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What Others Say About PROMO Sites

Do you ever wonder what others supposedly in the know think and say about professional referral online marketing organization (PROMO) services? Yeah, me, too. And neither of us has to look too hard to find opinions all over the place about the topic.

Here’s a link to let you read Digital Law Marketing’s article on the big ones.

Here’s a link to allow you to enjoy a comment thread on The Lawyerist. Opinions are a dime a dozen on this one and there’s at least a dollar’s worth in the thread.

Here’s a link where you can study JurisDigital’s study of AVVO.

There are dozens of places to read about PROMO advertising sites.

I’m curious what you have found about PROMO sites in your industry.

Post a comment below to tell me your experience in your workspace.[reminder]What’s your best PROMO site? What’s your worst PROMO site?[/reminder]

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PROMO No-Mo’; So-Med Instead

Have you ever tried to figure out how much it really costs to buy leads for new business clients sent to you by lead generation sites? Have you been really confused about all the tied package deals requiring you to buy websites (for an initial and then monthly fee) and professional pages (for another initial and then monthly fee) and then you can get leads (for each a per-lead price with scalable flow or a fixed monthly price with an undefined flow or for throwing all the money you have in your checking account into the cloud and whatever comes back to you in leads you can keep)? Yeah, me, too.

Regardless of what type of business you have, almost any business type has two, three, or ten or more industry-specific (legal, medical, automotive repair, plumber, HVAC or whatever) websites that will:

  • sell you a professional profile on their industry-specific site, where people looking for professionals like you can find you and get details about you and ask you to bid on their jobs
  • sell you a website that you can link to from that professional profile,
  • sell you warm leads from their industry-specific website and
  • sell you some paid search services to put your ads at or near the top of search engine results pages for the right amount of money used to buy the right collection of keywords.

I have a real smart son-in-law who has worked for several such websites after graduating with a Bachelors degree in marketing with a specialty of Internet marketing. I’m embarrassed to tell him how much I don’t know about this stuff. So, I asked a bunch of his colleagues who work in my primary workspace, practicing law, to try to explain what they would love to sell me.

For example, I called my rep Scott English at Martindale-Nolo. He explained they have a 3-pronged approach to Internet advertising. First, they have their Lawyers.com and Martindale.com and Nolo.com websites where you can (and, if you want to get a deal on their websites and search services, you must) purchase their full and complete professional profiles. Martindale-Nolo will sell you a profile on those pages so people can find you when they search those sites for help by topic and location.

Second, Martindale-Nolo will also provide you with a professional website, if you don’t have a top notch website already. These websites are mobile responsive and search engine optimized.

Third, M-N will sell you warm leads when people search for lawyers on M-N’s topic-specific (DivorceNet.com, etc.) legal information and professional pages.

Now, try to follow the pricing. My main rep, Scott, could only price the first two items. We had to get a ringer, Dennis Melendez, from Martindale-Nolo.com to price the leads for us.

Having a Lawyers.com professional page by itself costs $250 a month. Having a M-N website costs $100. But, if you buy them together, you can get them for $200 a month. Of course, that combo deal expired this coming Friday (no matter which day of the year you are talking to them).

Then, if you want to add getting the warm leads, it depends on your geographic area and practice area, because the pricing for leads varies by demand. For example, divorce leads in Baltimore, Maryland currently go for $26 per lead. You have to agree to spend at least $500 per month for a campaign. They will bill your leads against your deposit. You get and have to pay for all three kinds of warm leads — the good ones, the bad ones, and the ugly ones. But, if not a lead you receive is not in practice area or geographical area you can request a credit for it.

Now, returning to our previous posts, we are trying to develop $25,000 work of business using a $2,500 per month budget. We are paying $200 for a professional page and a website and paying 500 for 19 warm leads. Assuming a 50% closure rate. We are getting 9-10 cases of people who want our $500 “no kids, no property, nothing to fight about, uncontested, easy, inexpensive divorce” uncontested divorce. $700 results in $5,000 worth of business.

Granted, if we took all types of divorce cases, including our “less easy, more expensive”  divorces and the occassional “knock-down/drag-out” divorce then we would be able to get on average $2,500 per divorce or about $25,000 worth of business. This would be a better return on investment, but we don’t want to work that hard. We just want easy, inexpensive divorces. Maybe we can get cheaper leads for the no-contest cases.

Come back for the next post and see.

[reminder]For those of you who have different types of business, what are your similar figures for professional listings, websites, and lead generation farms?[/reminder]

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Finding Customers for Pennies on the Dollar Instead of a Dime

Picture of cornucopiaHave you ever thought it would be so great simply to pay one media outlet all your monthly branding, marketing, and advertising budget and be able to get all the leads you could service each month? Yeah, me, too. I’ve both had dreams and lived through nightmares like that. In a prior post, we saw how you could end up spending $2,500 a month for warm PPL (pay per lead) Internet leads and come up short hitting your $25,000 per month revenue goal. So, how can you get more business walking in your door for less, or, better still, almost nothing at all?

First, let’s review all the various ideas that may populate your BMA plan. We saw them a few posts ago. They are:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Blog
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

Note that “Internet directory referral fees,” which are the”professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) services we’ve discussed paying $25 per lead, are almost in the middle of this alphabetical list. This is probably where such things belong in a living, successful BMA plan. There are a lot of things you must invest in before paying PROMO services and there are also still a lot of things you should invest in after resorting to PROMO services.

Here are some of the must do’s you must do before investing in PROMO referral services:

  • You must choose a “result-oriented” customer value proposition to serve as the anchor of your branding, marketing, and advertising plan.
  • You must create a good tagline.
  • You must create, print, and carry plenty of copies of a nice traditional size business card, a more memorable quarter-sheet “ten-second” service card, and a trifold “elevator speech” brochure.You must create and claim your Internet address.
  • You must invest resources in a good, in contradistinction to a “bad” or a “killer,” reader-device-responsive, website. We have talked and will continue to talk about what makes a website “good.”
  • You must claim and optimize your social media accounts, your industry web aggregators’ accounts, and local marketing aggregators’ directory identities.
  • You must relate (i.e. be social) with other people in as many social media spaces your time budget will allow and convince them to follow your blog.
  • You must blog with relevant content that is supplemented, persistently and consistently, at least weekly, but preferably more often.
  • You must create a valuable lead magnet to give prospects in return for them giving you their email address.
  • You must convince people viewing your site (for the first time, hopefully) to let you continue to send them your new blog posts every time you send one.
  • You must create and implement an e-mail drip marketing program including both content and a platform through which to send it.
  • You must invest in and use an effective and efficient customer relationship management program that ties your prospect management into your client management aspects.
  • You must network in person and by email with current clients.
  • You must network around “pools” of prospects and people who can refer you prospects.
  • You must create and implement a referral recognition and thank-you program including a shout out in your blog and at mailing them a handwritten note containing at least a $5 Starbucks card. The size of the gift is not nearly as important as the handwritten note and the fact you personally took the time to say thank you in a demonstrative way.

Contrary to conventional thinking that everyone searches for whatever they want on the Internet, word of mouth still generates a lot of business for small business owners. It also costs you pennies on the dollar vs. pay-per-click or pay-per-lead.

If you do all of these things effectively, efficiently, consistently, and persistently, then you may well escape the need for long-term dependence on PROMO leads.

Nonetheless, come back next post and we will take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of PROMO leads. Spoiler alert! One of my main complaints about PROMO leads and other PPL and PPC digital advertising is PROMO leads only work what little they do only as long as you continue paying the PROMO website owners to send them to you.

[reminder]What’s your experience with PROMO lead generators?[/reminder]

 

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Yes! We Can!

Have you ever thought the home page of your big, beautiful, awesome, professionally designed, horribly expensive website is an overgrown thicket of inconsequential stuff that does nothing but vacuum money from your bank account, dust up your clients’ view of your business, and never delivers prospects to your sales funnel? Yeah, me, too. But then I learned to treat my website like a legal brief; the key word there being, “brief.”

Briefs should be short, sweet, well-organized, easily navigable, and to the point. Take a look at these 16 examples of brief website home pages from Hubspot! They are all good. They are all effective. They are all brief. They are short, at least “above the fold.” Uncluttered. They all resonate with their target audience and compellingly state their value proposition and only one value proposition.

And, finally, they all state that “single-topic” value proposition front and center in very few words how you can use whatever they are selling to join a crowd of similarly situated others and make your life better.

None of them talk at length about how many years of experience their company has. None of them discuss everything their owners have ever done and every award they have received. None of them provide you with much, much more information than you can easily digest in 5 seconds. None of them give you more choices to delve deeper in their website than you can pick from one look at the page and pushing on button.

And, being good cultural branders, most of them are doing as many of the steps of cultural branding as they can on one page.

An, they are doing it effectively using good layout, CTA (call to action) placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements.

These things can be done by yourself with just a little education, training, and experience; just a little bit of coaching from a business advisor with education, training, and experience in website design, implementation, optimization, and usage; and just a little bit of help from a website service company that is geared toward using easy, inexpensive tools to provide business owners with easy, inexpensive websites.

Among all the other things I do, I run a business company consulting company, which is not only affiliated with, but also uses such a website service called hibu.

[reminder]How can we help you create and use your website better?[/reminder]

 

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3 Reasons Most Business Websites Suck at Branding

 

Have you ever wondered why that spiffy new, professionally crafted website you spent a few grand developing to show yours is a “serious business” sits all alone on the web, unvisited, unfriended, unshared, untweeted? Yeah, me, too. Rereading a long series of articles written by some “people who ought to know” about marketing in the age of social media may, however, clue us all in on an answer to this dilemma.

  1. Most business websites’ owners are too tight-assed to use the word suck on their websites when it’s really appropriate. People, especially serious business owners, seek to be universally loved and understood as serious, professional, prim, proper, and absolutely neither common, crass, nor, heaven forbid, vulgar. Being so, they for darned sure aren’t willing to let their hair down long enough to really relate with real people who are quite comfortable saying something, like your perfectly coifed website, sucks when it really sucks.
  2. Most business websites’ owners try to create a culture around themselves instead of trying to serve a culture that is coalescing around a topic bordering their businesses’ workspaces. Coca-Cola made this mistake with its Coca-Cola Journey digital magazine. Under Armour apparently didn’t when it took over where Nike left off and began UA’s “I Will What I Want” program by addressing issues of concern to UA workout clothing wearers somewhat more rowdily and randily by letting the public it was seeking lead the discussion
  3. Most business website content is designed to sell instead of enlighten, educate, entertain, and enthuse those viewing the website.

So, what can you do to do better than your dull, boring competitors?

First, do the opposite of these things.

Second, do the opposite of these things in a way that doesn’t overtly look like you are trying to do the opposite of those things.

Third, come back next time and we will learn some details of cultural branding.

[reminder]Would you stay on your website more than three seconds after you first see it?[/reminder]