Social Media Examiner: “Are you wondering how to influence potential customers and prospects? The latest findings from Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influence Report show that ‘consumers are turning to blogs when looking to make a purchase.’ In fact, blogs rank favorably with consumers for trust, popularity and even influence. Here are some interesting findings from the Technorati report.” Note that Twitter ranked only at 8%.
Real Lawyers Have Blogs: “Traditional advertising is rapidly losing out as marketing professionals begin to realize the effectiveness and advantages of content marketing. . . . The number of businesses blogging jumped 29% in the last year, going from 51% of businesses to 65% of businesses blogging. Blogging not only helped businesses gain trust, credibility, and authority, but companies that blog receive 55% more web traffic. Blogs are also increasingly being viewed as effective in marketing with 58% of businesses believing blogs are an effctive marketing vehicle. Belief in Social media effectiveness jumped 61% from 31% in 2011 to 50% in 2012.
Legal Marketing Mavens: “Are you driving regular traffic but it feels like no one is taking the next step to pick up the phone and call? . . . A great way to neutralize the overwhelm and capture a prospect’s information anyway–even if they aren’t quite ready to call–is to implement a strategy of lead generation. Effective lead generation is the process of offering something of value to the prospect in exchange for their contact information.”
Larry Bodine of LexisNexis and the Editor in Chief of Lawyers.com wrote an article that should get the attention of attorneys who do not know that the internet is an untapped goldmine of potential new clients. In his article called “Most Consumers Go Online to Look for an Attorney” he says:
“The way consumers look for a lawyer has changed in today’s digital age. The advent of social media, smart phones and search engines has dramatically affected the way consumers find lawyers. . . . For lawyers, it is essential to have a website and blog that discuss the legal problems of consumers. An attorney’s online presence should feature FAQs, white papers and checklists to be found by consumers conducing online research. . . . For lawyers who want to get leads and find clients, it means having a robust directory profile, activity on social media and client-friendly websites. Lawyers can join the conversation – or miss many opportunities to find consumer clients.”
Kissmetrics posted an excellent article that examines what websites need to do to convert more visitors into paying customers (aka clients for us lawyers). This is a topic that I need to spend more time understanding. My Arizona Limited Liability Company website has 9,627 visitors during April of 2012, but I only formed 41 new Arizona LLCs. That’s an awful conversion rate of .004. I would have loved to convert 1%, which would have been 96 new LLCs.
Understanding the best ways to convert traffic to paying clients is important for all attorneys who have websites and who want more revenue. Remember this important fact: Your goal is not merely to have a blog or a website – it is to make more money. To accomplish that goal you must do more than have a static site/blog. Take some time and learn from Kissmetrics’ article that begins:
“In this post we’re going to go over what the highest converting websites do differently. But before we get into the details, we want to highlight a few points to get you thinking first:
- You have 0-8 seconds to make a compelling headline and landing page. After 8 seconds, the majority of visitors leave.
- Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.
- The more landing pages you have, the more leads you are likely to get.
- Product videos can increase purchases of the product by 144%.
- A 1 second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- A/B testing is becoming the preferred method that has brought a lot of the companies the most success.”
Note the statistic that 96% of the visitors who come to your website are not ready to purchase your services. This fact is why it is so important that you have a system like Infusionsoft to collect visitors’ names and email addresses from your blog or website and do automatic email followup marketing. Your site must offer visitors a free report that they get only in exchange for giving you their name and email address. Once you have the prospect’s name and email address you want your system to automatically send the prospect one or more email messages with content designed to:
Marketing experts say that you need an average of 7 – 9 touches (contacts) with a prospect before the prospect becomes a customer/client. If you don’t keep your name and contact information in the mind of a prospect that prospect is not likely to remember your name or how to contact you weeks or months after the prospect visited your site/blog when the prospect is ready to buy.
I have used Infusionsoft for five years to collect leads from my websites and do automatic followup marketing. To learn more about Infusionsoft and how I use it to make more money in my law practice read my “Infusionsoft Review: The Cheapest & Best 24/7/365 Marketing Department.”
I got an email today from a lawyer who said check out my article at : http://blog.firmname.com/index.php/estate-planning-2/7-major-errors-in-estate-planning/#more-147. Have you ever gotten an message with a link that is mostly numbers such as www.firmname.com/blog/12/5/030455020110304440500060.phx? I am sure you get lots of email messages that have URLS with a long string of text or numbers and/or text that doesn’t make much sense. I call these URLs “gross URLS” or for WordPress users “gross permalinks.”
Do yourself and your readers a favor and do not create pages or posts on your website that have gross URLS for four reasons:
The last point may be the most important because you want your URL to contain key words that may help increase the page or post’s search engine ranking. Think about the most important key words in your post and use them in the URL / permalink. If you are writing an article about Arizona widget law which of the following URLS is better:
Do you have your own law blog? Does your law firm have a blog? Do you want to get more clients? Do you want to make more money? Does a bear . . . oh never mind. I am a big advocate of the attorney law blog. It works for me. It can work for you.
The term “blog” is short for web log. In the early days of blogging a blog was a series of posts displayed on a website in reverse chronological order. People typically created a blog with content about a specific topic because they wanted to provide a source of information about their topic of interest. You can find many blogs on any topic you can imagine. The quality of each blog depends on the creative talent, knowledge and writing ability of the blog’s creator. Nobody know how many blogs exist, but there are millions of them.
Here is my list of some of the reasons a lawyer should have a blog:
Thanks for contacting me about terminating your Arizona limited liability company. To hire us to prepare the documents to terminate an LLC, complete our service agreement found here:
www.keytlaw.com/azllc/killllcagr.pdf
For more information on terminating an Arizona LLC, see my article on this subject found here:
www.keytlaw.com/azllclaw/terminating-llcs/how-to-terminate-an-az-llc/
A great way to get ideas for blog posts is to listen to questions prospects and clients ask you in email messages and over the phone. I am sure you have the same experience I have with people who ask the same common questions about widget law (ok maybe questions about your area of practice, not widget law). These commonly asked questions make great blog posts. Turn these questions into a post you can email to prospects and clients to show your expertise. See for example a blog category on my Arizona Limited Liability Company Law website called “How Do I.” When I get a call or email message from somebody that asks me a question I’ve answered on my blog I send the person a link to the blog post.
An very important fact of blog life and the key to a successful client generating blog is that you must create good content. This means you need to invest the time to create posts. This leads me to Keyt’s Technology Rule #5, which is call the Website Content Equation. The equation is:
more posts = more content = higher search engine rankings = higher web traffic = more new clients = more revenue
Schedule times for content creation and set a goal for a minimum number of posts every week. Over time your content quantity will grow and the Website Content Equation will put more money in your pocket.
Copyblogger is a great website for learning about blogging and website building using WordPress. It’s tag line is “Content Marketing Solutions for WordPress that Work.” I bookmarked this site a few years ago and recommend it for those who want to learn more about using WordPress and getting more traffic to their website or blog. The site contains a ton of articles on creating good content. For example, here are some Copyblogger posts just on the subject of the importance of writing good eye-catching headlines:
The secret to getting a lot of traffic to your website is not really a secret. For those of you who do not know the single most important thing you must do to get lots of visitors to come to your website here it is:
Put lots of high quality content on your blog/website!
The reason my law firm website averaged 163,000 visitors/month during 2012 is because the site has thousands of pages of content. Yes thousands. My site is 11 years old and includes eleven separate websites all of which have content and bring visitors to keytlaw.com.
Keyt’s Technology Rule #4 is “If you build it they will not come.” Yes, your law firm should have a website or blog, but do not be discouraged if it has little traffic in the beginning. It takes time to create good content. Your goal should be to add original content on a regular basis – daily is best, but several times a week is better than once a week. Set a time every day to write content. I like to get up at 6:15 everyday and spend the first two hours of the day working on my websites. Over time a regular plan of creating content and adding it to your site will add up to a lot of content, higher search engine rankings, more traffic to your blog or website and more new clients.
To learn more about creating content, read an excellent article published by Kissmetrics called “44 Must Read Resources on Content Marketing.”
I have used WordPress to create 11 websites (put your cursor on the menu text above that says “My Other Websites” to access one of my other sites), ten of which I created to get more clients and revenue. The only WordPress site I created that is not for my law firm is one called “F-4 Phantom,” a site about my five years flying the F-4 Phantom supersonic fighter bomber in the United States Air Force.
If you want to know why I use WordPress to create my law office websites read my article called “Why I Love WordPress for My Law Firm.” In that article I say that the biggest reason I love WordPress for the law firm is because WordPress has over 19,000 free plugins that allow a WordPress administrator (you should be your site’s administrato) to add cool features to your WordPress blog or website. A WordPress plugin is software written to accomplish a specific task or add a feature to your WordPress site. My guess is that somebody has already created a free plugin that will do everything you could possibly want to do with your site.
Do you want to have message forums or a list serv on your site? Would you like your site to have a gallery of photos or videos that are displayed to viewers in the order you select for the number of seconds you select? Would you like to require a visitor to type a captcha before he or she could send you a message? There are numerous plugins that provide all of these features right out of the box. That’s cool and free, but the second neatest thing about WordPress plugins is that when you see one you want you click twice and the plugin is installed and working on your WordPress website. IT ONLY TAKES A FEW SECONDS LITERALLY TO INSTALL A PLUGIN.
The following is a list of plugins in alphabetical order that I always install on every WordPress website or blog I create:
To learn more about these plugins and the 19,000+ other free WordPress plugins go to the WordPress plugins page.
I love WordPress. WordPress for attorneys is a fantastic tool for generating clients and more revenue. I have been creating my websites using WordPress since 2009. As of today I have created 11 WordPress websites. You can access them from the menu link at the top of this page. Of these 11 sites, I am the only person who adds content to 7 of them, two sites contain content created only by two other KEYTLaw attorneys and two sites contain content created by me and other KEYTLaw attorneys.
If your website is not a WordPress site, you are making a mistake unless you have the money to pay a consultant or web development company a ton of money for a super-duper site. My experience is always been that I can invest the time to learn a software program so I can use the program and its powerful features without being dependent on a high paid consultant who probably isn’t really that knowledgeable. See Keyt’s Technology Rule Number 1.
I started the original www.keytlaw.com website in the winter of 2001. At that time I was a partner at one of the largest law firms in Arizona. The firm’s board of directors told me I could not have a website and that a firm website was worthless for generating new clients. I knew that virtually all lawyer websites did not generate new business because they were nothing more than electronic firm brochures. I was convinced that I could create a website with original content that informed the public about legal issues and that it would generate business.
I was right. Since leaving big law in 2001 I have obtained over 6,000 new clients most of whom hired me and my firm because of my websites. A good informational website is a great way for a lawyer to obtain new clients. During 2011 the total combined traffic on my websites averaged 163,000 visitors/month. Per Avvo and www.alexa.com the KEYTLaw website is one of the 35 most visited law related websites in the United States.
Microsoft FrontPage
When I took the plunge and created my first website in 2001 the two most popular HTML editors were Microsoft’s FrontPage and Adobe’s Dreamweaver. FrontPage was cheaper and sold to the public as more user friendly than Dreamweaver so I bought FrontPage.
For eight years I used FrontPage to create every page on the old www.keytlaw.com. Take a look at an old FrontPage created KEYLaw page. The old site look and feel worked well for me for many years despite it’s cludginess. I designed the look and feel of the site without any knowledge of what I was doing, which is why the site looks like it was made by somebody that didn’t know how to design a site. I knew I wanted a website and so I just loaded FrontPage and started creating web pages.
My original website and now the other ten WordPress sites generate a tremendous amount of web traffic because they contain content. See an old web log report for the month of December 2006 which shows www.keytlaw.com had 91,489 visitors that month, an average of 2,859/day. For the year 2006 my old site averaged 85,500 visitors a month and 2,850 visitors a day. Every year the number of visitors increases because we are constantly adding content to our sites. Web success is very very simple – the more good content you have on your site the more visitors it will have.
FrontPage was actually user friendly for its era, but the problem with HTML editors is that you start with a blank screen and you must build every page and every feature of your website from scratch. A simple website was easy to create in FrontPage, but to create any feature required a ton of time and html editing.
WordPress
In 2009 I decided to create a law blog so I did a little research and concluded that WordPress was the way to go. The difference between WordPress and FrontPage is as great as the difference between night and day. FrontPage was a low tech do everything yourself program. WordPress is a high tech do everything for you program. WordPress combined with WordPress plugins is a winning combination that allows a novice to do anything with a website/blog with very little effort or knowledge needed by the WordPress user.
WordPress comes in two flavors, i.e., wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The .com version is hosted on WordPress’ website. The .org version is free downloadable software that you must install on a server (shared or dedicated) and that is accessed by people who go to the URL of your domain.
WordPress.com
The .com version of WordPress is a website that as of today hosts 426,536 free WordPress blogs. To have a blog on wordpress.com all you need to do is sign up and two minutes later you are in business on the internet. Your site will be a subdomain of www.wordpress.com such as www.lawfirm.wordpress.com. WordPress hosts your site on its server. Although it is actually very easy to have a WordPress.org site on your own domain, the WordPress sites on wordpress.com are even easy to use. See a list of features offered for free by www.wordpress.com.
The downsides to the .com version are:
1. Your site is not on your domain.
2. You will not have access to the vast universe of plugins available when you have WordPress running on your domain.
3. You cannot have any ads.
4. Customization is limited.
5. Moving your site to a Wordpress.org site later is a big deal for the average WordPress user.
Reasons Why I love WordPress
1. WordPress is Very Easy to Install: With a good webhost like Bluehost anybody can create a WordPress law firm website or blog simply and easily. I’ve hosted my websites at Bluehost since I created my first blog in 2009. Bluehost hosts millions of WordPress sites and is adding 20,000 new sites a month. I cannot say enough about Bluehost. It’s cheap ($5 – $7) month. It’s got great tech support 24/7, which I have used from time to time. What I love best about Bluehost is that is uses something called Cpanel and Simple Scripts. What these two programs mean to the WordPress user (prospective or actual) is that you can create a new WordPress website/blog in less than ONE MINUTE. Yes! In a future video I’ll demo how to do it and how quickly I can create a new site.
To learn more about everything Bluehost gives you for $5/month go to its hosting features page.
2. WordPress is Very Easy to Learn: It takes me about 15 minutes to show a person everything he/she needs t know to add content to WordPress. Only one person in your firm needs to be the administrator of your WordPress site and know how to do things like add, configure and update plugins and do the admin stuff. There is a higher learning curve to be the administrator, but there is virtually no learning curve to be a WordPress content creator. Everybody only needs to know how to create a blog post or a web page, both of which are extremely simple.
3. WordPress Themes: A WordPress theme is software add on to WordPress that gives the entire site a certain look and feel and built in features. In my bad old days of using FrontPage, I had to create the look and feel (theme) of my website. It is not an easy task for a novice, which is why my theme was not too spiffy for eight years. WordPress, however, for some reason I do not understand offers 1,549 free themes that you can download and install in a matter of seconds. Yes. That’s right SECONDS! See the free WordPress themes yourself. If you see one you like all you have to do is click on the “install” button then 5 seconds later click on the “activate” button and your WordPress site has a new look and feel. I use a very popular theme on all of my sites called “Atahualpa,” which had been downloaded 941,182 time as of the date of this article. There are also thousands of themes that you can purchase if you can’t find a free theme you like. Update: I now use the Avada theme on most of my websites. I love this theme. It is state of the art including being “responsive” out of the box. A responsive site is a site that looks great on smartphones, iPads and tablets.
4. WordPress Has Plugins: The thing I like best about WordPress is that there are thousands of plugins (19,330 free ones as of the date of this article) that I can quickly download and install on my WordPress site. Most plugins are free, but some require that you purchase the plugin before downloading. A plugin is essentially software code that you can add to your WordPress site literally by making two clicks with your mouse. Unlike the FrontPage days when the website developer had to create all the code to do anything on a website, there are probably several free WordPress plugins that will do anything you could imagine doing with a website or a blog. See WordPress’ plugins page where you can find all the free plugins. Here are the four most downloaded plugins (I use all of them on all of my sites) with a description of what the plugin does:
How to Learn How to Use WordPress
There are many ways you could learn how to use WordPress, but here are my recommendations:
1. Teacher-Student Method: If you know somebody who is a serious user of WordPress, ask him or her to give you a lesson and if you can call from time to time with questions.
2. Watch Lynda.com Training Videos: Whenever I want to learn how to use software I go to Lynda and watch one or more training videos. When I wanted to learn how to make Adobe Acrobat pdf fillable forms I watched a 20 hour training video on Lynda. Today Lynda has a 6.5 hour course on the self-hosted version of WordPress and a 5 hour course on the WordPress.org hosted version. Both of these courses are about version 3.3 of WordPress, the current version.
You can pay to watch individual videos, but for years I have paid Lynda $25/month for unlimited access to all of its training videos.
3. Watch My Demo Videos: You can’t watch them today, because I haven’t created them yet. In the very near future I will have demo videos that show lawyers interested in learning WordPress everything they need to know to install a WordPress site on Bluehost , configure it with a theme and plugins and how to add content. Check back in the near future or enter your email address in the field in the top of the left column of this page if you want to get an update when I add new content.
Your thoughts? Do you or your law firm use WordPress and have any gripes? Do you use something else that you like? Leave a comment.
Do you know what a Google “rich snippet” is? Should you? If you want more visitors to your blog or website you need to know what a rich snippet is and how to create them. There are three types of bloggers and webmasters:
Until yesterday I was in category 2. Now, after reading the two excellent articles listed below I have the knowledge I need to create a Google business page for my law firm, KEYTLaw and implement the suggestions contained in the two articles. I’m now at stage 2.5. I just need to implement my new knowledge.
To date Google + does not have the reach of Facebook and Twitter, but we all know Google’s power and innovation track record so it is safe to bet that Google + could be as important blog/website referral source as Facebook. By the way I have heard many people, including a keynote speaker at the 2012 Infusionsoft convention, say that Facebook doesn’t send much (or any) traffic to their blog/website. The primary reasons for the lack of Facebook referrals are:
My websites get a lot of referrals from my firm’s Facebook page. Earlier this month I did a blog post on a new law passed by the Arizona legislature entitled “Arizona Legislature Passes Broad Internet Censorship Bill.” I also put the entire text of the bill on the KEYTLaw blog. The day that blog post went live it got over 800 visitors, including over 400 who were referred from Facebook!
Here are the two articles on Google’s rich snippets and Google + I recommend:
The second article listed states “according to one study on the impact of rich snippets on traffic, the number of clicks increased by 150% once the rich snippet was added. This is one of those opportunities to give yourself an almost unfair advantage in Google.”
Read also “Google+: Should Lawyers Care?” which states:
“Last week, Google announced that Google+ (aka, “Google Plus” or “G+”) has reached 170 million users. By any measure, that is a truckload of users; but it is staggering when you consider that G+ is less than a year old. That makes the infant G+ roughly the size of Twitter (200mm registered users) and larger than LinkedIn (150mm registered users). And, while G+ is still only 20% of the size of Facebook, it has clearly arrived, requiring lawyers to strongly consider it as part of their online branding and business development strategies.”
The following is the beginning of an article on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog called “More guidance on building high-quality sites“
“In recent months we’ve been especially focused on helping people find high-quality sites in Google’s search results. The “Panda” algorithm change has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality websites, so most of you reading have nothing to be concerned about. However, for the sites that may have been affected by Panda we wanted to provide additional guidance on how Google searches for high-quality sites.
Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals.”
The article mentions 23 things you can do to improve the quality of your website.
Neil Patel wrote an excellent article that I recommend bloggers who want to get more visitors read. He describes in detail 12 mistakes bloggers make. They are:
In a one hour video LexBlog CEO Kevin O’Keefe provides some tough love and explains how he uses his blog and other platforms on the Internet — like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and even text messaging — to build relationships and bring in business. Blogging is an important piece of my internet marketing solution. Every lawyer should have a blog to which he or she contributes regularly. A good blog is a great way to get new business – if you do it right.
Blog Tip: All lawyers get people who email and call and ask routine questions about their areas of law practice. When you get one of these emails or phone calls, turn it into a blog post on your Frequently Asked Questions category/topic. For example, on my Arizona Limited Liability Company Law website I have a blog category called “How Do I” (another name for a FAQ) where I pose a common question and then give the answer. A great marketing benefit from answering common questions on your blog is that when you do get an email or phone call asking the same question you can send the questioner an email message with a link to your blog post that gives the answer. Prospects tend to be impressed when they read an answer to their legal question on your blog. Written content on your blog is a great way to establish that you are an expert on a topic.
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A recent survey by Pingdom found that 48 of the most popular blogs are created with WordPress, up from 32 in 2009. In order the blog platforms by percent of sites using the software are:
Where does your blog/web software fall in this list? The article says, “It’s also interesting to see that our findings are not far off compared to what Technorati found in its State of the Blogosphere 2011 report. In it, Technorati found that 51% of blogs in the world use WordPress.” The article contains a list of the top 100 blogs and the software platform used by each.
If you are not using WordPress for your blog or website you are probably making a mistake. If you are paying somebody big bucks to create a custom site for you then you are really wasting a ton of money.
I started using WordPress in the fall of 2009. It is an incredible program and it’s free. I now have 11 websites/blogs (counting this one) that I created using WordPress. I use WordPress to create pure blog sites and sites that are traditional websites that may or may not have a blog. Here are the reasons I love WordPress and recommend it:
Do yourself a favor and switch to WordPress or create a WordPress site if you do not have a blog or a website. The first step is go to www.lynda.com. Pay to watch one of its how to videos on using WordPress version 3, the latest version. If you learn WordPress and have a WordPress blog or website you can save tons of money and frustration by avoiding the need to pay a consultant.