As many of you might have heard Google and other search engines are increasing their use of blended media types to provide more relevant search results. This is a great article from American Express OPEN for Business.
Research indicates that if you have video on your homepage, up to 80% of your visitors will click that first, so it better be good!
Many blog platforms lend themselves to exceptional organic search engine rankings. In our opinion the WordPress platform has the best infrastructure and features to increase existing organic phrases as well as introduce new phrases to the search engine results pages.
The Purpose Of Blogging:
The majority of the time our tendency is to write blog articles with Google and the other search engines in mind; this is mistake number one. The true purpose of blogging is to share your thoughts and expertise on a given topic. Journalists do not write articles just to fill up pages, they write to inform and educate.
Basic Blog Article Parameters:
Blog articles can be long or short. If there is something relevant to your law firm or an area of law your firms practices in the local or national media you could link to an article or video with a few lines of commentary. Oppositely, if you just wanted to share your thoughts on a current issue or topic, or perhaps you wanted to educate people on a particular process or procedure your article could be roughly 200 or 250 words in length. It is good to vary the length of articles, but in general do not exceed 250 words.
Link to other pages of your website for additional information. For example, if you make reference to chapter 7 bankruptcy or a particular taxation law and you have a page that explains these areas in more depth make the text ‘chapter 7’ a link to the chapter 7 page. The link text should correspond to the text on the page you are linking to. If your link text says California Taxation Laws Click Here but the page you are linking to talks about New Jersey Social Security Law, you are likely to have wasted a linking opportunity.
It can also help to create links that go to other websites such as NYTimes.com, Wall Street Journal, CNN and other mainstream media outlets.
Photos & Rich Media:
Adding photos, sound clips and YouTube videos make the article more engaging for a user but do not necessarily help with search engine rankings. Again, we are writing the articles for humans to read, not for search engines to index and catalog.
When preparing your blog post ask yourself if you would take the time to read the article – is it engaging, informative, interesting, or is it plain old boring?
You’re The Expert:
There is a reason you have a blog. It’s not just because you want to get to the top of Google or Yahoo, it’s because you have a wealth of knowledge that makes you an expert. Write articles that prove you know what you are talking about. However, write the articles with your reader in mind. Try to avoid using too much legal jargon that the average person would not understand. You want to relate to your readers by explaining the laws, processes, procedures, pros and cons in a language that anyone can understand.
Blog articles are not an advertisement for your firm. There should not be any plugs for your firm, free consultations, mention of your success rate, etc. Simply provide good, relevant, high-quality information.
Choose Your Keywords Wisely:
When starting to write a blog article have a couple keywords or key phrases in mind. For example, if your firm specializes in Personal Injury you might want to write an article on slip and fall injuries. Even better would be to include your local city name and state. A good sentence might be:
“In Raleigh, North Carolina, Slip and Fall injuries have risen 25% from 2008.”
Or another good option might be…
“Slip and fall injury attorneys in the Raleigh, North Carolina area have seen an increase in xyz.”
Your keywords should be phrases that people might search to find a solution to their problem. If their problem is overwhelming credit card debt they might type: eliminate debt, file bankruptcy, how to eliminate credit card debt, how to reduce debt, etc.
The general rule of thumb is to repeat your keywords or key phrases 4 times per 100 words (4%). If you exceed 7% or 8% you could suffer the consequences of Keyword Spamming (trying too hard).
National Vs. Local Geography:
Competition is strong for almost all types of law therefore you must be as specific as possible. Writing an article about divorce law will not help you find clients. Writing an article about choosing a divorce attorney in Buffalo NY will help you find clients. Not all articles have to be tailored to local geography but the majority should be.
Duplicative Content:
This is very important… Do not ever repeat, copy exactly or duplicate an article on more than one website. It is perfectly acceptable to cite a couple links and link to another article, but never duplicate. This is true if you have more than 1 website, you have to write unique content for each site. You can write an original article and then re-write that article for your other site but be sure they are not duplicative.
Relevant Categories:
When posting articles to your blog they should be tagged and categorized. If the article relates to recent bankruptcy law changes you could tag it as December 2009, new york state, bankruptcy law change. You might file the article under: New York Bankruptcy Law or Bankruptcy Law Changes.
It’s not wise to create a new category for each article. If a user wants to view all articles posted in a given category they should see multiple. Organize your articles wisely.
When creating categories the keyword structure is important. Everything should correspond and relate to each other. Below is an example of an article title, category title, tag and a few interior article links.
Article Title: How to Choose your San Diego Bankruptcy Attorney
Category: San Diego Bankruptcy
Tags: san diego, bankruptcy, attorney
Interior links: San Diego Bankruptcy (link to a bankruptcy information page), Bankruptcy Attorney (link to a bio page that provides information on a particular attorney within your firm). Experienced San Diego Bankruptcy Attorney (link to another blog article that talks about why you should use an experienced bankruptcy attorney rather than go through the process yourself.).
Last, but not least:
Be genuine, do not be wordy, do not use too many technical terms or lingo, repeat your phrases at a rate of 2% to 4%, post relevant content, link to good content that is relevant (both on your own site and on other sites), ask yourself if you would take the time to read the article – do not duplicate content.
When your telephone rings do you know where the caller originated from? What campaign, what made them call and what is the probability they will purchase?
More than ever before, tracking advertising efforts has become incredibly important. In today’s economic times you do not have the ad budget to hope for the best. In general, advertising is very uncertain. You allocate funds where you *think* the best returns will be. However, you rarely know how many phone calls or website hits you receive from a single ad campaign.
New technology allows us to track our ad campaigns in a way that removes virtually ALL THE UNCERTAINTIES of advertising. If you know where your revenue is coming from you can better maximize the benefit from that ad campaign.
Imagine having a Google Pay-Per-Click campaign with 200 phrases. Your total budget is $1000 per month. You spend on average $4 per click and get about 250 clicks per month spread between 200 phrases. Currently you only know that the campaign gets clicks and brings traffic to your site – perhaps you track how many people submit email forms for more information. Ad Track allows you to accurately and effectively determine which of your 200 phrases are bringing the most phone calls that ultimately turn into sales.
After running the Ad Track system for a couple months you would have enough data to eliminate a portion of your 200 keyword list, freeing up more dollars for the phrases that produce sales. Imagine if your list went from 200 to 25 high producing phrases – you would now get almost 10 clicks per phrases (before you were getting 1.25 clicks per phrase). Where you were getting 1 phone call you could be getting 10.
What if you could track phone calls that originated from various Internet Marketing campaigns?
What if you could record the call to better anticipate and prepare for pre-sales questions, aid in sales training efforts and much more?
What if you knew 80% of calls from Google Organic lead to sales and 60% of calls from Google Pay-Per-Click lead to sales – or vice versa?
What if you knew phone book advertising only brings 10 calls per year and only 20% turn into sales?
Would this information change the way you spend your advertising budget?
We like to call it Advertising Accountability and Advertising Forensics.
The time is now to start strategically measuring the performance of virtually every advertising campaign you deploy.
Running a successful Philadelphia law firm requires many things, including solid business acumen, keen oversight of billing and accounting procedures, and strong managerial skills (as well as all of the prodigious legal knowledge you possess that is at the heart of your business.)
Having to spend time on things other than legal matters can initially seem like a poor use of time – that is until you consider the opportunity cost involved. Every potential client you miss reeling in is – cha ching – another dollar in your competitor’s pocket. Framing it in that context, suddenly marketing doesn’t seem like such a waste of time, does it?
Many companies say they know marketing, but Law Firm Marketing is a beast of a different nature for several reasons (including the fact that many clients are intimidated by the legal process, or are reluctant to discuss private financial or personal information with a stranger.)
Additionally, the legal profession requires a diverse spectrum of marketing strategies, because while some specialties (such as Business Law) yield consistent, repeat business, other specialties (such as Bankruptcy, Foreclosure, or Divorce) are situation specific, and hinge upon events that occur infrequently in a client’s lifetime.
Because of this, it’s imperative that you work with astute marketing experts — ones that won’t pigeonhole you, or lump you into one all-encompassing legal marketing niche – “Attorneys.”
That’s where we come in. We’re the Legal Marketing specialists of Axis Creative Group, and we can help you plan marketing campaigns for maximum efficiencies at your specified pricepoint. From Philadelphia, to West Chester, to Exton, we have a proven track record of helping attorneys across a broad spectrum of subspecialties all boost their bottom lines via our array of innovative legal marketing strategies.We take extreme pride in custom-tailoring legal marketing solutions unique to your specialty and your practice or firm.
Whether you seek to increase conversions (turn prospects into paying clients), expand your market share, improve client acquisitions, or increase your ROI, the legal marketing analysts at Axis Creative Group are here to help. Not only are we cognizant of the complexities that legal marketing for attorneys requires, we are experts at integrating the many dynamics necessary to help you achieve success.
So call today, and let the pros at Axis Creative Group put our legal marketing muscle to work for you in Philadelphia and beyond. Just because the scales of Justice are balanced, doesn’t mean the competitive legal field is. You need a way to set yourself above the competition, and Axis Creative Group can make that happen.
As an attorney, your days are full enough already, and any time spent on internet marketing is time you could be spending on billable activity – consulting with clients, courtroom appearances, or reading, writing, and filing legal briefs.
Your revenue is directly proportionate to the number of clients your service!
Many experts say it costs five times more to get a new client than to keep an existing one. For lawyers specializing in Bankruptcy, Foreclosure, Personal Injury, and other situational-specific specialties, few of these clients will offer the opportunity for repeat business. The question then becomes – how do you maximize revenue from existing clients, while attracting new ones in the most cost-efficient manner?
From a business standpoint, your advertising dollars and lead-generation tools need be maximized for optimal impact, and let you concentrate on truly qualified leads – not waste your valuable time on less serious prospects.
That’s where Axis Creative Group can help. We offer a variety of services, including Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Social Networking, Quality Web Content and Targeted Lead Generation, along with a variety of other effective marketing strategies. These services not only direct you to ripe prospects who are ready to purchase your services, but today’s evolving technologies also allow you to track each of your marketing campaigns to ensure maximum ROI.
Using some simple math, we can illustrate how easy it is to lose money on poorly implemented and managed Internet Marketing campaigns:
The numbers used in the illustration are not necessarily indicative of the specific traffic or yields you will experience, but the principle holds true. Depending on your target audience and your perception of what the ideal client is, a professional internet marketing firm can help you analyze your monthly budget, re-allocate funds towards more effective campaigns, and thus maximize your cost per new client.
At the end of the day, it really comes down to the number of new clients you gain and the cost it takes to acquire those clients. All too often, a budget is determined solely on perceived expectations of what one can afford. However, the truth is that when efficiencies are factored in, your budget may be set too low – or too high. Once our clients start tracking their true efficiencies, they often see that the money they spend on targeted marketing campaigns is brought back to them tenfold. Our innovative tracking technologies and strategic marketing can help you attract an influx of quality, ready-to-do-business clients.
At Axis Creative Group, we can help maximize your advertising dollars with a variety of custom-tailored strategies. From reducing PPC bid amounts, limiting or targeting specific geographic boundaries, and using negative keywords, we can help you generate more qualified leads and reach more clients.
Bankruptcy Lawyers, Foreclosure Lawyers, Personal Injury Lawyers and all other attorneys and law firms should add strategic Internet marketing to their advertising mix. By working with a highly qualified, professional Internet Marketing firm, you’ll assure that your advertising investment will produce the maximum ROI, because the potential for poor results and lost revenue opportunities is far too great to leave to chance.
So contact Axis Creative Group today, and leave the marketing headaches to us. We’ll focus on what it is we do best – implementing strategies that let you gain the most qualified leads and ripe prospects. You’ll then be free to concentrate on what it is you do best – providing quality bankruptcy, foreclosure, personal injury, and other situational legal services to the clients who so desperately need your help.
Directly from the Official Gmail Blog. Gmail takes precautionary measures to prevent sending those “nasty drunk emails” late at night.
By adding a new feature called Mail Goggles, Gmail can help determine if you are in the right state to be sending emails.
You can configure the new feature for certain days of the week and times within those days. By default it’s active on the weekends during the wee hours of the night – when most are likely to send inappropriate messages.
Although this is hardly relevant for the purposes of Axis’ blog, it demonstrates with unequivocal honesty, creativity and corporate culture that is not only condoned but promoted within Google. Google, along with innovation superstar, 3M, allows each employee to spend a certain percentage of their work week on individual projects. Both 3M and Google, take this approach to innovation because they realize each person in their own right can potentially develop a stunning new product or service that will be valuable – maybe not to everyone but possibly to a small niche.
What makes for a good social networking website?
Is it the look and feel of the website, the ease of navigation, the tools and features?
For Facebook, it is the pleasant mixture of all three with a slightly more focus on technology-driven tools that has enabled it to overtake its close competitor, MySpace.
The Beginning
Ever since its birth in February 2004, Facebook, the privately owned and operated social networking website has been enticing and accumulating followers, being a free-access website where people from all walks of life can join networks (organized by cities, workplaces, schools, or regions) to interact with others, and to some extent, rekindle old friendships and reconnect past relationships.
Beyond the Face Value
Four years have passed and Facebook has managed to remain virtually on top while undergoing a lot of progress in terms of applications. Starting from an idea (the website’s name came from the “paper facebooks” illustrating members of a campus community that some American colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, or staff aiming to familiarize them with the other people inside the campus) of a then Harvard sophomore student, Mark Zuckerberg, the website turned out to be a major hit as a multi-million dollar enterprise.
Bridging Gaps and Cultural Differences
The CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, describes the impact of Facebook through a story about a group of young militants from Lebanon who have reconciled their views of Western culture by way of Facebook friendships. The story spoke of the free expression of ideas which the World Wide Web allows, thus making people rise above their cultural disparities.
On Expansion and Language Translation
Facebook has reached a great number of users, as it quickly expands to other regions, internationally. In fact, the website stands unruffled to the top as a global social network. The numbers released in August 12 by comScore says it all. There are about 132 million followers of Facebook, 63% of which are outside North America. It helped that the network has been translated to 20 languages such as French, Spanish, and Mandarin. Recently, it has added 69 more languages. The international manager of Facebook, Javier Olivan views this as more than just enabling everyone to understand one another. The translations, according to him, will jumpstart astronomical growth internationally.
Growing and Thriving
To date, Facebook faces tough competition with MySpace and News Corp.’s to name a couple. They not only focus on their local markets, but are also meaning to saturate the global scene to amplify audience growth, thus making them very attractive to advertisers and prospective investors.
MySpace has spread out in 29 countries such as India and Korea. Based on a study from Pingdom, a Swedish website availability monitoring website; it is mostly frequented by users in US, Puerto Rico, Australia, Britain, and even in Asian countries such as Malaysia.
LinkedIn is another social network catering to professionals. According to Pingdom, it is popular in India, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and US.
Despite all these, a staggering 153% increase in new members last June has thrown other social networks off-balance, in terms of the website’s success through a purely user adoption.
Tech-Savvy Socialization
Facebook proved to have more ease conquering the international market through its technology-driven strategy. The social network boasts of translation tools, enabling users to take their existing sites and personalize them using their native tongue. The tools proved to offer very accurate translations, setting it apart from the other social network websites. The senior analyst of comScore, Andrew Lipsman, said that it is indeed, a very scalable process, with the audience’s number multiplying really fast.
MySpace on the other hand follows a different route. Facebook’s close rival opens offices in countries where ad dollars and friends are probable. This strategy definitely slows down their expansion internationally but this approach is deemed to be a surefire way to better reflect the cultures of new countries while racking up dollars from advertisers, too. Soon, according to Jeff Berman, MySpace’s president of sales and marketing, MySpace’s non-US users will cover half or 50 percent of the its total revenue.
Hi5 language translation tool applications strategy resembles that of Facebook’s, except that this social network from San Francisco initially hired a third-party service provider, Lionsbridge, to translate the social network to languages such as Japanese. This strategy increased its popularity, making the base users amount to a hefty 56 million. According to Pingdom, the site remains immensely popular in Latin America.
More Possibilities
The Facebook executives, though focused at present on the website’s tools, have not closed their doors on the possibility of opening offices in other countries to make their website more culturally-relevant, similar to the strategy employed by MySpace. Right now however, Olivan stresses that as long as there are users, advertisers will continue to create campaigns and put ads on their sites, making Facebook remain universal.
Former executive David Katz may have already left his post as the head of sports, entertainment and studios in Yahoo.com in 2006, but he never really left what he has always cared about and loved to do: write about sports and offer something relevant to sports enthusiasts.
A Healthy Competition
At age 36, Katz will wage war against the other Internet powerhouses such as ESPN, Yahoo, Fox Sports, Major League Baseball, and AOL with his website, sportsfanlive.com. Sportsfanlive.com is looking to be released within the week, boasting of Katz’s versions of customized contents, social networking, and even fantasy games. Katz felt that the other competitors have become a lot more complicated and difficult to navigate, so sportsfanlive.com is what he thought would enjoy quite a good number of followers.
Everything But Traditional
What sets sportsfanlive.com apart from the rest is that it is built for the next generation and with their evolving needs in mind. Katz stressed that the other sports websites have what he calls the “traditional media DNA”, fooling around with the site here and there but keeping them basically the same and generic.
Six months of planning in his Hollywood Hills abode have made him very positive and confident that the website is up to the challenge. The site’s features are naturally-flowing, allowing a visitor to create a community which is projected to have a viral growth. SportsFanLive is aimed to become the sports enthusiast’s Facebook, rather than connect to existing social networking websites.
Similar to MyESPNand MyYahoo, the users can customize their site, mixing in together the teams they love and hate.Additionally, the users will receive news from 4500 aggregated sources which are regularly updated.
The Secret Sauce
Katz believed that aggregation will be SportsFanLive’s secret weapon. Because unlike Google, which is definitely useful in searching for general needs of visitors, it has no clear perception of the specific sports needs of sports fans.
Through the FanFeed feature, sports-minded pals can easily share articles with one another or they can opt to use FanFinder application to alert their sports buddies to sports bars where they come together to cheer on their favorite teams. FanFinder is a zip code and map -based function which is a visual update of forums on rivals.com (which happens to be a Yahoo subsidiary).
A Sports Facebook
Katz also commented that SportsFanLive aimed to be everyone else’s Facebook, at least for the sports enthusiasts, that is. According to him, without a doubt, Facebook is commendable for doing a really good job at connecting people all over the globe, but like Google, Facebook is not specifically geared towards sports-related matters. The site aims to be apart from the other social networking websites by keeping sports their focal point.
Traditional fantasy games are out of the question at this point as he feels that fans may not have a lot of time to tend to season-long fantasy games.
Gaming Features
SportsFanLive offers gaming features that will enable them to challenge one another by posting or accepting wagers (this is akin to an online casino sports book which is user-generated) allowing them to either earn or lose Buxbets (SportsFanLive’s version of funny money). The feature is interesting (“they can compete on any topic they want against anyone at any time”) because he designed it based on the assumption that fans like to test their wits about anything they felt they know best.
Mouse Voting
Jeff Price,Sports Illustrated Group president for digital, commented that Katz may very well understand and know sports fans’ hearts, but he has misgivings on how SportsFanLive can sustain traffic and engagements. Voting depends on a sports fan’s mouse. Price also noted how interesting it is the way people can embrace the games made available to them.
An analyst for Jupiter Research, Bobby Tulsiani remarked that if Katz succeeded in his plan, he would be similar to other new web entrants who will defy the pioneers in existing categories. The recent research on Internet sports users showed that evidence is yet to be confirmed regarding sports fans who wanted to switch to other online sports space.
Full of Hope
Katz’s belief on his success remained unfazed. SportsFanLive may be self-funded for the time being, but then, he is positive that individual investors will be interested though he put off dropping a name for now. Samsung though, has already signed on as an early sponsor of Katz’s project.
He is happy to note that sports fans may not see it at present, but soon, they’ll realize that SportsFanLive is something they just have to use and will be unable to live without.
It was announced that Google takes into consideration, amongst a plethora of other variables, the location of your server that hosts your website. Although this was known before it helps to have it confirmed by Searchnomics 2007.
Really, it makes perfect sense.
If you search for the same phrase on Google.com and Google.co.uk you will get different results. What this tells us is that if you are an American company selling to American consumers you should host your website on an American server – not a server in another part of the world.
Thank goodness my server is only up in Michigan. Just a short (well not really short) drive away.
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