Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal editor, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, marketing consultant, legal consultant, business development

WordPress offers a free plugin designed for bloggers who want to add legal news content to their websites. You blog's own content will be combined with fresh legal news from LexisNexis' legal news website, Lawyers.com at blogs.lawyers.com.

Download the plugin here.

Features:

• Combine Your Content With Fresh Headlines: This WordPress plugin will display a mix of fresh legal news headlines that your predetermine intermixed with your blog's own content.

• No 3rd Party Branding: This plugin is "White Label". The design is determined by your WordPress theme and no other logos or branding will be displayed or marketed to the end user.

• Customized Legal News: You customize what types of legal news (bankruptcy, family law, etc.) is displayed to your readers in the easy to use admin screen.

• Adjustable Content Display: Ability to add a character limited summary option to display excerpts from stories directly on your blog.

• Continuous RSS Scrolling: Headlines will vertically scroll at a speed you determine, allowing a large amount of content to be displayed in a small box.

• Easy Installation: No coding knowledge required to configure this plugin. Just activate the plugin and drag and drop the widget to sidebar and check the front end.

• Scalable Performance: Based on the latest WordPress feed fetching technology for enhanced performance and scalability

• Multiple Flavors of RSS Supported: Supports all major types of RSS and Atom feeds including: RSS 0.91 (Netscape), RSS 0.91 (Userland), RSS 0.90, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0

• Easy Configuration: Easy to use configuration settings screen

• Multiple sources of legal news categories: bloggers can select specific types of headlines to be displayed in widget (Divorce, current events, Family Law, etc.) in admin interface

• Configurable name for headline box: Call this widget box whatever you want (ie. Top Legal News, Name-Of-Your-Blog News, etc.)

The No. 1 mistake I see lawyers make when marketing themselves is failing to be active online. LexisNexis® just announced new research by The Research Intelligence Group (TRiG) that reveals that 3 out of 4 consumers seeking an attorney over the last year used online resources at some point in the process.* This means that attorneys must have a Web page or blog as the cornerstone of their online marketing. Further, every time a new article or blog post is published, a lawyer should share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

To build a following, a blog should be updated at least once a week, if not more often. A blog allows attorneys to demonstrate their expertise and discuss legal issues that consumers face. The more content that is created, the more there is for Google to index.

This can be a lot of work, so I recommend that attorneys enlist help from LexisNexis, which can set up your blog and Web page and actually write a first draft of all the material you put online.

Marketing Musts

• It's important for lawyers to publish FAQs ("frequently asked questions") online that discuss a potential client's problem — not just practice area descriptions — because people often start by researching their legal issue, not by searching for a particular lawyer. Smart lawyers put content online that gets them found early in a person's search.
• An attorney must be facile and comfortable with the Web, blogging and social media. With the huge growth in social media, a potential client's friends, co-workers and colleagues are online — and so the attorney must be online too.
• Along with online sources, referrals are a significant source of new business for lawyers. Accordingly, attorneys should find their counterparts and set up express referral arrangements. For example, a litigator should seek out transactional lawyers. Social media is a great way to meet referral sources.
• Smart lawyers join and become active in trade associations and organizations that their clients belong to. Many associations have online groups and networks, and they make it easy for an attorney to meet a potential client online — and then pursue the relationship in person.
• The new TRiG research shows that Lawyers.com^SM is the top-cited online legal resource mentioned by consumers who sought an attorney in the past year, following Google.* Consumers are accustomed to reading reviews online, on websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. When a consumer cannot find any information about a lawyer online, this is a major turnoff. Furthermore, consumers don't like it when they cannot find a rating of a lawyer online. The place to turn is Lawyers.com, which carries profiles of hundreds of thousands of lawyers, who can invite their clients or fellow attorneys to rate them. Consumers want to know a lawyer's clients rate them highly, and whether fellow lawyers respect them.

The "old-fashioned" methods for finding lawyers are still in use — people will always check with friends, family and co-workers to find a lawyer. But there is one thing you can be sure about — people will double-check that recommendation online.

With do-it-yourself lawyering, as with many things, you get what you pay for. Yes, legal websites that allow you to create your own will and other legal documents charge you less than what you would pay to hire an attorney. But, as Consumer Reports magazine discusses in its August issue, many consumers are better off consulting a lawyer.

Where do consumers start when a legal need is more complex than one might have thought, or there is a desire to preserve one's rights and prevent disputes? LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell® extensively studies behavior around how consumers approach legal issues and what we've found is there's a lot of uncertainty about taking the right steps to find a lawyer. Far outside their personal comfort zone, many don't know where to turn to first. People don't generally think about legal issues very often ... that is, until a situation develops where they must find legal answers fast.

Read the rest of this article by Philip Livingston at the LexisNexis website.