An eccentricity of this site is that it is set-up to show ads, mainly to demonstrate that it isn't going away; there is enough revenue to pay for the domain name. Mostly, there hasn't been! The main agency - google - bans sites with angry clicks on ads. The other agencies may make money in a really big market like the USA, but have trouble earning enough to make a minimum payment in the UK. Qadabra were good to deal with, but had a very low payout per view even if their minimum was low. Their ads stopped showing once they had paid $50 over my several web sites.

The Guardian reports that online advertising revenue is falling and asks for voluntary subscriptions. If they can't get ads, then obscure bloggy troublemaking sites definately can't.
08.02.17

If you work for a law firm for disgruntled trades unionists, or perhaps employment law for employees, then perhaps we could get in touch directly and work-out a system but I didn't find an automated way for all the other law firms that happen to want to advertise to happen to end-up on this site. Some probably do automatically, and I don't see them, because a lot of targetting is by previous site visits. You can also get in touch directly via john at employees then dot org then co then uk 12.2014

Apart from advertising on this site, I think lawyers could do more to advertise on each others' sites by promoting

http://solicitors.lawsociety.org.uk/

...on their letterhead, on their doorbell, on bumper stickers and business cards, over the window, on brass plaques, on grand sponsorship and down-to-earth postcards in newsagent windows. The idea of a law society I guess is to help qualified people work together to promote each other, whether or not they sign-up to a panel or an advertised system or work like a slave in a hard-to-get junior role at Millionare and Co or are known in an area after buying Bloggs & Co's conveyancing business. Basically: where you write "bloggs and co", also write "find us on solicitors.lawsociety.org.uk". If you are Mr Blogs, now semi retired and active in the Law Society, get them to give-out bumper stickers & biros and brass plaques with "solicitors.lawsociety.org.uk" written on them, alone for free or cheaply with a qualified name like Bloggs on the same product. 12.2014

https://hannondigital.com/2014/03/07/content-marketing-tips-law-firms/ have an article about writing interesting stuff on web pages, which has a new buzzword for the likes of Cocacola who used just to put brands on their web pages. I wonder: will the voluntary sector and political parties will catch-on soon too? The new buzzword is "Content Marketing for Lawyers". Looking at the Hannondigital site's source code (press control+U), they also use mailchimp which is free for low-volume emails and a web site optimisation guide from Yoast which is free if used weekly or less. 3.2014

Your adverts on Bing or Google may end up on the Qadabra ads here. I don't know. 160x600 on Bing is most likely.

Addiply's hand-targeted, hand-picked advertising can also be used to advertise anywhere you like on this site & the Brixton Bugle & Blog, Lichfield Live, The Peoples Republic of South Devon, as well as some football sites in Norwich .
The simplest sized advert is a square to fit in the column on the right filled with three or four lines of text and a link, but plenty of text and image sizes are possible. I'd have to add more ads to the site, which only takes a minute. Recently I haven't been able to make their site work, and if it does work I can't remove the narrow geographic spread that defines the space, so it may not be usable.

The default price is

• £1 / 1,000 impressions, or can be set to
• £1 / month
• £1 / click.

A good format for professionals to use is dignified brief plain text, which is also quickest & easiest to set-up. That's it!

• Advanced users: some time in future you might want to put similar ad space on your blog or home page - even a business page - and suggest that business neighbours, colleagues and clients use the same system to make a targeted link exchange. This would pay or charge a few pence here or there, but its main benefit would be to keep peace and goodwill between all the participents by accounting for all these clicks and impressions. If each user trusts the system, each is more likely to sell or buy advertising space for next to nothing rather than pay for ads down the side of google search results.
  
• Advertising sales reps should know that a default commission of 30% is available on salable Addiply space. Publishers can vary this & haggle. So if you see a chance to sell space for legal ads on Lichfield Live, the Brixton Blog and Bugle, Myfootballwriter of Norwich, or the Peoples Republic of South Devon, why not ad Employees.org,uk to your list as well? A large proportion of visitors to this site are from the London area so Brixton Blog and Bugle would be a good place to start after practicing on the others.

Adsgadget provide most of the ads on this site but do not take individual advertisers. You'll probably see that their advertisers are mostly mainstream brands and do not include employment law solicitors; any who advertise on Addiply could stand-out as the only solicitors advertising on a page.

Quantcast on the top right say who reads this site. That's the gist so you are ready to advertise now or read-on if you are just curious.

Some facts about getting UK employment law clients to your site

• 22 lawyers paid 83p to £3.38 per click advertising to "lawyers employment" Google searchers.
  Source: http://www.spyfu.com/UK/Term.aspx?t=2794477 measuring cost per click paid-for, checked in October 2010. Prices have fallen since, as they find other cheap or free ways to become known. You can see some advertisers' landing pages, without costing them any money or clicking on their ads, here.
  contactlaw.co.uk/employment/,
  justanswer.com/sip/uk-law?r=ppc|ga|5|law - england and wales|cass trial - employment&jpkw=lawyer employment,
  ashbycohen.co.uk/employment-solicitor.aspx,
  browells.co.uk/index.php/employment-law,
  uddirect.co.uk,
  driscollsolicitors.com, and many more that you can see via the Spyfu link above
  
• Google and the other one have limits
  They do not advertise on obscure or contentious sites. Yahoobingnetwork.com/en/home has no "publisher" tab at all on their UK site because they only deal with the largest web sites besides their owners' search engines of Yahoo and Bing. Adwords.google.co.uk starts but sometimes changes its mind just before paying, & will not allow credit from ads to be spent on other ads; it requires money to sit for months in the system and quite likely not be claimed.
  
  As a result, someone can be paying £3.58 a click to advertise down the side of google searches while the same searcher on an obscure or contentious site sees ads for strange ads that pay next to nothing, or even a banner exchange advert that is free to anyone who posts a banner on their own blog in exchange. This is a pity because you will have noticed that ads follow you around nowadays.
  Source: See the adverts on this site or any obscure or contentious legal site, or see how the respected niche sites at listed at the bottom of this page have sold their own advertising.
  
• People reading Employees.org.uk include people searching for employment lawyers.
  SourceSource: http://www.quantcast.com/employees.org.uk/traffic/report?userView=Public#summary
  >: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/employees.org.uk#keywords .
  500 people visit a month. 15% visit several times. Many visitors read more than one page.
  The stats vary but in mid 2012 a lot were looking for DIY employment law or were worried about a trades union service and might be looking for alternatives. Most are from the UK.
  
• Addiply charge you £1 per thousand views of the space on the right or pay per click
  Source: https://beta.addiply.com/network/publisher/1050.
  A text ad can be written in the time it takes to think about writing it. You only have to write a few lines. You can advertise to South Devon, Lichfieldm Norwich, Brixton & Hackney customers on various sites that use the same agency - look for red blobs on the addiply google map and avoid the blue ones.
  
• Advertising exchanges could work if targeted by hand & accounted automatically.
  If you have a site that could show other small ads for the addiply network, you earn credit for any clicks or displays. You set the price and their commission is very reasonable. They differ from Google and Bing advertising in allowing this credit to go straight into payment for advertising; you don't have to earn £100 then transfer to another service from the same company to spend £100. On the other hand, it is hard to find advertisers who are willing to place a small add. Neighbours & neighbouring niches could be a good start. An employment lawyer from the other end of the UK. A divorce lawyer. The accountant in the next office. Some of your clients. Addiply keeps track of the micropayments so that there is no lost good will if someone decides to stop showing the ads. Simply adding a slip of paper or a note to each letter sent suggesting a cheap or free advertising exchange might bring some results. You'll also see column space filled with strange free ads that aren't targeted enough for law, but are sometimes used by recruitment agencies.
  
• The cost of acquiring clients may rise:
  Souce: The Law Society Gazette states that many firms are still not advertising, which is great for efficiency all-round if it works: people track down their nearest suitable law society member from Solictors-online.com. You can do your bit to help, as a firm, by putting "find us on Solicitors-online.com" or "Law Society members" or whatever works on your brass plaque, over your doorbell, in the window, at the bottom of your headed paper or email: anywhere where it doesn't reduce trade because if people can find a solicitor without advertising, everybody benefits. You could even look for heraldic graphics from the law society, although their current page [checked 8.10.2012] looks like an ad for cheap web hosting. They are new to the business of free advertising too. This Google image search for The Law Society might inspire you to find what works from the default brand that all professional lawyers use.
  
  If professional sales channels don't work, this is bad news for the profession. Once some lawyers start advertising there is pressure for others to advertise or merge into larger groups in order to advertise.
  
  It's a similar kind of pressure to the pressure to specialise & so get loads of cases done quickly, which is probably good.
  
  It's similar to the pressure to start a brilliant career by working for nothing while top partners get zillions of pounds for some un-necessarily complex law firm in offices that you have to commute to, which is probably bad. You just need clients, someone to ask for help when you are stuck or out of date, and a quiet place to work. City offices are not on the list.
  
  It's similar to the pressure to become a panel solicitor for ruthless organisations which may expect you to work just for success fees, and then pay them commission as well, while taking membership dues or premiums off their ignorant clients who have not read this site. This is ripping-off members & claimants. It is giving the employers' side an unfair advantage, because their legal insurers are better scrutinised than the employees' legal insurers and trades unions. It is not dignified. It is corrupt and repulsive, I think. You see similar opinions of trades union employment lawyers expressed by their clients in surveys on other pages of this site.
  
  Before the 1980s, professionals used to go on a social round of forced conversations and Abigails Parteys at golf clubs and charity events, meeting the same Prudential insurance reps, prep school headmasters and accountants at each time. It's now possible to have a facebook page and a twitter account in your business name (assuming your boss allows you, if you have a boss) and begin to get connections that way. If you are allowed to do a web site or blog connected with your business, a search of what brings people to read it may reveal a cheap search term that doesn't look odd to use again once in a while or use to control where your google adverts appear. Search engine optimisation and social media are the usual recommendations of pundits alongside a little cheap keyword and postcode advertising, and you've probably seen stuff about them. Which brings us to the next point.
  
• Local & niche advertising agents are unstable.
  In the lifetime of this site we have been owed
  €100 by an ad agent called Oxado Europe, which dissolved on 14/01/11 (archived link), and
  €50 by one called Namesco Ltd still trading as Simply.com which is still accepting new business.
  Addynamo is a new entrant to the market but appears to have no ads; Addshack registers no views, Adjug has ads and registers views but forgets each previous months' earnings. Media.net states that it will pay, but only when it has earned $500 which is about ten or twenty years' worth of advertising.
  Addiply is a UK-based exchange with the same ability to let advertisers and publishers choose the adverts, if any, and advertisers choose space they want, if any is available. Local publishers in Brixton, Lichfield and South Devon have taken it up along with some sports sites in Norwich where system was set up by a redundant newpaper sports journalist who decided to write online. Anyone who wants to sell Addiply space can also get commission which is set at 30% by default. It's easy to ad advertising space on the most visible, relevant parts of this site using the column on the right hand side. Choose London SW as the start of your search.
  
  Qadabra pays & is easy to use but doesn't accept individual advertisers - only publishers. It provides the mainstream paid-per-click advertisements on this site.
  
  An unstable market makes it hard to find an ad agent that can target the postcodes closer to you than similar employment lawyers - your patch - or obscure web sites about employment law. It over-charges you, and under-pays potential web site publishers.
  
  You will see in my other places to advertise employment law at the bottom of the page that Delia Venebles, The Times, and Butterworths have all found ways around the mainstreams of Google and the other one. They don't want to pay a large commission to a large agency nor risk having their account removed at whim if a disgruntled customer or a desparate rival clicks 100 times on one of the adverts. My own experience was writing a page about nonleather shoes for animal rights enthusiasts. It attracted adverts for leather and hundreds of clicks from one or two disgruntled people until google withdrew the service on a whim. That was my fault, apparently, and if it hadn't happened on that site it would most likely happen on any site about contentious journalistm or law. Contentious law attracts discgruntled people, but even if you escape that problem, Google simply doesn't target adverts very well. Lichfield Live [pdf link to interview] is like something out of The Archers but they can't be bothered with google ads either.
  
  "We initially experimented with Google AdSense, which generated a grand total of £18 revenue in 3 months from adverts mainly promoting hotels in Lichfield (hardly what our readers would be after). We didn't need a lot of money as we're volunteer run and not-for-profit but we had some costs to cover and AdSense clearly wasn't providing value for us or our visitors."
  
  The other big online ad agency - now a "search alliance" of Bing & Yahoo - does not even offer to place adverts on smaller web sites.
  
• If your corporate web site doesn't allow you to ad tracking code, you can set-up a personal blog page and add it there. Here's an employment law blog and here's an example by a criminal lawyer.
  

Other places to advertise employment law - none of which uses mainstream ad services:

TakeLegalAdvice.com charge lawyers a subscription fee each year according to The Times.
Lawyer Locator - an online version of Butterworth's - offers £199 annual promoted listings to its 51,000 monthly searchers. Like several law web sites, they charge by time but do use an agency called adtech for tracking visitors, which is good because their 100 times more visitors than employees.org.uk are spread between 1,643 law firms and an extraordinary variety of niche specialities that are mainly business-to-business rather than business-to-new-customer.
Emplaw.co.uk/services/findlawyer allows free listings in a directory searchable by speciality and area. Presumably the listings with links on them are charged for.
InfoLaw offer 30 pages of free solicitor's listings with paid-for highlighting or top placement as well as more ambitious search engine optimisation services for legal web sites.
Venebles.co.uk manages all ad sales manually - there are two, possibly three ad spaces amongst employment law solicitors and others around the site. She operates a waiting list. Current advertisers & renewal dates are here:
Venables.co.uk/aboutsponsoredlinks.htm#group 2

Solicitor.info is free and takes two minutes to sign-up to. The reason it's a respectable link is that it invites reviews of firms from the public. Some firms pay by the month to have an advert in a county section or shown nationwide.

Untargeted UK advertising - cheap or free

You pay for the targeting for intenernet ads - whether you pay a robot at Bing or Google or £25 Splut ads to place your ads on large web sites or you find someone with time to place ads by hand on Addiply. Unfortunately, lawyers need targeting by post code, search term, and the content of the web site advertised on or sites linking to it.

Apart from targeted advertising there is another world of fairground propositions placed on very cheap advertising space or placed for free if you put an advertisement from the same agency on your blog or homepage. Only a few agencies can find you a UK audience.

BAMify is a quick & easy to use because their text ads can show on any sized advertising space.
Two older agencies are Impressionz, which has only been known to show ads for ebid and no longer updates its list of other advertisers but claims to be a banner exchange across a large network of sites. Looking on the ebid forum, there are "free ads by Impressionz.com" at the bottom and bottom left of each page, but refreshing different pages a few times only shows mainstream ads with optout links from Google and a shared system for AdRoll, BlueKai, and
eXelate none of which sound like firms that have exchanged links in a link exchange. UK Banners that does not seem to be taking-on new publishers at the moment by approving their advertisements, and only seems to show ads for its own dating site. I'd like to hear from anyone who knows how to audit a banner exchange; some way of searching for the code on the web to see where it really shows.

.005¢ to 0012¢ buys space on Bamifry. Impressionz price on application to compete with
.001p space on UK Banners
The Bamify price is for a "credit" of about a column inch in flexible formats - maybe a quarter of a large column or half a small banner - while the other agencies have larger fixed sizes that they charge for, usually 726x90 or leaderboard 120x600 and 160x600 skyscraper and wide skyscraper, and 300x250 which has a forgotten name. The names and sizes are set by a trade association.
.100¢ buys "lederboard banner advertising" over framed UK Adfly links. If you want to annoy your viewers with an enforced five seconds of viewing before they see a "skip ad" sign, that's 0.4¢ and they state there are no guarantees of click-through rates.

If you're interested in the things being advertised on these sites, Chilli Towells are "a biodegradable, multi-use, ice cold towel that remains cool for up to two hours". "Funny Pics" is a site called Gewgle which has pictures on it, and "Fitness Friends Northampton" is an abandoned blog, and "Cydia Tweaks" are for a free & open source operating system you can put an apple iphone to save having to pay for addons or stick with to a over-priced phone company.

People with the next generation of web site tell me that OpenX is a good exchange and I will try it when technology allows.

---