Practice Marketing

How to Blog about Your Professional Services

marketing — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 17:20:42 +0000

Blogging has always been a great way to share your expertise and professional insights with your online audience. Now that search engines like Google are placing a renewed emphasis on fresh, relevant content in their search results, however, maintaining an active blog is also becoming an essential element of a successful inbound marketing campaign.

By providing Google’s bots with an active feed of fresh blog posts containing quality content and relevant keywords, you’ll give your practice’s website a significant boost in the search engine results. You’ll also provide new and existing contents with usable tips and tools that they can use while evaluated your services while establishing yourself as a leading voice in your professional niche.

The best way to get started is to create a realistic game plan that includes the types of topics you want to focus on, the frequency of your posts and the primary keywords that you want to target. By setting up a simple editorial calendar for your blogging campaign, you can easily track your blog’s progress and ensure you’re creating the right kind of fresh content.

Suggested Exercise:

Spend some time creating a clear and consistent strategy for your blog. Begin by identify the primary keywords that you want to build content around for SEO purposes. There are tons of great tools and resources available for keyword research, but the best place to start is the Google Adword Tool.

Next, brainstorm some relevant blog post topics and incorporate your keywords into simple but engaging titles. Finally, create a couple of pieces of content that use your primary keywords effectively while offering readers relevant and useful information. If you’re discussing topics that you’ve already written about elsewhere on your sight, be sure to include links to those pages in the body of your post.

Catering SEO Copy to the Online Buying Cycle

marketing — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:01:37 +0000

Much of SEO is about improving the visibility of your site. Unfortunately, some have misunderstood this and believe that this is the only goal of SEO. It’s important to recognize that SEO and sales are closely related. Your site should not only be optimized for the search engines, it should be optimized for your visitors.

One of the most important elements is the connection between SEO and the online buying cycle. It’s a mistake to think that all internet searches are conducted by the same kind of user, and that they all have the same likelihood of clicking on an ad or buying a product. Thankfully, most of your traffic belongs to one of three categories: interested, researching, or buying. A good site targets all three types of users, but treats them differently.

Interest

Take a close look at your keyword list and try to identify those that indicate a general interest in the subject. These keywords tend to be fairly broad. They tend to be either academic or entertainment seeking. These are the users looking for “latest news” and “funny clips.” They have no immediate interest in buying something, and shouldn’t be treated as though they do.

Why target these readers at all? Several reasons. Users who find your content interesting or entertaining are more likely to subscribe to your site, share it on their social networks, link to it, leave comments, and become a loyal visitor.

Let’s face it, nobody buys something from an eCommerce site and immediately jumps on Facebook to let everybody know what a great deal they got on a “Custom heavy-duty, large spring Mfg for industrial & OEM applications.” Users who are farther along in the buying cycle are the least likely to promote your material.

While the users with an interest in your subject matter may be the least likely to offer direct product, they are the most likely to offer social and SEO benefit.

Research

These users are looking for something to buy, but don’t yet know what they’re looking for. They won’t yet be susceptible to anything very marketing oriented, but they will be interested in reviews and other neutral articles about products they are interested in buying. These users are a good source to target for advertising revenue. You could, for example, compare two products neutrally, and provide an affiliate link to both of them within the content of the review.

Buying

This searcher is typing things like “buy” or “order” into the search box, or they’re searching for something very specific. Odds are this user wants to buy something right away. In this case, you’ll likely achieve the best results if you don’t waste any time getting in their way. The very first thing on these landing pages should be a product description sitting next to an image of the product with an easy to spot “buy now” button in an obnoxious color that can’t be ignored.

Do not waste any time trying to convince this visitor that they want this product. Their search query has already let you know it’s exactly what they’re looking for.

Top Tools

marketing — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:22:11 +0000

Join Us!

marketing — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:15:02 +0000

Web Site Audit

marketing — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:13:28 +0000

At one time another, we’ve all experienced a serious case of tunnel vision working on a project that requires so much focus on detailed minutia that it becomes nearly impossible to see the forest for the trees. No matter what the project happens to be, there comes a point when a fresh pair of eyes is going to pick out things that the dedicated workers who created the darn thing will never be able to see.

This problem is particularly common in the case of web development, especially for solopreneurs and other small business owners. When you’re building out your web presence on your own or with a very small staff, it’s all too easy to get carried away with how you *want your audience to see and interact with your business without paying attention to how visitors actually behave on your site.

If your heading into the new year with big plans for online marketing, it’s worth considering getting a second pair of eyes on your businesses website to find out whether others see what you think they see. There’s a wide variety of user testing tools and services available, some of which I’ve reviewed over at our sister site, Top Marketing Tools, but even an informal survey among trusted colleagues and friends is likely to reveal me significant opportunities for improvement. If you’re interested in a more detailed audit of your website’s actual performance for SEO and online conversions, we offer our own website audits as well.

Soloville

marketing — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:10:24 +0000

If you’re a solo lawyer marketing your legal practice, sometimes it can feel as if you’re all alone in a sea of larger firms. But being small can be a big advantage. Large practices often find changing direction as cumbersome as turning around an ocean liner, but small practices have the agility to quickly respond to shifts in their niche market. All you need is some help with marketing your practice and the support of other small medical practitioners.

The Law Marketing Association has partnered together with Soloville to help small entrepreneurs like you. Whether you’ve been in private practice for years or are just venturing out on your own, Soloville can give you the marketing tools and resources you need to power up your campaign.Soloville also gives its members the support of a community, a welcome break for providers used to marketing a medical practice on their own. Although Soloville is presently in its beta stage, the Healthcare Marketing Association has designed the service with these key qualities:

Our Soloville Library—featuring up-to-the-minute articles and reports directly targeted to the small solo practice.
Our Soloville News Service—giving you streaming news feeds from some of the premier experts in marketing small and sole-proprietor businesses.
Our Success Tools Newsletter—equipping you with practical marketing tools and tips to launch your campaign.

Visit Soloville to see how we can rev up your law practice marketing campaign. If you like what we have to offer, subscribe to our Soloville RSS Feed. Soloville is also on Facebook and Twitter, so join us.

Subscribe Free!

marketing — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:07:35 +0000

If you’re like most legal professionals, the chances are that you are far too busy to stay on top of all of the latest developments in the world of law practice marketing. At the Power Practice Network, we scour the internet for the best law firm marketing tips, tools and resources so that we can provide them to professionals like yourself in our complimentary Success Tools newsletter.

Thanks to the dozens of news feeds that we follow at our sister site SuccessTools.org, we’re able to keep our finger on the pulse of the practice marketing industry. From the latest online marketing tips and tricks to top notch advice on generating more referrals and building your practice, you can rely on our Success Tools newsletter to provide you with the just-in-time information that you need in an easy-to-read format.

To sign up now, simply enter your email address in the field provided to the right. Stay informed about the latest developments in law practice marketing by subscribing to our free Success Tools newsletter today!

Power Practice Network

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:32:54 +0000

Here at the Practice Marketing Center, we’ve assembled a powerful Marketing Jump Start training program designed to provide professionals service practices with the tools they need to succeed to dominate their niche.

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Cultivating the Referral Expectation

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:20:29 +0000

You & Your Target Market: Love at First Sight

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:08:02 +0000