Are your business objectives well-defined? To get to where you want to be, you need to know where that is.

I presume that your number one goal is to do your best for each and every client. Without first being a great lawyer, nothing else matters. But doing your best on each case is not a useful metric or framework when it comes to planning for long-term growth and profitability. If you don't mindfully approach the other aspects of your business, your legal skills and toil will be undervalued in the marketplace.

If you want to maximize the profits and efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts, you must invest, but you must also refine.

I regularly talk with lawyers who believe that the way to expand their business is to add more websites, more banner ads, more pay per click, more back-links, more directory listings, more features… more, more, more. They focus on traffic for traffic's sake. Diversity and reach are important parts of the picture, but omnipresence for its own sake can lead to a terrible overall ROI.

There are only 10 top-ten organic listings in the search engines. If your firm has all ten of those listings, you win, right?

Not so fast… at least not when it comes to ROI.

Here's why:

Your customers (potential clients) want choices. But not too many choices. If, in the first ten results, they only have one choice, some will make it to the second page of the search engine results, which typically display results 11 – 20. The amount of money and energy you need to spend to completely dominate the first page of the results will ensure you a greater market share, but not necessarily greater profits, and most likely a much lesser ROI.

Your competitor, who might spend 1/50th of what you do each month, who occupies the 11th spot, will "inherit" a small portion of your business by virtue of a percentage of your potential clients wanting a second option for comparison.

What is the right amount of online marketing? What is the point where more is not better (this point has to exist somewhere)? The answer to that question is local-market specific. It is also a moving target.

When it comes to online presence, equating effectiveness with quantity can be misleading. A competitor can always outspend you.

Can you have too many leads?

I believe any firm, no matter the size, can have too many leads. A lead is "one too many" if it is not qualified. Too many unqualified leads, or leads that are shopping around, dilute your ability to close and service the core percentage of leads that produce profit. The more your Internet infrastructure focuses on quantity and dominance, the more unqualified leads you will receive. Every unqualified lead you receive costs you money in the form of your time and staff's time, and increases your exposure to negative reviews (whether online or by word-of-mouth). Unless you spend a lot of time "giving" to unqualified leads who will never pay you anything, chances are their experience of you and your firm's "free" consultation (if you provide one) will not be favorable.

Quality and efficiency are the objectives of refinement online. Over the past fifteen years the Internet has evolved from a random cesspool of toxic waste and BS to… well, a less-random cesspool of toxic waste and BS where the good stuff is starting to rise to the top. The search engines are learning how to tell the difference, and most online consumers already know.

While traffic as a metric of campaign performance used to be the holy grail, the number of visitors is, in reality, much less important than the quality of each visitor.

Suppose your firm's target is to open 25 new DUI cases each month. If you could realize your target by having a total of 100 visitors, or by having 10,000 visitors, which would you chose?

I would always take the lower ratio, in the above example 1 in 4 visitors becomes a client versus 1 in 400 visitors.

In my business, if I could attract only attorneys who actually understand and appreciate quality legal marketing while bypassing those who don't, I would make more money with less effort.

The questions I ask myself every day as I work on DUIAttorney.com are:

1. What can I do today to increase the quality of each visitor?
2. What can I do to make the site and the user-experience more efficient?

The fewer junk visitors I can attract (bounces, spammers, people with DUI cases who are not serious potential clients, attorneys who don't understand Internet marketing), the easier my business runs and the more profitable it is. I gladly sacrifice visitor quantity in exchange for quality.

If you invest in quality, the peaks and valleys in your business will not be as big. You will not waste as much time entertaining dead-end leads. You will spend less time in the "sales" phase of the attorney-client relationship.

Relying on tricks and "black-hat" tactics has become more costly in most cases than building quality. There are still tricks on the Internet that can blast your traffic level through the room in the short term, but the life-cycles of the tricks and fads grows shorter and shorter, and search engines constantly work to eliminate them.

The problems with these "black hat" or low-quality vehicles are that success gives birth to failure. Try a new trick. If it works for a short time, your practice has to react and increase infrastructure to handle the increased business. When the fad fades, you will have to downsize or desperately scramble to find the next fad.

Most lawyers don't have the time to really learn how to determine the quality of their Internet campaigns, even when making decisions that can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year and make the difference between continued growth and downsizing.

We are in a world where quality is the new king, and slow and steady will win the race.

At DUIAttorney.com, our growth strategy is to work with firms that understand that progress takes a commitment to quality. The firms that will be on top in a year from now actively engage in the process of building not only their reach, but their long-term reputation. They involve themselves because they understand that their future success depends on it.

With the suite of tools that have evolved over the past year, we now offer DUI lawyers ways to engage in their firm's future that have never before been available in an exclusive directory.

We are also organizing what promises to be one of the largest and most efficient collaboration tools that will allow non-competing firms to leverage the collective power of group promotions.

For our members, the use of the tools is unlimited and included in the monthly subscription fee. The more attorneys use the tools, the more their ROI will increase over time.

The Internet has to be monetized to exist. But the days of rising prices on finite services are coming to an end. I believe our model of one flat fee for unlimited use is the embodiment of the current Internet evolution. As should be true everywhere online, after the price of admission, the lawyers who participate in the site truly hold the keys to accelerated growth in their own hands.

If you are a member of DUIAttorney.com and have not scheduled your one-on-one training session with me, let's try to get it on the calendar as soon as possible so you can start using the tools to build your practice and boost your other Internet properties.

If you are not currently a member and if we still have a county or state that interests you available (we work exclusively with one attorney per state or county), let's talk and I'll show you how, together, we can strengthen the foundation of your online sales and marketing infrastructure to grow your ROI in a way that truly builds a solid future.