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If you just want the link it's
Some facts about getting UK employment
law clients to your site
Some facts the changing market in web
advertising
- Simply.com's adverts on the right probably reflect sites
you have visited before
You can test this by visiting Viking-direct.co.uk, or Habitat,
and then clicking back here. You will see that agencies who advertise
on Simply have used tracking software to show you adverts for
Habitat or Viking-direct. This makes space on less visited web
sites just as valueable as the expensive space down the right-hand
side of search results on the search engines.
- If you aren't using an agency, and just want to test an
advert, it's simpler to advertise on Simply.com than on Google:
How to start advertising on a small scale
- Check if the free opening £50-worth
offer is still open. In February 2010 it was possible to
go to
https://advertiser.simply.com/en/insys/simply.php?insysname=SIMPLY-B2_NLB&PR=BRT0
- Click the small "log in" link after "Already
signed up for Simply.com?"
- Click the small "Sign Up" link after "Haven't
registered for Simply.com yet?"
- Log in with your email address and the password whenever
you need
- Click on the "Campaigns" link in the top
menu,
select "Product Line" from the dropdown
Select either "TextAd" or "Display"
on the page and follow the instructions
- Free online
banner-maker software can by googled for putting together
an online display advert if you want to. The most clicked-on
sizes are 250x300 pixel wide square and 160x600 wide skyscraper.
Once the service is activated, you will find on your control
panel detailed and updated information on the performance of
the creatives, numbers of hits and ad clicks, and your spend
to date. As Simply.com is a new entrant to the market, it has
enough space for a display advert. Google for "banner ad
creators online" and try at least two variations so that
you can compare performance.
For more information on the service and how the control panel
works please read Simply.com's FAQs. The minimum limit on spending
per period is five pounds, but real spending could be much less
if you select low bids and few sites to advertise on.
A frequent advertiser on this site via Simply is People
Per Hour, who charge you 10% if you get paid work through them,
otherwise nothing. At least two law society members have
got small amounts of work paid for through this web site - regular
advertisers are James Carmody of Reculver
Solicitors in London (who also hires meeting space and admin
by the hour) and Ian Steel of Employment
Law Solicitors Direct in Bingley. You can see the current
list at http://www.peopleperhour.com/find/Employment_Law.
If you're a law society member on that site, we're happy to mention
you on ours.
How to start advertising on a large scale
Contact simply.com and ask which advertising agencies among
their customers can use cookies to identify viewers who have
looked at legal pages. Better identification of peoples' viewing
habits now means that if you have just looked at Habitat, this
page is probably showing you a Habitat advert, or Viking Stationary
if you've just looked for something there, so your adverts can
be targeted very precisely without the need to advertise down
the side of search engine results.
This is why adverts on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft / Bing,
and Ask.co.uk are not the only or the best value option.
- Yahoo & Microsoft only advertise on high-traffic sites;
Google is fickle - their doubleclick rating service on the left
of the page refuses to recognise this site on a whim.
Mainstream search engines have plenty of good space next to their
own search results for advertising; snippits of their code on
other sites are a sideline. Microsoft and Yahoo don't bother
with middling web sites outside of the USA. Google sometimes
does, but doesn't invest staff time. You can see this on their
doubleclick
add planner, which refuses to acknowledge any hits at all
on this site even though the industry-standard Comcast.net does.
This leaves many middle-sized publishers & advertisers short
of a marketplace in which to swap space for pence and we are
forced to use the new-generation agencies like Simply.com
We can set-up our own click monitoring system if you prefer through
bit.ly and invoice you per click, or use other obscure agencies
if the turnover is enough to justify their minimum payment. Most
law publishers charge advertisers directly and charge per six
months. They are selling business to business services. We are
selling one niche of business to consumer services, and so think
it's fairer to charge per click.
- This is a quote from Intelligent Marketing for Lawyers:
Source: http://www.intelligentmarketingforlawyers.co.uk./downloads/10mistakes.pdf
(warning: you could spend a day reading this before placing an
ad on employees.org.uk & you might get bogged-down &
forget. Please place an ad before reading the guff.)
When did you last use Yellow Pages to look for a professional
service?
Or contact an accountant, say, just because you saw their ad
in your local weekly?
If nobody’s offering you a ready recommendation, don’t
you usually start by Googling when you need to find a professional
service? We’re prepared to bet you do. And this of course
begs the more important question—how many of your prospective
clients do you suppose start searching for an employment lawyer
by flicking through a book? And if you’re still advertising
in Yellow Pages (or another physical directory), do you really
know why? Further, if you’re advertising in any kind of
published media—newspapers, magazines, trade press—can
you quantify whether it’s achieving anything?
Mistake # 8 is to carry on advertising “just because”
and without being able to measure the results. [...] an intrinsic
weak link [...]. Your message is only going to be of value to
people who need what you’re offering at the exact moment
they read, see, or hear your message. If they don’t, they
may remember you, but unless you are Tesco or Ford, they much
more likely won’t. And herein lies the appeal—and what
helps explain the phenomenal success—of online pay per click
advertising, of which more shortly. [...]
Direct response works entirely differently, and if you’re
going to spend on advertising this is where to do it. Here you
are inviting a prospective client to take some action which leads
them to your door. And, unsurprisingly, as you have no widgets
to sell upfront the best type of direct response advertising
for lawyers is offering something for free to start the relationship.
Adams, Brown and Curtis could, for example, advertise a free
redundancy seminar in the local paper, either directing readers
to a dedicated phone number (ideally an 0800 number) and/or to
a specific page on their website. Either way, the means are in
place to measure the response and gather the names of some new
prospective clients, and the firm has also achieved a little
positive profile-raising. It’ll also quickly become obvious
whether it was worth the effort.
What about those ads on Google then?
You know the ones—they appear at the top of your search
results on both Google and Yahoo!, and in a column down the right-hand
side of the page. This is pay per click—direct response
advertising 21st century-style and the easiest way to get a high
searchengine position. [meaning in the "sponsored links"
column] Google’s AdWords take the lion’s share;
Yahoo!’s equivalent is Sponsored Search. PPC can produce
fantastic returns because you advertise to people who are very
specifically searching for what you’re offering—and
they want it right now. You only pay for your ad when somebody
responds by clicking through to your website, and the pricing
is determined by a real-time auction based on actual market values,
not a figure plucked from the air by an advertising executive.
A further huge advantage of PPC is that—unlike just about
any other type of advertising—you can turn it on and off
at will.
So far, so good, and the process looks disarmingly simple at
first glance. But do not be fooled. Finessing any PPC programme
can be incredibly time-consuming and complicated. And because
it’s becoming more and more popular, the goal posts keep
shifting, and it’s all too easy to spend a great deal of
money very quickly and achieve nothing. So before dipping even
a toe into the PPC water, research the topic thoroughly, get
some expert advice, and don’t just rely on what Google and
Yahoo! tell you about their respective packages!
Internet advertising is booming because it is easy to dip
a toe into the water with a pay-per-click text advert stating
your name, your town if the software doesn't allow regional adverts,
and inviting a click on your personal page of the corporate web
site, your blog or perhaps the contact form of a smaller legal
firm web site. You can do it from your laptop. You can do it
after a few glasses of wine if you check back in a day or two.
You can do it as a junior employee without bothering your boss
(but consult a lawyer if not true). Basically it it suits self-teachers
and dabblers.
Those who practice get more. The results may be a few clicks
a month and little or no trackable new business, but this is
a good way of learning what works. Maybe modest advertising is
best. Intelligent Marketing for Lawyers quote another example
of a card on a stand at the Citizens' Advice Bureau (Advice
Service Alliance are the rival) which may only bring one
client a year but is still worthwhile. If internet advertising
is so important to your business that it can be out-sourced to
a specialist, it's still worthwhile to dabble and experiment
before going to a meeting with them, just in case it isn't. Otherwise
you will be going to a meeting about something you are clueless
about, which is surely every lawyer's nightmare.
"lawyers employment [town]" if people are searching
for "let down by my trade union". And the click
itself is of low value unless you offer a local or niche service
that people discover in more detail. Your office's reputation
might rise from "that firm over the road" to
"Bloggs.co.uk over the road who have an employment specialist",
or from "that firm I see advertising" to "the
one with sample grievance letter templates".
If your corporate web site doesn't allow you to ad tracking code,
you can set-up a personal blog page and add it there. Here's
an example by
a criminal lawyer.
So it's best to set the ad to click on your particular page of
a large corporate web site, on a blog, or research ways of tracking
what happens next. Yahoo offers a pay-per-call option. The ideal
would be a pay-per-case won, check cleared and nett happiness
caused worldwide. The worst result is teasingly put in the title
of another expert's article:
http://www.barnesgraham.com/Traffic-has-no-value.html?page=1
No add agencies offer happiness tracking but most offer some
sort of tracking code that can go part of the way, tracking who
clicks on your contact form for example. It could be technically
possible to pay per deposit, even if no agency offers the service
yet. Meanwhile, please book a test advert before going-on to
read the rest of the download.
Other places to advertise employment law - none of which uses
mainstream ad services:
TakeLegalAdvice.com charge lawyers a minimum subscription fee
each year according to The
Times.
Lawyer
Locator - an online version of Butterworth's - offers £199
annual promoted listings to its 51,000 monthly searchers. Like
several law web sites, they charge by time but do use an agency
called adtech for tracking visitors, which is good because their
100 times more visitors than employees.org.uk are spread between
1,643 law firms and an extraordinary variety of niche specialities
that are mainly business-to-business rather than business-to-new-customer.
InfoLaw
offer 30 pages of free solicitor's listings with paid-for highlighting
or top placement as well as more ambitious search engine optimisation
services for legal web sites.
Venebles.co.uk manages
all ad sales manually - there are two, possibly three ad spaces
amongst  employment law solicitors
and others around the site. She operates a waiting list. Current
advertisers & renewal dates are here:
Venables.co.uk/aboutsponsoredlinks.htm#group
2
Solicitor.info
is free and takes two minutes to sign-up to. The reason it's
a respectable link is that it invites reviews of firms from the
public. Some firms pay by the month to have an advert in a county
section or shown nationwide.
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Source: NOP survey for Lexis Nexis 2004
^ A Simply.com
ad ^
Simply.com are European-based and sometimes have an opening offers
to advertisers. Advertisers are offered simple code to put on
their sites to measure how much visitors do after clicking-through.
If you prefer to advertise through Google Adsense, please
ask them to allow their code to work on this site.
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