MARKETING IDEAS TO SELL STANDARD LEGAL

Standard Legal's most successful affiliates have an existing web site, email newsletter or other online marketing vehicle.

If you do not have a web site, you should consider building one. But if you do not have the time or capabilities to build a web site, we suggest using a "branding domain name" for marketing purposes -- click here to learn more.

If you are linking to us from well-established content web site, a professionally-branded shopping site or a major corporate web site, you will most likely want to link directly to the specific software titles we offer. Direct linking is a "best practice;" the conversion rate will be highest if you send traffic from your web site's content directly to a software product description page that is relevant to your site's topic. (You can also link your site directly to the Standard Legal storefront, as a list of legal software titles is very prominently displayed there. But research has shown that it is better to link directly to relevant products than to "create an extra click.")

If you have a new web site or are just starting to focus on online marketing, here are some ideas that can help you to be successful:

First, it is critical to make the web site you develop look as sharp, clean and easy-to-navigate as possible. It doesn't matter how much traffic you generate to your site if visitors click away immediately because the site is unprofessionally designed or poorly organized. Make sure the text is positioned in a readable way, the graphics are crisp and pleasing to the eye, and the navigation is easy to understand.

To be successful selling Standard Legal Software online, you will need to create a site with highly favorable natural search rankings via search engine optimization (SEO). SEO takes longer to see the results than paid ads, but the SEO time and effort is much more profitable long term. We suggest you spend some time reading these online SEO/marketing web sites (make sure you sign up for the email newsletters from these sites, too!):

SEO Book
SEOmoz
HighRankings.com
Marketing Sherpa
Marketing Experiments

To raise your natural search ranking positions for your site, the best-case method is to create a blog (we suggest Word Press) or other type of content-based website with separate categories or pages for each legal "topic" you want to promote on your site. Create unique posts about that specific topic, or shoot video about it, or write a well-researched 300-500 word essay about that legal topic for that page. CREATE UNIQUE CONTENT -- it is the most critical element of value. Make sure you title each of your topic pages or categories using the keywords that are specific to that topic; that is CRITICAL so visitors can find your pages from the search engines. Then post your affiliate-tracking links to our software in and around all of that unique content to create links back to our products to faciliate conversions. You can use the tools posted on our Ads & Banners page to help you get visitors from your site pages to our software offerings. Finally, link all of these "content" pages together within your site using a consistent navigation scheme on each page.

Once you have a content-filled easy-to-navigate website, you need to get other sites and directories to link to your site to increase its online visibility and page rank. You should manually submit your site URL to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Open Directory (dmoz.org), etc.; that is usually done through their 'Webmaster Tools' accounts.

Then you must pursue asking other sites, asking them to trade links with you as well. Pitch them on the reason to do so, and spread the word about your site. Links back to your site are a significant scoring method for search engine algorithms, so it's worth the effort to get other worthwhile sites to link to yours.

Finally, you should also consider spending a bit of ad money on Google Adwords and on Microsoft adCenter. Google and adCenter work right away at driving traffic to your site -- assuming you use the right keywords and the right ad copy -- but there's a risk and a cost involved as you test and learn. But it's another component of online marketing that should be utilized. Go slow, learn, test and revise.

We hope this information helps. Our best advice: read everything you can about promoting your website, then test, test, test!

DIRECT-MAIL MARKETERS AND 'FACE-TO-FACE' MARKETERS:
FREE CUSTOM POSTCARD ART TO HELP SELL STANDARD LEGAL!