What's our brand meaning? What do we stand for as a company? Right? So we try and figure out, do you want to be the no fees, unless we win? Guys, do you want to be the big check? Guys, do you want to be the we're the most active in the community. Gals, do you want to be the we fight the insurance companies? Law Firm, we're the best in court. Law Firm, one thing I've learned, it doesn't matter which one you pick, because I've tested different options, different landing pages. What matters is that you're consistent. You pick one and you stick with it. And everywhere you're going to have your brand message, you're going to be consistent, because that's how you fight Morgan to Morgan. You can't win on dollars, but you can win on local presence, having the right message that resonates with your customers, your staff, your past customers, and then delivering that consistently in your marketplace. Here's a great example by Amanda demanda. She's an Attorney in Miami who even changed her last name to demand, which means like legal demand, or lawsuit fighting a lawsuit in Spanish. She actually changed her name to create a brand that stood out. She uses these purple and pink colors. She's developed a brand kit their logo, how to use the logo, what they stand for as a brand. And she delivers that consistently in everything she does. Look at all of her social media. Look at her on stage. She's very consistent with her branding and her brand message. Every single impression is consistently delivering a brand message.

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to this month's live stream event. I'm really excited about this one, because this month we are going to do the 10 golden rules of online marketing. And this is kind of like the presentation that started it all for me. I'm going to tell you the story of how we got started and 22 years ago, how this all came about. And the cool thing about this presentation is we're also going to do a legal version of it, and we're also going to cover the hot trends. What's working today, what's moving the needle for marketing companies, what's moving the needle for law firms on their internet marketing. Without further ado, let me share my screen here. Get the slide show. Slide showing. So my name is Jay Berkowitz. My company's 10 golden rules, and I'm the author of the 10 golden rules of online marketing. And today we're going to talk about the law firm edition. So I wrote the 10 golden rules over 22 years ago. And we're going to talk about what are still rules, what still matters? What's changed, if anything, and what the environment looks like. Today, we're going to share real case studies from our clients from law firms. And this case study is amazing. We made one simple change to the website, and we increased signed cases over 100% in one of the markets. So this amazing, some amazing little tricks we're going to share with you today. I'm going to share with you the single most important software every law firm should have today, and we're going to talk about the biggest change that's happened in Google as well, and how you can take advantage of it. We're going to go through a couple case studies. I like to call them the hockey stick. I'm originally from Winnipeg, Canada. More about that in a minute.

But we've got a number of real case studies where we've got these hockey stick shaped business results, and we'll get into that as well. So we'll talk about what's changed, bunch of success stories, case studies, and Golden Rule Number 10 is lead the trends. So that's where we're going to talk about, what are the newest things that are working the best today. We're going to talk about SEO and PPC and local service, ads, social media strategies. And if I can just take one minute, I'm going to tell you my backstory, how it all came about. I come from an amazing little city in Canada called Winnipeg, Canada, and it's even more amazing today when I tell this story, because way back when I was a junior account manager for the Winnipeg Jets account, the hockey team in Winnipeg, and the Jets came to us and they said, we want to do this thing in the playoffs, where one night the fans wear blue, and the next night they wear red, and the next night they wear white. And we said that would be way too confusing, and those were the team colors, red, white and blue, that we've just got to simplify it. Everybody wear white. Everybody wear white tonight. And I was on the front page of the Winnipeg sun with some of the Winnipeg Jets employees the day before the first big game, and the whole thing took off. As a matter of fact, this is my career coming full circle, because when I searched white out Winnipeg Jets, to show you a picture, there's actually a Google AI overview, the Google artificial intelligence search result explaining this massive marketing success story that became. Team, everybody wearing white at playoff games in Winnipeg, and last night at the playoff game, everybody was wearing white and on they now have huge street parties. And so this was one of the greatest marketing success stories of my career, and I'm super excited every I gotta conclude this every time I present the Winnipeg Jets actually finished number one in the entire league, and we're up to nothing in our series, and hopefully we're on to playoff success.

So with this incredible experience that I had very early on, in the early days, I actually wrote the 10 golden rules of online marketing. Now, why did I do that? I always give credit to this guy, Jeff sabar. Jeff became a good friend of mine, and he was a journalist that wrote for the South Florida Business Journal and for the one of the newspapers down here, and he did a presentation at the American Marketing Association, and it was the first time I'd ever heard a personal branding. And he referenced this article on Fast Company called the brand, called you. And this was a new concept, like we never, nobody ever talked about creating your personal brand, developing your own or your own social media, like social media really didn't exist back then, right? So this was like a new concept. And what he said was, think of yourself like the brand manager of your own brand called you. And what you want to do is you want to like, when's the last time you refreshed your branding? If you think of this is representative like a package brand, when's the last time you updated your resume to achieve the goals that you want to achieve. And so I said to myself, you know, what's the positioning for Jay Berkowitz, the brand? And I said, I had this tremendous experience where I worked on McDonald's, I worked on Coca Cola, I worked on strategic large fortune 500 brands, both agency side and client side. And now I had this incredible digital experience. I also worked at Sprint, getting people their first websites, and I worked at E diets, where we did hardcore $40 million a year worth of advertising and marketing. And so I came up with this concept of the 10 golden rules of online marketing, and I was asked to speak at the Direct Marketing Association, and I wrote this presentation, and I spoke at this conference, at the Direct Marketing Association, and I worked on nothing else in my spare time for six weeks in between getting booked to speak and speaking, and I created the first 10 golden rules website and the draft of the book and the presentation. And at the end of the presentation, five or six people came up to me, and they said they wanted to hire me as a consultant. And basically, I've been doing the same thing for the last 22 years. I talk about internet marketing, here we are today, or here you are sometime in the future, watching our popular YouTube channel.

And I talk about internet marketing, and then folks say, Hey, Jake, can you help me out? Can you take a look at our marketing? Or can you know, what would you do for our website? So basically, my business was formed that first day, at that first presentation at 10 golden rules. And there's one person that I always want to say another big thank you to, and her name was Sherry Maxwell McConaughey, and unfortunately, we've lost sherry. She had a terrible health mix up four or five. Years ago, but she was a beautiful soul. And Sherry came up to me and she said, our family has a Halloween store. Could you help us with our internet marketing? And we were able to build that up $6 million in revenue in the first couple years, and they were our first client at 10 golden rules. So God bless Sherry, and thank you so much for giving me that first inspiration that I could help people with their internet marketing. So today, 10 golden rules is an internet marketing agency, and we help clients with their marketing, but in the last five years, we've decided to specialize in working with law firms. So we only do internet marketing for law firms today, and that's our specialty, and we've become really good at it, because that's what we focus on, and that's what we do all day, every day. These two books became Amazon Best Sellers, and I'm working on my new book. We're trying to get it out the door, called advanced Internet Marketing for law firms, coming out this year. So without further ado, here, that's the backstory, and here's the 10 golden rules. And what we've done is we've revisited it and updated it with lots of examples on best practices and new things you can do for your law firm marketing.

So golden rule number one from day one, still today is there are no rules, and it's like a tongue in cheek rule. But the reason for this rule is that when I worked for Coca Cola McDonald's, we had, like, marketing rules, because we didn't know exactly what worked, so we followed the rules. And there were some rules, like, don't have more than five or six words on a billboard, because when someone's on the highway and they're zipping by, you can only have so many words, and we didn't know definitively that worked, but we followed the rules. The other one was we had focus groups, and we'd show people like a layout of an ad, or we'd show them a concept board for a TV commercial, and we'd ask regular consumers to envision, if this was a commercial, would it get you to go to McDonald's to eat more salads, or with this new flavor of Coca Cola, would you go buy more Coca Cola? And so we just generally followed the rules, like you would ask consumers things in focus groups, and it seemed to work more often than not. So we followed the rules. But I was always a little frustrated, and believe me, the franchisees at McDonald's and the bottler Coca Cola was even more frustrated that we didn't really know, like when we did advertising for McDonald's, did the did we need to do TV, radio and billboards? Or could we cut out the billboards? Or could we cut out the radio and save some money? And we would do tests in markets, and we would get results. The one thing I can tell you for sure is advertising works like when we launched a new campaign on Thursday at 6pm and we always started on Thursday at 6pm because we'd have a big weekend, say we had a new Happy Meal toy, we would be mobbed by like Friday after school, because the word got out, there was a new Happy Meal toy. And it worked like crazy. But we didn't know exactly what worked. But the one theory I had is that the one plus one equals three. If someone saw a billboard and they heard a radio ad in the morning and the kids were in the car like that, would click in, and then they'd be like, Oh, we're going to go to McDonald's. But it seemed to have a multiplicity effect. But definitely, one plus one equals three. But again, we couldn't tell exactly what worked, precisely to the penny. But the beauty of the digital world was now we had much more precision. So we didn't apply general rules, we applied math.

So here's an example of one of the first projects we ever did at 10 golden rules. And we worked with a great company great friends, called Life script. And this was a vitamin company that did customized vitamins based on a survey you would take online. So this banner on the left was our was the best banner when I met life script. This was the best performing banner that they had, and it got about 1% click through rate. So think back way back to the old days when this was internet marketing. You would run banners on AOL, Yahoo and MSN, and people would click, and they would come to your website, and then you could try and get them to take action. So these were new banners that we developed. So pick the one that you think was the winner. Was it exercise, donuts, nurse, or why vitamins? And people have guessed all kinds of different things over the years, but the winner was actually this woman asking the question, why do you want vitamins? And the moral of the story is that testing is the winner because we thought, okay, this attractive woman who's maybe multi race, she's pretty there's she was not cut off. That's very important in banners, we asked a question that was engaging. We had these radio buttons. Google doesn't let you do that anymore. We had another link, another call to action. We had a ban, a button that looked like a button that was clickable. There was a lot of reasons why. This banner worked. But we thought, okay, we've got the magic. We'll take this model and we'll put it in all the other banner sizes, and we'll put it in emails, and we'll put it in testing, and we'll put it on the website, and of course, it worked like crazy, right? No, it didn't. What we learned was that testing was the magic, right? I'm going to go back like testing all kinds of different banners and all kinds of different sizes, and finding out what worked and then doing a little bit more of what worked and testing it and retesting it, that was what worked. So we didn't follow rules. We follow the numbers. Here's a recent case study from a law firm my friend, Jeff McDonald, and here's his law for his website before, and I said, we made one pretty simple web change to the website, and that was we took the form off the homepage. And so many people are coming to me today. Morgan and Morgan has the form on their homepage. We have to put the form on the homepage. Guess what? Morgan and Morgan is one of the top search keywords in the world. People are actually looking for Morgan and Morgan. When they go to Morgan and Morgan, they're ready to sign up with Morgan and Morgan. But for the rest of us, phone calls work a lot better than forms. If you're a law firm, and hopefully most of the people listening to this are or any kind of business. Think of the difference between when someone fills out a form on your website and you try and call them back, or if they call your firm and you pick up the phone calls convert way better than form fills.

So what we did is we changed, made that one simple change to the new website. We changed the branding and the coloring and stuff too, but we went from 467 phone calls to 12 190 phone calls in the same time period, look at the skyrocket number of phone calls and leads like the overall leads improved. And one market was up 103% in signed cases, the other market was up 47% in signed cases with just that one simple change. So what's the moral story here? We want to test. We want to continually test. Follow your best instincts for what you think is going to work better, test it and validate it with very precise numbers. Another phrase I love, you can measure your return on investment, your ROI to the penny, and that's what I loved, of digital marketing versus internet marketing, right? Because here we have a number of different campaigns for one of our clients, and we know exactly how much we spent. So the auto accident campaign, the slip and fall campaign, and we know how many conversions we got, and conversions are going to talk about this a lot calls. Number one, we want calls. They generally convert higher than form fills. Number two, we want chats, and we'll talk about chat on the website. And number three, we want form fills. Okay, so calls, chats and forms. So this campaign, we spent $26,000 got 130 leads, conversions, Google term conversion, not signed clients. We'll talk about that separately. But these are Google, what Google calls conversions. And the overall cost for conversion was $202 but we can find out to the penny, like the slip and fall campaign got leads for $52 the auto accident campaign, 220, $5 the workers comp, 238, and then we're going to test within the same data we can get for every single keyword, every single ad, every single landing page.

We're going to follow the numbers right? The return on investment is measurable, literally, to the penny in these types of campaigns. Again, I talked about testing and innovation adding chat to the website. I'd like to spend a minute on this. It's so important. We still meet a lot of lawyers and other companies that don't have chat on your website. This is the intake or chat bot. We've got it on our website, and people say, I never use the chat. That doesn't matter, because take Jay's word for it and test it. 15 to 20% of people are going to use the chat, but 15 to 20% more than if you didn't have chat. Why is that? Some people are never going to call you when they come to your website, trust me, they're never going to call you because they're doing research for their aunt or their husband or their girlfriend, right? Or they're at work, or their kids are sitting there playing a game, and they're in the family room, they're not going to call and talk about that accident or the divorce or the bankruptcy, right? They're just never going to call because they're doing the research for someone else, or they're in a place where they can't make a call, but there's a high likelihood they chat, and by the way, they're not going to fill out the form on your website either, because it's their ads case. It's not their case. So we've got to test chat, and then we can get very precise data. So again, here's a client that got 177 calls. 44 of those converted 25% so the average conversion on this instance is 24% of the calls became signed clients. Okay, clients retain versus phone calls. The chats, 9% became signed clients. But these are 42 more clients. Maybe some of these people chat instead of called, but I would argue there's probably 30 more. More retained clients out of 473, so there's another 345, percent that wouldn't have happened if they didn't have chat. And then the forms, okay, only 5% of people who filled out a form became a signed client. Because, you know why? Because when you call them, they don't necessarily answer the phone.

So we're tracking everything very precisely and to the penny, and you have to do that in this competitive environment. Here's how we're using technology to track and measure when someone fills out a form on your website. We want to improve your performance. Okay? So we create, developed a software called tgr Boomerang, and it's like this, this Australian toy over my shoulder, the boomerang. You throw it out and it comes back and you can catch it. That's how boomerang works. So if somebody fills out a form on your website, our software immediately sends a text to your intake team, and they can call them right away. And you've got to call them right away, because if someone fills out a form on your website, and you check your email two hours later and find the form and call them. They probably already hired another firm. They probably already talked to three other firms. So we're using technology because we're learning from the numbers, and we're improving the numbers. Here's another program we're using to improve the trajectory, and it's called our referral and review program. And we send out these gift boxes to people who haven't done a five star Google review on behalf of our client, Stewart and Stuart, and in the gift box. So this is after a client's case is resolved they haven't done a Google review. We send them these VIP cards. We call them up. We explain, hey, you've got to open this up. There's a gift certificate in there, there's a bunch of merchandise, and there's these VIP cards. We're going to treat your friends and family like VIPs if they ever have an injury. So we're trying to get more reviews, and then we text them the link and ask them to do a five star Google review. So important, right? It's all about the numbers. Golden Rule number one, there are no rules. So what I say is, you got to block everything you know about traditional marketing, because it's not the rule of, oh, you should have five words on your banner, or you should have or someone tells you LSAS don't work. Doesn't matter. You got to test it. You've got to do a legitimate two, three month market test to find out if something's working, to find out the cost per lead and to measure the cost per conversion.

So we measure precisely how many conversions, but more importantly, how many signed clients you saw in those forms. We were tracking how many people signed up as a client. That's more important than how many keywords you rank for and this applies for everything you do online, for Google, for website design, you saw the case studies landing pages. We'll show you an example in a minute, tracking your calls, chats and forms and innovation like tgr Boomerang, this is an innovation, the new adding the new chat feature. These are things that are improving Five 10% improving your results. It's so competitive today that if we can get something that improves things 10% that's a game changer, right? You're either cutting your cost per acquisition 10% or you're getting 10% more clients for the same investment. One thing I say is there's no bad ideas. One time, we were talking to the intake team at a firm, and they said, Hey, you should try this, and you should say this in your advertising. But seemed like it didn't make sense. But we tried it, and it worked like crazy. So what you want to do is have a list of 10 or 15 things you're going to test in the coming year, and you want to test and verify and validate those ideas. And finally, there's one thing I added to this slide from the original slide, which is it's hard work, like you can't just do one landing page test and you're done, or in add chat, and that's the entire marketing innovation for a year, you've got to constantly have a testing calendar and do lots of great new things, and that's what changes the game.

Golden Rule number two is the internet is not television. Now, when I wrote this rule, maybe this is one that we would tweak a little bit. You couldn't stream any video on the internet like zero. The internet was like, super basic and dial up. 22 years ago, 23 years ago, when I wrote the 10 golden rules. And the biggest difference when I wrote the rules was that TV commercials and TV advertising could tell a story, and this was one of the most famous TV commercials of all time, and it was called, have a coke and a smile and mean. Joe Green, this famous mean defensive player on Pittsburgh, was walking out after a game, and this little kid said, Hey, Mr. Green, have a coke. It'll make you feel better. And he drank the Coke, and it was a classic drink shot. And then he gave the kid his shirt, and he smiled, right? And then the music came on, have a coke and a smile. This was telling a story. This was using music. This was using video, using sound, using emotion, right? And in the early days of the internet, you. When we couldn't play video, we couldn't do that. Now this again, this would be the one asterisk on the 10 golden rules. Is now we can use video, we can tell stories, we can use commercials on the internet. But back in the day, we had to rely on the tools of the internet. But one of the things that's was applicable 22 years ago, very applicable today is ID.

I see Don peppers and Martha Rogers wrote a bunch of great books called one to one marketing, and the lessons we learned are still applicable today. You want to identify, differentiate, interact and customize everything you do on the internet, and a great example is still Amazon. This is an old screenshot, but it basically works the same today. Every time Jay Berkowitz goes to Amazon, there's special deals and special offers, and they're suggesting books for Jay Berkowitz. And this is an old screenshot, but it basically looks the same today. When I go on there, there's a bunch of books about internet marketing and a bunch of books about lawyers and lawyer marketing, and those are the things Amazon's recommending to me. Oh, and there's probably some Winnipeg Jets hats, because they're the first place team, and I've bought a lot of Winnipeg Jets merchandise. But the message here, identify who are your best customers. How can I differentiate my marketing to target them? How can I interact with them differently, and how can I customize the relationship? Now I mentioned direct marketing a little bit, and when I wrote the 10 golden rules, and when I worked at Sprint and E diets, I was lucky enough that I had attended a great training course on direct marketing, the old fashioned direct mail testing and a lot of the principles that we learned in direct mail we applied in internet. And those rules I've been teaching for 22 years in the 10 golden rules, right?

So one of the things we learned in direct mail was a B testing. So imagine this is one test, and this is one test. And in the old days, it would have been we would test a blue envelope versus a yellow envelope, and then we'd wait three months for the data to come back in, and how many people took advantage of our offer that got the blue envelope, like, how many opened it up and looked what's inside, and how many took advantage of the yellow envelope? And we would test different letters and different copy and different offers and different response mechanisms, right? But you it was very slow and it was very it took three months to get the data back, and it was great, because you would get the data. But the beauty of the internet, and why I loved it when it came along and moved my whole career on the online, was because of the quickness of it, that we could do a B testing very quickly. So this is one of our clients. They're a tax attorney, and this was the old landing page, and this was the new landing page, and we see the results here. The first variant with no bulleted list was what we called it. And then these were, this was like a bulleted list, three easy steps. This one was getting 1% conversion rate. This one got 8% conversion rate. The software was 100% confident that it was 581% better than the original.

So we call it a B testing, because B beat a, and then what we're going to do is we're now, we're going to try and beat B, and there's a new champion, and the old champion gets thrown out. And so now we're going to test B versus C and B versus D, and until we beat B, and then we've got a new champion. So B, we've made a couple tweaks to B. We got it up to 9.5% conversions, meaning almost 10% of the people who came saw that landing page would call us or fill out the form or chat or whatever. And then we did version E. We just called it new design, but I think it had the orange call buttons and this blue we added, we the phone number popped a little bit better here, and we were able to get to almost 14% conversion rate. So again, we apply the strategies A, B, testing from direct mail. We do it very quickly, we measure it very precisely, and we get the results. Now I didn't tell you guys, I didn't give you any warning, but the bad news is, there's a math test involved in the 10 golden rules. Now the good news is you can just do it for fun here. There's nothing relying on it. But every single employee at 10 golden rules that we've hired over the last 10 years has done this exact same math test, and we do it today on Zoom. So feel free to pull out a pen, pull out a calculator, and what I want you to do is I want you to calculate the cost per lead using this example of one month of advertising. So the way it goes when I'm interviewing for a new strategist right now, and I'm giving out this test, as I have again for 10 years. So we in one month, we spent $2,500 on Google. We got 150 leads. Forget the sales. It's the same calculation. So. So whether they fill out a form and it's a lead, or whether they buy something on your website and it's a sale, it's the same thing, but if it's a law firm, and that's our example today, we spent $2,500 on Google ads, 150 people either called, chatted or filled out a form, so we got 150 leads. So what I want you to figure out is, what's the cost per lead, and then on Yahoo and Bing, same thing. We spent $1,500 we got 65 leads. And on Facebook, we spent $2,000 got 108 leads. Now, if you're watching this, sometime in the future, I want you to pause the video and do the exercise, because this is really good to test your mind and see if you're qualified to work at 10 golden rules, and I want you to answer everything in this column and then fill in all the totals on the bottom. And I'm going to delay here for one minute, and you guys are going to do your homework, and then we're going to come back and see if anybody can get it right. Okay, so hopefully this is the result you got.

Now, the mistake a lot of people make is they add up the cost per lead or cost per sale, but what's the moral of the story? Here on Google, we spent $2,500 we got 150 leads, and the cost per lead was $17 on Yahoo, we only got 65 leads, and it cost a lot more for each lead. On Facebook, we had the best, the lowest cost per lead, right? Because you want as many leads as possible for the least amount of money, our average was $15 cost per lead. So the next question I ask when we do this exercise is, I say, what would you do in month two? So a lot of people are like, What do you mean? I'm like, how would you reallocate the spend so that you get the most number of leads and we still retain some of the testing. And a lot of people say I put all the money in Facebook because I'd get way more leads. And I said, we forgot about the part about retaining some of the learning, some of the testing, because we might have had keywords in Google that got leads for $3 and some of the keywords were $100 the average was $17 so we're going to retain some of the testing. We're going to keep some money in Google, maybe take $1,000 of Yahoo, Bing, and put it into Facebook, and maybe 500 of the Google money into Facebook, and in the next month, assuming the percentages stay the same, we're going to get a lot more leads, and we're going to lower the overall cost per lead, cost per sale. Now you see why I asked this question in all 10 golden rules interviews, and you all can use that question as well, but that's the marketing math.

One of the cool things we can do today is something called custom audiences. And so what you can do is you can upload your email list to Facebook, to Google, to most of the LinkedIn and you. These are all the people on Facebook. These are all the people on your email list. And then there's an intersection there where Facebook's going to recognize or LinkedIn is going to recognize, who are all my prospective customers. And how can I target more people who look like this? And then you can tell Facebook, through their algorithms, create a lookalike audience, and I want you to advertise to more people who look like my customers using the Pareto principle. So Golden Rule number two, the internet is not television. A common mistake is to use a television strategy to think that you can use emotion and tell stories right? And to be honest, that's the one change in the golden rules today. You can use video, and you can use it very powerfully, but it's probably going to be shorter, right? It's not going to be 62nd commercials. You're going to have shorter, 20/32, clips, or even 10 seconds on tick the tick tocks of the world. But video should definitely be a part of your strategy. We'll talk more about that in a minute. I D, I C, from Don peppers and Martha Rogers, identify, differentiate, interact, customize. How can I find out who are my best customers? Who are my best past customers? If you're a personal injury attorney, then I'm going to differentiate how I'm going to treat those folks. I'm going to interact with them. I'm going to customize my relationship with them. So maybe we're going to send them the VIP kits that I talked about earlier. We're going to have a VIP party. We're going to invite all of our best customers once a quarter to a party where we're going to have do it in a buffet or do it at a pizza place. Have food, have drinks, give out our books, give out our merchandise, and sit people down and ask them to do a five star Google review. Right? Direct marketing.

So it's a bribe like I want you to give me your information to enter a contest, or I want you to give me your email to get my free ebook. And it's irresistible, like you make it something that seems so valuable that everybody wants to do it again. It could be a case calculator. How much is my case worth? A free eBook, a free software trial contest? Okay, so develop and test your own uvps. But here's one clue I'll give you. In the personal injury space, you don't you actually don't want to lead with the free handbook. You want to lead with the free consultation, because on a personal injury page, you don't want them to download your handbook and wait to get it in the email and read it. You want them to call you immediately, because if they download your handbook and they call another firm, you missed out on a chance to close a case.

So Golden Rule number four, if you build it, they won't just come a classic mistake that killed a lot of the dot coms was they didn't push, pull and drive people to the website. They'd raise a million dollars. They spend a million dollars building the website, where they should have built a website on the cheap, and spent the million dollars on advertising and marketing use, pay per click. Search engine marketing, search engine optimization. We call it the ABCs of SEO. Your architecture, your website's got to be fast. You've got to have lots of backlinks, other sites linking to your site. And C is content. And by the way, for all these topics, if you want to go deep on any of them, and you like this kind of concept, this kind of training, we have webinars on the 10 golden rules, YouTube channel, on literally, the ABCs of SEO. There's a whole one hour webinar on our YouTube channel where you can get information local service ads. We've got a couple of webinars on how to optimize for Google screen local service ads. You can use partner marketing and integrated marketing. PR is really good where, basically, you put everything into the mix, right? You've got your community marketing, your partner marketing for personal injury, that would be referring attorneys, referring chiropractors, referring MRI clinics, things like that. And so you want to build your community, build your partnerships, and connect everything through your social media. Talk about everything you're doing in the community, connect your marketing, all the improvements we talked about earlier, lots of testing and your advertising and marketing.

Get them on your email list. If you're a law firm or a digital marketing agency or even the local barbecue joint, these guys are great. Stay subscribed to them just because they're smart with their marketing. Right like before the start of the football season, I get the kickoff special before the start of Super Bowl. I get a Super Bowl special. And they're just very smart with their email marketing. Every time we send out the 10 golden rules newsletter, we get tons of opportunities right. Like once a month we this is our conference, by the way, 10 golden rules, tgr live. If you haven't heard about that, it's amazing. Check it out. We'll be back next March, but we were talking about our events. We're talking about, here's that website, case study, and we're just staying top of mind once a month, summarizing the things we put on our blog, summarizing the things we're doing, talking about the upcoming webinar, talking about last month's webinar, and giving everyone a download. But every single time I send out the newsletter, someone calls me up says, Hey, Jay, I've been thinking of redoing my website, or, Hey Jay, can I interview you for my podcast? But every time I send it out, I get opportunity, the super important thing for law firms, I always tell the story, unfortunately, I was in a car accident 12 or 13 years ago. Then I was in another car accident. I got rear ended again six or seven years after the first accident, I couldn't remember the name of my lawyer from six or seven years before that, why I wasn't on his email list. I wasn't on his Christmas card list. I'm Jewish. He could have sent me a holiday card. I didn't get a birthday card from the firm. So it's very important that you think of your subscriptions, and every month, at a minimum, you send out an e newsletter. Even better, print it. Send it out. Print it. It's going to stand out. There's very little mail today. You today. Send out the birthday cards. This is awesome, guys. It's a great opportunity. And every subscribe, every like on Facebook, every social media subscription, is an opportunity for you to tell your story, to stay top of mind for those referring the past customers, the referring attorneys, even Google reviews. Think of the importance every Google review is like a modern subscription, if you will, where people are saying, Hey, I like these guys. I trust these guys.

Golden Rule Number six, remember the four Ps now, most of us who went to business school took a marketing course and the four piece product place price and promotion. So I always like to share this. Think of your website as if you're a product manager in the old days, like I was a product manager in Coca Cola, and I was responsible for Coca Cola and sprite and all the flavors, like the oranges and the test we did, okay, solo, okay, soda was like a test product. We had a root beer product, right? So that's a product manager at Google. The product managers are in charge of web, search, mobile, YouTube, right? Geo, maps, there'd be a product manager. So think of your website like you're the product manager. What are you in charge? Assigned different people to be in charge of different things. Here's a great assignment. If you're a big marketing if you have a marketing department, you should have a testing a testing calendar, someone's in charge of the testing calendar. You should have landing page testing. Someone's in charge of that, new innovations, someone's in charge of that, okay, or maybe your marketing managers in charge of all these products, okay? Product, place, price, promotion, so, promotion, so on the internet, typically, we're going to, it's going to, we're going to charge less than we charge in a retail store. We're going to have things like free shipping and things like that. So you want to think what I'm going to do differently on the internet that I wouldn't do what's more important, right? Price. Again, typically price is less on the internet. And there's even an app that you can scan in a store and see if it costs less on Amazon. And then you can literally in while you're in the store, while you're showrooming, you can buy that product on your phone. You don't have to carry it home. You can get it shipped to you at home. And finally, place product, place Price, Place promotion on the internet. I would argue that the most important. A place, we used to say in retail location, the most important location is coming up on a Google search for car accident attorneys near me or divorce lawyers near me, right? So you can use pay per click local service ads and Google Maps. You've got to make sure you optimize your Google Maps.

Golden Rule Number seven, trust is golden. So this is a great example. My friend Brendon Burchard all of his he's got a little app that you can get for free from Facebook, and it shows everybody who likes the High Performance Academy. So I'm going to see a bunch of my friends who like his product and service, that's going to build trust. The way we do that on law firms is we get all these trust signals, Google reviews, things like that, are going to build trust for your website and for your marketing.

Golden Rule Number nine, the best never rest. And the subset is the best never rest us. We've covered that in a lot of detail today. Tony Robbins, I was lucky enough to see Tony seven or eight times to see Tony Robbins, a great motivational speaker. We did a lot of work in that industry, running ads for Tony Robbins conferences and things like that. One of the one of the things I learned from him is the term, can i constant and never ending improvement? And that's a term he talks about for personal development, right? If you're not constantly getting healthier and going to the gym and getting fitter, you're going in the other direction, and it's not pretty, trust me, been there. How about personal development? If you're not getting a little bit smarter as an individual and as a company and developing new products and bringing new things to the marketplace, you're falling behind because your competitors are getting better. So you've got to have a program of constant and never ending improvement for your website. So we're going to do different things like constantly testing. Can i constant, never ending improvement? Sometimes just changing your website, just change the picture, it's going to be fresh, and you're going to get more conversions. It are they different people? Not necessarily, or they're not even the same people, but just somehow that Google rewards you for updating your website, right? You want to do lots of testing for customer acceptance. And then finally, site credibility. Stanford University did a study, and they said your designer look has to be professional looking. 46% said that gives you credibility your information design and structure, it has to be well organized. It's got to be focused. Don't fill it up with too much crap. That's the lesson we learned when we focused only on lawyers. And our website says we do internet marketing for law firms, and our webinars say we do the law firm edition by being focused. People realize, okay, I want someone who only knows about doing marketing for lawyers and specializes in working with personal injury lawyers. And finally, the company motive, you can't seem too commercial on the internet, right? You've got to seem like you've got some free stuff, because that's just like the way the Internet environment works, right? Yeah.

And finally, Golden Rule Number 10, lead the trends. The conception of this rule was when I was at E diets. This thing came along called the pop up. A lot of us used to access the internet through AOL, Yahoo and MSN. I talked about that earlier. So if you got your email on AOL, you would typically log into AOL, you know, get free email. You'd put in your name and your password, and you'd get your email, and then you'd go searching around. You'd go to people and search and channels and fitness and sports scores, and your check your stocks, right? And we did all that within this closed community of either AOL, MSN or Yahoo. So we did our advertising, and then all of a sudden this thing appeared out of nowhere, called the pop up. And you'd be on one of the regular websites and something else would pop up, and you'd be like, Oh, that's a good idea. I'm going to check that out. And in the early days the pop ups, we got 30% click through rates. So literally, 30% of people who saw a banner pop up, they'd be like, Oh, I'll try that. We were like, hamsters. We're like, Oh, great. Check that out. So the good news was, in the early days of pop ups, when you did them as an advertiser, you got 30% click through rate. Remember our banners, early on in the campaign, we got 1% click through rate. What happened very quickly is we started getting 10 pop ups and eight pop ups and 20 pop ups because they worked so well, the advertisers were using them like crazy, and the people who fed the pop ups were making a lot of money. But as consumers, we started going crazy, get rid of these pop ups. And we told our internet service providers and our security people, I do not want pop ups anymore at all. And pop ups went from being great, getting 30% click through rate to being like evil, and people hated people who did pop ups. So what's the moral of the story? The moral of the story is, when something new comes along in advertising and marketing, we've got to capture that leading edge trend right when it comes out. Because if you wanted to take advantage of the advertising and marketing and pop ups, you had a two to three month window where you got 30% click through rate, then 20% click through rate, then 10% click through rate, and you had a chance to make some bank, but after six months, basically they were gone. People hated them, and the Internet service providers were blocking them anyways. So what are the modern examples today? Here's one of the hottest leading edge trends that I've been talking about for the past year. So a year ago, when you did a Google search for Tom Brady, you would see pictures of Tom Brady and videos of Tom Brady. But if you looked in Google's labs, and there's a login area that's free, you can just find it by searching Google Labs. When I logged into Google Labs, I saw what they were doing with their generative experimental AI, and you're probably Recognizing this, because now we're seeing this very commonly, and Google's calling it AI overviews. This is Google's AI Artificial Intelligence search result. And basically what do Google's doing is they're compiling the information on two or three websites to answer our questions. How do I choose a car accident attorney? So they still have a paid ad, but what they did is they compiled the results from three or four of the top people also asked questions results, and they gave us the result. So they're giving you a result. So now you don't even have to go to a website anymore, and it's like a chat GPT result. Why is Google doing this? They had to do it. They want you to they still want to make money. They still want us to click on ads and go to websites, and they still want to give us free SEO results, right? Because we don't always want to go to paid clicks. But Google's got to answer our questions, and if Google doesn't answer them as well as chat GPT, we're going to start using chat GPT. So this was an existential threat to Google's existence. So now, if you click show more, the cool thing is, Google's actually showing their homework, so that what they say is, here's the three or four websites that we use to compile this answer, and this is the first result we saw for one of our clients. Congratulations, Jeff McDonald and Associates and chat GPT started doing the same thing. This is my friend Spencer aerofeld. That's the first link I saw for a personal injury lawyer. A lot of these are still Forbes and Super Lawyers, Avvo, things like that. But why is this significant? Let's go back here. This is a link to a website, so now Google's giving you the answer, but they're showing their homework, and I can get traffic. So Jeff McDonald has started getting a lot of traffic from chat, GPT and from Ai overviews and. So how did we do it? Chat GPT is even showing maps now, but the good news is they're showing lots of folks who came up in the maps.

So think of it a little differently, right, like now we started asking questions, and Google and chat GPT are answering those questions, and the reason we ask questions is because we figured out with Siri, we can ask a question, and Google got really good at answering questions in the form of a sentence, right? So what we've been doing proactively to optimize for these question and answers is we're answering questions on video and we're answering questions on our websites. So this is Jeff McDonald, who's getting a ton of traffic from this, and he's answering the question, what happens if I get hit by an Uber or Lyft? We put the video on YouTube. We search engine optimize it. Because Google owns YouTube, the algorithms are connected. Then the YouTube video goes on Jeff's website with a blog post explaining what's in the video. So what we've done is we've search engine optimized for a question in the form of a sentence instead of a keyword. Right? Like in the old days, we would be focused on Car Accident Lawyer, bike accident attorney, but now we're targeting Q and A's because we search differently. We ask serious questions, we ask Google voice questions, we ask Alexa questions, right? And Google's showing the AI overviews results chat GPT is showing results with links to our website. So how do you search engine optimize your website to take advantage of these AI overviews? You cover topics comprehensively with detailed explanations and real examples. You have bulleted lists the kind of things that come up in the AI overviews. You become an authority signal. So get linked to in press releases and journalistic stories that talk about the question and answers you're talking about. Have a Frequently Asked Questions page on your website, and everybody has one with four answers, go and write 400 answers that answer questions become part of the community. This is built into the algorithm, right? If you're popular locally, it's more effective. So that's a section on how do you get ranked in the AI overviews, the next leading trend. And I told you, there's a software that every law firm should have today, and it's called case status or Hona, two different companies. And basically this is an app that solves the biggest complaint that customers have about law firms, the number one complaint that comes into the bar associations. My lawyer doesn't get back to me. I don't know what's happening with my case. So what you do is you get the case status or the Hona application. Now you get your customer to install it on their phone. Everybody's happy with apps these days, right? Customers know how to use apps for banking, for ordering an Uber, for ordering Uber Eats, right? Everybody's happy to get their data, to get their updates from an app. So instead of the number one complaint being, I don't know the status of my case, now they've got an app they can find out exactly what's going on with their case. Every time you enter something into your case management, it pushes this information out to the out to your prospects. And we highly recommend case status or Hona to solve the number one bar complaint and make happy customers. And here's an even bigger deal that makes Jay very happy as your digital agency. If you have happy clients, you get more referrals. You get more reviews, right? Because if at the end of a case, somebody's oh my god, like these guys kept me in the loop. I knew exactly what was going on. They were so easy to get updates from, as opposed to, they were frustrated with their lawyer. He never told them the status of their case. They didn't know if he had the MRI. They didn't know when they're supposed to see the doctor. Now, everything is updated, and it also uses AI to answer the client's questions. It drafts the question in AI, and then you can press yes and send it to the client, or you could tweak it a little bit and send it back to the client. The next one was something that I learned by searching for my clients all over the country. And this is my friend and client, Jeff Phillips, and here's the Morgan website. And I started seeing Morgan and Morgan coming up in local service ads all across the country. And I said to myself, you can't pay the most money to get in local service ads. If you tell Google, I want to spend a million dollars a week in local service ads, that actually sets the algorithm off the artificial intelligence, it doesn't work any better. So why was Morgan showing up in Arizona in. Philadelphia, in South Florida, like he seemed to show up the most of anyone. Again, you can't necessarily pay more. You have to follow our secret algorithm for LSAS. I'll talk about that in a minute. So Morgan's doing a good job with that, but I, what I came up with is brand is a big part of the LSA algorithm, because if you recognize John Morgan and you don't recognize Jeff Phillips, you're more likely to click on John Morgan. Now, a lot of people in Arizona would recognize Jeff Phillips, but a lot of people in for my small clients would have no idea who he is. So Morgan gets more clicks as a percentage. What does that mean? Means Google makes more money, and at the end of the day, Google's going to try and optimize every piece of this real estate to maximize their revenue, because obviously their commercial company. So branding is important. Now, the bad news we don't have $400 million like John Morgan spends on advertising, but the good news is we can still go do a good job with our brand and make the most out of our brand message. As a matter of fact, branding is even a part of Google's new search engine algorithms. This is a data leak that revealed a lot of Google search engine algorithms, and the big takeaway from people who analyze it said that brand matters more than anything else. So what our opportunity is we do this exercise with our clients, is we figure out, what's our brand message? I talked about that a little bit earlier. What's our brand meaning? What do we stand for as a company? Right? So we try and figure out, do you want to be the no fees, unless we win? Guys, do you want to be the big check? Guys, do you want to be the we're the most active in the community. Gals, do you want to be the we fight the insurance companies? Law Firm, we're the best in court. Law Firm, one thing I've learned, it doesn't matter which one you pick, because I've tested different options, different landing pages. What matters is that you're consistent. You pick one and you stick with it. And everywhere you're going to have your brand message, you're going to be consistent, because that's how you fight Morgan to Morgan. You can't win on dollars, but you can win on local presence, having the right message that resonates with your customers, your staff, your past customers, and then delivering that consistently in your marketplace. Here's a great example by Amanda demanda. She's an Attorney in Miami who even changed her last name to demanda, which means like legal demand, or lawsuit, you know, or fighting a lawsuit in Spanish. She actually changed her name to create a brand that stood out. She uses these purple and pink colors. She's developed a brand kit, their logo, how to use the logo, what they stand for as a brand, and she delivers that consistently in everything she does. Look at all of her social media, look at her on stage, she's very consistent with her branding and her brand message. She's getting. Every single impression is consistently delivering a brand message. Another example, Jen Gore, she's a real character out of Atlanta. Same thing, she's figured out a brand message. She's figured out her coloring. She's super consistent in all her social media, and even when you see her on stage or see her out in public, she's got her green and black coloring, and she's on brand another great example, John Barry's a veteran. Dad's a veteran. His brother's a veteran. And everything they do is consistent with that brand message. Their website talks about being veterans. They do a lot of VA work, even if they pick a charity that they're going to participate in, it benefits veterans. So that consistency goes a long way in your local marketing and your brand marketing.

The next thought, and we're getting to the end here. If you're grinding through with me, keep we're almost there. Okay, we can see the finish line is run your business like a business. And this is a huge trend that I'm seeing, and all the law firms that succeed are using a business operating system. Our best clients are using a business operating system. The top performers when we're at a conference, and all the guys who are in the top 10% are using a system like EOS Gino Wickman, who wrote this great book called Traction. I always keep it right here at my side, if you have 50 people doing everything 50 different ways that leads to increased complexity and mass chaos in your firm. So basically, what you want to do is use an operating system like traction, or you could do mastering the Rockefeller habits, or scaling up from Vern Harnish or the great game of business Jack stack. But the message here is you've got to have a business system. And we've used, we're using Eos, Gino Wickman system, and it's been fantastic for our company, because now we have a leadership team that follows. A protocol. We had our L 10 meeting this morning, same agenda every week. All the issues that come up in the company during the week are added to the agenda for the L 10 meeting. We have a scorecard we look at every week on how the firm's performing. We're tracking everything. And guess what gets measured, gets attention and improves. So I highly recommend considering one of these programs where you're going to have structured weekly meetings, you're going to have a leadership team, you're going to have targets and scorecards, other benefits. Get in an active mastermind. The firms that are in masterminds are like twice or five times more successful then the firms aren't in a mastermind. How about a business coach, like I've got a tennis coach, I've got a workout coach, I've got a business coach. It's made a huge difference in my business. A financial coach. We got a financial coach. Now, matter of fact, he spoke at our conference. In fairness, Greg Crabtree is not my coach, but this book simple numbers. Greg spoke at tgr live, and we work with the his company, the simple numbers company, to do financial coaching for everyone in our mastermind. It's amazing. It's made a huge difference. Calendar is everything. Have a calendar and finally, have an integrator, which is the classic traction EOS system is there's a visionary and an integrator in your business. Couple more, and I promise we'll wrap up local service ads. Okay? Is it the hottest thing? Is it the hottest trend? Not anymore. It's about three years old now. For lawyers, it's still pretty important. If you're in a smaller market, or you're in a less competitive niche than personal injury. This is still a killer strategy to get you a lot of leads and cases. But I'd still say even for personal injury, you want to get as many calls as you can from Google screen. You want to try and get right to the top page of Google.

So we made it. I can now wrap up the 10 golden rules of online marketing, legal edition. Golden Rule number one is there are no rules. So in the old days on TV, we used to follow the rules. We would the TV commercial would get 375, GRPs. That was this mythical number of the number percentage of the target audience multiplied by how many times they saw the ad. And that was called the GRP. We target like 375 GRPs, which was like 30% of the target audience saw the ad seven times, or whatever. Golden Rule number two, the internet is not television, so you can't just play a commercial and develop emotion, right? The internet is much more like direct mail, where we do a B testing, we measure everything to the penny. Golden Rule number three, create a UVP, a unique value proposition that's something on your website, like a calculator, like a download, like some type of interactive device, a video they watch, where you get a higher percentage of people engaging with your website, because conversion is so low, like I mentioned a minute ago, if you get people to call you, that's 100% conversion. Got 100% chance to talk to them. If they click on a pay per click they go to your website, it might only get 5% of the people to call you. Now, if you have a free calculator on the website or a free ebook, you might get seven or 10% to engage with. You create a UVP, a unique value proposition on your website, and for personal injury lawyers, it should just be calls for a free consultation, because you want to focus on the phone calls, not the ebooks. If you build it, they won't just come again. One exception to the rule, if you build it with great SEO, they will come. But if you, if not, you've got to build a great website, but you've got to save budget and strategy to use multiple tactics to bring people to your website, to get those leads, to get those conversions.

Now they only have 500 57 ranking on the first two pages of Google. And last thing, if you think this type of content would be good for your bar association or any legal groups, if you're member the trial lawyers group in your state, I'd be happy to come and speak to your group or do it on a webinar. And you can use this link. This is screwed up, but it's calendly.com/j-ten golden rules, slash strategy dash, session, and you can book a strategy session with me. It's a lot easier just go to 10 Golden rules.com and send us a note or do a chat, and then we'll book your free intake. So I'm pretty much out of time, so I'll do Q and A virtually. So pop me a note on LinkedIn or on 10 golden rules, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you, guys who made it to the end, for sticking to the end. I'll take one question. Michelle said, for someone starting from scratch, which golden rule would you say is most important to implement first? And I'm going to cheat and go back to the 10 golden rules. It is which one to do first, but it's which one to do second, third. Golden Rule number four, you need a website. You need a home base. So I would build your website, get a Facebook page, a LinkedIn, an Insta, and then then you're going to maybe create a UVP, some something on your website for them to download, and then start your marketing right testing and measuring everything. Do a social media program. Super easy to those videos we talked about, answer people's questions. You don't even have to do video. You can just write a blog once a week and answer one of the most frequently asked questions that your prospects are asking you all the time, and that'll start building your SEO, and when people come to your website, it will answer their questions.

So with that, I'm going to say thank you all very much. Amazing to do the 10 golden rules again. Lots of fun for me and those of you who made it this far, please send me a note on LinkedIn or on 10 golden rules, and just tell me what you thought, or obviously, if you're watching on YouTube or listening on our iTunes, please give us a five star review and send me a shout out. Thanks, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.