law firm blog — Legal Practice Pro

6 Non-Sleazy Ways To Promote Your Law Firm Blog

November 5, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

You can create a law firm blog with real value, but if you don’t let people know it exists then it’s all wasted. How can you promote you blog posts without being sleazy?

We’re uncomfortable with sales and promotion; that goes for the attorney marketing a law firm just as much as any other profession, but I think lawyers are hit particularly hard in this respect. We’ve been trained to behave conservatively, and in our minds the notion of promotion (hey look, I made a rhyme!) is distinctly NOT conservative. Add in years of being compared to hucksters and you’ve got most lawyers believing that promotion of any sort is unseemly.

Done the wrong way, promotion can make you feel dirty. If you look at most of the marketing online you’ll see scads of yellow highlighter and exclamation points that tell you to BUY! BUY! BUY!!! Is it any wonder why some fairly prominent legal bloggers think that marketing is a word to be expunged from the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary?

But there’s another side to this coin, and that’s the realization that marketing need not make you want to take a bath in lye and burn your clothing. If you’re marketing a law firm you want to be not only ethical, but mindful of your professional standing in the community.

Your law firm blog is a marketing tool, no matter how you slice it. A law firm blog showcases your capabilities, exposes people to your message, and enhances your standing. It informs, inspires to act, and serves as your online face. You need to promote the content in order to gain an audience, and you want to do so without being sleazy.

Send Links to Select People Who May be Interested. If you read an article about the foreclosure crisis and are doing a post about TILA, RESPA or any of the real estate-related “alphabet soup” of statutes, send an email to the author of the other article to let him or her know what you’ve done. Be polite and offer up an invitation to visit the link. Three lines should do the trick, and it will help to gain one more viewer. That viewer may send the link along to others if it’s a good enough post. One thing you need to know, though – do not spam your email address book. I’m talking about sending the article out to 1-3 people who you know will be interested in it. If you spam, you suck.

Post the Article to Facebook. 500 million people are registered on Facebook as of this writing; when you post a link it shows up on the stream of all of your friends. If something interests you enough to write about then it’s probably interesting to the people you know and connect with on Facebook.

Tweet a Link. Twitter is a hive of activity, with people sharing links to content that interests them. Though you may choose to post your links automatically (I do this), the secret sauce is to create a compelling question rather than sending out the title of the post (which should be compelling anyway, but I know sometimes you just can’t make it sexy enough. For example, I recently sent out a tweet to someone else’s blog post. Her title was, “Is Bankruptcy Right for Me?” My tweet was, “Is bankruptcy a good idea or best left to others? Ask yourself these 22 questions.” Which one looks more interesting?

Hit The LinkedIn Group. If you’re a member of a LinkedIn group associated with your field of law then you’re already associated with a bunch of people who are interested in the topics you’re blogging about. When you’ve got a particularly interesting post (not one of those, “who is the Chapter 7 trustee in my area,” ones) head over to the LinkedIn group and post a link with a description. Your colleagues may find the content interesting enough to pass along to others.

Comment On Related Blogs. Blog commenting is an excellent traffic generating tactic for your law firm blog because it gives you exposure to the other blog’s audience. But let’s say you’ve got a meaty post on your site that you’re itching to share. Chances are pretty good that there is another blog out there talking about the same issue. In fact, I’m going to go so far as to say that your article may be yin to another blog’s yang. Go to the other blog and comment appropriately (again, no spamming please); in the area where you enter your URL, paste the URL of your article rather than the main law firm blog URL; in this way, when people click to learn more about you they will be taken directly to your related post.

Ask Your Readers To Share Your Law Firm Blog Content. Using blog plugins such as Sociable, Tweetmeme and the FBLike you’ll make it easier for readers to share and pass along your law firm blog posts to other people. Good content has a way of traveling fast, so if you’re providing real value to readers you should expect the traffic bump.

Your law firm blog isn’t going to take off into the stratosphere overnight. It’s a slow build, but when you consistently use these promotional techniques you’ll have a greater chance of reaching more of the people who may find your content interesting.

Image credit: victoriafee (Flickr)

Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: blog, blogging, facebook, law firm blog, lawyer blogs, legal blogging, linkedin, online social networking, promotion, social media, Twitter

Your First Law Firm Blog Is Just A Baby Step

August 24, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Law Firm Blog Baby Step On 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.

5 Ways To Use The Reno Rule For Your Law Firm Marketing This Summer

July 6, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Law Firm Marketing And The Reno Rule The schools are closed, the kids lining up for ice cream by the truck with that annoying jingle emanating from it. Moms and dads are forking over money for water parks, blockbuster movies and chlorine for the pools.

No work is getting done whatsoever. And here in New York City, we’re facing temperatures closing in on the triple digits all week.

If you have a legal problem and need a lawyer, chances are pretty good that it’s going to wait until Labor Day unless it involves something extremely urgent.

For those of us who get the majority of our business from clients who could conceivably wait for a few months with anything awful happening, the instinct is to pull back on our law firm marketing efforts.

Me? I’m going to double down on my law firm marketing rather than take a breather. But I’m going to play with the Reno Rule, not just throw money at the table.

Law Firm Marketing With Content – Counterintuitive, Or Money Maker?

May 10, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Marketing a law firm is time-consuming, costly, and rife with risk. What if your headline sucks? What if someone’s offended by the photo you chose for your snazzy (and super-expensive) display ad? Will it make money or lose money? You’re marketing a law firm to bring in business, after all – and if the new clients don’t show up, you’re out of luck. And potentially out of your home.

Marketing Your Law Firm With Content Is Counterintuitive

You went to law school for three years, spent ages digging out of student loan debt, and now are struggling like hell to make enough to keep your law firm profitable. Some months are flush, some are lean. Heck, these days a lot of lawyers are contemplating their own bankruptcy filings. Including bankruptcy lawyers, mind you. Your law firm marketing efforts need to reliably pay out every month.

So you read about this concept of content marketing, which essentially tells you to market your law firm by giving away your expertise.

The companies that were selling you on beautiful law firm websites last year are now [Read more...]

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: content marketing, law firm, law firm blog, law firm marketing, law firm websites, marketing your law firm, michael chiarello

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

March 11, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

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: blog, blogging, computing, content marketing, internet, law, law firm, law firm blog, law firm marketing, Legal Marketing, marketing, marketing your law firm, Search Engine Optimization, social information processing, technology

How To Generate A Color Scheme For Your Legal Blog

November 4, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

The look of your legal blog is in many ways just as important as the information it contained. After all, the way your site looks is going to make a huge difference between an actively engaged audience and one that, “comes, pukes and leaves.”

One of the great joys (to me, at least) of beginning a new online legal marketing venture is trying to figure out what it’s going to look like when it’s all said and done. But it gets frustrating because I don’t always have a good eye for the way colors go together. That, and the color schemes being used online today are so much more varied and complex than in the past.

I could go for the standard blue that you see in most law firm blogs, but it’s boring and doesn’t reflect much in the way of personality. Visitors to your blog need to have a visual cue to keep them interested, and as a way to remember your blog above all others.

There are a ton of places to start, but I often get hung up on the colors to use on the site. I’ve got a marked preference for earth tones, and enjoy palettes that make me feel calm. After all, I spend a ton of time online and don’t need one more site to make me anxious.

My first stop for inspiration is usually ColourLovers, a terrific site for getting ideas about color palettes. Just check out some of the top colors and palettes, and you’re off to the races.

My next stop is Kuler, a site I fell in love with about a year ago when I was hunting for color schemes for one of my legal blogs. Kuler is filled with hundreds of color palettes, and you can save the ones you like best.

Once you find a few options, show them to your graphic designer. This will help the designer put together some header ideas for you to review. You’re more likely to find something you really like once you’ve given the designer some ideas to work with, and color helps a lot.

Of course, there are times when you’ve got an image and just want to get a color palette to work with. It’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, but we’ve all been there before.

If your image is online already, head over to the DeGraeve Color Palette Generator and plug in the URL of the image. The site will spit out the colors contained in the image. Pick out the one you like, then head back over to Kuler and create a color palette using their handy tool.

Jim Minard

Image sitting on your hard drive? No worries. Jeff Minard provides this very handy little color palette generator that allows you to upload the image and figure out what colors it contains, down to the HEX code. Once you’re armed with this information, you can go back to Kuler.

These aren’t the only sites out there by a long shot, but they are some of the ones I find most helpful. Bear in mind that this is not a replacement for an awesome web designer or graphics guru – it’s a quick-and-dirty way of launching your legal blogging efforts so you can get on with the task of connecting with your audience in a meaningful way.