Nolo's Legal Marketing Blawg

It's time for another round up of updates on previous posts.  Without further ado, here's a bunch of quick follow up tips from around the blogosphere:

1. Be Careful Whom You Hire As  a Marketer  A few months ago, I asked whether you should hire a legal marketer and warned about some of the potential red flags to avoid in choosing a marketing consultant.  At least one unfortunate attorney failed to read my advice, and now, she's found herself the brunt of serious criticism around the blogosphere. 

Colin Samuels' Infamy and Praise Round Tuit 2 provides the best summary of the sordid affair.  Apparently, a California attorney retained a marketing consultant (well, actually, she bartered for his services) who chose to build her online presence by scraping content from other blogs, including Houston criminal defense lawyer's Mark Bennett's Defending People.  The consultant also set up a number of alias Twitter accounts under the California attorney's name in a lame effort to boost her SEO.  Mark Bennett took the consultant to task  here and here, with the end result of spreading the story around the blogosphere, damaging the attorney's representation in the process.  Two lessons here:  (1) bad publicity isn't necessarily better than good publicity and (2) DON'T outsource your marketing efforts.  Hopefully, this attorney will read my earlier post on guarding your reputation online so that she can minimize the negative commentary.

2.  Recyle and Re-purpose for a Successful Blog In my post on ebooks, I described how you can recycle or re-purpose content you've created for blogs or other publications to include in the ebook. However, the concept of re-purposing or multi-purposing is also useful to understand if you're trying to build a successful blog, a topic I've covered here. Over at Blog for Profit,  California Defamation Law Blogger Adrianos Facchetti describes how he multi-purposed his blog content to gain visibility in his niche of Internet defamation in just six months time.  Facchetti explains:

This is the "hub and spoke" strategy.  This is how it works.  Let's say I write a really great post and I want to make sure a lot of people read it. The first thing I would do is to upload it to as many websites as possible. So, I would upload the post to several bookmarking sites like social median and digg. Then I would upload it to JDSupra. Then I would tweet about it.

I also made sure that my blog posts updated automatically to my LinkedIN profile and to my Facebook profile via RSS feed.
My goal was to get my content in as many different places as I possibly could, which I did.  Use this strategy. It works.

There's similar advice over at the Baby Boomer Entrepreneur, which in addition to Facchetti's suggestions recommends (1) recording blog posts for podcasts or videos and (2) circulating blog posts to Ezinearticles.com, a heavily trafficked site which will rock your SEO.

 

Once again, it's time for a round-up post, updating information that I covered in earlier posts.

1. Lawyer-Bloggers All A-Twitter About the Value of Twitter 

Back in February 2009, I considered whether lawyers should be using Twitter, ultimately concluding that at the very least, they ought to give it a try.  Last month, however, lawyer marketing expert Larry Bodine stirred up a controversy with this piece contending that Twitter isn't a very effective tool for lawyer marketing.  Bodine highlighted Twitter's high churn rate, with 60 percent of users dropping off after just a few months' use and pointed out that other tools such as email promotions and blogs were more effective ways to drive traffic to a website.  Most significantly, Bodine argued that Twitter was a time sink -- a distraction from getting real marketing work done that didn't lead to serious business.

Bodine's post earned him lots of criticism in the blogosphere, which David Barrett exhaustively summarizes at Linked In Lawyer.  Most of the commentary emphasizes that Twitter isn't an end in itself, but a supplement to other marketing tools, such as creating an introduction to warm up a cold call or other personal connection, or helping lawyers reinforce their personal brand.

2.  Are Listservs Obsolete?

Back in December, I made the point that the new generation of social media still hadn't rendered listservs obsolete.  Fast forward six months... and is that still the case?  Via the Legal History Blog, I came across this interesting article, Where Do Legal Listservs Fit in A Social Media World? by law librarian Greg Lambert.  Lambert notes that while listservs still remain a great way to build relationships, network, and discover new resources, at the same time, they have drawbacks such as "lazy research" (obvious questions sent out to 2500 members) and a tendency to generate flame wars if left unmoderated.  Lambert favors Ning (which I'll post about on Monday) as his tool of choice for combining the ease of use and spontaneity of listservs without the drawbacks.  I checked out the Law Librarian Ning that Lambert referenced -- and while it's a nice looking site, it lacks the fluid interaction of a listserv.  At the same time, the participants have all filled out bios, which can facilitate connections and networking.

Here's the latest round-up on some of the topics covered in earlier posts to be sure that you have up-to-the-minute information on the latest and greatest in lawyer marketing:

1.  Add More Value to Videos By Power Using YouTube.

Back in January, I posted on why lawyers should consider making video part of their marketing portfolio.  In addition to the reasons that I described, Travis Campell, the Marketing Professor offers some ideas for building community and online presence through YouTube -- which means that you'll get more bang for the buck out of any videos you produce.  So what benefits does You Tube offer?  For starters, you can get statistics on viewer demographics and feedback on your video through commenters.  Posting video on YouTube can also help drive traffic to your site and enhance your search engine visibility.

2.  Should You Hire An SEO Expert?

My first post for this blog described some do-it-yourself SEO tips.  But if the DIY approach doesn't get you the results that you need, should you consider hiring an expert?  I've posted, more generally, on issues to consider when hiring a marketing consultant and now, lawyer marketing expert Larry Bodine shares advice on hiring an SEO expert.  My favorite tip of the post? 

Type the vendor's own targeted search terms into Google and see how well they do for themselves. Type in "law firm web consultant" or "law firm SEO consultant" or "law web marketing consultant" into Google. If they can't get good rankings for themselves, move on.

3.  Social Media and SEO.

Six months ago, when I posted about do-it-yourself SEO, I didn't focus extensively on social media, largely because its impact on SEO wasn't fully recognized or acknowledged at the time.  That's since shifted, as Duct Tape Marketing writes, noting, "It has become extremely difficult to achieve any measure of success for important keyword phrases without the use of social media."  As a result, any business attempting to optimize a site should add a blog and podcast, participate in Twitter and optimize profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn at the very minimum.