Introducing the Marketing OnLine Legal Services Blog

My personal blog on DirectLaw Connect will focus on marketing online legal services. I believe there is a lot of confusion and misinformation on how to market legal services on the Web, and my goal is to help you make resource allocation decisions on the best way to spend your limited marketing budgets.

The success of your Web site and your practice is a function of how effectively you are able to market your services online. Launching a web site and hoping that "they will come" is not realistic. You must be proactive in your marketing. You have to discipline yourself to do at least one marketing task a day.

I want to share my experience with everyone in the DirectLaw network on how to market legal services online and I hope to learn from each of you as well in terms of what works and what doesn't work. I will draw on my experience in operating my own virtual law firm in Maryland since 2004 and I will share with you the new techniques and technologies that I plan to test out on this site and on my District of Columbia web site, where I am also a member of the bar.

Some of the topics that I will cover include: pay-per-click search engines like Google, search engine optimization (SEO), lawyer directories, use of the social media to promote your Web site, blogging, and marketing your virtual law firm off-line.

I hope that you will use the Comment function in this blog to provide feedback and in so doing build a rich knowledge base that our community can take advantage of as you try to compete against other law firms and other non-lawyer providers of services on the Web such as LegalZoom. Today the legal industry is very crowded and there are more lawyers and too few clients. To survive in this competitive environment you have to use every tool at your disposal.

We welcome your input, as we are all learners on the online legal services frontier.