Getting Free Organic Traffic in Ten Easy Steps

I get everything for free. It's great, I've never had a job and I never will. I get all my food for free, a roof over my head, entertainment, toys, treats, rides. I wouldn't know what to do with a dollar if I had one. I'd chew it up.
Since I've been blessed with the easy life, I thought I should share some free info with my loyal readers. All two of them.
In Response to this post, "SEO: Free Traffic That Isn't Really Free" I'm going to list out a ten step program for getting traffic absolutely, 100% free. And even better, getting that traffic to convert into actual paying clients.

Step One: Write Some Good Legal Content

This should be easy, considering all the education required to become a practicing lawyer. Your head is filled with laws, processes, past cases, helpful advice. Just pick a few topics that you focus on in your own practice, and write up some unique articles that you feel would help potential clients understand their situation.

Step Two: Get it Online

Since our budget is $0, we don't have a lot of options here, but there are a few easy ways to get it up.
1. Claim your profile on Avvo. This is an interesting product, and a great looking site. You can login, answer questions, and publish legal guides. The site gets a lot of traffic, and is growing at a tremendous rate. You'll have to deal with their algorithmic rating system, which is either a plus or a deal-breaker, depending on how the math treats you. I wouldn't expect anyone rated at less than a 9 to get any business this way. A consumer is going to trust that this rating is legitimate, so why would they settle for less than a 10?
2. Start a Blog. This is easy, and every lawyer should have one. You don't have as much control over the user experience as having your own site, but it's still a great way of building a reputation online, and gives you the freedom of writing in any tone, about whatever you like, whenever you like, on a property comprised wholly of your own content. Plus, it can be a great outlet, and is actually kind of fun.
3. Use an article syndication site. Eh, most of these are pretty terrible compared to the first two options, but it is another way. Ehow is pretty good though.

Step 3: Promote Your Content

In order to get traffic, you're going to want search engines to rank you. This requires that you spend some time promoting your pages. You're going to want other sites to talk about you, and link to your content. Find related web pages, and contact the owner. See if they will put links up to your site, with appropriate anchor text. This is hard, and you will need to devote a lot of time here, but it is absolutely necessary if you want any real traffic from search engines.

Step 4: Optimize Your Content

Add Google Analytics to your site, and spend some time getting familiar with it. It's an incredibly powerful tool, and will give you great insight into the kind of kewords you site is driving. Make sure this traffic is appropriate to your goal of getting new clients. You want people searching for lawyers, or keywords related to something they would need legal help with.

Step 5: Optimize Your Inbound Links

Now that you're getting better at promoting you content, do it some more. However, focus on highly credible, and related webpages with a lot of good content and few outbound links. Get past these types of sites. They suck.

Step 8: Manage Your Conversion Rate

Now You're getting to be a pro at analyzing your traffic. How is it converting? Are you getting many calls/business from your efforts? Do you know? Make sure you are able to track your traffic, so that you can continually optimize it to ensure you're not wasting your time.

Step 10: Be a Lawyer

You've become an expert at content generation, search optimization and lead management. Don't forget that your primary source of income is providing legal services. If you're doing all of the above steps at the level required to compete with professionally managed web properties, you should be spending quite a bit of time everyday to ensure you're getting business out of it.

Conclusion

Ok, I skipped a few steps. Sue me (Sometimes I forget who I'm writing for). It was beginning to get too tiresome for a blog post. Skip steps 2-10, and sign up for expertSYNDICATION. You're a Lawyer, do that. Let me do all the other stuff. I'm off, Dog Town is on Animal Planet.