Trust your own mind and do the math

Don’t be psyched out. Basic principals still hold true, even when it comes to the internet and so-called digital marketing. It’s no different that any other marketing. You want to play in the big game; you want to go where the most fish are. Don’t be distracted by side hustles, also known as “directories.”

Transcript:

Good afternoon, Michael Byrd again for WordwrightWeb video number eight in our series. I say this is an endless series I don’t know when we’re going to end or if this is going to morph. But pretty much indefinitely, we think the Internet’s going to continue to change and grow and we’re going to need to be smart about it.

I’m going to do a little brief story fireside chat to try to set you up for the way we approach it here and the way I approach things in general. Since I’m on the profession of law and attorneys and the fact that we happen to work with a lot of attorneys, I want to give you a story about when I was a young journalist and I went to speak with the attorney for the newspaper. I was trying to get an understanding of a particular law it was libel law in this case, what we could say and what we couldn’t say about subject of the news story. I was right out of college it was a weekly newspaper and the attorney was a very nice gentleman war suit and sat down with me took time with me. He pulled out a legal pad (and I end up pulling out a legal pad a lot). So we were talking about this particular situation he says all right well let’s look at the law right here and he went a couple paragraphs in and said well let’s read that and he just walked me through it. Now obviously I was a journalism major and I could read and write English. What he was really showing me here was that just because he’s a lawyer and I’m not a lawyer doesn’t mean you can’t understand something. So just because you’re not a digital marketing person or you’re not a geek or you’re not a computer head or you barely use the computer and you’re intimidated by your phone, it doesn’t mean you can’t understand these things. You learn it constant conceptually and trust your own mind, that’s what I really wanted to say. Because we’re going to get into some areas where you’re going to trust your mind that’s really my point up today’s video so let’s jump into it. I’m going to get over here and see if we can record the screen we’re going to do picture-in-picture just like we did last time and here we go let’s see if we can get there without us much slowing down and whatnot.

Alright here we are now we scanned the ten last time when we talked about the number of directories on the page versus the number of actual competitors. Let’s just assume you are a law firm and you’ve done a search like I asked in your own marketplace as though you were a prospect and you see in this ten here how many of the results are directories like this one findlaw.com or avvo.com or just iya.com or whether the result is a law firm. And we know we can go counting but you will see this for yourself there are ten there are always ten in the organic search results. How many of these are law firms what I’m going to ask you to do here. Is take a just take a little logic here’s a list of ten I’m a person that got a speeding ticket and I need a lawyer and I went to Google which is what most people do around the world today ,that is just the nature of reality and the Internet. I go to Google okay, I got ten results here four or five or six of them are attorneys and others of them are directories. Now, you understand that the directories that are here require another click. The directories are competing with each other. I’m looking for a lawyer, I’m not looking for a directory I’m not looking for another list I got a list I have a list of five lawyers right here or I could go and look at another list now maybe I’m going to be one of those people that’s going to click another list. But I just want you to do the math here and so and just see that hypothetically let’s say ten results, they each have a one in ten shot. But let’s just say one in ten shot each one of these directors each one of them is a subset of this list which means that if you aren’t this attorney right here Beaver law firm or Girdwood Williams or the one below it or the one below that if you aren’t one of these four or five or six attorneys up here then you have to hope that when somebody clicks one of these directories they’re going to click you and you know what they’re going to get they’re going to get another list so the math. It is not working in your favor one out of ten shot right here if you go to another directory you’ve only got a one out of ten shot and I can just tell you, I’m going to go to one of these directories at the end of this video they actually list more than ten they list 20 so now you you’ve already taken only one tenth of that pool of people that’s looking for a lawyer. Speeding ticket lawyer you’ve only taken ten percent of one tenth of the number that have clicked now they’re on the page where you would because you weren’t on this page you’re in the directory page I know that’s a roundabout way of saying that I probably could be cleaner- you’re in a subset you’re in a smaller pond and you’re still up against 19 other competitors. The point of all this is to say one problems with directories one of the things that they all fight against is the fact that Google has the market. You want to win in directory number one which is Google.

There are some other problems with directory. So I’m going to go into that in video number two but the math right at the outset is not in your favor. Now usually, when a directory is selling itself they’ll tell you all the great features of the directories and they’ll give you the statistics from all the people that click on that directory but before they ever get there there’s a much bigger number that got to Google first I can assure you nobody gets a speeding ticket and says well let me go to findlaw.com, never heard of it never heard of it.

Right so we’re going to click on this directory and it’s just going to show you what you see all right here you are let’s hope you’re in this batch of 20s, a pile of them . You could be, somebody could click you, somebody could find you here. Alright so that’s what I want you to do. I want you to go to that ten, I want you to see whether you’re in the first page of Google for whatever you search for. And then I want you to click on the first directory and just have a look, we’re going to talk more about that in the next video.

Thank you, Michael Byrd with WordwrightWeb.

 

Updated: 10/25/2023

Categorised in:

This post was written by admin

Comments are closed here.