to marketing, but why don’t you expand a little bit further on how you do your SEO. We already mentioned that you do a lot of transcripts, do a lot of in-depth interviews with your customers. Why don’t you go a little further in depth on search engine optimization and what it is that you do that’s different.

Interviewer: Well, there’s really two pillars to making SEO work, content and links. Links are the little blue clickable snippets of text that are on someone else’s site, that when you click them they go to your site. Whenever you search for anything in Google, Google has hundreds of thousands of sites that they can show to the person. Whose site are they going to show? Well, something that’s relevant to what you’re searching on. You know, if you’re searching for a flower shop in Arlington, Texas, they don’t want to show you a sporting goods store in Washington. They want to show you exactly what you’re searching for. So, that’s why content is so important.

But, also, too, Google wants to know that you’re not just a junk site out there who no one visits and no one believes in. They want to see that other sites link to your site and not just any sites. So, for an attorney site, you want to get what’s called ‘relevant links’ from other attorney sites, if possible, other legal sites, perhaps some newspapers, you know, places like that. You don’t want to just get junk links from anywhere.

This is also another common slogan or tactic. Companies will call and say, ‘We’ll get you 500 links a month for $1,000 a month. Your site will be flooded with traffic. I spent time with some of the top SEO people in the world and I paid $3,000 or $4,000 for a day of consulting with these people and here’s the question I wanted to ask them and I got answered: ‘Would you rather have 100 or 500 mediocre links or one good relevant link from a site that makes sense?’ They said, ‘You want to go with the one good relevant link.’ That’s what I wanted to know. That taught me everything. I was afraid to do it because you’re romanced by the fact that, ‘Oh, I got 20 links this month and now the site’s going to do better,’, but I let go of that, finally, and I only chase relevant links, even if I only get a few of them a month, you know, one or two or three and I saw a massively better result from that. Again, that’s another hard pill to swallow. That’s opposite of what everyone’s telling you, but, I’m telling you, it works. That’s what works out there. So, that’s something that has to be done in SEO too. Those are really the two pillars.

Andrew: That’s fantastic. Again, really great advice. So, we touched on SEO a little bit. Why don’t we talk about some other kinds of marketing? How can you help attorneys with their pay-per-click campaign, maybe even social media if you want to touch on that? That’s a big buzzword these days. Everybody thinks that they’re going to put up a Facebook page and are going to get a ton of people on it. Maybe you can touch on that and also, maybe, direct mail, Google maps, local. I know attorneys get hit up every day with somebody trying to tell them, you know, Google Maps listing or reputation management or different things like that. How do you help attorneys who have problems in these different areas?

Interviewer: Yes. This gets into the customization of a person’s particular situation. Okay? So, there’s an instant shot in the arm you can get. You can buy leads from online directories. That’ll give you an instant flow of leads. Okay? If you just stop paying them, they go away. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you don’t have enough real flow, that’s what you want to look at. There’s a number of services online that do that, I being one of them, and a lot of other good ones.

You can also do pay-per-click, which is pretty difficult to do. It’s got to be worked on quite a bit and you need to know what you’re doing or it will take your money faster than any strip club will, but, if it’s done right, again, you can turn on that faucet of leads pretty quick. The longer-term stuff is SEO. I liken that to building muscles over months of time. It sticks with you. Other things you can do is direct mail.

In some states and cities they have the criminal defense attorneys doing the ‘jailer mailer’ where the courthouse will provide the names and the charges and the addresses of people arrested for various things. So, you can do a direct mail piece to those guys. And, yes, I know, each state has restrictions and your mail has to be compliant. That’s fine. It doesn’t mean it has to be boring. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be tested. It doesn’t mean that there’s not a whole host of things that you can do to improve that. So, these are just some of the things that attorneys can do.

In terms of social media, a lot of them just do it wrong. They do it the same way that one would advertise on a billboard. They’ll say, ‘We fight for you. We’re aggressive. We’re former prosecutors. We treat you like family,’ all that. You know, it’s what everyone says, the exact same thing. They’ll have a picture of the attorney in front of their books. They’ll have a list of practice areas and, again, they’ll have these slogans. So, for the most part, I haven’t seen social media work, but I think that’s because attorneys are doing it the wrong way.

What is working, actually, is driven back to content. If you provide valuable things that help educate people in the market, and you push that out on social media, or you put it on your website, or your blog or in the mail or any of those places where potential clients can run into it, that’s what works. So, as a for instance, let’s say you deal with car accidents. If you wrote up a little guide of, like, the top five or 10 things you must know about dealing with a car accident, and why you may or may not need an attorney, and you put that out there, again, on Twitter, Facebook, places like that, and you’re always offering helpful info, well, people out there are always looking for that. They’re craving it.

I mean, I had a lot of situations myself where I’m looking for info. I can’t find it. In the absence of info, I don’t know how to make a decision. A lot of people, when they get charged with a crime or they’re dealing with an accident, it’s a sudden occurrence. They don’t know which attorneys are good or bad or who to talk to. If you help people and inform them, they’re not going to just sort of take your info and run. They’re going to be thankful to you for providing the info and it’s going to act as a magnet for people to be attracted to you and to call you, instead of you having to hunt them down and beg for them to hire you. That’s the way to make all this work. Look at it in terms what are you missing in your practice, how fast do you want to ramp up, what areas are you deficient? That’s what’s working, that overall process.

Andrew: That’s great. And you touched on something that here, at my company, we call ‘me marketing’. It’s marketing all about the business and what the business wants you to know and it’s rarely about what your potential customer actually needs or is searching for. That’s kind of how we refer to it. It’s all about the business owner and it’s not actually about the person looking for their services or, basically, the solution to their problem. That’s really good. That’s good. So, I think you touched on some of this again. So, what are some of the products or methods or just the things that you’ve developed that have really helped attorneys market their practices better?

Interviewer: Well, again, this new method of creating content on their site is big. Actually, what recently we done with it is an hour-long call, once transcribed, if it’s done in the right format, you can add pictures, table of contents. You can make it into a book. It could end up being a 50- or 60-page paperback-sized book. So, I have a book offer out right now, actually, where this is what we’re doing, one-hour call and you can speak a book in an hour. We’ll do one on, let’s say, estate planning or divorce. We’ll do an hour call, get it transcribed, again, with pictures, table of contents and all that and it becomes an actual physical book. Then, the content goes to three places. It can go even more, but, one, is that the transcription goes on their site, helps with Google searches.

Two, we make it into a PDF and we make a picture of the book that goes on their site. People can download this book for free. When they do, they’re asked to put in their name, phone number and e-mail. They actually become a lead to that law firm.

Number three is that we actually get physical copies of the book made and sent to the attorney and we tell the attorney, ‘Hand these things out.’ Here, for attorneys is a common situation that they should do that; potential calls, they talk to them on the phone. They don’t make an appointment because they’re, ‘All right, well, let me think about it,’ or, ‘I’m going to talk to my uncle,’ or whatever it is. Well, get a physical address and tell them, ‘Hey, I have some free information that would be really helpful for you. I would like to send it out to you. There’s no obligation. It’s a book I wrote on this particular subject that we’re talking about.’ So, get that in the mail to them. That may include a sheet of testimonials, include a letter from you, include a bunch of items.

Well, that’s going to make a huge impression on potential clients. No one else is doing that, unless you’re getting a phone call, ‘Oh, you called us a week ago. We’re seeing if we can move forward on your situation.’ In the meantime, after they’ve talked to you, they’re also getting besieged by other attorneys offering a payment plans. Their family’s telling them, ‘Oh, Uncle Bob handles this area of law. Why don’t you call him?’ So, you’re fighting against all that stuff and if you come through as the expert, and you have this authority and credibility because you wrote a book, and because your marketing it to them in this personal way, well, you’re going to do far better and close far more clients.

Situation two is, you talk to them on the phone and make an appointment. Even though they have an appointment with you for next Friday, which is, let’s say, six days away, that whole time they could be suffering buyer’s remorse. They could, again, be called by other people and they may no-show. I mean, there’s plenty of attorneys that get no-shows and it drives them crazy, wastes their time. You can cut down on it by sending them out a package of stuff, especially a book.

A third way is they come in the office. You talk to them. You’d now spent time in a free consult which everyone offers and it’s, ‘All right. Thank you. I’m going to think it over,’ and your thinking, ‘Dammit, they haven’t signed my retainer agreement.’ Well, hand them a book you’ve written. Hand them some testimonials. Hand them things that will cut down on them being lured away by someone else. That’s one of the main products that I’ve recently developed that’s is working wonders for attorneys’ practices because most of them are leaving 3, 5, 10, 20 clients every month that they might have gotten. That’s thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands, for a lot of them. So, that’s one major thing.

Andrew: That’s huge. That’s huge. So, again, your approach is, just like you said in the previous question, making it about the person who needs help and not about the attorney. Make it about helping people and offering them valuable advice that they can actually use and that really puts you on top and sets you apart from the other attorneys that are competing with you in your market. That’s really good advice. That’s really good advice.

So, let’s continue on the topic of attorneys. So, what kind of a law firm would be an ideal fit for you to work with and what kind wouldn’t? I know there’s all types of clients out there. Maybe some of them are nickel and dime law firms. Maybe some of them just, for whatever reason, you don’t want to do business with them. Just a couple of examples of who would be great to work with and who wouldn’t.

Interviewer: Well, first of all, you know, the attorney’s got to be open to not thinking they know everything. Not that I’m attacking anybody, but attorneys have to be highly knowledgeable and highly skilled. They have to know a lot of stuff. They’re seen as the expert when someone comes in. Well, there are experts out there in marketing and other things and an attorney has to be open-minded and, not only be willing to listen to somebody that may help them, but also get involved in the process. So, attorneys, whether solo practitioners or bigger firms, they have to be willing to partner with me on the marketing, learn about it, take time to do phone calls, things like that.

If they just want to treat it like a service, like a cable company, that you pay 30 bucks a month to, and when the cable doesn’t work, you punch the cable box and say, ‘Piece of garbage company. This doesn’t work.’ This is not a janitorial service. This is like an integration into the heart of your practice. So, you’ve got to be willing to do that. You’ve got to be willing to tell the marketer, ‘This is how much we charge for this kind of client, depending upon the case. This is how many cases I have a month. This is how many cases I want to get a month. This is my monthly nut. This is where I’m at,’ and not be embarrassed by it or think, ‘You don’t need to know that information.’ That’s the kind of firm that doesn’t work well with us.

Also, firms, too, that are willing to track what’s going on. I mean, everyone wants to cover their eyes and not see what happens when they spend money or when they step on the scale or things like that. They just don’t want to know and I’m guilty of that too, but if you don’t track what’s going on, you just won’t know. You’ve got to track how many phone calls you get to your site and how many people visit the site. What are they searching on? You got to track, if your admin is answering the phone, what are they saying? Are people hanging up on them? Are you taking calls at night? Do you have a system for doing that, and on weekends?

If you’re spending marketing money in five different areas, which area’s working and which area is just wasting your money? Cut them off. You’ve got to be willing to do that and then you’ll be a lot more successful. So, the companies that, again, are willing to do that, and they’re not just thinking that they’re better than everybody else are those that I can work with. The other ones, they’re probably going to be victimized by bad companies because they’re just not open.

Andrew: That’s great. That’s great. So, kind of, in closing, for all the attorneys who are listening to this interview, in the event that you might be able to help them, how can they contact you and what should they do to start a communication with you?

Interviewer: Okay. They can send me an e-mail. My e-mail address is myduiattorney@gmail.com. Give me a call on my cell phone which is 585-309-0353. I have a pretty fast turnaround. Just to make the attorneys listening laugh, we’ll do a free initial consultation so you know your marketing rights. There’s no obligation. The same goes for the way you speak to clients. I’m more than happy to talk to you and go over your situation and see if I can help you, if it makes sense and if you need the help. You may not.

Andrew: That’s great. That’s great. Richard, unless you have anything else to add, I think that was fantastic. I mean, that was some super valuable information. I hope that all the attorneys listening got something good out of it. I’m sure they did. If not, re-listen to it because that was some really good juicy bits. Richard, do you have anything else you want to add before we end the call?

Interviewer: Well, no, that’s it. I appreciate you taking the time and being interested.

Andrew: Well, it’s always good to hear what other marketers are doing. You know, me and you are in completely different industries, but we both share common techniques. So, it’s fantastic to hear another marketer’s perspective. Thanks Rich, take care.