Attorneys need to approach the use of syndicated blog content with care. Many times, syndicated posts are written as a one-size-fits-all approach, and you can make tweaks and changes as needed. But what if you don’t have time, or don’t know how, to make the changes? What problems could you see if you relied on syndicated content?

Here are three reasons we think attorneys should have their own blogs with their own content, instead of relying on syndicated content.

1. Syndicated content does not perform well in search.

If you buy a copy-and-paste content service, chances are it’s not going to be picked up by the search engines. That’s because Google has a “no duplicate content” rule they follow, meaning they don’t want to see a lot of websites using the same content over and over.

You may hear this described as the duplicate content penalty, but it’s not a penalty. Rather, Google just does not index the content. The Google bots see it and say, “we already saw this back at another website, so we’ll ignore this one.”

One of the primary reasons to have a blog is to rank high on the search engines, and it doesn’t make sense to pay for syndicated content if it’s not going to help you rank in the first place.

(That’s not to say that all content syndicates do this. The better ones don’t. The cheaper ones, not so much.)

2. You can localize your content.

Google is paying a lot more attention to local search, because they’re delivering local search results to their users. Check it out. Go to Google, and do a search for “Italian restaurant.” The results you’ll see will be for the city where you perform the search. That’s because Google can see where you are, and it wants to deliver the results you’ll be most interested in. If you’re in St. Louis, Google assumes you don’t care about Italian restaurants in Jacksonville, Florida, so they deliver the results you’re most likely to be interested in.

To that end, it’s more helpful to write localized articles about your areas of specialty and include your city or geographic practice area in things like the headline and body copy, so Google will know where they should have you listed.

• Five Things to Look For In An Indianapolis Personal Injury Attorney
• When Does a Startup Need a Chicago Intellectual Property Attorney?
• Should I Hire a Florida Attorney to Plan My Estate?

You need to do this so when a potential client does a search online for an attorney, they find your page. Google is not going to return the best-optimized pages around the country. It’s going to show them the results from the pages in their city and/or state. If your site is properly optimized, clients will find you, not your competition.

3. Your Content Can Fit Your Readers’ Style

Syndicated blog content is written one way, and it may not be your style. But, you paid for it, so you might as well use it, right?

Wrong.

If you’re paying for it, you’re presenting your image in a style that doesn’t quite fit with you, or more importantly, may not appeal to your readers.

It’s important that you communicate with your readers in the way they want to be communicated with. And since you know your clients the best, you can best dictate the kinds of topics they want to read, the style, language, and even readability of the posts. You should even be able to decide the best keywords to write about that week or month.

Since you know your readers best, you need to create content that they will find and read, which will ultimately lead to them calling you when they need you.

Whether you write your own blog posts 2 – 3 times a week, or work with a ghost blogging service (which we recommend, given your hourly billing rates; otherwise, blogging will end up being your lowest priority), you need to have content that is geared toward your style, your geographic region, your clients, and can help you win search for your niche and your keywords.

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Should you have a sponsor for your blog? Is it worth the effort? Or are you selling out your soul by accepting filthy lucre for a company to have a say in your blog’s content and tone? And which company’s filthy lucre should you pursue?

(Yes, yes, not really, and it depends.)

I’ve been DMing with Mark Eveleigh, a first-class travel writer, book author, and photographer who takes some gorgeous photos of those places you’re never going to see before you die, about whether he should blog (he should) and if he could get a sponsor (he could). He also owns a freelance photography assignment agency where several other outstanding outdoor photographers are available for hire.

Mark Eveleigh. Petty jealousy and raging insecurity make me want to not help him. A guilty conscience makes me do it anyway.

Mark has an interesting situation, because a sponsorship for his personal branding blog makes a lot of sense. As I see it, he would appeal two basic categories of readers: travel enthusiasts and photography enthusiasts.

The experience levels in these two categories may range from “I wish I could do that” to the serious amateur to the consummate professional. And because Mark is a specialized travel writer and photographer — trips to remote locations to take beautiful pictures — he is most likely attracting readers who want to do similar activities, or at least learn more about it.

Why Sponsor a Blog?

Travel writers have a special niche that can appeal to a wide range of readers — from people who like to travel to people who like to read about travel — who have self-identified as loyalists and users of a particular special interest. That’s a valuable niche for marketers to tap into. Anyone who sells products to travel fans should take advantage of sponsorship opportunities.

So who should sponsor Mark’s blog?

If he wants to appeal to the travel readers, he should talk to large travel agents that specialize in adventure travel, airlines that travel to out of the way locations (think Brazil, Thailand, South Africa), adventure travel gear manufacturers, and publishers of travel guides for the adrenaline-addicted.

On the photography side of thing, he should reach out to makers and online dealers of high-end camera equipment, camera bags, and other photography-related businesses.

(Frankly, Mark’s camera manufacturer, Nikon, should be begging him to throw their logo all over his blog, and include him in their ads.)

In exchange, Mark can write include basic mentions in an occasional article, review a sponsor’s service or product, and allow some ads on his site.

Sponsorship doesn’t always have to include money though. It can also include goods or services. For someone like Mark who travels constantly, it could be free flights for a year, or an expensive new lens to review and keep.

Prove Your Value First

Of course, pursuing sponsors also means being able to prove the value of the blog itself. It means knowing the number of readers, what their interests are, what kinds of influence they have, and even who they are.

Using tools like Google Analytics for web traffic (where they came from, what they read the most), Klout for influence (your readers’ and your own), and even what your network is interested in (using Twellow.com or Gist.com) can help bloggers show where their readers are coming from and what they’re interested in.

I think that as blogs grow in popularity and blog owners are able to show something newspapers have never been able to demonstrate — accurate and up-to-date reader stats — we’re going to start seeing more marketers get involved with real bloggers who can deliver on both great content and valuable readership.

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That’s right. Ignore it completely.

It’s stupid. It’s a stall tactic. “What’s the ROI?” is often a cop-out question asked by people who don’t really want to do or understand social media. If you’re asked this question when you first start talking to someone about social media, distract them. Jingle your keys in front of them or something.

I heard Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) speak at the Social Media Club Chicago this past week, and he said something that made me want to pump my fist and shout “F— YEAH!!!”

No, no, I meant R-O-I, not Patrick Roy (wah).

“The next someone asks you about the ROI of Twitter,” Scott said, “substitute Twitter with the word ‘talking.’

“What’s the ROI of ‘talking?’ How much money do you make with this new ‘talking’ business? I don’t understand why you’re ‘talking’ to customers all the time.”

F— YEAH!!! </fistpump>

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging — they’re all tools for communication, just like talking. But we don’t measure the ROI of talking. We measure total results, usually as a sales figure.

I love networking. I go to networking meetings, and I talk to people. I meet those people later for coffee, and talk some more. My cost is the driving, the time, and the coffee (medium decaf mocha, extra hot, please). The ROI — which I have never been asked about — comes when I close a deal, get a speaking gig, get a referral for a new client, or even get a book deal. That’s something I can measure after the fact. But I can never figure it out beforehand.

An example: the first time I ever met my good friend and writing partner, Kyle Lacy (@kyleplacy), for coffee was nearly three years ago. I think I bought my own coffee, but I could be wrong. (I probably am.)

Total cost? $4.20 (mochas ain’t cheap, Chester).

But what did I get out of it? Over the last three years, several speaking opportunities, collaborating on a couple projects, a little business passed back and forth, and two book deals. And he’s bought lunch a couple times. So the ROI is pretty damn high, especially if he did buy the coffee. [Update: I checked with Kyle. He bought the coffee. He always buys coffee for first meetings. Looks like I owe him a cup.]

I’ve never had to justify the ROI of talking. No one does. So why should we justify the ROI of Twitter and Facebook? They’re tools that let us talk. If we have to explain their ROI, then show me the ROI of your cell phone. Or your desk phone. Or your laptop and email. Show me the ROI on a handshake.

Otherwise, stop asking me about it until you start using it. Then we’ll figure it out.

(Note: This is NOT to say that social media should not be measured. It absolutely should. But if you ask about ROI at the beginning of your efforts, you’re setting up for failure, because you don’t know what you’re trying to measure. Instead, try it, use it, jump into it. Get good at it. Then measure how much money you’ve made on it. I’ll talk more about how — and why — to measure the ROI of social media next week.)

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Sean X Cummings, the director of marketing for Ask.com, made a rather bold, but completely wrong*, argument in his recent post “3 Reasons To Ditch Your Microsites.” Cummings said that companies should ditch their microsites because they are “advanced brochureware” and a sure sign that a marketing agency “does not get it.”

(*It’s entirely possible Sean and I are using the same word for two very different things. I’ve been calling one-page sites on unique URLs “microsites.” The following is based on my usage of this term.)

Actually, microsites serve a very important purpose to web marketers. Here are the three reasons you need to keep them:

1) Microsites boost search engine optimization.
2) Microsites improve your SEO.
3) Microsites make your SEO better than your competitor’s.

Microsites are not for marketing, not for branding, not to participating in the conversation. Once you build them, you don’t do a single thing with them.

The proper way to use a microsite

Let’s say you own a carpet cleaning service in Kalamazoo, Michigan. You also serve other areas, like Grand Rapids, Holland, and Battle Creek. You’ve already checked, and CarpetCleaning.com is already taken, but you own Cleanest-Michigan-Carpets.com (mostly because you listened to your brother-in-law, and he’s an idiot).

But you also know that:

• Yellow Pages usage is going down, while search engine usage is going up.
• Rather than pull out the phone book, people would rather Google something.
• Local search engine optimization wins local search (and carpet cleaning is definitely a local business).
• Search engines love keywords in a domain name.

Here’s how to use microsites properly:

1) Buy domains for KalamazooCarpetCleaning.com, GrandRapidsCarpetCleaning.com, etc. This tells the search engines that your sites are about carpet cleaning in Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Holland, and Battle Creek, and nothing else. Those are also your keywords for each site, and you will use those 3 – 4 words, in order, without exception (i.e. not “Carpet cleaning in Kalamazoo”).

2) Optimize the bejeezus out of each microsite.

• Put the keywords at the start of the page title: e.g. “Holland Carpet Cleaning for Residential and Commercial Jobs” and “Kalamazoo Carpet Cleaning by John Smith.”
• Put the keywords in the first 4 words of the body copy. This may be awkward, but it needs to be done.
• Have no more than 2% keyword density (2 keywords or phrases per 100 words). SEO experts are still debating this, but 2% is a safe number.
• Include photos of you cleaning carpets, and use the keywords in the alt tags. “This is John, working hard for a Battle Creek carpet cleaning customer.”
• Use only the keywords in hyperlinks that lead back to your main site. “Find more information about Grand Rapids Carpet Cleaning on our website.” Don’t use any other words in those links. Put 2 -3 links back to your site.

3) Install a WordPress.org site on each page. Not because you need WordPress’ amazing functionality, but because it’s free, and let’s you create one front page. You can add more if you want, but you need at least one page. (You could expand each site later by writing blog posts about your keywords — see #2 — but that’s pretty involved. Save this as a last resort for when your idiot brother-in-law opens his own carpet cleaning business.)

4) Make it look pretty. A man is sitting in his living room wearing nothing but his underwear and a hat. A friend stops by to visit, and asks about the man’s outfit. “I’m in my underwear, because no one ever comes to visit me,” says the man. “Then why are you wearing the hat?” asks the friend. “Oh, because someone might come,” says the man. Put a hat on the site — download a free template — because someone might visit it.

5) Write strong, persuasive copy: If people come to visit, you need to give them a reason to click through to your main website. Don’t put up crappy copy just to game the search engines. Create well-written copy that explains what you do, how well you do it, and includes a call to action. Make significant changes to the text for all four sites, so they’re not identical or even nearly identical.

6) All links must point back to your main site: They should not point to any other site anywhere on the Internet. Ever. With one exception. Create links to the other sites under a small section that says “we also offer carpet cleaning services in other Michigan cities.” Then use the exact keywords and link to each of the other sites. These backlinks between the microsites and to your main site will boost your search engine ranking.

Here’s what will happen (more or less): The search engine spiders will visit each site and say “Hmm, this site appears to be about Kalamazoo Carpet Cleaning. Let’s make sure.” It will do a quick check, and confirm — based on your domain name, title tag, first 4 words, keyword density, and alt tags — that, “by God, this IS a site about Kalamazoo Carpet Cleaning! And it has everything we like, so it must be important. Let’s see where these links go.”

The spiders will follow the links back to your main site (hence, the name “backlinks”), and conclude, “if those really well-done sites point back to this site, and this site does carpet cleaning in all these cities, then this carpet cleaning site must be really important!”

Then, when people do a quick search for carpet cleaning in one of those cities, your main site will come up first.

That is how you properly use a microsite. No brochureware, no moving the brand, none of that marketing crap, just pure SEO goodness with trackable, measurable results. If your marketing agency ever suggests it for anything other than SEO, tell them Sean X Cummings would like a word with them.

Photo credit: Auntie P (Flickr)

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I’ve been Blog Indiana 2010and attended several of the presentations here. Our sessions tend to be the same kind of presentation, although they cover a wide variety of topics. Whether it’s at a conference, a seminar, or a corporate presentation, presentations tend to follow the same formula.

Me at my presentation at Blog Indiana

If you’re interested in becoming a public speaker, there are five basic types of presentations you could give.

1. How to: Basic tips, how-to, suggestions, and strategies. These are great for sharing information, and to establish your expertise. Title your talk something 7 NEW Secrets To Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media. People who are interested in sessions like this are looking for concrete, nuts-and-bolts ideas. This is the kind of talk I gave this year.
2. Case Study: These historic talks show how you got from point A to point B, and the lessons you learned on the way. They can be inspirational or a cautionary tale, and if they’re done well, people can get both types of information from them. If you’re a great story teller, then I suggest you give this a try. Do a case study of a single client, or tell a part of your story (Note: We didn’t ask for your life story), or even 3 -4 short stories that are all centered around a single point. This is also a good place to ask for discussion from the audience. Paul Poteet gave this as a keynote presentation this year.
3. Futurecasting: This is where the futurists and 30,000-foot-view thinkers can really shine. You can talk about what you think the future of your industry will be. If you make enough accurate predictions, you’ll be one of the hot properties on your industry’s speaking circuit. This presentation may look back historically to make its point, but a futurecasting talk is going to discuss what they believe will be happening over the next few years.
4. Educational: Educate your listeners about a topic, idea, or tool. It may not be as in-depth as the how-to, but it’s great for teaching beginners about a particular concept. An informative session will teach people about Twitter — why use it, how it works, who uses it — while a how to session will cover the specifics of using it — signing up, following people, sending tweets. Doug Karr told listeners why their site sucks, with his Why Your Site Sucks educational session.

Jason Falls, Jay Baer, Chris Baggott (standing)

1. Issues: Every industry has its issues and controversies, and these are a great place to address them. This can be a panel discussion, a single person facilitating an audience discussion, or even one person presenting one or both sides of the issue. Fellow ghost blogger Lindsay Manfredi talked about ghost blogging this year, which has been a big hot button issue for our industry for a few years. Chris Baggott, Jason Falls, and Jay Baer participated in a panel discussion to “dispel the myth of the blog reader.”

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A couple weeks ago, Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s blog manager, talked to Google’s chief blogger, Karen Wickre about corporate blogging, and the important things companies need to do when taking the plunge into blogging.

Wickre says the most important thing a company new to blogging should do is to get a feel for what’s out there, and consider what they would want their blog to say. A blog could be personal, could be about thought leadership, or could focus on customer service. But find the blog’s voice, and stick with it, she says.

While that’s important, I don’t think it’s the most important thing. In some ways, that issue is going to resolve itself as time goes by.

I believe the most important thing about corporate blogging is that a blog will “establish ground for the company.” Wickre said a good company blog should do all these things:

• Do most posts offer useful or unique information?
• Do they reflect the company’s values and interests?
• Do they demonstrate the people behind the company/products?

Wickre had other good points for corporate bloggers to consider, but for me, this was the biggest. We try to get our clients to see that their blog needs to be more than just a commercial, or a catalog. Yes, you can have those kinds of posts, but you also need to tell your customers about your company. You need to show what you stand for, how you work, why you work. You need to answer questions about your company, your products, and your values. You need to introduce your staff to your customers, and let them develop relationships. (Remember, people buy from people they like. If they like your staff, they’ll like your company, and they’ll buy from you.)

Your corporate blog is more than just a marketing mouthpiece. It’s not a cheap form of sales literature. It’s the window into your company and possibly one of the best ways to communicate with your customers. So find the voice, jump in, and you’ll answer all Wickre’s questions as time goes by.

Photo credit: DannySullivan (Flickr)

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It’s online marketers’ dirty little secret: Web metrics are not very accurate. None of them.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

Users can block script and pixel based systems and proxy servers (servers that cache content to reduce bandwidth use on networks, like say, your ISP’s or corporate network) prevent your server’s weblog from recording every page view (I blogged in a little more detail on accuracy issues here). On top of network issues, there are some basic software limitations in browsers and metric packages that prevent every click and visit from being counted.

How bad is it? Somewhere between 4% and 12%. And it’s almost, almost always missing clicks, visits and page views.

So, do web analytics have value? Yes. But despite what you may think, their value isn’t counting every single click you get on your site. It’s for identifying trends. Knowing what is happening and what has happened in aggregate has great value. Even with a 6-12% margin of error.

The problem is, many web metrics solutions are on a time delay (like Google Analytics) that prevents you from seeing what is happening now. On the internet “NOW” means everything. And if you want to see what is happening minute to minute, your options are rather limited.

Here’s a situation that happened with one of my clients:

We had a client who had just started a $90,000, 48 hour advertising campaign for a major affiliate network. We didn’t realize it, but some bad code was preventing people coming to a landing page for step 3 in the registration process. A real-time analytics package allowed us to see the problem and fix it in about 15 minutes, but a once-a-day analytics package would have only pointed out the problem halfway through our 48 hour schedule.

Should we have tested the landing page better? Yes. Reality is that marketing sites are often done on much tighter deadlines than traditional software development and sometimes testing isn’t that great. That means real time metrics are critical.

If we had waited 12 hours for metrics to become available, my client would have lost 25% of sales and 25% of the money they had spent on the campaign.

Real time matters more than you think. If you’re not investing in it, you need to consider it.

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After reading Erik’s blog postThe Number One Reason Companies Need to Blog About Their Products, I thought I’d clarify the best place to put your blog if your objective is to get the most search juice and the top search rank.

If your blog attracts lots of links, it may be better to have the blog inside your website as the links will drive your site’s page rank and SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) up. In fact, links are so critical to search engine optimization that almost always, the right answer will be put the blog inside your website’s domain. For those who have and have no idea what I’m talking about, we’re talking about this difference in your blog’s address:

mydomain.com/blog
versus
blog.mydomain.com

This is a very important consideration as search engines see blog.mydomain.com as a separate website from mydomain.com. Search engines see mydomain.com/blog as part of the same website, so links to the blog are going to help raise the page rank and search position of the entire website.

There really are only three reasons that are likely to come up for hosting your blog outside of your website’s domain for SEO purposes:

1. You already have a top rank for your keywords and wish to banish your competitors further down the first page of search results.

2. There is a technical reason you cannot have your blog inside of yourdomain.com. For example, you might use a subscription service for your website like a lot of Realtors, attorneys and financial planners do. Often times, these services will not let you install WordPress or another blogging system on their servers.

3. No one is going to link to your blog, and so the best you can hope for are a few keyword links back to your website.

Let me say it again: putting your blog inside your website is generally the best strategy unless you are already top ranked, have a technical limitation or no one is going to link to your blog.

Note: In Compendium Blogware’s case, their blogs fall under situation number 2. They have to do subdomains or external domains(somenewsite.com) and cannot do a mydomain.com/blog URL as they would have to move their software to the server hosting mydomain.com. While the “rising waters raise all ships” philosophy will help your SEO efforts, you don’t get quite the boost that you do from the mydomain.com/blog strategy.

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• 

We write a lot of product blogs for our clients. No matter what size, shape, color, or price of the product, we’ve written several hundred blog product posts.

But for all the hundreds of posts we’ve written, there’s only one reason we do it: to win search.

Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware has long beat the “blogging wins search” drum. (And while I don’t agree about his “myth of the reader” — I believe you should try to get and keep regular, returning readers — he makes a great point about winning search.)

A product blog post is one of the easiest things to write. It’s just 200 – 300 words describing a particular product with a link back to the original catalog entry or product description. Each post equals a backlink back to your website, and the more backlinks you have to your website, the better you rank in a search.

Should I Keep My Blog Inside My Website, or Have a Separate Blog?

We’re fans of keeping a blog and a website together, but there’s no harm in keeping the two separate. After all, the search engines recognize it as a separate website that links back to your original one. However, you’re better off putting your blog on your static website and use internal backlinks to go from the blog to the static pages.

But if you want to boost your search engine rankings even further, create a second blog where you publish your blog posts, and keep it separate from your regular corporate blog where you’re publishing your authority posts, credibility posts, issues posts, and educational posts. This way you can improve search and find first time visitors with one blog, and gain returning readers with the other.

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There has been a lot of news lately on how companies are really not hiring right now. A recent report talks about how a companies are hiring temp workers, but they are not hiring them to stay. In the past, a common practice was to test drive a worker then offer them a position. Hiring them as full-time employees is not happening right now.

So, who is getting the work done?

When I joined ATA Airlines back in 1997, George Michelsons brought in Bain and Company to basically prepare the company for sale. The process was to get rid of a lot of people and put more jobs onto fewer people. While this strategy worked around the country for Bain, it usually preceded an upgrade in office automation to ensure the work could still get done.

The office automation phase did not occur at ATA Airlines.

The result was a lot of stressed out people carrying around their imaginary trays trying to figure out how they were going to fit one more item onto an already heavy load. No longer were people interested in teamwork, they were more interested in self-preservation. It created a lot of ill-tempered people in the process.

As some of my clients reveal their corporate cultures, I am finding similarities to what I experienced at ATA Airlines. No one has time to commit to anything above and beyond what their core responsibilities are. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is not projected to get much better – CEO’s are reluctant to hire.

What are the solutions?

The easiest is what is being done by some today. Hire temp workers to get things done. They may cost a little more in the short-term, but allow you to avoid the headaches of hiring employees and their costs over the long-term. There are a lot of companies providing these services.

Sometimes, just hiring a grunt worker is not enough. Sometimes you need a professional person to do the work, you don’t have time to do. There are companies being set up that can act as your Marketing Department, your Accounting Department, or your HR Department. They can do it at a cost that is far cheaper than hiring full-time employees, but are focused solely on getting work done for you.

So, look around and ask yourself, are you and your colleagues a bunch of stressed out grumpy people not really accomplishing much because there is too much to do? There is help out there that can help your company meet its strategic goals for the year.

We actually put together a white paper on the ROI of outsourcing blogging and social media. You can download it here, if you want to take a look.

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