Using Your Expertise to Promote Your Law Firm
You've probably heard a thousand times that starting and maintaining a law firm blog is a great way to promote yourself by demonstrating your expertise in your area of law, and it is. But blogging is far from the only way to establish your knowledge and ability/willingness to help consumers with a particular sort of legal issue, and thinking beyond blogging provides an opportunity to reach a much wider audience and thus a larger number of prospective clients.
Think about where your potential clients are, and use that information to determine how best to get your knowledge in front of them. A few possibilities include:
- Volunteer to write a weekly or monthly legal column for your local newspaper;
- Create an informational booklet or pdf that's available for free on your firm's website, by stopping in to your office or through outlets like your local library and park district;
- Host a free event to talk about a topic of interest to your prospective clients (and take names!);
- Create a free newsletter filled with information of interest to your client base;
- Get in touch with local reporters and let them know that you're available as a resource if they need quotes or analysis relating to their legal stories.
These possibilities just scratch the surface; your prospective clients need help and want to hire someone they can rely on, but often don't know how to choose an attorney or assess your knowledge base and willingness to go the extra mile for them. Providing free information in places they can access it even if they're not yet ready to hire an attorney allows them to see that you know your field and that you're offering resources to help them out even when they're not paying clients, making it much easier for them to trust you when it's time to hire a lawyer.
You'll find more ideas for getting the word out about your practice without spending a dime in our free white paper, How to Market Your Practice for Free. Just visit our Law Firm Marketing Resources page and scroll down to the white papers section.
