Laptop Legal » Solicitor SEO

twitterfeed: send posts to twitter

Jordan — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 07:36:22 +0000

twitterfeed can help you automagically turn your blog posts into tweets. The service has even recently expanded to allow you to feed any RSS into twitter and a whole host of other services, including facebook. It has lots of customisable settings, so that you can add leading or trailing text to your tweets, add hashtags, or even limit the tweets to certain categories.

Tools like this are really handy for solos and small firms because they save time and make use of a number of resources at once to help develop your online presence.

I don’t have a bit.ly account yet, but twitterfeed can use bit.ly for link shortening and even tell you how many clickthroughs you’ve had to your blog from twitter, which is handy to know for your impact.

Next up, I think I’ll have to investigate URL shortening services…

Practice management sites every solo should follow

Jordan — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:15:32 +0000

As a solo or small firm lawyer, you were a lot of hats and don’t have the luxury of just delegating lots of aspects of your practice to others. As a result of a conversation that I had today with a fellow small firm legal professional, I created this list of sites that I follow that help me keep track.

LPM blogs

Build a Solo practice. Susan Cartier Liebel’s blog and one of the first I started following when I developed my consultancy.

There are quite a few others that I dip in on regularly, such as Chuck Newton and Home Office Warrior. These days I mostly just see what is out there via the twitter people I follow, though I very sorely tempted to join Solo Practice University to give it a go.

Tech for the solo/small firm

Keep up to date with Future Lawyer and for the Mac users, subscribe to MILO and read iPhone JD if you have an iPhone.

SEO

SEO Moz comes in very handy and has lots of tools to help with SEO. My Pro subscription has been useful, but there are plenty of things to get you started for free.

SEO Book. I bought and read Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and it’s been a great help to understand the issues and where to improve (even if I don’t get to do all of what he and SEO Moz recommend).

UK

In the UK we have the SOLO IP group, which I’d hoped would offer more practice management tips and tricks, and still has the potential to be a really useful resource specifically for IP practitioners.

Ads on your business blog – don’t do it!

Jordan — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:38:12 +0000

Think about it. Why are you blogging as part of your business?

The answer: to help build your business!

You have a business. If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely a solo or small firm lawyer. But this applies whether you are a lawyer in Chicago, a consultant in London, or a widget manufacturer in Kazakhstan. You have a business, and it is not selling advertising on your web content.

Lawyers sell their services, not ads.

Blogging help you sell your services in many ways. Through it, you can increase your SEO, making it easier for potential clients to find you, and build out your networks and reputational capital to build referral business and boost your standing as an expert (and so charge higher rates).

Putting ads on your site sends the wrong message in this environment. It says you aren’t serious about blogging as part of your practice and it’s a distraction to the people you want to stay focussed on your site and your content (and not clicking through to other sites to buy things).

Besides that, those ads aren’t likely to be very successful. That one beer a month that you can buy with the GoogleAds on your blog will be useful to console you when you think about how the blog isn’t helping your business.

Twitter and webinars

Jordan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:51:26 +0000

Just a quick note to reflect back on a webinar that I was a part of last month. I helped organise the event, but didn’t speak. While all of the speakers were presenting over the webinar, I consistently tweeted supplemental information. For example, links to speaker profiles or relevant papers, links or supplemental materials.

This was admittedly a bit of a last minute idea for me, but realised that it worked pretty well. For next time, I think I’d:

develop and deliver some exclusive Twitter content given during the event
and do a bit of promotion around the Twitter feed.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

WordPress 2.7

Jordan — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:29:00 +0000

Managed to update one of my other blogs to WordPress 2.7 and the latest Thesis theme — went pretty smoothly especially with OpenHook for Thesis. I did a whole new install and imported my old site and had my plugins installed and site configured pretty quickly (couple of hours total).

I very much recommend upgrading if you haven’t already, especially as it looks like it has several SEO features already built in. It also might be a good time to try a new theme that takes advantage of some of the changes in WordPress.