Blogging is the biggest movement in online legal marketing since the first lawyer put up the first online storefront way back in the day.  And we’ve all been sold on the notion that blogging is, in and of itself, a terrific marketing tool.  Blog blog blog, the blogpunditry says (I just made up that word – maybe it will stick).  But the lawyers who are out there, plugging away at it, often fail to see results from their efforts.

Why?  Simple.

Blogging is terrific legal marketing – but it’s not so good at finishing the job.

Allow me to explain my point before you start throwing rotten fruit at me.  Marketing is the way we inform our prospective clients about solutions to their problems.  It includes persuading people that we’re the right people to solve those problems.

What marketing is not, however, is a means for getting them off their (ahem) to take the action we want them to take – pick up the phone, send an email, whatever.  And that is exactly what blogging does not do – it doesn’t move people.

Wait wait, you say, that isn’t right at all.  Blogging informs people that you can help.  From there, they naturally call or click.

Wrong-o, my friend.  There is no natural progression of any sort.  In fact, here’s a cardinal rule of marketing (and you may not like this, but it’s true):

If you don’t tell someone what to do, they will do nothing whatsoever.

Don’t believe me?  Go into a store or look online at any retailer.  You see stuff for sale, and right next to the pretty picture is this nifty graphic that tells you to order the darn thing.  If that button wasn’t there, people wouldn’t order.  They’d look around, learn all about the items, and then move on.

This is not rocket science, but apparently it’s something the legal community fails to grasp.  I think it goes back to the sense of entitlement that’s instilled into us when we pass the bar.  It’s that belief of, I’m a lawyer.  If I show people how much I know, they’ll gravitate to me.  And though that might be true in the long-run, you’re leaving it all to chance unless you take the step of telling someone what you want them to do.

Here are some ideas to help get you started):

1. Put a contact form on the upper-left hand corner of your blog, right below the header.  Eye-tracking studies show that people look to that area as informational in nature rather than ad-related, which is why you should put it on the left side rather than the right side.  Also, by putting it “above the fold,” you’re not forcing people to scroll on your site to figure out what to do.
2. Put your contact information in the header itself – phone, address, email, etc.  This makes it easy for people to find you.
3. Add a page to your blog and title it something along the lines of, “Work With Me,” or, “Become My Client.”  Giving the reader somewhere to look for those next steps is a great way to move them from Point A to Point B.
4. At the end of each blog post, tell the reader what you’d like them to do next.  Maybe you want more subscribers to your RSS feed, or people to sign up for your mailing list.  Whatever it is, be clear.

These aren’t the only ideas, but you can (hopefully) see ways in which your law firm blog can become a more effective legal marketing tool.

Share your ideas in the comments section!

Photo courtesy of billolen.

So you’ve got a legal blog and are cruising along at warp speed. You’re spitting out content regularly, and your web stats show that you’re starting to get some hits.

Cool.

But here’s the dirty little secret most legal bloggers won’t fess up to. They can’t figure out how to specifically bring in clients as a direct result of their blogging efforts.

Sure, they’re getting the word out and rising in the search engines. They’re hearing more people come to the office talking about the blog. So it’s clear that something is working. But the effect of blogging is ephemeral, not concrete. The real measure of success is dollars in pocket. And when it comes to that, not many legal blogs are cutting it.

So how the heck do you generate clients from your legal blog?

Here are three ways:

1.  Get readers to subscribe to your blog by email using Feedblitz – not Feedburner. Feedblitz is a free tool that lets you drop a signup box on your blog (just like the yellow box on the sidebar to your left), and people who sign up get updates from your blog automatically when you put up a new post.

That’s only half the battle, though. When you use Feedblitz you can go into their web system and create a custom email to be sent out to subscribers – over and above the blog updates. Jackpot email marketing for free, baby!

Every week or so, visit your Feedblitz account and send out an email to your subscribers letting them know your availability for the next week or two. Tell them how to set up an appointment with you, and what they’ll need to do to secure an appointment. Specifically ask them to take the time to make that appointment.

2. Create a page on your blog titled “Make Me Your Lawyer.” On that page, ask the reader to set up an appointment to meet with you. Tell them how to do it, and be clear. Give your contact information.

If you don’t ask for the action, readers won’t take the action. Period. Scout’s honor.

3. Offer something of value to your readers who make an appointment and hire you. It could be a free credit report (which you probably usually pay for if you’re a bankruptcy lawyer), foot the bill for their credit counseling certification (spending $25 in marketing dollars to snag a bankruptcy client who will pay you far more than that? Sounds worth it to me), or give an additional service at no cost (post-discharge credit report reviews come to mind).

The bottom line is that legal blogs – all blogs in fact – are seen by the public largely as information-gathering resources. To start making money directly attributable to your legal blog, you’ve got to take action and get creative. These aren’t the only three ways to get clients from your legal blog, but they’re fast and easy to implement.

What do you use to get clients directly from your legal blog? Add a comment below!

Photo courtesy of websuccessdiva.

Blogging is the simplest way to gain a toehold in online legal marketing. But there are a ton of platforms to choose from – WordPress (self-hosted or on WordPress.com), Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox, Posterous … the list goes on and on.

So what platform should you choose for your legal blog?

First off, you want to make sure you own your content. There’s nothing worse than waking up one morning to find that your provider has shut down your legal blog and pulled your stuff offline for some real or perceived transgression (yes, it’s happened to me).

Unfortunately, all of the free, hosted blogging solutions (WordPress.com, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox, Posterous and the rest) all suffer from that major drawback. Even if you’re using your own domain name, the content resides on THEIR servers. And guess what? You can put in a ton of effort on your legal blog and one day … poof … all gone.

That’s why I use WordPress. It’s free to download, most major web hosting companies will actually download and install it onto your site with the click of a button (which is awesome for those of us who don’t have the time or knowledge needed to fiddle around with that sort of thing), and is well-supported and regularly updated.

Heck, the New York Times runs its entire site on WordPress. And if it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s probably good enough for your legal blog.

There are tons of plugins available to expand the functionality of WordPress, and if something’s not available you can hire a programmer for a few bucks to get it done for you. I’ve had to do that once, and only because an incredible plugin wasn’t being updated anymore.

Entering information is just as easy as using your word processor, with a WYSIWYG interface that looks remarkably like Microsoft Word.

As far as look-and-feel, there are tons of free WordPress templates out there for you to pick and choose from. Once you get comfortable with blogging you can bring in the professionals and get a snazzy looking design for less than the cost of a “standard” website. I regularly call Cynthia at Rowboat Media to get professional blog designs done for me. She’s awesome and very cool to work with, not to mention the fact that she gets my sense of humor (she put up a YouTube video for the Ratt song, “Round and Round,” for me during one of our early projects, which endeared her to me personally and professionally).

Do-it-yourselfer? No problem, we’ve got you covered. This blog, as well as Untethered Lawyer, use the Headway theme. It costs under $100 and lets you customize every single aspect of the look and feel of your blog through the easiest user interface I’ve ever seen. In fact, I did Untethered Lawyer in a few hours on my own (except for the header graphic, which was done by the fabulous Carolyn Sheltraw).

When you’re using WordPress most of the search engine optimization is done for you right out of the box so you don’t have to worry about it. You can amp it up a little using a free plugin called All-In-One SEO Pack or just cruise with what comes in WordPress.

The upshot of all this is that when you host your own legal blog you get full control over your content without all the scary “oh my gosh I don’t know a thing about programming and techies stuff.”

Do you have a legal blog, or are you about the launch one? If so, which platform do you use – and why? Sound off in the comments – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This is crazy, but for some odd reason lots of lawyers still don’t blog as part of their legal marketing efforts.  In fact, I’ve done a ton of searching (on Google, Technorati and a bunch of other places) and found that the field for legal blogging is pretty much wide open.

In fact, if you do a search on Google for “bankruptcy blog,” you’ll find that there’s not a heck of a lot there.

For those of you who have not yet been dragged into the universe as it currently exists (which apparently is a lot of you), I wanted to take a moment to prevail on you to understand WHY blogging is an awesome legal marketing tool.

When you’re blogging for your legal practice you are really doing nothing more than giving out information in a way that speaks to your potential clients.  You’re breaking down the lawyer/client barrier in a way that fosters honest and open communication, unfiltered by the stuffiness of a formal consultation.

When done right, this lets you show your prospective client a little bit of your personality, a good deal of what you know, and how well you can explain it to non-lawyers who need your help.

You get to change the conversation from a monologue about how terrific you are to a conversation about issues that affect your clients – and how they can fix those problems.

It’s terrific if you’re AV rated by some outmoded publication or that you’ve filed a bazillion Chapter 7 cases over the past 20 years.  Goody for you, we’re sure you’re very proud and have the shiny plaques on the wall to show for it.

But the people who need your help care only marginally (if at all) about that pomp and circumstance.  They want to know if they’re going to lose their car and have to take the bus to work.  They want to know if they’re going to get fired from their job with the TSA because of their bill problems.

That’s the sort of thing that keeps them up at night.  And by blogging honestly and in a “no legal mumbo-jumbo” way, you get the chance to explain the answers.  Clients like that.

When you’re blogging you also get to show your “softer” side.  One of my legal blogging buddies routinely puts YouTube videos of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra singing standards and joking around.  Why?  Because it shows his clients that he’s just like them, and it gives them a window into his personality.

You may think that sounds like a colossal waste of time because none of your clients wants to see YouTube videos on a legal blog.  But take a step back and think about this for a minute.

Your clients and prospective clients want to hire someone they trust.

People trust those with whom they have an affinity, a shared interest.  People they know pretty well – their best friend, their co-worker who’s been on the job with them for the past decade, their spouse, their buddies in the neighborhood.

And how do your clients get to know you?  By seeing who you are after you strip away the legalese.  By looking at the pictures on your desk, by listening to the music you pipe through the reception area … and by watching your personality emerge on your legal blog.

Maybe a YouTube videos doesn’t clear things up about legal problems, but they do a fine job of showing your true colors and providing a basis for establishing common ground.

These things are part of what comprise effective legal marketing.  Showing your knowledge and willingness to help, doing so in a way that is unfiltered and relaxed, and providing a way for prospective clients to get to know you.

And when done right, it’s all wrapped up in a neat little package called a blog.

Pretty cool, huh?

Photo courtesy of Annie Mole.