In fact, many of you practice in the field of bankruptcy as well as those other areas.  Mortgage servicer abuses, FDCPA, FCRA, and a ton of other practice areas.

My original inclination was to keep this site as it is, but my better instincts got to me.  After all, the challenges we face as consumer bankruptcy lawyers aren’t that different from those tackled by consumer protection lawyers, divorce lawyers, criminal, personal injury … the list goes on and on.  We all market to individuals, seeking to educate them and influence them.  We build relationships with our market, reaching out online and offline to create the bond that leads them to hire us rather than the lawyer down the block.

Websites, direct mail, social media, blogging, Yellow Pages … we’re all in the same place, suffering the same setbacks.

We all want to go paperless, hire virtual assistants, and attain a work-life balance.

In other words, we walk the same path to profitability.

With that in mind, I’ve launched Legal Practice Pro – your single source for marketing, managing and growing your practice.  Like a phoenix from the ashes, this new site will rise above what you’ve seen here.  And not in a Marvel Comics Jean Grey-Turned-Dark Phoenix sort of way, either.

Head on over there, say hello, and make yourself comfortable.  I promise I’ll make it worth your while, offering the same valuable content and information you’ve come to expect from me.

It’s been a blast.  Let’s continue the party.

Image courtesy of Cayusa.

You wake up one morning and realize … Holy *&$*%!  I ain’t got no clients! (that’s a hat tip to Louis Prima and David Lee Roth, by the way)

So what do you do?  You brush off those business cards, fire up WordPress, and start running around like a snowman with his feet on fire.

Of course, those efforts will take anywhere from weeks to months to bear fruit.  Ads must be run, websites indexed and updated, business cards passed around.  Until someone walks in the door with money for you, your family’s eating ramen noodles (and not because you like them).

But what’s a poor lawyer to do?  It’s feast or famine out in the real world, dog-eat-dog, cliché-vs-cliché.

Some productivity experts would tell you to set aside a few hours a week to concentrate on marketing, but I’m no Pollyanna.  I know you’ve got enough pressures to deal with, and telling you to block off 4 or 5 hours every week to dedicate to your marketing is just plain silly – not to mention unrealistic.

So here’s the challenge:

Take One Hour Per Week To Do One Thing To Make You Money

One hour.  60 ticks of the clock.  That’s it.  Use it however you see fit.  Post a blog.  Write and submit an article.  Record a video or podcast.  Heck, take an existing video and strip out the audio so you can turn it into a podcast.

Surf the Internet for cool blogs to post comments.  Troll a forum to participate in the conversation.

And if all else fails, call your friend who happens to be a decent source of business when you take a cow prod to the sea tof his pants.  Catch up, ask about the family, and remind him that he hasn’t sent you anything new for awhile.

60 minutes per week.

Do it now.  Do it for an hour before you go to bed at night.  Is most television really that compelling anyway?

I’m looking to you, my readers, to tell me what you think that name should be.  And I’ve got an awesome prize for the winner.

Here’s the deal:

Over the past year or so, this site has begun to spread through the legal community like wildfire.  At first it was just bankruptcy lawyers, but word got out and now my readers include divorce lawyers, immigration lawyers, consumer protection lawyers … well, you get the point.

There are a lot of you who wouldn’t know how to practice bankruptcy law if your life depended on it.

So that means the name of this site is kind of … outdated.  Outmoded.  Not reflective of the true nature of the site, which is marketing a law firm that handles issues of concerns to consumers in general.

I could choose to cast off many of my loyal readers, or I could become more inclusive.  I choose the latter.

Help me re-name this site.  If your entry is chosen I’ll not only give you a shout-out but also free access to Practice Pro Monthly until the end of December – the closed-doors coaching program that teaches the ins-and-outs of marketing offline and online (the prize is available only to lawyers, not to paralegals or people who are not actively engaged in the practice of law).

Do I just stick with my name?  Something funky and cool?

Let your imagination run wild, folks.  Enter your suggested new name below.

What Yodle does is create a replica of your website on a another domain name. they do this so they can track visitors, provide an alternate phone number and assist in tracking leads.

This may be a problem for your “real” site’s organic search results.

It’s important to realize that the creation of duplicate content online may cause an issue with Google. There is some suggestion that duplicate content may harm your organic (i.e., non-paid) placement on the search engines.

According to Google:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

* Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
* Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
* Printer-only versions of web pages

Check out this page for more information on the problem and how to minimize the impact.

So let’s say that Yodle protects against the problem of duplicate content.  That’s a good thing for your organic search rankings, but it could harm your paid rankings – in other words, where you show up on the paid ads.

Google uses an algorithm for paid searches that is similar to the one used for organic rankings.  Among other things, Google looks to the relevancy of the advertised site to the search term in order to generate the best results for the searcher.  No matter what you offer to pay per click, Google will factor in the entire site (as well as the ad and bid price) when deciding where to place you on the paid ads.

That’s why some pay-per-lead servies rank very well on the paid searches but pay far less per click than other lawyers and advertisers.  They have deep, relevant content that scores well with Google.

There’s more to it, of course.  But look solely to this factor – one of many, but one to consider nonetheless.

If Yodle blocks Google’s robots through a robots.txt file or noindex tag then Google has no idea as to what the site is about.  That’s bad because your site will show up lower on the paid ads.  And if Yodle doesn’t do this then it may harm your organic searches.

What does Yodle do?  I have no idea, but it’s something to consider and ask about prior to making a decision to hire this company – or any other company that duplicates your site content wholesale.

To some, not so much.  Some of my lawyer friends have commented lately that they don’t want to connect with their clients on these sites because doing so will show the client a side of the lawyer that isn’t congruent with the lawyer’s “office personality.”  In other words, the lawyer’s kind of uncomfortable with the client seeing pictures of their attorney on a catamaran in the Caribbean.

To those lawyers I say – you’ve got two options.  Either get your hair wet or stay out of the pool.

Look, it’s pretty simple.  If you’ve got a social networking profile it’s out there.  Google can find it, so searchers can find it.  Period.

If you don’t want someone to find the profile, don’t have one.  Because once you do, it’s out there.

What If You Don’t Want Clients To Connect With You On Social Networking Sites?

You run a very real risk of being perceived as an elitist snob, that’s what.  By declining to allow a client to friend you on Facebook you’re telling that person, “Look, you’re good enough to give me money and allow me to live my life.  But you stay on the other side of the red velvet rope with the riff-raff while I hang out over here with the cool kids.”

Imagine this.  You’re walking down the street and see your dentist with his wife.  This is a guy who has stuck his hand in your mouth, has seen your gums, and has watched you spit into a basin.  You’re pretty intimate.

So you stop, smile at your dentist and put out your hand to shake his.  Pleasantries and what not.

Your dentist, barely breaking stride, looks at you briefly and shakes his head.  As he continues on his way you hear his wife say, “Who was that?”

“Nobody important,” comes the reply.

How do you feel?  Are you going back to that dentist anytime soon?

How about using Fan Pages on Facebook?  Can’t you just use those and tell clients they can connect with you there?

Again, it’s like shuttling the client to the back of the bus.  They’re left with the feeling that they’re somehow inferior.  And they get justifiably angry at that.

So here’s the solution – radical, but it works.

Don’t put stuff on your social networking sites unless you’re comfortable with the world seeing it.  No naked pictures, no dancing on bars, no driving fast without a seatbelt.  My rule of thumb is this – if I don’t want my mom to see it, I don’t put it up there.

As to the stuff that’s on there, remember that your clients need to know who you are as a person.  Your dog, your cat, your life.  Doing so makes you more than just a lawyer in a suit, it makes you a person.  Someone with a life, who has things they think are cool and fun.  Someone who is just like them, separated only by circumstance and some specialized knowledge (and perhaps some student loans to show for it).  Doing so allows you to maintain rapport and bonding, create empathy and maintain your positive influence over clients.

Because deep down, we are not too different from our clients.  It’s not too far to fall into bill problems, nor is it too far to climb to the top of the ladder.