Legal Practice Pro

Guest Posting – The Dark Side

Jay Fleischman — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:00:32 +0000

Guest posting is important for blogging, search engine optimization, and legal marketing in general. When you guest post you have the ability to reach a new audience, expand your reach, and spread your message. You also get the chance to add a quality backlink to your arsenal, which is a major SEO boost.

That having been said, not all guest posts are created equal from a legal marketing standpoint.

Two weeks ago I undertook a familiar legal marketing tactic by doing a guest post on the subject of estate planning as it relates to bankruptcy. Rather than ask, I did the guest post and sent it off to the firm for which I wanted to see it appear. This particular firm has a nice blog and I assume it does well for their legal marketing efforts if for no other reason than the fact that it ranks well for a particular search term.

My post was about 450 words of solid content, and well written. Within 12 hours I got a response from the lawyer that he thought it was very good post and he’d get it up immediately.

About 10 minutes later I got the following email, sent to me by a “Legal Communications” person who apparently didn’t understand the concept of “reply all.” The email said:

This is how it works. Nice tie in. Now, we can identify some bloggers for to write the same kind of email to.

I’m not worried at this point. It’s good that someone who gets paid for this sort of thing has been taught the “hidden secret” of guest blogging as legal marketing vehicle.

The following day I get an email from the lawyer saying:

It looks like it needs a partial rewrite now that I have reviewed it (since there are some other alternatives) so I will simply borrow most of it, give you attribution and link to your site.

A partial rewrite? OK, no problem. A little editorial control in the interests of clarity is a good thing. After all, I’m not an estate planning lawyer.

Now remember why we guest blog, people – to increase our reach and audience, to provide value, and to get noticed in a field in which that may not otherwise be the case. Legal marketing in the online world, this is. Tried and true content marketing.

In hindsight my mistake was clear.

Fast forward to the other day. I get an email from the “Communications Director” of this law firm (my oh my, they do have a lot of people working in the field of communications) telling me as follows:

Sending you a link to the blog with did based on your recent email. Please note that you are quoted in the blog and we have provided a link to your website. Thank you for the suggestion.

The content is noted as having been written by the attorney, and encompasses the content I provided. Of course, it’s wrapped in pure promotion for this attorney’s firm and not offered as a substantive piece of content written to inform and educate.

I am quoted with a link to one of my sites, but it is not my post. I did not give this attorney an interview, and I did not agree to ghostwrite a post for him. I did not offer to feed him ideas, and I certainly did not knowingly give him a “suggestion.”

What this proves, however, is that this attorney does not necessarily control his own content. His “communications” people are handling that, thank you very much. And rather than either accept or reject a guest blog post they chose to co-opt the content for their own purposes.

No, I’m not telling you the name of the other lawyer. It’s not relevant.

What is relevant is this – guest posting is a valid form of legal marketing. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. But before you submit a proposed guest post you need to remember that it is your intellectual property. You need to retain full editorial control or, at the very least, final say on the content being published.

Photo courtesy of chick pea pie.

Marketing Your Law Firm Online With A Domain Name

Jay Fleischman — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:00:41 +0000

Marketing your law firm online can be a struggle, especially where you don’t know where to begin. One of my students calls it, “analysis paralysis,” and I like the alliteration. But it’s true.

The domain name you choose for your law firm blog or website is like the color of your home’s front door. It says something about who you are, what you stand for, and where you want to position yourself in the marketplace.

Too often, lawyers will choose their firm name as their domain name. They think they’re branding their firm when in reality they’re just obscuring the truth about who they are and what they do.

Let’s say you’re looking for a lawyer to handle a nasty dog bite case in San Francisco. Like most Americans, you’re going to hit a search engine to begin your search. You enter in your search term and it comes back with the following:

Which website are you going to click on? The one that stands out, if you’re like most people. And the things that stand out most are the title, the description and the domain name.

Why? Because Google puts in boldface your search terms. So if you search for “dog bite” then anywhere those words appear they will be in bold. The goal is to help draw your eye to the most relevant search results, and it works darn well.

To be sure, the title and description are also critical to drawing the eye to your website. But the domain name is the single thing you can begin to get a handle on immediately when setting up your website.

Marketing your law firm online requires you to use every single tool to your advantage, and the domain name is clearly one of them. Every other lawyer in your area is going to look to that holy grail of a keyword search term, which is why it’s doubly important to pull out the stops.

Will your domain name be the single thing that catapults your law firm website to #1 on the search engines? Not at all. But getting a leg up surely isn’t a bad idea.

Hire For Passion

Jay Fleischman — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:00:51 +0000

The solo and small-firm practitioner decides to start and build a law firm because he or she has a passion for a particular field of law. You have a connection with family law, bankruptcy, criminal law, personal injury … whatever it is, you’re in it for a reason.

The firm you built exists to serve your clients, and to serve them well. To do right by the public and, in turn, to make you money (no, “profit,” is not a dirty word).

When you hire new employees you look for technical expertise of some sort. Good computer skills, perhaps experience in the field. For a receptionist, you look for a good speaking voice.

Technical skills are good, to be sure. But the one thing we as business owners must actively seek is not the ability to use Microsoft Word or Outlook, it’s passion. Passion for what we, as business owners, stand for.

Your potential employees need to have that same fire in their gut that made you open the office in the first place. Be it a drive to do good in the community, to help people get to a better place, or just to make a positive impact in the world. Whatever it is that brought you here, that raw energy should be instilled in your employees before they get the job.

Once hired, it’s your job to focus that passion and guide the employee accordingly, You need to train them to put their passion to use, to give them the tools they need to connect with your clients and provide the service for which your firm has been hired.

You can teach the technical aspects of any field of law – as a judge once told me, this ain’t rocket science. Our paralegals and staffers are trained to use the tools we provide, and the lawyers we hire learn to put their education and training to use for our office.

The one thing you can’t teach, however, is caring. And if someone doesn’t care, their only motivation to get something done is the money. The employee is a clock-watcher, someone counting down the slow hours until the end of the day.

If a client email comes in at the end of the day? If you care and are passionate, you’re going to answer it. If you’re a clock-watcher, you’re out the door and on the bus home.

If a phone call comes in during lunch? If you care and are passionate, you’re going to put down the sandwich and talk with the client. If you’re a clock-watcher, the call goes to voice mail.

How do you interview for passion?

Ask questions that don’t relate to the law. Find out what fires up the interviewee. If you can’t find anything, chances are pretty good there’s not much passion there.

Plug the person’s name into Google. Do they have a ton of Facebook friends? Are they on Twitter? Digg? Do they have a blog about a personal hobby? These are clues as to a person’s passions. Ferret them out to get a better idea of the person behind the resume.

In short, learn as much about the person as possible. Take your time – this is an important decision, and the one you make will help or haunt you for a long time to come.

We must hire for passion, not technical skills. Our firm deserves it, our clients deserve it.

***Photo courtesy of* *Emily’s mind***.

5 Reasons Why I Educate My “Competition”

Jay Fleischman — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:00:24 +0000

One of my readers sent me a question a few weeks ago, asking me if I wasn’t worried that I was educating my competition on the ways of online legal marketing and the use of social media in the legal profession.

The simple answer is that I’m not concerned in the least bit. But real life is seldom simple, so here are my 5 reasons why I want my competition to know all about online legal marketing:

The Prospective Client is More Important Than The Lawyer: I want my prospective clients to walk in the door filled with the right information about bankruptcy, not some mumbo-jumbo they’ve picked up from a talking head on TV. If they’re properly educated then I don’t need to spend hours swimming upstream. In fact, a local bankruptcy lawyer on Long Island writes an excellent blog to which I refer clients all the time.
My Clients Are Different Than Yours: You read that last sentence right – I send my clients to another local lawyer for his insights when I don’t have a piece of content at the ready. Doing this isn’t a big deal to me because I know my clients, and everything I do is specifically targeted towards a single client persona. My client can read another local lawyer’s blog and think, “That’s interesting,” but it won’t connect with them to the extent that mine will. So, too, my blog won’t connect with a client who doesn’t fit my target client persona.
There’s Enough Work To Go Around: Let’s face it – my law firm couldn’t handle every single bankruptcy case in New York if we wanted to. Impossible.
Collaboration Instead Of Competition: I’m not giving up any trade secrets on this blog or on any other for which I write. I’m discussing my thoughts on where we’re going in online legal marketing and sharing tips I’ve picked up over the years and tested for my benefit. If someone local wants to take the time to read and implement it, so much the better.
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: If what I do here can lift the access to quality information to consumers in New York (where I practice) and teach lawyers how to connect with people on a human level then we’ll all be able to do better – better work for our clients, a better job at being lawyers, a better outcome for the process.

Maybe it sounds hokey, maybe it’s a little too kumbaya (to borrow a term used by Sonia Simone) and perhaps it doesn’t resonate with you. If that’s the case, no problem – keep on doing what works for you.

But I urge you to take a step back and consider what I’ve said here, and whether the way the legal profession has evolved (or failed to evolve) in terms of customer service, creating real connections with the public and delivering outstanding service hasn’t been a bit … shall we say, stilted up to now. Don’t we deserve a new model, a new way to reach potential clients and delivery remarkable results?

This is exactly why I speak at conference all around the country each year, delivering value not only on the topic of legal marketing but also substantive law. It’s why I sat in a room two years ago and taught 15 of my local colleagues how to handle discharge violations in bankruptcy – a field in which I practice heavily.

If this blog is the model, then so be it. But I think you’ve all got something within you, some spark that makes you want to educate your local colleagues so that the bar is raised.

Photo of Boalt Hall lecture hall by umjanedoan.

Legal Marketing At The End Of The Honeymoon

Jay Fleischman — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:00:53 +0000

Your online legal marketing plans have taken shape, and you’re serious about generating new business for your law firm. You haven’t abandoned your offline marketing but you’re looking at those media like distasteful relatives you are required to invite to your home for holidays.

Your law firm blog is all shiny and new, the pictures beautiful and the designer paid. You’ve got your Facebook fan page, Twitter account, whatever you’ve decided to work with. Your legal marketing efforts are all ready to go.

Welcome the the online legal marketing honeymoon, when it’s all wine and roses, romantic sunset walks along the beach and passion.

You start off easy, with a blog post about the basics. You get so excited it takes you 900 words to describe the most mundane subject, but that’s OK – you want to be thorough, right?

Of course, it’s dry and boring to the outsider. But it really showcases your knowledge of the field, sets you apart from the rest of the competition. That’s what legal marketing is all about, right? Full steam ahead!

The next day you go onto Twitter and follow everyone and their mother, all in a mad rush to beat Ashton Kutcher and Oprah in numbers of followers. The more people you follow, the more will follow you back!

You have no idea who these people are, or why they would want to follow you. But they sure to use Twitter a lot! Your Twitter stream gets clogged up within seconds, but you send out a link to your brand new blog post and know – just KNOW – it will send your traffic skyrocketing.

Of course, next up is Facebook. Two bazillion users, and they are all pining for your wisdom. You set up your fan page, so you send out a suggestion to all of your Facebook friends that they become fans. You send out your blog posts there, too.

You are a legal marketing Goliath. Market domination is within reach. You can sense your competition trembling in their offices, fearful of your wrath and legal marketing prowess.

Now, check your website analytics. Re-check them. Keep checking. Where’s that rush of traffic?

The online legal marketing honeymoon is over. And as with all long-term relationships, the hard work begins.

Your spouse doesn’t bring you flowers anymore (cue the song, please). No more all-nighters filled with insights into one another. It’s time to start figuring out who’s going to load the dishwasher at night.

So, too, with your online legal marketing efforts. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you aren’t going to be an overnight success. Nobody is. It takes hard work, nose to the grindstone, day in and day out.

And even worse is the fact that it never ends.

You have a blog but need to feed the machine. Forever.

You are on Twitter, but if you don’t interact and reach out to new people then it’s nothing more than another broadcast mechanism.

Facebook is bigger than ever, but if you’re there and don’t work on your presence then you might as well go home.

Because the competition is waking up, and doing it faster than you realize. Lawyers are hitting Avvo hard, learning the Facebook ropes, and embracing blogging like never before.

Maybe you’ve never heard of them, maybe their legal marketing efforts aren’t on your radar yet because you’ve got your nose buried.

It doesn’t matter. They’re out there. And your competition isn’t just spending money on some company that claims they’ll get you on the first page of Google (not that it matters even if they could – if you’ve not nothing to add to the conversation then nobody’s going to stick around your site for long).

So stop asking how long you’ve got to keep at this marketing and content creation thing. Forget about when you can start going to sleep early and sleeping late again. It isn’t going to happen – not now, not ever.

You signed up for this, after all. You decided that you wanted to run your own law firm, to be the master (or mistress) of your own domain, to eat what you kill.

But ask anyone who’s been married for 50 years if the hard work has been worth it. Most will say it was some of the most rewarding work they’ve ever done.

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

Jay Fleischman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:00:44 +0000

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.

Legal Marketing Tip: A Flip Camera And 8.3 Seconds

Jay Fleischman — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:49:15 +0000

Legal marketing takes all forms, but one of the best ways to convince the world that you’re good at what you do is to get other people talking about you.

Word of mouth is indeed a powerful force, especially these days. There are so many lawyers out there, so many marketing messages thrown at consumers, that it’s difficult to separate the good from the bad.

When someone tells the world about your law firm, those words carry weight. They infused with what’s called social proof, that undercurrent of, “it was good for me, so it will be good for you, too.“

Your legal marketing message needs to answer that unspoken question of, “can I trust that you’re a good lawyer who will take care of me?”

Testimonials are powerful ways to get that word of mouth going. And one of the best places to get those testimonials is when the relief is fresh in the client’s mind.

This morning I took my Flip video camera with me to bankruptcy court. On the way out, one client told me that he thought we were terrific.

So I asked him if he’d be willing to say that on camera. He agreed, and I pulled out my little video camera.

He took 8.3 seconds to say what was on his mind and to share his positive feelings about the firm.

The result? A priceless piece of legal marketing that is better than anything we could have said ourselves. I paid not a single dime for it, and all I had to do was ask a happy client if he’d be willing to say a kind word on video.

Remember that a happy client is not only a direct referral source, but a potential evangelist. And every person they send your way is someone you don’t need to convince that you’re good at what you do.

Don’t believe me? Ask Gustavo.

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

Jay Fleischman — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

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 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.

How Content Drives Law Firm Marketing

Jay Fleischman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Law firm marketing used to be so simple. Slap up a few ads, buy up some television time, and call the Yellow Pages representative to pick up a fat check.

But somewhere along the line it got more difficult. Prospective clients started wising up and asking questions. They realized that there was no early way for them to differentiate between Lawyer A and Lawyer B based on a 30 second commercial spot or a full-page Yellow Pages ad. The problem was that they didn’t know exactly how to tell the difference.

So they did what we all do when we shop for a new car – we peek under the hood.

First they turned to the Better Business Bureau, not realizing that lawyers didn’t utilize that venue. So they moved onto Martindale-Hubbell, the grand-daddy of lawyer rankings. But M-H was stuffed to the gills with huge law firms that looked down on helping people with their problems in favor of billing big corporate entities.

Some lucky few could ask their friends and family members about lawyers, but when it came to things like bankruptcy and divorce it was a little stickier. Who wants to approach their uncle and say, “Hi Uncle Bob. I can’t pay my bills. Do you know a good bankruptcy lawyer?”

So they turned to the Internet. At first there was no way to find a reputable professional, so the public just bumped around in the dark. But eventually lawyers started getting websites, those online brochures with pretty pictures. Lulled into peaceful slumber, people started equating the best website with the best lawyer.

But something happened along the way. Blogging came around, and some folks started thinking that it was a darn easy way to add information to their website. It sure was a lot faster and cheaper than paying the web guru to update the site every month.

Blogging didn’t take off for lawyers for a long time. In fact, there’s a good argument that blogging still hasn’t taken off for lawyers. But with blogging evangelists like Grant Griffiths leading the way, inroads have been made over the past few years.

When you’re talking about blogging, you’re talking about the entire world of online marketing. Every industry has marching orders to get blogging and get it done now. Every media channel has a cadre of super-successful people who also happen to be blogging their brains out. You can’t get away from it.

Consumers have been trained to ask questions online, to query Google and Bing and the rest in an effort to get answers. The answers to their questions float to the top of the search engine results page and, in so doing, the site on which those answers reside gain the most loyal followings.

Follow someone long enough and you come to trust their intellect and insight. You rely upon them for good information. You get to know them to an extent, and feel closer to them. And when you need help, you turn to that person over all others.

Chances are pretty good that you’re not creating content and, in fact, don’t know where you’d put it or what you should do to get people to notice it. If so, you’re not alone. In fact, most of your competition isn’t doing anything either. They’re watching the world pass them by, caught up in the day-to-day grind of being lawyer and entranced by the notion of cutting a fat check to some “SEO Mastermind” to turn their 3-page website into a Google magnet.

Good luck with that.

So here’s what you need to do, right now. Take out a pen and a blank legal pad and start writing. Anything at all.

We’re going to keep talking about this. Because your future depends on it.

Photo courtesy of SPazzo_1493.

Online Legal Marketing Tip – Google Local

Jay Fleischman — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:26:02 +0000

Online legal marketing tactics vary from person to person, but one thing every lawyer wants is to rank at the top of the Google results. On this audio post (I’d call it a podcast but then I’d probably never podcast again, then I’d look like a dummy) we talk about online legal marketing using Google Local, as well as some statistics about mobile phone adoption in the “baby boomer” crowd.

For example, more Americans than ever before are turning to their mobile devices for their web-related activities. They’re checking email from restaurants, their sofas, and during idle time in general. When people search online from their smartphones and mobile devices, Google Local gives them the option of clicking the local result and placing a phone call without the hassle of writing down the number.

When you’re marketing your law firm online it’s important to go where the eyeballs are. In the old days that meant the Yellow Pages and newspapers, but more people than ever are replacing those modes of communication and information-gathering with their phones, netbooks and (very soon) iPads.

Will your law firm be found online when someone does a search from the grocery store checkout line?

To listen to the audio, just click the link below. To save it to your computer, mp3 player, iPod or whatever – just right-click and hit “Save As.”

Online Legal Marketing Tip – Google Local (Click To Listen)

Add your law firm to Google Local here.

News stories relating to mobile Internet usage:

Boomers’ Mobile Adoption
An App for That, Too: How Mobile Is Changing Shopping
Women More Likely to Get Social on Mobile