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Two really good reasons you should buy (and read) Jeff Lanz’ book, “The Essential Attorney Handbook for Internet Marketing:”

• When a bad attorney marketing company blames Google for your sites’ nonperformance or tries to sell you services you do not need, you won’t fall for their bull.

• When a good marketing company tells you the pink background and heavy Flash you so adore won’t help you get new clients – you won’t fight them so hard when it comes to making  critical decisions you hired them to help you make.

This book does offer reliable information about search engine optimization and social networking and can be used as a great reference book, but it offers so much more. Instead of just saying “do this” Lantz explains why you should (or should not do something), educating attorneys so they will be able to make their own independent decisions when it comes to the micro aspects involved in marketing individual websites.

I highly recommend this book to attorneys who are looking for self-help solutions that make sense. But I also recommend reading it before you select an attorney marketing company, or, if you are unhappy with your current provider. The knowledge you will gain about the duality of how website marketing works (getting people there and then getting them to call you) will empower you to demand more from your own marketing company, or maybe even to muster the courage to run your own website.

Read My Full Review on Amazon

Steven A. Reisler published an hilarious piece on the Washington State Bar Association website about attorney malpractice insurance company application questions.  He opens with:

“The good news, my insurance carrier explains in a cover letter, is that rates for some areas of the practice of law have not increased in 2011. However, it furthermore explains, if you actually “represent clients” and “charge for your services,” or if you practice in the fields of criminal law, personal injury, commercial litigation, insurance defense, family law, admiralty, patents or trademarks, arbitration, civil rights, international law, tax, estate planning, securities, creditor-debtor law, bankruptcy, collections, business formations, real estate, mergers and acquisitions, elder law, labor, administrative, aviation, healthcare, immigration, workers compensation, antitrust, municipal, or environmental law, then, to account for actuarial fluctuations (i.e., my insurer’s need to make a profit in unprofitable times), there will be a modest 100 percent to 300 percent increase in your premiums next year.”

Reisler then lists the “questions” on the insurance inquiry form he must complete. A few:

• How many claims have been made, or could have been made against you or your firm in the past 25 years?
• How many claims or incidents are you aware of that might, by any stretch of your simple imagination, result in a claim?
• Do any past, current, or future clients not like you?
• Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about one of your cases?
• If not, why not?

Read Steven Reisler’s Post

Google launched a new algorithm 02/23/11 that affects 11.8% of U.S. websites – heavy penalties will be slapped on poor quality sites, sites with duplicate content, and plagiarizers.  This may mean the downfall of Demand Studios and the like, but there are two major attorney marketing companies that sell the same content over and over to dozens, perhaps even hundreds or thousands of lawyers for their “info centers” and, in some cases, even entire websites are duplicate content.  Will their sites now topple in ranking?

First you need to know if your site is built with duplicate content.  Find out by cutting and pasting a small portion of text from one of your information center pages.  For example, personal injury attorneys can cut and paste the following into Google – see if your site shows up (along with many others) who use this snippet repeatedly:

Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is damage to the spinal cord that results in a loss of function such as mobility or feeling. Frequent causes of damage are trauma (car accidents, gunshots, falls, etc.) or disease (polio, spina bifida, Friedreich’s Ataxia, etc.). The spinal cord does not have to be severed in order for a loss of functioning to occur. In fact, in most people with SCI, the spinal cord is intact, but the damage to it results in loss of functioning.

If you have a medical malpractice information center, try Googling this:

If you were injured as the result of a medical procedure or medication, the concept of informed consent will likely arise in any claim for your injuries that you bring against a medical professional. In many situations where medical care or treatment is provided to an individual, medical professionals are required to obtain the patient’s “informed consent.”

It is important to understand that having the same content in your info centers as (who knows how many) other attorneys is not a reason for wide-spread panic. Hopefully, Google’s new algorithms will recognize the value of information sharing. For example, will the CDC be deranked because countless other websites use their data?  What about the almighty Wikipedia?  They allow 100% reuse of their articles with a simple attribution.  And, I own a decade-old medical information website that allows reuse of material that is used  everywhere from county health departments to public and medical schools, and, I am sure on more than a handful of knock-off sites.  My goal was to get valuable information in the hands of the most people – will that noble public service gesture now backfire on me?  I doubt it.

But you should pay attention to your sites’ ranking and traffic.  If it falls, no sense in blaming Google – it will not get your standing back.  Instead, demand your SEO company start making recommendations to get you back in the game.  It is what you pay them for, not to hear excuses like,  “Sorry, it’s a Google thing.”  In fact, that exact excuse has been so wide-spread “cut and pasted” by SEO companies that those using it should be deranked.

Excerpt From Google’s Blog:

Finding more high-quality sites in search

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

Read The Full Post on Google’s Blog

Advertising Age reports:

Car insurance — a $161 billion industry obsessed with risk protection — is anything but conservative when it comes to marketing these days. The top players are doling out the dollars once reserved for categories like beer and travel, pouring impressively lavish budgets into funding splashy campaigns, partnerships with celebrities and rock bands, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

The good-hands people needed their own over-the-top personality to push their message that there is more to insurance than price. “Nobody wants to sit around and talk about car insurance,” Ms. Abnee said. “In order to combat that, we needed to entertain. We needed to get people’s attention.”

Insurers seem to be slapping their names everywhere. Farmers just agreed to shell out $700 million over 30 years to put its name on a planned NFL stadium in Los Angeles. And the city doesn’t even have a team yet.

“This category has gone from a kind of forgotten category to a category with real sizzle,” said Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer for Progressive, who proudly boasts that Flo, who debuted in 2008, has helped lure nearly 2.5 million fans to the insurer’s Facebook site.

When all lines of insurance are included (some ads plug multiple products) spending for 2009 was $4.15 billion, more than double what the industry spent in 2000, according to industry-reported ad spending figures cited by J.D. Power & Associates that include some direct marketing expenses. That far outpaced the rate of growth for all categories combined, which in that time edged up by just 2.7%, according to ZenithOptimedia.

Read Full Article

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Breaking News Alert: Justice Department will no longer defend law banning same-sex marriage
February 23, 2011 12:30:29 PM
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The Department of Justice says it will no longer defend the constitutionality of the law that bans federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/0H2RO6/BMK4GE/12FOXJ/ETOGSU/K65W2/T3/h