Rather than leave social media as largely uncharted territory, lawyers can reap the benefits of learning to harness the true power behind these types of sites to further their own careers. These attorneys tend to raise their profiles in the eyes of existing clients and prospective clients alike, which has an overall positive effect on business.

Here are some ways a progressive attorney can utilize social media:

Social Networking

The object of social media sites like Twitter is to gain followers. As a lawyer, you really don’t want to accumulate followers who might potentially need to come to you for advice one day. Instead, you want to connect and network with those professionals who are likely to refer people they know to you.

This means finding a way to increase the number of followers you have who are from a legal or business network. One way to do this is to follow other attorneys and subscribe to blogs that interest you. Leave comments that help to engage the blog owner or other respondents in a conversation.

Once they are following you, it’s up to you to use other forms of social media to let them know about your field of specialization.

Blogging

Using a dynamic platform like a blog can be an ideal way for a lawyer to offer credible legal opinion and expertise. WordPress can be installed easily on a private or corporate domain and makes blogging quick and simple. A blog allows you to establish a professional online presence, whether you have your own firm, or whether you’re working as an employee for a larger firm.

Many employers worry about their attorneys blogging under their own name, as they fear this may detract from the company itself. However, if the message being posted on the blog attracts the right audience, it can be a draw-card for large companies to contact that lawyer as an individual and eventually become a client for the firm.

Insights and Opinions

It should be noted that any legal insights or opinions you do decide to share on social media sites should never be confused as actual legal counsel by your readers or followers.

Wherever necessary, display a disclaimer on your blog, on your Twitter profile or on your Facebook profile. Say something akin to: “Opinions posted to this blog (or feed) do not constitute any form of legal advice”.

Personal or Professional

Perhaps one of the reasons many lawyers avoid social media sites for professional purposes is that these platforms are often seen as being more of a personal nature. However, there are many attorneys who can successfully inject a personal insight or a level of their own personality into their blog posts.

This gives readers a reason to continue coming back to read more, as these types of personalized professional blogs aren’t all about trying to drum up more business. Instead, they highlight that there is a real, living, breathing person behind all that legal talk. This can actually help to instill a sense of trust in your as an attorney, which may be beneficial for attracting new clients in the long run.

These simple social media tips could be the key to broadening your professional online presence. Before long, prospective clients will begin to connect with you as a potential source of legal advice.

About the Author:  Lior Levin who works for an E2 visa lawyer that specializes in e2 visas for UK and German citizens.

However, the feature list of Headway is not its main selling point, but instead it is the ease of use in building and customizing your blog. As I said, we had completely re-built TechnoEsq’s website after installing WordPress in under 2 hours. The only thing which was exported from the old site was the post content and images. Under normal conditions, it would take a considerably more time in re-creating a website to keep the look of the prior one. As we mentioned, there are built-in options for custom sidebars and image rotation boxes which are called leaves (as in the leaf of a table). These leaves are boxes inserted into the layout of your blog just like leaves in a table and are customizable to include text, video or any other code you would like to insert.

For those technically inclined, resizing containers and leaves is as easy as clicking and dragging from within the layout editor. Colors can be chose for backgrounds, links, text and any other editable object using a color wheel.

Headway is truly an amazing product and anyone even considering a blog should seriously consider Headway. You can save a considerable amount of money creating a blog using WordPress and Headway instead of hiring a firm and you retain complete control over your site.

What critical components must my blog have to ensure it performs at its maximum potential?

We are coming close to the end of “The Right Foundation to Build Upon” in our series, Building a Successful Blog. This part of the series is where I want to focus some of our attention on just a few of the design elements of your blog. These are some of the critical components I feel are a must for building a successful blog. Most, if not all of them come from my own experiences over the last 4 years. And some will be those components which I received from my followers on twitter when I ask them the same question.

I know you are asking yourself, “why are we talking about this here?” One, because I want to. And two, before you even start the design process, you have to know what you need in your design. Knowing this will make the initial design process run smoother. And you and your design firm will appreciate the fact you thought about these items now and not in the middle of the process.
If there are questions you have to keep in mind when you are considering what your blog is going to look like and how it is going to function it would be these:

• How will it affect your readers’ experience?
• Can your readers find what they are looking for?
• Will your readers find it easy to participate in the conversation you are promoting on your blog?
• If your readers want to reach you, can they?
• If they want to subscribe, can they and is it easy to find?
• Are you giving them what they want?

Critical Components

1. Search Option

One of your goals as a blogger is to keep your readers on your blog. You want them looking at and reading as much of your content as you can get them to read. And if they can’t find it, they are going to go look for it somewhere else. To help your readers find what they need, provide a search box somewhere towards the top of your blog. Most if not all of the blogging platforms have a way to add this to your blog if you are a do-it-yourself type of person. Make sure you include it. If you are working with a design firm and if they are any good at all, they will include this for you without you having to ask.

2. Contact Information

Even if you don’t provide them with a physical address or a phone number, you have to have some way for your readers to contact you. I do this in a number of ways. There are times when I might include my email address in a post so our readers can contact me about a particular post if they want. The main component we use to provide our contact information is our Contact Page.

On my Contact Page I provide my physical address. The social media/networking services I use and we also have a contact form. The contact form comes to my email when it is filled out by a visitor. If you are a business or a professional service firm, how can your readers contact you? Make sure you provide them with as many ways as you can. One of your goals as a business or firm is to capture possible leads. Give yourself a way to do this.

3. Call to Action

Working right along with the “Contact Information” discussed in #2, you need what is called a Call to Action. Again, if you are a business or a service firm, isn’t one of your goals in your marketing program to capture leads. A call to action will help you do this.

You want to provoke your readers to contact you, get prices, sign up or buy from you. A call to action could be an opt-in for a free ezine or newsletter you are providing to your readers. Or it could be as simple as a quick form for them to request information about a new product you just introduced. The ways you can use a “call to action” are really never ending.

In addition, if done right, you are building a list of individuals who have opted-in to receive information from you. Take advantage of this tool to further your marketing efforts.

4. Subscription Options

This is another one of those components which should be towards the top of your blog and easy to find. Make it clear and easy for your readers to either subscribe via RSS or Email. Why both? Because there are still some who don’t know about RSS, let alone understand it. Everyone knows what email is. We provide both options on all the blogs we design for our clients. And I don’t care which one our readers use.

The key here is to make sure it is very visible and easy to subscribe to. And don’t put a whole list of those subscription option buttons on your blog. First of all, they are tacky and you don’t need them. If you will just use the universal button and burn your feed through one of the feed services, they will get the option they want.

One thing we also do is provide a link to a short video explaining what RSS is. Even with so many people reading blogs, the use of and understanding of RSS is still not what it should be. Which is why you should include something explaining what RSS is and how they might use it.

5. Categories (Your blog’s Index)

The categories which you must have on your blog are your blog’s index. This section in your sidebar should be towards the top so it is easy to find. And you should try to limit your categories to no more than 20. (Yes, I know we have too many on Blog For Profit).

Each blog post should have a category assigned to it. (One category is best. If you must assign additional “tags” to your post, then use Tags and not multiple categories). This in turn will enable your readers to find those topics by using the categories as someone would use an index or even a table of content. Also, when someone is looking for information on a blog, they are most likely going to use the categories just like an index. They will use categories before they will use an archive calendar. Which is why I am not a big fan of archive calendars on a blog. I think they are a waste of space.

Some bloggers have their categories in their footer or at the bottom of the page. This is fine if your blog is well established and you have 1000′s of subscribers. However, for a newer blog, put them in the sidebar so they can be easily found. Using categories is another way we can keep our readers on our blogs longer. They may not only read the original post which brought them there. They may also hunt around for other post on that topic or a different one by using your categories as an index to find those other post.

6. Services or Products Page

Even though we discussed a Service Page in a previous post. I feel it is worth mentioning a second time here. I feel a service or product page is that important and it is a critical component of your blog.

Make it clear and easy for your readers to figure out what you do or sell. This is your opportunity to tell your audience what you have to offer them. Granted, you will be putting up blog post throughout the week. And some of them will most likely discuss your services or products. However, those blog post are not “static” pages. They move down the page until some point in time they disappear off the front page. Your service or product page is one of those critical components which is also a “static” page.

Make it easy to find. Put it in your tab navigation and/or in the sidebar. This could be your company or firm’s brochure. Don’t force your readers to play a guessing game trying to figure out what you do. And if you are going to use a “Page” for this, put your contact information there and a contact form too. Keep your goals in mind as to why you are blogging. I will almost bet you, it is to build a relationship with these readers and hopefully to have them contact you to buy your product or service. Give them what they need to know about what you do or sell.

7. Relevant Content

This is a no brainer in my opinion. If you aren’t providing your visitors with relevant, up-to-date content, why would they ever become regular readers. They won’t. Your visitors are going to go somewhere else to find the answer to their questions or a solution to their problems.

We will spend more time on “Content” in Building a Successful Blog, so we won’t labor that topic here. The key however is this. If you don’t have good, up-to-date, relevant content, all of these other components we are discussing here and in the next post will not matter at all. Your visitors will not come back and your blog will certainly fail.

Just do it…

All of the critical components we have mentioned are not hard to provide to your readers. Most blogging platforms have easy and simple ways to include them on your blog. And if you are hiring a professional to design and implement your blog, they will usually include them in the blog’s design. However, make sure you discuss them with the design firm.

We have just scratched the surface of components and features your blog should have. And that is why I am calling this “Critical Components (Part 1). We are going to talk more about this next week in the series. In the meantime, leave your comments or drop me an email at grant@g2webmedia.com with the critical components you feel are a must. And we will include them in the next couple of post. I will also include the list which was provided to me by some of my followers on twitter.

Your Homework

Go visit some of the blogs you read and see what they are doing right as far as what components they have. And, go visit blogs and see what components are missing. This is one of the ways I spent my time before I started my first blog.

Be sure to visit Grant’s other great sites at G2 Web Media, Blog for Profit and Home Office Warrior. All three are of immense value to any legal professional contemplating the use of a blog in his legal practice.

So we thought we would repost the part series, by Blog For Profit which seeks to teach you how to build and grow your own blog. Thanks to Grant Griffiths, founder of Blog For Profit, for the time and effort he’s given in documenting all of the things he’s learned through the years building his legal and non-legal blogs.

I originally was going to call this series “growing your blog” and decided the name just didn’t fit with what I was trying to accomplish. Establishing and maintaining a successful blog for promoting and marketing your business did not seem to fit with a growing analogy. Building a successful blog did. From setting it upon a solid foundation to defining what our end goals are for our blog. And the middle of the structure is the activities to reach the final goal.

To illustrate, I have started by providing the very basic framework of our structure.

Like any good project and before we even start the building process, we need to establish our goal. What is it we want this blog to do for our business? Where do we see this blog taking our business? Do we want to use the blog as a marketing tool to drive sales or the retention of our services? Or do we want to use the blog as a means to communicate with our target audience?

It is my belief, a blog which you are using to promote and marketing your business can be used for one, some or all of these end goals.

Consider what you want to accomplish when looking at your blogging goals

To start the process of building a successful blog, I am going to ask that you do some homework and consider the questions I just mentioned. Look at each one as they may apply to one question, “what do you want your blog to do for your business?”

Where do you see your blog taking your business?

Do you want to use your blog just to generate visitors to your blog or business?

Do you want to use your blog as a marketing tool to drive sales or the retention of your services?

Do you want to use your blog as a means to communicate with your target audience?

Do you want to use your blog as a means to develop a relationship with your visitors so they become readers?

Do I want to use my blog to do all or some of these at the same time.

As you may have guessed, we aren’t going to get all the answers to building a successful blog in this one post. There will be at least 3 total post and maybe more. What I would really appreciate is for you to leave your comments on what you would want a blog to do for your business or professional service firm. This topic is so much more important and needs more then just what I can provide in a few blog post. What will make this series great is for you the readers of Blog For Profit to get involved and give your input. I can promise you this, if you leave a comment and I use it in subsequent blog post you will get additional linkage.

So leave your comments and lets get the conversation going and keep it going.

Also don’t forget to subscribe to the Blog For Profit Newsletter. We include information in the newsletter we don’t feature here on the blog.

Be sure to visit Blog For Profit for other great articles and check back here each day this week for the rest of this series.

Focusing on the author’s, Adam Greivell an associate at the law firm of Leo P. Hylan, P.A., extensive use of Mac’s in his life and legal practice (he started on a MacPlus, as did Finis so he is in good company), Adam blogs about his use of Macs in his criminal and civil litigation practice in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  His lawfirm is not Mac only and thus provides insight into the ease and reliability of Mac computers in a Mac/Windows office environment.

His blog has delivered early on its promise to present  tips, tricks, reviews and musings about using Macs in a small law office and has already shown us a few programs we have never seen before in the short time the blog has been running.  Keep an eye on this legal blog, you will be glad you did!