Tomorrow the Legal Marketing Association will kick off its 2012 program with “Connecting Costs to Value: Your Role in Driving Revenue.”  If you are an  attorney, marketing and business development professional, marketing partner, managing partner, practice group leader, or manager from law firms/accounting firms, then you should be there!

Nationally recognized as a leader in law firm business development strategy, special guest presenter Silvia Coulter, will discuss what firms can do to build relationships based on loyalty versus cost of services, client growth cycle and process improvement and its impact on the firm’s revenue.

When: TOMORROW! Tuesday, January 17, 2012 from 5 p.m. -7:30 p.m.

• Registration and networking being at 5 p.m.
• Presentation starts at 5:45 p.m.
• Food, fun and networking at 6:30 p.m.

Where: Berger Singerman; 1450 Brickell Avenue Suite 1900, Miami, FL 33131

Cost: Complimentary for lawyers, legal marketing professionals and LMASE members, $25 for other business professionals or non-members

Please RSVP to Jennifer Clarin, jclarin@boardroompr.com (954) 370-8999 or via SurveyMonkey, http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YMJ3ZW7.

Hope you can join us!

A recent article in the Greater Miami Attorney at Law Magazine shares ways on how to get potential clients to find you on the Internet. A senior writer from FindLaw, a website that provides free legal information, shares ways on how to get potential clients to find you on the Internet and have them contact you. It is very important for these potential clients to feel a connection and at ease when looking at your web page. 

When advertising on the Internet it is very important to know the audience you are trying to reach. It is very common that you would want to write a website as you would for a judge or another lawyer, but most of the time that is not who you are trying to reach out to. The people most likely looking at your page, and to hire you, would be the people who were just injured in a car accident, arrested for a DUI, or harmed by a doctor’s mistake. You have to consider the questions the readers are looking to be answered and if your website provides that type of information, or at least enough to make them contact you.

It is also important to use plain language when creating your website. Potential clients want to be able to understand what they are reading, not confused by legal jargon. By using plain language that is easy to digest by potential clients, it gives them confidence in your abilities to help them with their problem.  Another benefit to using plain language is that when potential clients are searching for a lawyer that is what they plug into search engines. A search engine marketing consultant is invaluable in researching the words most used in your practice area and in your geographic area.

When creating the layout to your website, make sure the information is divided into easy-to-find segments. You know from your own experience that when information is not readily available and easy to find, you hit the back button and move on to the next site. Use headers, subheads, bullets, and bold type that will assure potential clients that you have what they are looking for.

For more tips on how to write and structure your website visit http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/after-deadline/.

In the February issue of Estate Lifestyle Magazine, Boardroom Communication’s founder and president, Julie Talenfeld, offers advie on how to lure Internet traffic to your Website.

“They say that on the Internet, content is king. Actually, it’s the ruling monarch. The trick to luring visitors online is simple: Get the search engines to like your site. You’ll rise in the rankings and exposure will grow.”

Julie explains that regularly posting content will increase your chances of getting a better search listing on popular search engines –  like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Content can include home page information, biographies, product information, press releases and news coverage. However, there are other ways to create a continuous stream of fresh content. Check out Julie’s article for more tips.

A great time was had last night with the stalwarts from the Legal Marketing Association’s South Florida CityGroup at Soyka. Thank you all for your friendship and support, and thank you to our co-chairs Jennifer Clarin and Nicole Berman for their preparation and planning to ensure 2011 is another great year for legal marketing professionals in the greater Ft. Lauderdale–Miami–Palm Beach County area.MIA LOGO ARTWORK

Public relations is the practice of systematically reaching out to the press in hopes of generating favorable publicity or media coverage for a person, product, company or concept.

Search engine marketing is the practice of researching and using words highly searched by online consumers in hopes of increasing the visibility of a website or brand online.

Formal P.R. traces its roots back 100 years. SEO is only as old as the Web’s commercial applications.

Yet by effectively combining these two marketing disciplines, a marketer can improve the power of the press release or a media outreach campaign by ensuring it more effectively reaches its target audience across the universe of search-generated outreach. (more…)

In that place where public relations and search engine marketing converge, practitioners have a long-standing understanding of the process: Infuse every press release, opinion and op-ed, advertisement, passage on the website, and other written text with keywords.

Keywords are the words and short phrases that not only define what your firm or client does, but what prospective clients or customers likely will be using in their searches.

For marketing communications pros from South Florida to New York City, the process is the same. Every document we write or Website we create for our clients is stacked with keywords, including those seen on the screen – and unseen in the back-end where only programmers go.

But has the process changed? A provocative new perspective has emerged from none other than the SEO Team at Google.

Metatags are a waste of time.

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