Sunflower Media Concepts

Jamie Spencer at the Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer had a great post today called Getting other lawyers to link to your blog.

My fellow blogger Jamie, gives two main ways to accomplish this. And I could not agree more.

1. Content, Content, Content.
2. Link out to other people who are writing on similar topics. Basically, to get them to notice that you exist in the first place, the easiest thing to do is to cut and paste from something they wrote (while, of course, acknowledging them and linking back to them), and then comment on what they wrote.

And as he says, “nothing, and I mean nothing will beat good content.” Something I have been preaching for over two years now. And as Kevin O’Keefe stated, “no reason to expand, its as simple as that.”

I too would be glad to discuss blogging with anyone that wants to visit. Drop me a call at 785-632-6612 or an email at gdgrifflaw@mac.com

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I often get asked whether a lawyer should put ads, such as Google Ads on their practice blog. Short answer NO!! I and others agree, a blog a lawyer is using to promote his or her practice is no place for ads. The amount of clutter and image your blog will have from such ads is not worth the small amount of money you will make.

If you have a desire or need to promote something on your blog, promote yourself. Promote a service you are providing. Promote a free report you have to offer. But, don’t put Google Ads on your blog.

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The Bankruptcy Practice Pro gave Five Reasons To Embrace E-Mail Marketing

They are:

1. Email can help you achieve your business goals: A well-planned email marketing campaign can generate high response rates, allow you to get the word out about offers and discounts, and create opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell.

2. Keeping customers in the loop = happier customers: Providing relevant information via email can help you score points with customers, or lessen the impact of problems elsewhere in your business.

3. It’s more cost-effective anyway: Email is much cheaper, more measurable and can be better targeted than traditional direct marketing. Sending out the right messages at the right time can also help you retain customers - retention is much cheaper than acquisition.

4. Customer intelligence: Email marketing is highly measurable and each campaign gives you the chance to analyze customer feedback to see which offers and products individual customers are interested in.

5. Improved overall online marketing: Data gleaned from email campaigns can help you improve the effectiveness of your other online marketing activities. Email marketing is also a good chance to develop and update your in-house customer database.

I still question whether E-Mail marketing truly is as good as a well designed, maintained and updated blog. Of course Jay is not saying that.

Source of post: e-Consultancy.

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With TypePad Pages you can set up an individual web page with your blog. This is something a lot of people have been talking about and wanting.

With the new TypePad Pages, you can use all the power of TypePad’s posting tools to create as many individual web pages as you want. And those pages have all the power of TypePad’s widgets and rich media features, automatically inheriting the look and feel you’ve chosen for your blog.

This feature is available at all account levels, to all TypePad members. To create a Page, go to Compose > Page and add Page content (text, images, video, etc…) just as you would a post. When you want to update a Page, simply open it from the List Pages tab and edit and save it as you would a post.

I will play around with this new feature and see what I can come up with. If any of you try it out, make sure to put a link to your new TypePad Page in the comments to this post. That way we can all see what is being done with the new feature.

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We held a webinar today on the basics of blogging with a group of collaborative attorneys from around the country. We were online for almost 2 hours. Great exchange of information, questions and ideas.

If anyone is interested in such an event, drop me an email or give me a call. I would be glad to discuss scheduling a webinar for another group.

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Webconfs.com has a great List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website. All of the suggestions will work with a blog.

Basically they collected all the major factors that might affect the search optimization of your site, attributing a score to them. The score ranges from -3, which is very bad for your site, to +3, which is very good. Below you will find a summary of the most important factors:

Keywords

• Keyword in title tag (+3)
• Keyword in URL (+3)
• Keyword density in document (+3)
• Keyword in H1 and H2 headings (+3)
• Keyword in the beginning of document (+2)
• Keyword in ALT tags (+2)
• Keyword in Meta tags (+1)
• Keyword stuffing (-3)

Links

• Anchor text of inbound links (+3)
• Origin of inbound links (+3)
• Links from similar sites (+3)
• Links from .edu and .gov sites (+3)
• Anchor text of internal links (+2)
• Many outgoing links (-1)
• Outbound links to bad neighbors (-3)
• Cross-linking (-3)

Meta Tags

• Description Meta Tag (+1)
• Keywords Meta Tag (+1)
• Refresh Meta Tag (-1)

Content

• Unique content (+3)
• Frequent updates (+3)
• Age of content (+2)
• Poor coding or design (-2)
• Invisible text (-3)
• Doorway pages (-3)
• Duplicate content (-3)

Other factors

• Site accessibility (+3)
• Sitemap (+2)
• Site size (+2)
• Site age (+2)
• Top-level domain (+1)
• URL length (0)
• Hosting downtime (-1)
• Flash (-2)
• Misused Redirects (-3)

Source for Post: Daily Blog Tips.

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New York attorney Nicole Black, a lawyer blogger, shares 10 tips for generating traffic to legal blogs.

1. Decide why you’re starting a legal blog–Is it to generate new business, establish your expertise in a particular area of practice, provide you with a web presence and/or more visibility, or is it simply an outlet that allows you to express yourself?
2. Determine who your target readers are–Are they potential clients, lawyers who practice in the same area of law as you do, lawyers located in the same geographic area as you or some other type of professional? This will help craft your content.
3. Create a blogroll–Your blogroll should serve two purposes: it should assist your readers in locating interesting content and it should alert other bloggers to your newfound blog’s existence.Send an email to the bloggers on your blogroll and let them know that because you enjoy their blog, you’ve added it to your blogroll–and a reciprocal link would be greatly appreciated, but is certainly not necessary.
4. Consider adding a link to Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground–This blog is a high traffic blog and he regularly acknowledges those blogs that have linked to his own.
5. Make sure that Tom Mighell is aware of your blog–Drop him an email so that he knows that your blog exists. His well known blog, Inter Alia, regularly features new legal blogs, and by letting him know about yours, he may mention your new blog more quickly.
6. Add your blog the legal blog directories listed on Nicole’s blog.
7. Submit blog posts to Blawg Review–Each week Blawg Review features blawg content from the past week. Consider signing up to host Blawg Review.
8. Read Kevin O’Keefe’s blog–His business is law blogs, and his blog always provides helpful tips for both new and experienced bloggers.
9. Regularly link to other blogs in your posts–Other bloggers will notice and appreciate it, and may reciprocate in kind.
10. Submit relevant comments to law blogs somewhat similar to your own–Make sure that your name is linked to your blog, so that anyone who clicks on it will be directed to your blog.

One tip that I would provide a bit of caution on however is the blogroll. While I agree, you should have a blogroll on your blog. Be careful to provide relevant links. Especially if your legal blog is a niche blog. Remember your target audience.

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My practice blog, Kansas Family & Divorce Lawyer hit 100,000 visits today, in just over a year. While I don’t spend my time watching the numbers. It does show that even a lawyer from Kansas can get traffic to his blog.

I had an email today from a fellow Mac using attorney asking me if my blog has brought in clients. Yes it has. I get contacts weekly. And I get clients weekly. It has been a great marketing tool.

If anyone wants to talk blogging, drop me an email. I would be glad to arrange a phone conference too.

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For those of you using Typepad, have you been noticing the changes occurring? I have and I have to say so far, I like them. Reviewing and approving comments and trackbacks has really improved. I can now read the entire comment in my email window without the need to go into the backend of Typepad to do so. Much better.

But, the improvements are coming slowly. New templates are also coming about. For too long, Typepad had too few to pick. It will be nice to have more standard templates to use.

However, should a professional service firm use Typepad as its main blogging platform?

Kevin O’Keefe touched on this in his recent post, Typepad improving slowly, but steadily.

TypePad, with a few problems here and there, is a good product. For professionals looking to have a blog and who are willing to forgo custom design and to learn the ins and outs of blogging on their own, it can be a good fit. For others looking to learn what RSS is, how to use it, how to use newsfeeds, and how to enter into the ongoing discussion on the net so as to enhance their reputation, they’re going to need something more than TypePad alone.

ROI is the key to blogging for professionals. Saving money is not the answer. The answer is leveraging your time blogging so you achieve success in enhancing your reputation as a leader in your niche. That’s how you grow your business.

Did you read that? Those two paragraphs answer the very question I get the most. Why did I go with lexBlog for my practice blog, Kansas Family & Divorce Lawyer?

While Typepad is a good product, it did not allow me to customize my practice blog the way I wanted to. We did some exciting designing with the blog when we started it in March 2006. I was able to get the column layout I wanted. I was able to get the features I wanted. And, I had a professional firm do the work so I did not have to go about learning coding myself.

Best of all, my ROI is out of this world. I get clients from my blog on a weekly basis. And my SEO is also great. We are fast approaching 100,000 page visitors to the Kansas Family & Divorce Lawyer. The ability of lexBlog to generate SEO is great.

I spend a lot of time visiting with other lawyers about blogging. And I love doing that. They almost always ask me is it worth it going with a professional firm like lexBlog. In a word, YES!!!!

But, just because you decide to blog, that is not enough. You have to do it. You have to take the time to learn how. Learn about RSS. Learn about SEO. Learn how to write a good title to a post. Learn what to post about. And know how to write a post to your target. You CANNOT just put up a blog and hope you will get traffic. It does take some work and it is well worth it.

At Sunflower Media Concepts, we can help you with those issues. While we don’t at this time offer professionally designed blogs, we will work with you to make your blog work the best for you. Drop us a line, I am always glad to discuss blogging with anyone.

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Common Craft had this great plain English explanation of what RSS is. Check it out. If you have not jumped on the RSS wagon because you were not quite clear what it does or how it can help you. This video should get you to a point you will use it.

Click To Play

Source for Post: Lexblog

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I for one have always favored full-text RSS feeds. And quite frankly when others don’t use them, I rarely visit the rest of the post by clicking through from my newsreader. I am a newsreader blog surfer. And if you aren’t using full-text feeds, you are not getting the readership you deserve.

Kevin O’Keefe has finally seen the light and is a convert himself.

I’m a convert to full-text RSS feeds. Being the small minded lawyer I am, I began blogging with excerpt feeds wanting users to come to blog. My logic was that readers would read more about me and what I did - like they cared.

When I switched to full text RSS feeds more people read my blog posts and more people, other bloggers and the media, cited my blog posts in their writings. My reputation as an authority on lawyer blogs grew and LexBlog’s business increased.

LexBlog’s law firm clients, thinking traffic and stats is the goal, want people coming to their blog to read their posts. However, I’m going to advise full text feeds going forward. Stats is not the goal - enhancing one’s reputation as an authority in a niche practice area and a growth in business are the real goals.

In addition, the Feedburner weblog mentions full-text feeds too.

Dennis Kennedy touches on this subject also. Dennis states:

There’s long been a debate over whether to distribute your RSS feed as an excerpt feed or a full-text feed.

I started out with an excerpt feed because I enjoyed writing a customized “excerpt” as a teaser. I didn’t use the standard automatic “first 20 or 50 words” excerpt that people commonly use today. I switched to a full-text feed because I preferred full-text feeds from other blogs and sites. And because I sometimes spent more time on writing the excerpt than the full post.

There are good reasons that you might choose to distribute a full-text or an excerpt feed. Excerpt feeds require that a reader click-through and visit your blog. Full-text feeds let your readers read the full post without going to your blog.

Over the years, people who use newsreaders to consume RSS feeds often reach a point where they feel that they have subscribed to WAY TOO MANY feeds. They then decide to prune their list of feeds. Historically, one of the easiest ways to cut the feeds you subscribe to is to delete those that offer only excerpts of posts.

The reason should be apparent. You save yourself the time and effort of clicking through to see the rest of the post. If you read feeds offline with a stand-alone reader, as I often do, then you will prefer full-text feeds because you can read everything in the post.

So, if you are blogging and not doing full-text feeds, stop it. Do full-text feeds. I have been doing them since almost the beginning of my blogging. It has not harmed my traffic one little bit.

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Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog posted the following today.

I received this email of blog success from a non LexBlog client lawyer regarding my post that lawyers earn money from blogs indirectly, as opposed to making money via sponsorships and ads.

I read your recent post on indirect benefits of blogging. I have received 18 new client inquiries over the last 12 work days. (My partners are in disbelief over the number of conflict checks). [A fellow lawyer] is experiencing similar results. It has been absolutely incredible. (Of course I am sure you have numerous examples).

As usual, when I asked to share this story I was told telling of the success was fine but not to share who she or he was. They didn’t want competitor law firms to know how they were getting all their work.

I can tell you the lawyer experiencing this blog success does business and corporate work for good clients. So the argument of the blog naysayers that their law firm’s clients are too sophisticated for blogs to work is out the window on this one.

Folks, blogging for a law firm works. I have had very similar results with my own practice blog, Kansas Family & Divorce Lawyer. I get new clients from it each and every week. Paying clients to boot. There is really no reason a law firm should not have a blog.

Source for Post: Real Lawyers :: Have Blogs.

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NewsGator Technologies, Inc., one of the leading companies focused on RSS technology, today announced the availability of NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry.

With NewsGator Go!, the company is fostering RSS adoption into all aspects of everyday life and is enabling users to consume information anywhere and at anytime. NewsGator Go! delivers information users want, from sports scores, world news and weather updates to relevant busi

Source for Post: Planet BlackBerry Blog.

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We went live with Sunflower Media Concepts on March 17th, 2007. One of the tools I use to gather information for posting is Google Alerts. And some of the keywords I use to gather information for this blog are “lawyer blogs”, “law blogs”, “blawgs”, “legal blogs.”

And on March 27th, 2007, only ten days after going live, this blog shows up in Google Alerts for those terms. SEO at its best. Here is a screen shot of the actually Alert I received in my Gmail.

Blogging works. Blogging will get you exposure on the internet as fast or faster than any other marketing method. If you are not blogging and have questions as to why you should or what to do, drop me an email at gdgrifflaw@mac.com

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If you don’t have Trackbacks and Comments enabled on your blog, do it. I allow Trackbacks and Comments on all my blogs. I do however moderate them to keep out spam.

Not only should you allow them on your own blog. You should do Trackbacks as often as possible and you should Comment on other other post as often as you can.

A Trackback is the method of informing a blogger that you are linking to and using information from his post. Both Trackbacks and Comments are just one tool to also help you with your SEO.

The fellow are additional reasons from Problogger why you should be doing Trackbacks and Comments.

• Leaving a comment or two makes your name familiar and lets the blogger know that you read his or blog. You become a person, a person who is interested and interesting. Leaving a trackback before you ever comment can look like you are standoffish or too busy to comment.
• Leaving a trackback on the same post where you’ve left a comment can work really well, if you are truly interested in the dialogue and the topic. Think of it as a real conversation, that you might have had with a fairly new friend. If you were truly engaged and thought of a new point on your way home, you might shoot him an email or IM to pass it along.
• The track post that you write shows that you took the conversation at the original blog one step further. Almost everyone would think that’s a compliment, sending a trackback is a lot like saying ‘You’ve got me thinking, and I’m telling others good things about you.’ Who wouldn’t like to hear that?

Good advice to follow. So, go forth and Comment and do Trackbacks and increase your own traffic.

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A fellow Kansas Stater, Michael Wesch recently published a great video on YouTube about Web 2.0.

The five-minute clip, set to techno music, helps explain Web 2.0. As he points out, Web 2.0 is the so-called second wave of Web-based services that enables people to network and aggregate information online.

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A well done blog is a great source of information for its readers. However, one area I have seen lawyers forget when doing their blog is the importance of the category list. Under the three blogging platforms I use, TypePad, Moveable Type, and WordPress, categories are used for the post.

The category list is important for two big reasons.

When you have readers come to your blog, it is the category list where they tend to go to find information on your blog. In designing your blog, you should try to limit your categories to no more than 20. And you should place the category list as close to the top of the page as possible. Don’t make your reader hunt for the “index” to your blog. Once you get them there, your goal should be to keep them there as long as possible.

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The Blog Herald talks about the future of blogging in this post   "The Future of Blogging - Human Generated or Computer Generated?" The reason it bothered me so much is because if you love writing, as I do, then in the future authors and bloggers will be competing for readership with computer-generated content.  According to this post MEXICA can actually create dialogue that will read emotional construction of other dialogue and create tension between the characters.  Therefore, it has the ability to write fiction stories.

The program, called MEXICA, is the first to generate original stories based on computerized representations of emotions and tensions between characters.

Rafael Pérez y Pérez, MEXICA’s creator, explains, “The program keeps a record of the emotional links between characters while developing a story, and employs its knowledge about emotions to retrieve from memory possible logical actions to continue the story.

An Internet survey was done to allow readers to vote on which stories they liked without knowing the source, and MEXICA’s stories ranked highest for “flow and coherence, structure, content, suspense and overall quality.”

Fiction writers, and bloggers, might want to take note and pay close attention. Your competition might be a machine.

Already our blog content is illegally copied and spread out across the web through feed scrapers, letting our hard work be used by lazy bloggers as a replacement for their content. Computers generating content isn’t about splogs stealing our content. It’s about computers become the source of content.

And our competition.

In the future, I have no doubt that computers will be able to scan the web looking for news stories. They will have the ability to analyze trends, and even predict them. They can already quickly cull information and references from various sources and generate fairly accurate summaries and lists, so what would be so hard to add a few words and turn those into paragraphs?

As for blogging, programs have the ability to read trends across the blogosphere, emotional language and then use your hard work to create computer generated content on their own blogs.  While large law firms will probably latch onto this technology, I believe solos will not want to because personal blogging differentiates us from others, allows us to be unique, express ourselves in a way that shows our personality, opinions, perspective and individuality.  But will we be plagiarized everywhere, our words gently, or not so gently, refashioned for another’s benefit? 

Posted by:  Susan Cartier Liebel - Build A Solo Practice, LLC

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Daily Blog Tips had a post today about creating a functional footer for your blog.

If you take a look at my practice blog, Kansas Family Law Blog you will see this in action on a law related blog.

Here are the items suggested and also, a list of what appears on my own blog.

A functional footer for a blog should have at least two links:

• a link to the homepage
• a link to the RSS feed

You can also consider adding the following:

• an email subscription box
• a link to the Archives
• a link to the ‘About’ page
• a link to the ‘Contact’ page
• the recent posts
• the popular posts

Source for Post: Daily Blog Tips.

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Below is a great post from Kevin O’Keefe at LexBlog. I am posting it word for word here. I decided why try to reinvent the wheel. I have talked a lot about blogging and will continue to do so. This is a great post about how Google may be ranking blogs.

‘Unlike most blog search engines, Google Blog Search ranks the results by relevancy,’ per Ionut Alex. Chitu at Google Operating System (Unofficial news and tips about Google). This gives you the most significant blog posts about a topic.

And per Bill Slawski who cites Google’s pending patent application, Google Blog Search ranks blogs based upon a combination of relevance scores and quality scores.

Bill’s post goes into great detail on each scoring item, but here’s a summary grid put together by Ionut Alex. Chitu.

Bill concedes that Google probably looks at other criteria and may not consider all of the above. However, he believes the above criteria provide good insight into how things work at what is becoming the most popular blog search.

Note that we’re talking Google Blog Search, not Google’s general search engine. Google Blog Search is generally used to locate blogs and blog posts and then to set up RSS feeds of the search results to one’s newsreader.

Source on post: Steve Rubel

Source for Post: Real Lawyers :: Have Blogs.

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I have read a lot about what is being called “linkbaiting.”

The Search Engine Journal defined Linkbaiting this way:

Linkbaiting is one of the most universally effective tactics for promoting a site, both for search engine rankings and short-term traffic boosts.

Blog SEO defined it this way:

Linkbaiting is a habit of writing good content with the sole purpose of getting linked to it.

Good content will get you incoming links. Writing good content will get you incoming links.

I considered my own habit of linking to other blogger’s post. And it is the content of that post that catches my eye. Not who else has linked to it. Not the tags they use. It is the content. For example, take the two links above. I used those links for the content of those post. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Search Engine Journal gave some guidelines on what content to write about to get those link backs.

Understanding what content, features, and subjects are “in” with the technorati (the web-literate individuals, not the blog aggregation site) is a subjective, but important piece of the linkbait creation puzzle.

There’s that word again, CONTENT.

The Blog SEO provided 2 ways to be good linkbaiters.

The first hint is:

Know what’s up
You need to know what’s going on on the Web and know what’s hot. A good way of finding out is checking out the popular searches on Technorati.

Taking the first hint, let me expand. One of the blogs I do is the Kansas Family Law Blog. I am providing a professional service on that blog. It is not my goal on that blog to generate traffic for ads, as you won’t see Chitika ads on that blog. One of the ways I decide what content to provide is to know what is going on. But not by checking out the popular searches on Technorati. What I do check out, are the searches I find my readers are doing by checking the stats of my blog. While checking those stats I can determine what actual searches are being typed into Google or Yahoo. I take those search requests and make them into post. In checking my stats nightly over a short period of time, I can usually see a pattern of what questions are being asked. Taking those questions and doing a post gets me traffic to my blog. It is not linkbaiting, but it does get me traffic, which is our goal. I am also following the first hint mentioned above, I am keeping up on what is hot and writing content to match what is hot.

The sec