I AM AN OVERWHELMED LAWYER…TRUE CONFESSIONS
If You’re Honest, They Will Come
I have more work than I can handle. I think about this stuff in my sleep…when…I sleep.
Yes. I’m an overwhelmed lawyer…but the truth is…I’m an overwhelmed lawyer-marketing-expert.
In 2016 I started charging $75 per 30 minutes just to get me on the phone.
This September, that same 30 minute phone call will cost you $400, just to get me on the phone, to ask me if I will do your marketing for you.
And lawyers are paying it. Willingly paying it. I’m not an ego-maniacal jerk.
I’m just insanely busy.
Why?
Because if you are a lawyer, and you have somehow found me (I don’t advertise), then you are more likely to win the lottery than to, in your lifetime, ever find another digital marketing “expert” who isn’t just scamming lawyers out of their money.
Slowly, over the last year or so, this has become known.
Real Recognizes Real
It’s why, after seeing one of my ridiculous videos on LinkedIn or YouTube, lawyers who have spent years getting scammed out of their marketing dollars by these digital marketing guru shysters, instantly recognize me as the genuine article.
And some of you are getting scammed by your own damn friends, by colleague lawyers, who wrote a blog, or run a conference in Bum-F-Nowhere Texas, who got a wild hair up their butt and decided they were a marketing expert because the other 2 attorneys in their small town said they had a nice website.
IT SICKENS ME. I DO NOT KNOW HOW THESE PEOPLE SLEEP AT NIGHT.
Fake Marketing Gurus
Today I had one of those $400 marketing consult phone calls with a personal injury lawyer in no-where Virginia who’s paying his Pay Per Click “expert” $11,000 per month…AND GETTING ZERO RETURN ON HIS INVESTMENT.
He says if I can’t help him, he’s going to have to down size (lay the other 2 attorneys off).
His Pay Per Click “expert” didn’t know the first thing about online marketing.
I spent the entire call just telling him EVERYTHING this PPC expert was doing wrong.
- Like…sending traffic to a website (at $70+ per click) THAT HAS NO PHONE NUMBER ON IT.
- Like…sending traffic to a website (at $11,000 per month) that immediately encourages the website visitor to click off to AVVO, or FindLaw, or NationalTrialLawyers, where any of those websites can advertise other attorneys to this lawyer’s website visitor.
Why in the hell are you paying someone $11,000 per month to send website traffic to SuperLawyers????????
So that SuperLawyers can advertise your competitors to your website traffic??!!
W..T..F..
I’ll tell you why you’re doing that….It’s because almost NOBODY who sells digital marketing services to lawyers KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT ONLINE MARKETING.
This is true.
They Have Never Used The Internet To Make Money
In 2008, 2009, 2010 before I ever handled a single law firm’s internet marketing, I was sitting in the back of my law school classes, with my laptop, making money…using the internet to pull money out of thin air, with dating blogs, fitness blogs, and survival blog affiliate programs.
To do this, I had to know conversion, I had to know psychology, I had to know how to generate website traffic…I HAD TO ACTUALLY KNOW ONLINE MARKETING.
Today, you have people calling themselves online marketing experts, selling online marketing services to lawyers…who’s only skill…WHO’S ONLY DAMN SKILL is conning lawyers out of their marketing dollars.
They don’t know ANYTHING about marketing…especially not digital marketing.
THEY HAVE NEVER MADE A SINGLE DIME ON THE INTERNET.
My Nephew Has A Twitter, Therefore He’s A Marketing Expert
Please understand what I’m saying here.
YOUR ONLINE MARKETING EXPERT’S ONLY SKILL, IS CONVINCING YOU TO GIVE THEM MONEY.
For 90% of the lawyers who call me asking if they should leave their current marketing expert, their outcome would be no better, or no worse, than if they just randomly walked up to a zebra in the Serengeti and gave that zebra $3,000 a month to handle your online marketing.
GoOd DAy SiR…I aRe SeO exPerT
I am so sick of lawyers calling me, talking about how beautiful their new website design is, I go to their website, there is no damn phone number on the website.
THE ONLY PURPOSE OF A LAW FIRM WEBSITE IS TO CONVERT INTERNET TRAFFIC INTO PHONE CALLS.
Neither the SEO “expert,” nor the web design “expert,” nor the PPC “expert,” ever thought to bring up the fact that there is no phone number on the website.
And yet you have these lawyer web design “experts” selling you beautiful, fancy, colorful websites THAT DON’T HAVE A DAMN PHONE NUMBER ON IT.
You have lawyer SEO “experts” selling you SEO that almost kind of worked back in 2010, assuming you had zero competition for your keyword (and that’s taking a huge leap of faith and assuming they’re doing ANYTHING AT ALL for you in terms of SEO other than just billing you monthly).
I routinely see lawyers who have been paying for SEO for 2+ years and they have 3 backlinks to their website.
You have lawyer Facebook ad “experts” who have never made a single dollar for themselves running Facebook Ads.
You have lawyer video marketing “experts” selling you $10,000 to $20,000 video packages, who have never created and converted a single video view into a dollar for themselves.
I go to your YouTube channel, look at your $20,000 videos and you have 6 views on them.
Meanwhile, my immigration lawyer who does a Facebook Live video every Tuesday, sitting in her damn SUV with her freaking iPhone, is out performing your $20,000 video “expert.”
Your lawyer blogging “expert” writing you $200 blog articles titled: “Labor Day Weekend 2021.”
Guess what…NOBODY is going to Google and searching “labor day weekend 2021,” and even if they were, they aren’t looking for a lawyer, and even if they were, that person is not likely to become a paying client of yours….
and even if they were, it literally took me 9 seconds just to wait for your website to load, and nobody is going to wait that long for your website to load, they are just going to close out and go to the next listing in the search results.
And neither your SEO expert, nor your Web Design expert, nor your PPC expert ever thought to mention that it takes 7 days for your webpages to load.
But…at least your web design “expert” gave you a beautiful, albeit worthless, website.
Never mind that your web design “expert” NEVER considered that all of those big beautiful images were going to slow your website down so much that the long loading time would virtually ensure that Google would never let your website rank in the search results.
Of course, your web design expert would actually have to know something about conversion and internet marketing to have ever taken that into consideration.
You Must Find Someone Who (1) Knows What They’re Doing, and (2) Actually Cares About You
And so every Wednesday, I have a calendar booked, with $400 30-minute phone calls, of lawyers desperately trying to leave their worthless marketing agency, because they watched a goofy YouTube video of mine and realized that they finally found someone who isn’t just scamming lawyers out of their marketing dollars for a living.
And I am overwhelmed.
Like so many other attorneys, overworked and overwhelmed. What I wouldn’t give to have those 10-12 hour days back as a 1st year associate.
Because what you didn’t realize back in those days was that the owner, the person with their name on the door, never stops working.
The other day a friend asked me, “Why do you work so hard? All you care about is money.”
I said, “It’s not the money. I’M HELPING PEOPLE.”
She said, “Yeah, but they’re lawyers,” as if that was something evil.
Maybe in the midst of assuming all of their Client’s burdens and all of their Client’s stress, and all the BS that comes with being an attorney, I can tell the lawyer who trust in my marketing skills, “Hey, don’t worry about your marketing. I GOT YOU. You’re not getting scammed anymore because lawyer-to-lawyer, I got you.”
Admittedly a delusion of grandeur, but that’s how I like to think about it, especially when it’s after 9pm and I haven’t even got through number 3 on yesterday’s to do list.
Because. Marketing.