Cross promotion is a great way to get targeted traffic to your website without paying for it.

Attorneys spend between $45.00 and $65.00 per click on Google, according to a recent article in the New York Times. Some keywords were over $300 per click. You can expect to see that increase as more law firms increase their ad spend online.

There are various ways to drive more traffic to your website without investing a lot of time or money. Social media and blogging are a couple of ways to do so. The downside is that it does take time and consistency to build an audience.

With cross promotion, or cross marketing, you can reach new and relevant audiences with the right partnerships.

Read on for tips on how you can best use it to drive traffic and business.

What Is Cross Promotion?

In simple terms, it’s forming strategic partnerships with relevant companies or people who share a similar audience. They promote your services to their audience and you promote their services to your audience.

For example, if you have a bankruptcy practice that targets Gen Xers and Millennials, you can partner with a credit counseling service who targets the same audiences to promote each other’s services.

Such a partnership wouldn’t work if one were targeting baby boomers and the other Gen Xers and Millennials.

Likewise, if you’re a real estate attorney forming a strategic alliance with a mortgage broker, or a divorce attorney working with a counselor.

The key is that your services compliment each other, not compete against and you share the same target market demographics.

It’s different from cross selling. That means that you’re selling more products to the same customer to increase their lifetime customer value.

Why Is Cross Promotion Important?

Cross marketing is about leverage. With the right partners, you leverage their assets and piggyback on what they already built to expand your reach.

There’s another added benefit to cross marketing. That has to do with improving your website’s organic search results.

When another site links to yours, it’s called a backlink. Backlinks are a big part of Google’s algorithm equation. That doesn’t mean that you should go out and buy a bunch of backlinks for $5 and call it good.

In this case, quality matters much more than quantity. When you create cross-promotion partnerships that link to your site, you’re creating relevant and quality relationships. Google will interpret that as a positive and rank your site higher.

How to Find the Perfect Strategic Partners

Since you need to find the right strategic partner in order to make cross marketing work?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is my target market?
• What are good businesses that complement yours that are not in your niche?
• Who are influencers in your area?
• Are there nonprofit organizations that work with your target audience or have board members and volunteers in your target market?

For example, if you’re a cyber law firm like Revision Legal internet lawyers, and you’re looking for a cross promotion partner, you have a lot of options.

You can partner with software companies that cater to e-commerce companies, or non-profit organizations that are concerned about internet privacy rights.

Come up with a list of potential partners and then reach out to them to see if there’s a mutual interest.

If there is, you’ll need to have an agreement that outlines what the expectations are. As a lawyer, you should be able to handle this part.

You’ll want to know where you’re going to post, how often, and by what date. That’s to hold each other accountable. It is also useful for all parties to have in case there are any questions or disagreements.

It’s also a smart idea to make sure that your cross marketing partners understand the tone and messaging you use in your marketing. You want to be sure that the content your partners post is consistent with your brand.

They can apply the same tone when they promote your services.

Cross Promotion Tactics That Work Online

You have an idea of who you want your cross promotion partners to be. What are the best ways to help each other? In the case of driving traffic to your cyber law firm, here are a few tactics that can work online.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the first place to cross promote content.

Depending on how your emails are designed, you can easily slip cross-promotional content into your newsletters.

When you do cross promote between organizations, have a call to action in newsletters. You want to tell the new audiences that you’re ready to help them. Have them schedule a free consultation, download a whitepaper.

Social Media

Have you ever seen a social media posts that says, “I just met with John from Acme XYZ. He does this and that. Give him a call.”

That’s a weak attempt at cross promotion. What would make a cross promotion post outstanding is a story?

“I just met with John from Acme XYZ. He helps people change their lives through his passion and commitment to service. I got to witness first-hand how he went out of his way to help others. I cannot recommend him enough.”

See the difference? There’s more of a story there. It’s more authentic.

That’s what you want when people are posting about your legal services.

Blog Posts & Guest Posts

You can write a guest post on your partner’s site and have them write content for your site. That will extend your authority and credibility beyond just posting on your website.

Otherwise, you can agree to link to each other’s blog posts when it’s appropriate. The content has to be relevant. Otherwise, it will appear like a spam link. That can do more harm to your credibility than good.

Cross Promotion Can Build Your Business

Cross marketing is a great marketing tool that can help you build traffic and expand to a new audience without having to invest a lot of money to do so.

That can mean a big return on investment to your firm.

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