Sipping Water from a Firehose

Man there's a lot of information out there about starting up a blog and podcasting venture! For someone easily distracted like myself, it can be hard to know where to start. I like to say it's like trying to take a sip of water from a firehouse. There is so much streaming past you it's easy to get spun off onto a tangent and find yourself down another rabbit hole that has little to do with what you started off trying to accomplish.

Oh look! A squirrel!

So let me fill you in on my thinking and ask you for your advice.

My primary goal for entering into the internet marketing and blogging space is to drive clients to my law firm mostly for estate planning services. The idea was to use Facebook advertising to entice potential clients to visit my website and ultimately sign up for a consultation that leads to an engagement. Simple, right? However, along the way as more and more of the firehose of information washed over me I began to see the opportunity to apply those same principals to a broader audience on a different mission. That's were the concept of The Law Entrepreneur got started. So really I am doing two things at once here: developing marketing strategies for my law firm and establishing The Law Entrepreneur platform for solo and small firm startups. But they are kind of intertwined. Pursuing the marketing strategies for the law firm is sure to be informative for those starting their own law practice or seeking to move, as I am, into a new practice area. But clearly this isn't the first agenda item for those who are starting their practice or solo firm. There are steps you have to take initially before you start thinking about marketing strategies. But it will be helpful to keep this in mind when you do.

So let's talk about advertising on Facebook. I have my own personal Facebook profile as well as a FB professional page for my law firm. Pretty standard stuff there. I have dabbled in marketing on my FB professional page by "boosting" selected posts on the page's timeline as well as "promoting" the page itself. Knowing very little about what I was doing, I still got some good results from that activity in exposing both my posts and the page to a wider audience. Did that result in more potential clients calling my office for an appointment? Not really or else it is hard to say since I wasn't exactly tracking that properly.

I decided, therefore, to reset by getting a complete understanding of advertising on FB and then implementing that strategy to accomplish the original mission of driving clients to the law firm. To that end, I signed up with Rick Mulready - the guru regarding Facebook advertising - and his FB Advantage training course. This course teaches you all you really need to know about the process of using FB advertising to accomplish your business objective whether it is simply improving brand awareness or a complex signup process for your next webinar.

The basic concept is to create an interesting, eye-catching ad that includes a free offer, targeted to a specific audience, that when they click on it it takes them to a tailored landing page, where you capture their email address in exchange for the freebie, and that email address goes into a programmed email sales funnel that moves the prospective client to the point of signing up for the actual services or product you are trying to sell. Phew! Having finished Rick's course, the concept is pretty clear to me now. But I haven't got all the pieces in place to begin just yet.

From the long-winded run-on sentence above, you can see that I need the following:

  1. The Ad itself - this includes the artwork and the copy. Looks like I will be using canva.com for creating the ad.
  2. The Landing Page(s) - I chose to use ClickFunnels.com which is an amazingly powerful platform.
  3. The Email List - I am using AWeber.com as my email provider. I also use Contactually.com for more direct email broadcasts.

I have a lot to learn in these in these three systems in order to implement the FB ad campaign. Sigh...

Wish me luck! Boy the water from this firehose tastes good!

About the author, Neil Tyra

All through his legal career, Neil has been a pioneer in the use of leveraging technology to allow for the growth and prosperity of his law firm while providing outstanding client service. Recognition of his expertise and leadership in the legal technology space culminated in his creation of the popular legal podcast “The Law Entrepreneur”.

The podcast addresses the statement “What They Didn’t Teach Us about Running a Business in Law School”. It focuses on what it takes to start and run a solo or small firm law practice. Mostly the podcast includes interviews with successful solos and small firms to learn what they are doing right, what they have done wrong, what they wish they would have done differently. In addition, Neil interviews other entrepreneurs and business owners whose skill sets might be of interest to new law firm owners. Lastly, he loves to have what he calles “gadget folks” - those who have a product or service to sell that might help solo attorneys - on the show.