How to market the small firm on the Internet

Promoting your site and getting people to come to your site:

Now that you have built your web site, will “they” come? Not without some web site promotion.

How to do it
1. In-house vs. Outside: You will again have to decide whether to stay in-house or go to an outside professional (to help you promote your web site)
2. Do it yourself
  Get a professional service or hire someone / telecommuting
  Companies that do submission
  Resources:
  * PromoteOne – http://www.promoteone.com/resources.html
  * AdResources – http://www.adresource.com/
  * WebPromote – http://METAtag.WebPromote.com/
Where to promote
1. Search engine promotion
  The Big Players
  If you don’t do any other type of promotion for your site, make sure that you at least submit your web site to the major search engines. This is where most of your (search engine) traffic will come from.
  * Alta Vista – http://www.altavista.com/av/content/addurl.htm
  * Lycos – http://www.lycos.com
  * Excite – http://www.excite.com/r/co=home_add_url;/info/add_url
  * Hotbot – http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp
  * Infoseek – http://infoseek.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.html
  * AOL – http://www.aol.com/netfind/
  * Yahoo – http://www.yahoo.com/. Really a directory and the submission process is slightly different
  Usually, you will simply need to click on the “Add URL’ or “Add Page” link
  A great resource that explains the ins-and-outs of search engines, is Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch, which has some fascinating and useful information.
2. Specialized Site Promotion
  You also should promote your legal site through some specialized sites that are law related. These sites range from free to $$$These range from getting a listing to a web site
  * FindLaw – http://www.findlaw.com/info/write/addurl.html
  * West – http://www.wld.com/
  * Martindale – http://www.lawyers.com/ and http://www.lawyers.com/lawyers-com/content/faq (give you page for about $200 / yr)
  * Attorney Find – http://www.attorneyfind.com/ – Price $100 per category per year
  * FreeAdvice – http://www.freeadvice.com or http://attorneypages.com/special/lawyersonly.htm – $250/yr plus $100 for each addtl. practice area
  * Lawguru (free) -Attorney Network – http://www.lawguru.com/cgi/bbs2/user/apply.cgi
3. Tools to use to submi
  1. Part automatic and part your work
    * Submit-it – http://submitit.linkexchange.com/ or http://www.submit-it.com/
    * lawguru – http://www.lawguru.com/cgi/submit01/submit-wnow.html
    * SelfPromotion.com – http://www.selfpromotion.com/ – A autosubmission service that works on the shareware principle. The site also has some good tips on site submissions. Besides the above search engines, there are a few more general engines you may want to submit to. An excellent list of the top 100 search engines has been compiled by Multimedia Marketing Group.
  2. Software
4. Link Exchanges
  1. Find sites to exchange links with
    techniques for finding
    search engines
    directories
    links to competitors
    * Alta Vista – link: lawguru.com
    * HotBot -select “links to this URL”
5. Newsgroups
  1. What are newsgroups?
  2. How to get there
    Netscape little button on lower right Read NG
    MSIE does not have built in one
    Check with your ISP
  3. NG Involvement
  4. Monitor and participate
  5. NG promotion
6. Mailing / Discussion Lists
  1. What are mailing lists?
    Examples
    net lawyers, webnet, lawyermedia, family law list
  2. how to get there
    listtool – http://www.listtool.com/subscribe/listtoollaw.html or http://www.listtool.com/
    CataList – http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html
    Listz – http://www.listz.com
    Involvement
    promotion

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