This old adage might hold true in our personal lives, but if you’re fooling your prospective clients online even one time, you’re doing damage to your brand and your bottom line.

Now, I’m not saying that you’ve been intentionally tricking your visitors, but the harsh truth is that innocent mistakes can lead to confusion or frustration. This breaks the trust of your online audience and can have real-world effects. Think about it in your own life. I’ll bet you can easily remember a time when you were turned off by a simple mistake or bad decision that another business made. You may have even taken your business elsewhere.

To keep your law firm in the good graces of your audience, avoid the following six missteps in your online marketing:

3.

Inconsistent branding

Your brand is more than your firm name. It’s your web address, your tagline or even your color scheme. You’d work to keep these consistent across business cards and email mastheads, so do the same online as well. Your audience should always be clear about who they’re working with.

6.

Abusing your followers

Finding the right amount of social media use for your firm is always a challenge. But for every brand, there is a line between enough and too much. And that line can move if you aren’t careful. Don’t overwhelm your audience with meaningless or off-brand postings. Odds are, your social network is made of courteous followers, not devoted fans.

Remember, trust is a key factor among legal consumers. Don’t let carelessness or self-interest get in the way of the connections that matter most to your business.