Some of our clients cases have been covered by the following media outlets:
| Since June 2007, this site has been on the first page of Google for the hundreds of military law keywords. In less than three years, the firm replaced all traditional forms of advertising with internet based marketing. They dramatically increased their number of high quality clients and reduced their advertising budget from by 85%. |
 http://www.ucmjdefense.com |
Military law is a highly competitive legal niche. Lawyers worldwide compete for top rankings in the search engines. Legal Niche Pros manages the top ranked web site for Attorney Michael Waddington, a military lawyer, whose cases have been repeatedly reported on by major media outlets worldwide, including CNN, Niteline, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, and many others.
When
Mr. Waddington entered private practice in 2006, he experimented with many types of advertising. During his first year of practice, his small firm's advertising budget was out of control. Every where they turned, advertisers were making big promises about their products. Few delivered.
Take a look at the first year's advertising budget and the Return on Investment (ROI):
| Type of Advertising | Total Cost for Year | Return on Investment (ROI)? |
| Billboards (2) | $26,000 (including set up) |
VERY POOR - 2 clients, one for a will and one to put a lien on a property. After 6 months of 0% ROI, we learned that we could not get out of the contract and the billboard company threatened to sue us. We continued to pay for the year. This $26,000 was a total waste of money and was vitally needed during our first year in practice. |
| Phone Book | $7,200 | VERY POOR - We advertised in the phone book, using multiple listings and bold headers. We did not go with larger ads. We could not afford the $1,500-$2,000 a month. In the end, we received very few calls from the phone book. The salesperson then tried to up the prices and used high pressure sales techniques to get us to renew. We dropped our ads the next year to simple listings. |
| Local newspapers | $6,200 | AVERAGE - We advertised in 2 small local papers. We received about 20 calls a month from the first paper (Augustino). Most were low level traffic type cases, many of the calls were from people that wanted free advice. We received little to no clients from the other paper. We wasted a lot of time dealing with calls from people that wanted free advice. |
| Pay Per Click (PPC) | $14,000 | AVERAGE - We advertised on Google, Yahoo, and MSN using pay per click ads. We received about 2 criminal clients a month through Google. We made our money back for military cases. Yet, we noticed that many of the clicks came from window shoppers, other lawyers and non paying clients. We were spending $3-$15 dollars per click for top placement. Our local pay per click campaign for criminal cases was a loss, we only received a few clients using PPC. We would receive about 7 visitors as day for $3-10 dollars a click. |
| Radio | $600 | TOTAL LOSS - We paid for ads on a small radio station. They went out of business before the ads were run. "Sorry, no refund." |
| TOTAL | $54,000 |
By the end of Year 1, the advertising budget was severely hurting the business. We then made the following changes. Cut the billboards, cut one of the local papers, cut radio, reduce the phone book to $320 per month (simple listing), reduce Pay Per Click, Invest hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in learning how to rank high in the search engines.
| Type of Advertising | Total Cost for Year | Return on Investment (ROI)? |
| Phone Book | $3,840 | VERY POOR - We kept a minimal amount of listings. We received no clients from the listings. The sales rep became very rude when we reduced our ads, even when we told him that we receive no business from the ads. The sales rep then placed our listing with several errors and misspellings. The next year, 2008-2009, we cut all phone book ads. |
| Local newspapers | $3,000 | GOOD - We kept the Augustino ads. These ads provided a steady flow of Spanish speaking clients, primarily for misdemeanor level traffic cases. |
| Natural Search Engine Rankings | Undisclosed | The firm spent considerable time and money on training, software, conferences to learn the techniques to gain natural listings. The site began to get 50-100 unique visitors a day, for free. |
| $16,840 |
In Year 3, the firm cut the Phone Book completely, cut local news papers and relies on a variety of internet marketing techniques.