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Your First Law Firm Blog Is Just A Baby Step

August 24, 2010 By

Law Firm Blog Baby StepOn July 6, 2006 I, along with my good friend and colleague Jay Jump of Kent, WA presented a free teleseminar to our fellow consumer bankruptcy lawyers.  We didn’t have much of a plan at the time, and figured we’d just do something fun for everyone; we’d just come off a heady panel discussion with Kurt O’Keefe and Alan Ramos at the NACBA convention in New Orleans, and I guess we just wanted to keep the party going.

I registered the domain name www.BKPracticePro.com for the occasion, figuring it had a nice hook to it.  The thinking was to do a teleseminar and see what happened.

What happened was a lot of fun.  Then we both went back to work.  That is, until I got bored on August 19, 2006 and published my first blog post dealing with Windows XP shortcuts.  It was all uphill from there, as the site morphed into what you see before you – a full-fledged business built around a blog dealing with online legal marketing, technology and managing a law firm.

Each one of those first posts were mere baby steps towards the current incarnation of this blog, done with tremendous hesitation and no small amount of trepidation.  What if I got it wrong?  What if I failed?

There were, however, a few things that gave me no small amount of freedom.  A freedom, I realize now, that is bestowed upon all of us who begin a law firm blog.

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Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Online Legal Marketing Tip – Check Your Site For Broken Links

May 26, 2010 By

W3C Link CheckerYour website or blog is critical to your online legal marketing efforts.  It’s got to be clean, well-organized and accessible.  Take the time to do some housekeeping to maximize your search engine results.

In order to engage in online legal marketing you need to understand search engine optimization, that nebulous field that deals with maximizing your search engine placement and visibility.  Without at least a minimal grasp of search engine optimization, your online legal marketing will never be as effective as it can be.  Period.  After all, how can you do something really well unless you know how to do it?

Remember that online legal marketing means attracting people to your content, keeping them involved, and educating them about how you can help.  As a result, you become a trusted resource and more likely to get a particular client as opposed to another lawyer.

One of the important search engine optimization factors you need to know about is the use of links on your website.  Links between pages on your site as well as links that go to other sites are useful not only to the search engines, but to your readers as well.

When someone visits your law firm website or blog and sees a link, they’re going to click it.  If that link takes them somewhere else on your site, you’ve kept them interested and engaged.  More interest and engagement leads to a greater likelihood that your online legal marketing efforts will lead to a paying client.  Paydirt, baby!

That greater level of engagement also serves to reduce your site’s bounce rate, one of the visitor engagement metrics that’s so important to search engines when determining how and where to rank you.  I’ve already talked about how to lower your bounce rate, and why doing so is an important facet of your online legal marketing strategy.  Lower bounce rate means better rankings in the long-term.

Though external links don’t do much for your rankings, broken ones tend to annoy visitors.  Ever go to a website, click a link and find out that it’s busted?  That sucks, and you’re less likely to visit that website again.  As the owner of the site, your online legal marketing efforts have been wasted if you lose a visitor because of something as simple as that.

On the pure search engine optimization front, you need to realize that the spiders are constantly looking at your site and making sure all those links work.  If they do, everyone’s happy.  But if they don’t, the spiders are decidedly unhappy.  It looks like you’re falling down on the job, delivering a less-than-optimal user experience to visitors.

And if the search engines think you’re doing a bad job then your rankings are going to suffer.  Bad rankings mean bad rate of online legal marketing return.

These are the reasons why you need to check your site for broken links, and do so often.  The tool I use is a free web-based on called the W3C Link Checker.  The tool will go through your entire website or blog and report back on any broken links.  If there’s a problem, you know where to look for it – and fix it immediately.

So check those links with this free tool.  Your wallet will thank you.

Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lawyers Who Blog (And Those Who Want To) Should Buy ProBlogger

April 26, 2010 By

I have a confession to make – I read a lot more than normal people.  In fact, I read more than abnormal people.  It’s a habit I picked up when I was a kid, and it kept me from learning how to play sports (my wife tells me she likes the fact that she’ll never be a football widow) and getting a proper tan (lower risk of skin cancer is good, but I’m pretty pasty).

As a lawyer who blogs, much of my legal marketing reading comes to me in the form of other blogs.  Also podcasts, which are really nothing more than blogs for my ears.  Television bores me for the most part, though I’m a treasure trove of Family Guy references (my dog’s name is Griffin because my wife refused to let me name him Brian).

Last year I was listening to a podcast where someone was talking about his goal of reading 52 books in 52 weeks.  Kindle in hand, I set about the same goal.

Today’s purchase was ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (that’s an affiliate link), the second edition of the excellent book by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett.  Both of these guys are successful bloggers in their own right, as well as social media icons.  Darren is heavily involved in Third Tribe Marketing, and Garrett is new media consultant.

First, a confession (well, I guess this is the second) – I never read the first edition of the book.

Second confession (which is really the third) – I am currently zipping through the new version.  I even bought it in (gasp) physical paper form because the Kindle version won’t be out until after I’ve gone to San Francisco for the weekend and was going to read it on the plane there.  At this rate I’ll be done long before then.

I can’t tell you if it’s better or worse than the original, but I can tell you that this is good stuff for anyone who wants to use a blog to make money.

In the book they discuss tools used for blogging, and there are a bunch of screenshots and descriptions to help you along. There’s also an excellent chapter on using social media for your blogging efforts.

The really nice thing for lawyers is the back story Rowse brings to the table. He began blogging out of passion, not as a business. In fact, his Digital Photography School had nothing to do with money when he started it. What he had, however, was knowledge about a core topic and a desire to get his information out to the public.

That sounds a lot like lawyers, doesn’t it? Lawyers have information about a niche subject and can use that knowledge to begin their online legal marketing efforts using content generation.

The title is obviously a huge draw for people who are looking to blogging as a way to build a business, and most lawyers aren’t going to use some of the monetization strategies used by that crowd.  But the underpinnings of social media and content marketing for lawyers is compelling and cuts across industries – right to ours.

Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Blogging For Your Law Firm? There Is No Middle Ground.

March 11, 2010 By

Marketing your law firm with a blog is a romantic notion in a certain sense.

Law firm marketing folks – heck, all marketing folks – extol the virtues of blogging. Create a law firm blog and your business will soar, setting you apart from the competition and bringing you accolades of all sorts.  Your law firm marketing efforts should center around a blog, they say.

Actually, that’s not true. Creating a law firm blog as part of your marketing efforts will set you apart from the competition, but maybe not in a good way.

Blogging is a content marketing mechanism that’s designed to provide useful information and show your stuff.  By creating a law firm blog you build trust your prospective clients and the public, enhancing your reputation.  It’s also terrific for search engine optimization, which exposes your words and thoughts to a wider audience and increases the reach of your message.

But unless you’re adding content on a regular basis, you’re not going to look so terrific to people to visit your law firm blog.

I’m not telling you to create content every day because I know it’s not realistic for lawyers to take that kind of time.  But would it kill you to put down something on your law firm blog once a week, something valuable and helpful?

There’s a lawyer in my area who, in a fit of “I want to market my law firm,” went out and hired a designer to do two new sites for his bankruptcy law firm.  The sites are beautiful, and very easily navigable.  And they both have blogs.

OK, I can see someone creating more than one law firm blog – in fact, I have more than one.  The problem is that both of the blogs cover exactly the same topic, with the only difference that one site allegedly covers New York City and the other covers Long Island (a distance of under 60 miles).

Since he launched these beautiful sites over six months ago, he’s suffered from a bit of over extension.

On one blog he’s done 10 posts since September 2009, which is respectable.

On the second blog he’s done 2 posts since September 2009.  And one of them is a duplicate of a post on the first site.

A failure of consistency tells a visitor that you’re not serious. And if you’re not serious about this aspect of your marketing, how reliable are you as a service provider?  Your law firm blog signals a commitment to provide information and share knowledge; your lack of consistency signals a failure to live up to that commitment.

In addition, failing to consistently publish content onto your legal blog will lower your site traffic. If there’s a blog I like, I’m going to visit it more frequently (as much as I love it, I recognize that RSS readers never really caught on with the masses).  Once I show up a few times and see nothing new, I’m not visiting anymore.  It’s like when I turn on the television every week to catch Big Bang Theory (which you should watch), I expect to see Sheldon in a new episode.  If all I get is repeats for a few weeks I’m going to find something else to do on Mondays nights.

So, too, with your legal blogging activities.  If you’re going to do it, understand that you’re in this for the long haul.  If you’re in that’s cool.  And if not, you need to go find some other way to market your law firm.

Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Online Legal Marketing Overdrive – 9 WordPress Plugins That Rock My Blogs

March 10, 2010 By
Online Legal Marketing And WordPress Plugins

Online legal marketing needs to include a blog – I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again before too long (that is, unless I end up saying that blogging is dead – nah, not likely).  And if you’re serious about your online legal marketing efforts you should be using WordPress.  Not the one they host for you (that would be wordpress.com), but the one you host on your own website.

Why?  It’s free, well-supported, easy to use, free, widely used (heck, the New York Times runs on WordPress) … I’ve gone through that a few times as well.

But once you’ve got WordPress installed you need to make sure you’ve got some plugins hard at work behind the scenes.

What are they?  Those are little mini-applications that you can install to make WordPress run even better.

On the heels of this fantastic post over at Six Revisions titled 6 Critical WordPress Plugins You Should Have Installed, I thought it would be helpful to let you all peek in on the ones I use on this site as well as on my other blogs.

Akismet:  This is an awesome anti-spam plugin, made by the folks who created WordPress.  You need to go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free account; once you do, you can get what’s called an API Key to make the plugin run.  Nothing worse for your online legal marketing efforts than your prospective clients seeing a bunch of less than <ahem> respectable comments on your site.  Bye bye spammy comments!

DISQUS Comment System:  The DISQUS comment system replaces your WordPress system with one hosted and powered by DISQUS. You can organize all the comments for all of your blogs in one place, mark spam accordingly and respond to others.  DISQUS also gives you a clean output in your blog to show not only comments, but also reactions to your posts through the entire spectrum of social media sites.  In doing so, it create a more effective barometer of your online marketing efforts.

Google XML Sitemaps:  This plugin generates a standardized XML sitemap so the search engines can index your blog more easily.  If you’re not being found, you’re not marketing – you’re yelling into a black hole.

Redirection:  Once in awhile, you need to move a post from one place to another.  Maybe you need to kill off a category or change a URL slug to make it more search engine friendly.  With Redirection you’ll never get those dreaded 404 errors again.  And we all know that when Google sees a 404, it gets sad.  We don’t like to make Google sad.

Scribe SEO:  I love Scribe SEO.  Period.  Check out my previous post about it.  Remember, I do as much on the cheap as possible – and I ponied up the money for this plugin immediately.  Some of the best money I’ve spent in a long time (the money I spent on Headway is still better, but it’s so – darn – close).

WordPress Database Backup:  I will never forget when I lost an entire blog.  All that hard work, down the tubes.  WordPress Database Backup runs automatically and emails me a copy of my blog database every day.  If the site blows up I can reinstall WordPress, upload my backup and be running again in a matter of hours.

WP Super Cache:  WP Super Cache makes your posts load up to 259.1% faster (according to Six Revisions – I just know it loads way faster). The faster a page loads, the less likely someone’s going to get antsy and click away.

WPtouch iPhone Theme:  This plugin works for not only iPhone, but for pretty much any mobile browser (Android, BlackBerry, etc.).  Using this handy little plugin lets you see my blog in a mobile-friendly version rather than having to squint to see the regular site in that tiny screen.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin:  This plugin is responsible for that list of related posts at the end of this one.  It finds the other posts on this site that are on the same or a related topic and serves them up automatically.

I use a few others, but these are the kings of my plugin world.  If you’re not using them, you need to start doing so immediately.  Your blog readers will thank you.

What plugins do you use?

Photo courtesy of ell brown.
Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The Ideal Length For A Legal Blog Post

November 18, 2009 By

Length Of Legal Blog Post

Much has been said.  Battles have been waged.  Mel Gibson has shouted, “Freedom!”

How long should your blog post be?  100 words?  200?  600?

There’s no answer, but there are some pointers.

  • If Your Reader Gets Bored, It’s Too Long.
  • If The Story’s Not Done, It’s Too Short.
  • If You Can Cut Out Words Without Losing The Gist Of It, It’s Too Long.
  • If Your Paralegal Can’t Understand, It’s Too Short.
  • If You Can Submit It To The Book-Of-The-Month Club, It’s Too Long.

This blog post was designed not to give you the answer, but to make you realize something important – a blog post is not a treatise, it’s a short entry that discusses one small topic in a clear, concise way.  If that means you’ve got to spend 700 words, then by all means do so; provided, however, that you can be entertaining and insightful for that long.  But if something can be explained and clarified in 200 words then by all means – don’t muck it up by rambling.

This post clocks in at 176 words, and that’s all I need.

Photo courtesy of capn madd matt.  (This line not included in word count stated above)
Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Upgrade WordPress To Version 2.8.4 Now To Minimize Attack Damage

September 5, 2009 By
Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers Tagged With:

6 Reasons Why Every Lawyer Should Have Their Blog Comments Turned On

July 8, 2009 By

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So you’re have a blog, building an online presence for your law firm.  You’re trying to attract a following and stand out from the swarming sea of other “me too” attorneys with stagnant websites.  But in setting up the blog you come across a major decision.

Do you turn your blog comments on, or off?

Most marketing folks will tell you that a blog needs to have comments turned on.  If they’re off then it’s not a blog – it’s a broadcast mechanism.

There are some high-profile people who have their comments turned off.  Seth Godin, for example.  He gets tens of thousands of readers each day.  If even a small percent of those people commented then he’d be bogged down in administering and responding.  He’d never have time to write anything.

You, however, are not Seth Godin.  You’re a lawyer who set up a blog as a way of sharing information, entertaining your prospective clients and building your authority in the marketplace.  I think it’s fair to say that Seth Godin has already accomplished that.

And in case you waver, here are my top 6 reasons why you must keep them on.

  1. Because you look like an elitist snob if you don’t. It’s like going to a cocktail party and standing in front of some blowhard who doesn’t let you get a word in edgewise because they’re oh-so-brilliant and have thought of absolutely every salient point in the conversation.  Hey, I’ve got some advice for that jerk – go talk to a wall and stop wasting my time.
  2. Because other readers may have some value to add. Maybe I’m writing about a bankruptcy discharge violation and one of my visitors has an angle that involves the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.  I probably want to hear about that because it may help my case, my level of understanding, and my other readers.
  3. Because it isn’t legal advice if someone asks a question. It just isn’t.  And if you think it is, add a disclaimer onto your sidebar.
  4. Because if someone can’t add their two cents on your blog, they probably won’t think they can speak freely at all. And when people feel muzzled they don’t feel like they can trust you very much.
  5. Because more comments on your blog are better for your search engine optimization. There’s the elephant in the room – SEO.  You blog to get to the top of the search engines for multiple long-tail keywords, right?  Right.  So when someone adds a comment they invariably are going to talk about the same stuff you’re talking about … including the same keywords.  So if there’s more keyword-rich content on the blog, that’s better for your SEO.  Your blog commenters help you in your quest for search engine domination.
  6. Because if you’re talking to yourself, you’re pontificating.  And that’s cool for static websites, but not blogs. It’s the nature of the beast, friends.  Blogging is social media – that means you gotta be social.  Conversations and all that.  Back and forth.  Build relationships.

Oh, and if you’re worried about spam comments – don’t.  There are a bunch of terrific ones out there to cut down your spam volume so it doesn’t bug you.

So what’s keeping you from flipping the switch on your comments area?

Image courtesy of Search Engine People.

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Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers