There is a guaranteed way to increase your profits and this theory applies to nearly all businesses, not just law firms.

A friend of mine is a self-employed electrician, he has work coming out of his ears, yet for some reason he never has much money, has a 10 year old car and lives in a small house, I never understood why, until he did some work for me…

When he was carrying out the work there were a few extras that weren’t covered by his quote, things like a new plug socket here and a new light switch there etc’.

He told me that because these bits and pieces only cost him a few pounds from the wholesaler he wouldn’t charge me for them and stuck to the original quote.

A few weeks later I asked him if he did that for all his customers and he said he did! He also revealed that he charged a lot less per hour than his competition to make sure he always had plenty of work.

I suggested to him that instead of living in fear of the competition, he got himself some belief in what he did and started charging a bit more and also charging for any extras, even if it was just £5 extra on every quote.

But despite my best efforts he wouldn’t change his ways and is still plodding on today.

I have learned from this episode that many of us live in unrealistic fear of the competition, often charging to little for the hard work, fantastic services and products we provide.

Don’t undervalue yourself, if you have say 1000 customers a year, charging them all an extra £10 would increase your income by £10000! Even if you were to lose a handful as a result of the increased price (which is unlikely) you would still be making more money for less work.

Please take this article on board, have confidence in yourself and your service or product and next time you give someone a price or quotation, charge a little bit more, you will be very surprised at the results!

The Chinese takeaway menu advertising goes from strength to strength, see the latest menu to feature our advert. 

We all want our website to appear at the top of page one on Google and there seem to be thousands of companies promising this very thing.

Before you waste a small fortune read on… 

Last year I took the plunge after an excellent presentation from a search engine optimisation company, they promised to get our website on page one of Google for 80% of the 30 key-phrases we gave them.

These were very competitive phrases, such as ‘Personal Injury Lawyer’ and so on, but they were very confident (and convincing!).

They weren’t cheap either, we paid a £5000 deposit and set up a direct debit for £1500 a month, at this price we were certain the results would come.

All this company did was to purchase 150 domain names, such as personal-injury-uk.co.uk and set up awful looking mini sites that linked to the main website.

They said this was their clever way of outwitting Google! There was no ongoing work at all, although they assured us they were working on the sites all the time (in an attempt to justofy the monthly fee).

And that was it, they told us to be patient, sit back and wait – 6 months later we were still only on pages 3-10 for our main phrases and we decided we were sick and tired of the false promises and what we now knew to be black hat techniques.

I have now ditched this company and after some considerable research have found an SEO who is very ethical (be careful they will all tell you they are ethical).

I decided the best way to find an SEO company who were likely to get you to the top would be to find one who had got themselves to the top for SEO related keywords!  

Then I spent a lot of time talking to the companies who appeared on page one for SEO search terms to try and establish who wanted our money and who was an SEO geek who loved the thrill of seeing his clients climb up the listings.

I found a small outfit who are very passionate about what they do and within 6 weeks of starting work have already got us appearing at No 4 for ‘Personal Injury Lawyer’ – not a bad start!

My thoughts are that SEO is well worth the money if you are dealing with a company who can deliver. Before you spend a penny make sure you satisy yourself as to whether they will…take time, do your research, speak to plenty of companies, take references from other clients and don’t use SEO companies who have a name starting with ‘L…….’

Any comments on your own SEO experience would be welcomed, I will be giving regular updates on here of our progress.

I am always on the look out for new ways to promote the law firm I work for and have always liked the idea of taxi advertising.

But when I have spoken to marketing companies about the cost involved they have all quoted me £2500 per taxi, per year!

However, I have managed to achieve exactly the same thing for £750 a year and have since discovered I could have done it for £500.

I was in the local sandwich shop one lunchtime and a taxi driver was talking to the shopkeeper, he was showing off his new £40000 cab that was parked outside.

When they had finished talking I asked the taxi driver if he had any plans to sell the advertising space on it.

He said he and his colleagues were always looking, but there are far more taxis than firms wanting to advertise.

He told me he was looking for £1000 a year per taxi, but also mentioned that his family have 3 cabs in all…

So I offered him £750 per cab, per annum and the deal was done for all three!

The moral of this story is cut out the middleman and speak to the taxi owners directly, there are loads out there crying out for someone to sponser their taxi.

As a footnote, I get calls from other cabbies asking us to advertise on a regular basis, one even went as low as £500 for the year. 

OK, I have to confess to putting a few sneaky reply posts on Yahoo Answers which have included a link back to our website.

I have simply searched for a suitable ‘open question’ and left a reply, in one case, somebody had been injured in an slip accident in a supermarket and wanted to know if they could/should claim compensation. 

So I added a reply along the lines of – ‘the same thing happened to me and I used these people’, then put a link to the site.

The posts are still showing (to date) and have been up for a few weeks now and they are even being counted as valid back links to our site from Yahoo. 

In addition Google lists questions and reponses high within the index, so we have been popping up on searches for ‘supermarket accident’ etc’.

It seems that Yahoo Answers can be used as an excellent marketing tool as long as you are VERY careful what you write in your replies.

I also suggest answering other questions without any links, so maybe only 25% of your replies contain a link and you don’t look like a spammer.

Might be an idea to have a couple of yahoo accounts, just in case!

Last year I decided it was time to start getting business using Pay Per Click advertising on Google.

As a firm of Personal Injury Solicitors it seemed logical to list under the following:

Personal Injury Solicitor

Injury Claims

Accident Compensation

And so on, how wrong I was…..

£5000 down the tubes in 3 months! A handful of new clients and that was all.

I have learned (the hard way) from this experience and realised that the genuine potential customers don’t usually search for generic terms.

I have changed our Google PPC adverts so they are very targeted, for example ‘have you been bitten by a dog’ ‘have you slipped over in Tesco’ etc’ – these adverts not only have a much lower cost per click, but a conversion rate in the region of 20% (that’s how many become clients).

Whatever business you are in, try and avoid the obvious, for example if you own a toy shop, don’t try and fight with all the other toy shops in the expensive, obvious heading.

Think outside the box, do a different advert for each of your main products, i:e keyword ‘sand pit’ – advert ‘Childrens Sand Pits’, when clicked goes straight to the Sand Pit page.

I know this may not be an earth shattering marketing tip, but there are millions of people who are wasting money advertising for generic terms. 

Everyone keeps menus in their kitchen drawer and they get looked at time and time again, well they do in my house anyway!

I wrote a letter to 25 takeaways in the local area, I offered that we would pay for their menus to be produced in return for a decent sized advert on it.

4 weeks on and I have got 2 takeaways on board, the menus are being handed out and I even got a free takeaway (it was worth doing for that alone).

From a local advertising point of view this is one of my best ideas so far, the annual cost is about £300 per takeaway, but just think how many times that advert will get seen!

I am the Marketing man for a firm of Solicitors in Aldershot, Hampshire.

My job is to bring in as much new work to our firm as possible, in my world, you are only as good as last months figures! 

I have decided to start my own blog as it will give me a place to document my creative marketing ideas and thoughts, which I am of course happy for visitors to steal and comment on.

I also hope that the blog will bring together other people who have the task of marketing their own companies or firms they work for and we can have exchanges of ideas.

Up until now, I have done just about everything I can think of to get business through the door, we are in the competitive Personal Injury marketplace (just to make my job that bit harder!).

Here’s a quick summary of what we do:

Locally 

Advertising on taxis

Roundabout sponsorship

Banners and flags outside our offices

Leaflet drops

Local paper adverts and stories

Charity events

Cross selling

Nationally

TV advertising campaigns

National leaflet drop

Website marketing (you thought I wasn’t going to mention it!!!)

Purchasing leads from a number of sources

Affiliate and recipricol business arrangements with other companies