Blog
0A huge benefit of legal blogs is the ability to focus your practice and still find clients who need your services. It’s a big world out there, and each year it’s full of more and more lawyers all competing for the same clients. One way to win that competition is to offer a more tailored service that your competitor. Thousands of attorneys offer “business incorporation” services. But how many of them do it specifically for medical professionals. If you can offer advice specifically tailored for that business, you can offer a better experience (and a better value) for future doctors.
In the past, marketing such a specific practice was a challenge. Doctors opening an office are widely distributed, so reaching them all required saturation. But now, almost anyone considering doing anything will Google it first. And that’s where your advantage comes in.
0First, click here and watch this video.
According to Eli Pariser, the Filter Bubble is an unintended consequence of efforts by Google, Facebook, and others to personalize the web. You see, some very talented engineers at these companies have built computer programs that monitor what you do online, collect that data, and use it to predict what else will interest me. Other items, that the programs think will not interest me, are filtered out of my search results or news feed.
Great you might be thinking, finally a search engine that can read my mind. But Eli’s point is that part of what makes the internet great is that it exposes users to everything else that is out there. By eliminating those things that don’t fit our past interests, we may be depriving people of important information. Information that makes them a better person.
0As a lawyer, between your blog, twitter, email and the phone, there’s almost no need to see someone face to face. And that makes it so much more important to do so. Here’s a suggestion: make it a point to have lunch once a week with someone who isn’t just a friend. Other lawyers are a prime candidate. Peers who practice the same area of law are a good option because you can talk shop. Those who avoid your niche like the plague may be even better because you can refer each other cases. Did a new guy just open up shop down the block? He probably won’t refer many cases, but he’ll appreciate the gesture and try to repay you somehow (even if it’s just telling everyone how great you are).
0Better yet, write like your clients talk. Don’t do it in a brief, a motion, or a letter to opposing counsel. But in moderation, it can be a powerful tool for your blog. I’m not suggesting you abandon proper grammar or start using crazy abbreviations. But odds are that your clients use different words to describe the services you offer than you would. While you might think of yourself as a Criminal Defense Attorney, what your client thinks he needs is a DUI Lawyer. The words personal injury likely mean nothing to the woman blind-sided by a big rig – she’s looking for a car accident attorney.
So when you sit down to write a new article for your blog, think about how your clients would describe the topic. Use those words, but also explain what terms lawyers use. They’ll appreciate knowing that it means the same thing, which is a good feeling to cultivate in a prospective client.
0Lawyers tend to be better with words than with pictures. So often, when starting a new blog, creating a professional design is a daunting task. But, you are not alone. Most bloggers are not web design specialists. And recognizing this fact, most of the major blogging platforms have implemented template systems.
Wordpress, which claims to be the world’s most popular blogging platform, offers easy integration of countless themes. Simply upload a theme to your host, place it in the right directory, and you should have a new look to your blog. But, like many free things in life, there’s a catch. Lately, there’s been a large number of incidents involving malware being placed inside free themes. Use an infected theme, and you’ll unwittingly be promoting the latest viagra spammer.
0Remember when you first opened up shop, and each time the phone would ring your heart would skip a beat? That excitement about the potential of a new client, of your first client? But you’ve moved on from there, things have grown and it’s getting harder and harder to give your current clients the attention they deserve. You’re growing, and that’s great. But like any good lawyer, you wonder where that next call will come from, if that next client will retain you. So you want to go slow, take it easy.
0A new legal service, LawyerUp, recently launched based on a relatively simple premise. If you need a doctor in the middle of the night, one’s available. But if you need a lawyer at 2:00 a.m., good luck. At least until now.
To solve this, LawyerUp charges a monthly subscription fee which guarantees access to an attorney whenever you need one. Even at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday. At $4.95 a month, the subscription service is affordable for just about anyone, at least anyone who could afford a lawyer. Obviously, this is aimed at people in need of a criminal defense lawyer (other areas of law don’t seem to have the same kind of urgency in the middle of the night).
0Writing a law blog is hard work. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It happens to be very effective for lawyers looking to build a practice, but it requires an investment of time, energy, and expertise. And it requires a steady stream of new articles, which is one of the most difficult aspects for many attorneys.
But as your blog grows, and prospective clients start rolling in from the web, you acquire a great source for new content: analytics. All our legal blogging packages here at Web Judicata include a custom analytics package which tells you, among other things, what search terms readers used to find your blog. Initially, it will be the terms that you’ve chosen to optimize for: your practice area and your geographic location. But as your base of articles grows, the terms that show up will become more and more diverse.
0If you spend any time, money, or combination of the two generating new clients for your firm (and I sincerely hope you do), you need to be tracking where they come from. At my office the receptionist has strict instructions to get that information from any person who calls that I haven’t spoken to before. When I meet with a prospective client for the first time, my intake sheet tells me his name, address, phone number, and how he heard about me. Make no mistake, that last line is as important as the others.
If you are spending money marketing your law practice, you’re crazy unless you track the results. I had lunch with an attorney the other day who is spending four figures a month on newspaper advertising (which he called cheap compared to his phone book ad). When I asked him what sort of a return he was getting on that investment he started at my blankly for a minute before saying, “well I’m pretty busy.”
0A content delivery network (CDN) is a way to distribute your blog’s content across the internet so that it is closer to any given user visiting your site. In the CDN, many computers across the world store a copy of your data to make it more likely a prospective client is closer to a copy of the information. Instead of a bottleneck created when everyone tries to access the same server, the CDN spreads your articles and content around the internet.
