Press releases can be useful for lawyers, even in this digital day and age.  It’s a good way to get out the word about some newsworthy event like a major victory or new initiative, though cultivating relationships with the press before you have a potential story is far more likely to bear fruit.  Still, sometimes the old ways are good enough.

Lots of lawyers are using online press releases as a means of attracting valuable inbound links and attention, thereby raising their SEO profiles.  Nothing wrong with that, either.

The disturbing trend I’ve been seeing, however, is the dissemination of online press releases for evens that are far from newsworthy.  It’s the online equivalent of broadcasting your child’s first successful use of the potty.

Actually, it’s worse than that because the potty trip is exciting for at least the parents and grandparents.

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As December winds to a close, we’re bombarded with predictions for the upcoming year.  Everyone wants to sound off about what’s going to happen next year.  Blogging will be hot, Twitter will be super-hot, Google+ will be on fire, Foursquare will explode, and somehow Yellow Pages advertising will make a comeback.

The reality is that nobody can reliably predict what’s going to happen.

Case in point (and stay with me to the end, please).

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When I was in high school I wrote short fiction and dreamed of the day I’d be a published author like Heinlein, Ellison or Sturgeon. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anyone in the industry to give it a second look. Good thing, too – it was atrocious.

If I were doing it all again, things would be different. The walls have come down. What this means for lawyers – for anyone, in fact – is monumental.

GalleyCat recently published Amazon’s Bestselling Books Of 2011. There’s some Grisham, Tiny Fey’s book, and the Steve Jobs biography. All good choices, none surprising.

But look more closely at the list and you’ll see something notable: [Read more...]

John Wanamaker is famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”  Too bad he didn’t have Google Analytics.

The successful retailer may not have actually said it, but the sentiment was certainly true in the pre-Internet era. Nowadays we have Google Analytics to close the knowledge gap to strengthen your law firm marketing results.

Google Analytics is a free product that helps you track how many people visit your website, where the came from, what they did while on your site, and what they found compelling (or not so much).  By digging into some of the elements of the application, you can unearth a treasure trove of information to make your marketing efforts more effective for your law firm. [Read more...]

When you’re on vacation and need to get around easily, you rent a car.  When you’re back at home, you buy one.  It makes no sense to rent a car for the long run.  Why, then, do you rent a web presence for your law firm?

You want your law firm to stand out, and you want a professional job done.  You want it to be as easy and hassle-free as possible.  So you call one of the big companies that offers you a deal – for only $1,200 a month they’ll design the site, write the content for the site, and host it.

The site goes up, and it’s lovely.  Some of the words aren’t quite what you would have chosen, but the web people say it’s good for your rankings.  They want you at the top of the search engines, or so they say.

I’m sure they’re not saying the exact same thing to your competition down the block.  No, they’d never do something like that.

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It begins with the feeling that something’s not quite right. A letter in the mail from a strange company, talking about an account you can’t recall. A phone call from a bill collector when you know you’re up-to-date. A confirmation email out of the blue.

The US Federal Trade Commission received 250,854 complaints about identity theft during 2010. That’s 20% of the complaints the FTC received overall. And for every person who lodged a complaint, you’ve got to wonder how many others either dealt with the issue privately or not at all.

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Now that the California bar exam is out of the way, I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been working on since the end of July (aside from, you know, practicing law and such).