Top Blog Technology Mistakes Law Firms Make Today - Slides from LexBlog's Webinar
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These slides were used in LexBlog's webinar, "Top 10 Online Technology Mistakes Law Firms Make Today" Webinar reply (video) is available at https://vimeo.com/lexblog/blogtechnology2015 About the webinar: If you’ve ever worked with a law firm partner who responded to your email with a handwritten note circulated via intra-office mail, you know law firms can be some of the last to fully understand and adopt technology best practices. At LexBlog, we want you to steer clear of common pitfalls as you utilize online technology. Join us as we clarify everything from the basics such as risky website user passwords to more complex choices like software-use fit. We’ll do our best to provide these insights in laymen’s terms and help you understand what issues you need to prioritize so your clients and potential clients recognize you as having your technology act together. We recommend this webinar for any legal professional involved in making decisions and policies around use of online technology including (but not limited to): - Marketing technology professionals - Chief technology officers - Chief information officers - Chief knowledge officers - Directors of communication - Attorneys involved in law firm technology policy decisions IMAGE CREDITS: Security lock: Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User David Goehring: http://bit.ly/1M8Yw0t Sick with thermometer: Image cropped and flipped. Original via Flickr Creative Commons by user Courtney Carmody: http://bit.ly/1NtSB6K Infrastructure cord mess: Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Richard Masoner: http://bit.ly/1UHyC8W Tactics football play board: Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Dov Harrington: http://bit.ly/1KIVGPS
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Top Blog Technology Mistakes Law Firms Make Today - Slides from LexBlog's Webinar
- 1. #LexBlogLearn Top 10 Online (Blog, Website) Technology Mistakes Law Firms Make Today
- 2. About LexBlog Founded in 2004 The legal industry’s authority blogging and social media Turnkey design, blog software and best practice coaching provider for the legal community | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.2 #LexBlogLearn
- 3. Agenda & Presenters Security – 3 mistakes Infrastructure – 4 mistakes Tactics – 3 mistakes | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.3
- 4. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.4
- 5. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.5 #1 MISSING SAFEGUARDS LIKE S.S.L. security
- 6. Safeguard: S.S.L. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.6 #LexBlogLearn Law enforcement agencies have long been concerned about the vulnerability of United States law firms to online attacks because they are seen by hackers and nations bent on corporate espionage as a rich repository of company secrets, business strategies and intellectual property. - Matthew Goldstein, The New York Times
- 7. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.7 Source: TeleSign via entrepreneur.com/article/246902
- 8. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.8 Source: TeleSign via entrepreneur.com/article/246902
- 9. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.9 LAW BLOG SECURITY IS A TOP LEXBLOG PRIORITY Secure Password Enforcement S.S.L. via Premier Managed Platform Enterprise- grade Infrastructure
- 10. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.10 #2 USE OF “FREE” TOOLS (PLUGINS) security
- 11. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.11 KNOW THE EFFECTS OF “PLUGIN-ITIS” Site slowdown Maintenance burden (each plugin = another piece of software to update) Less good content written Distracted site visitors
- 12. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.12
- 13. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.13
- 14. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.14 #3 LACK OF REGULAR UPDATES security
- 15. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.15 FEATURE ENHANCEMENT BUG FIXES MAINTENANCE SECURITY All four types of updates are key to successful software
- 16. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.16 Source: wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/ultimate-guide-to-upgrade-wordpress-for-beginners-infograph/
- 17. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.17 LEXBLOG SOFTWARE UPDATE PROCESS Security fixes applied whenever needed, a.s.a.p. Regular, larger updates* occur every 3-4 months *Bug fixes, maintenance, new, improved features Planning Testing, Fixes, Re-Testing Update Applied Monitoring
- 18. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.18 #4 NO VETTED, MANAGED HOSTING PROVIDER infrastructure
- 19. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.19 The 5 ‘S’s of Managed Platforms #LexBlogLearn Support e.g. What training is available for authors? Security e.g. Do you provide regular vulnerability scans? Stability e.g. What is your deployment process for updates? Speed e.g. Are site response times under 500ms? Scale e.g. Will the site keep running even w/ a huge traffic spike?
- 20. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.20 #5 PURPOSE- PLATFORM MISMATCH infrastructure
- 21. Examples of Mismatch: | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.21 #LexBlogLearn Simple website using overly complex software (excess software = slower site) Blog powered by website CMS software (limits cool blog-specific features, functionality) Blog on non-responsive software (outdated approach for visitors and editors)
- 22. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.22 #6 BLOG INSIDE WEBSITE infrastructure
- 23. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.23 #LexBlogLearn Within Website Outside Publication
- 24. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.24 #7 OUTDATED SUBSCRIBER EMAIL SERVICE infrastructure
- 25. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.25 #LexBlogLearn Outdated Email Branded Email
- 26. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.26 #LexBlogLearn Branded Email Professional header Social share buttons Additional post(s) Compliance Features of
- 27. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.27
- 28. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.28 #8 TOO MUCH S.E.O. EMPHASIS tactics
- 29. Search Engine Optimization With today’s sophisticated search technology, your best recipe for success as a publisher is: 1. Write content your audience wants to read 2. Cite current leading authorities 3. Build up your online (author) reputation 4. For every post, do PR work | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.29 #LexBlogLearn
- 30. Search Engine Optimization and spend less time: obsessing over keywords checking analytics focusing on rank to non-comparative sites procrastinating writing good content | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.30 #LexBlogLearn
- 31. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.31 #9 POORLY MANAGED MIGRATION tactics
- 32. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.32 Via Half Dome Partners:
- 33. Site Migration Risks Downtime Traffic drop due to poor site structure Broken URLs Visitors sent to error pages Search engine penalty | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.33 #LexBlogLearn
- 34. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.34 #10 TERRIBLE TITLE TAGS tactics
- 35. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.35 Google search result Facebook open graph
- 36. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.36 LEXBLOG PROVIDES Solid structural foundation for blog title tags Blog author coaching on how to write post titles Hand-written custom title tags for static pages at new blog launch
- 37. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.37 #LexBlogLearn Recap: Technology Mistakes to Avoid Missing safeguards like S.S.L. Use of “free” tools (plugins) Lack of regular updates security
- 38. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.38 #LexBlogLearn Recap: Technology Mistakes to Avoid No vetted, managed hosting provider Purpose-platform mismatch Blog inside website Outdated subscriber email service infrastructure
- 39. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.39 #LexBlogLearn Recap: Technology Mistakes to Avoid Too much S.E.O. emphasis Poorly managed migration Terrible title tags tactics
- 40. Every LexBlog Blog Comes With: | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.40 #LexBlogLearn 1. Strategic consulting 2. Coaching 3. Development on a professional publishing platform 4. World-class design 5. Firm-branded email notifications 6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 7. LXBN.com inclusion and exposure 8. Ongoing support and more
- 41. | ©LexBlog. All rights reserved.41 Questions? #LexBlogLearn
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar - the Top 10 Online Technology Mistakes Law Firms Make Today. And this is going to be focused on the technology used for firm blogs and websites. My name is Katy Maynard and I am the Business Development Manager here at LexBlog. I’ll be your host today, keeping track of your questions in the webinar chat box as well as the conversation happening on Twitter. The hashtag for this webinar is #lexbloglearn. This session is being recorded and the recording will be made available within a couple of days. This will be sent to you via email. We will have two polls during the presentation, so be ready to participate in those as we’d love to get your feedback on some of these technology mistakes. Additionally, the end of this webinar will be utilized for answering your questions so feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation via the chat box.
- Lexblog was founded in 2004 by Kevin O’Keefe, a former practicing lawyer of 17 years and author of Real Lawyers Have Blogs, and we have been helping lawyers and law firms grow their business through blogging for over a decade. We are the legal industry's leading authority in blogging and social media, allowing us to work with almost half of the Am Law 200 firms and over 8,000 blog authors. Every LexBlog blog comes with world class design and development, strategic consulting, coaching, firm-branded email notifications, SEO best practices, on-going support, and exposure on LXBN and more. We truly have a turnkey design and blog software for the legal community, resulting in you focusing on generating new business, and us focusing on keeping your blog modern, secure, and online.
- Joshua Lynch, our Director of Product Development is going to be our presenter today. Josh is in charge of consistently updating our secure platform here at LexBlog, as well as identifying new trends in blogging technology which we can improve upon. He’s going to be walking us through the 10 mistakes we see for online blogging technology today. To make it easier, we have broken them out into 3 different core areas; Security, Infrastructure, and Tactics.
- The results of this first audience poll showed cost/budget in the lead. Of course, a big one here being budget. Make sure to include technology upgrades in your yearly budget, and when large necessary upgrades come, like SSL, ensure those get applied quickly to avoid vulnerabilities.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User David Goehring: http://bit.ly/1M8Yw0t We’ll start with security mistakes, as that has been an area of focus recently with high profile data breaches like the Ashley Madison hack, health care industry breaches like Anthem and Premera’s, and big box retailers like Home Depot, Target and Staples. There’s also been recent media coverage of law firm technology drawing attention to security. Law firms handle sensitive client information every day, making them an attractive target for hackers. Bloomberg and The New York Times recently reported increased hacking attempts against law firms as well as law enforcement concern over their preparedness. One of the most straightforward security measures law firms can take with their online presence is to secure their sites with SSL. SSL, also known as HTTPS, is the industry standard security technology for encrypting connections between web servers and browsers, protecting visitors’ connections from monitoring and tampering.
- But for our webinar on our 2015 Am Law 200 Blog Benchmark Report, we found that 10% of Am Law 200 firm websites are using SSL and only 1% of Am Law 200 blogs. SSL has long been a must for websites collecting credit card and personal information, but through a movement Google dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” much of the web industry is moving toward making SSL the default way we connect to websites. The federal government also recognizes the importance of SSL. The HTTPS-Only Standard directive requires that all publicly accessible federal government websites only allow connections over SSL by the end of 2016. We’ve heard from our clients that savvy law firm clients are expecting the same from their firm. This all sounds like a bunch of acronyms until you consider that login information and client messages sent via contact forms, for instance, can be intercepted when a connection is not secured with SSL.
- Lack of SSL is especially concerning when you consider how many of us have poor password habits. TeleSign found that: - 73 percent of online accounts are protected by passwords shared among multiple accounts - 54 percent of us use five or fewer passwords in our online lifetime. - 47 percent of people use passwords that are at least five years old!
- So the risk is there that a password used for a firm website or blog not secured with SSL could become the gateway into accessing much more sensitive or privileged information because the password was shared with another system.
- At LexBlog, our platform forces strong passwords, which helps keep them unique, and SSL and periodic password resets are available on our Premier Managed Platform.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User David Goehring: http://bit.ly/1M8Yw0t The second mistake we see related to security but also site speed and stability is something I like to call pluginitis. Pluginitis is a condition where rather than publishing posts that their audience will find helpful and growing their reputation and network, blog authors chose to focus on adding features the blog just has to have! Some firms aren’t equipped to turn down these requests from an insistent blog author, regardless of whether the features are even a good idea or not. Many law firm blogs and microsites are using the open source platform WordPress, which powers 59% of all websites on the internet that use a content management system. WordPress is known for its extensibility with plugins and themes. However, not all of the more than 40,000 free WordPress plugins are made equal.
- Image cropped and flipped. Original via Flickr Creative Commons by user Courtney Carmody: http://bit.ly/1NtSB6K Some effects of a serious case of pluginitis include: - A poor user experience with obtrusive buttons and features everywhere - Slow site response times and page loads - Pages or features that don’t work due to plugin conflicts - Frequent downtime or serious outages that take sites down for days - Less focus on writing quality content - Hacking that adds malware to your site or replaces your pages with a message from the hackers, like these examples
- Photo: Screenshot of hacked site warning, infected with malware With the effects of pluginitis, suddenly adding features with free plugins is far from free, costing staff hours to research options, install, activate, test, configure, train others and troubleshoot. That’s if the plugin behaves and doesn’t cause downtime or get the site hacked.
- Photo: Screenshot of hacked site taken over Every day new vulnerabilities in plugins are discovered by both well intentioned software developers and malicious hackers. Law firms not monitoring these reports for their software and taking action are at risk of damage to their investment in their online properties and their reputation.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User David Goehring: http://bit.ly/1M8Yw0t One of the other effects of pluginitis rounds out Security as the third mistake: not updating software regularly. If pluginitis is causing you to add many features, you are adding more software that will need to be maintained when updates are available—or replaced when the plugin is no longer being updated.
- Software updates can generally be described as containing one or many of four things: feature releases, maintenance, bug fixes and security patches. Running a recent version of software is important for websites’ stability, speed, scale and the users, who will benefit from the new features making the software better. And in the case of security patches, it’s critical that you always use the most recent patch available, so that you reduce the risk of your site being compromised.
- This applies to any website software really, but since we see many law firms using WordPress and it powers The LexBlog Platform, here are some stats about WordPress versions: - WordPress.org reports that 46% of WordPress installations are two or more feature releases behind - According to WPBeginner, 83% of hacked WordPress installs were not running the latest security release And that’s just for WordPress itself; this doesn’t include how many sites are not running up to date plugins and themes on WordPress.
- Just to give you a sense of what goes into maintaining a healthy WordPress platform, I’ll tell you what we do at LexBlog to stay updated: 1 - We subscribe to industry news and vulnerability databases that report security issues. 2 - We use monitoring software that notifies us when updates to our software is available. 3 - We develop more than half of the plugins we use in-house, so that we can make updates, control the code quality and any security issues are not widely documented like with publicly available plugins. 4 - For security releases to WordPress and plugins, we update as soon as possible, often the same day. Due to additional security measures and customizations, we are often not vulnerable to the security issue being patched. 5 - A new feature update of WordPress is released approximately four times a year. Each time a new release occurs, we update to the previous feature version. We trail one feature release behind so we are not affected by bugs in a new feature release and don’t have compatibility issues with plugins. This way we’re still able to take advantage of the latest security updates while we prepare documentation for new features. 6 - We schedule our updates outside of business hours, use replicated testing environments to test the updates starting weeks before our maintenance window, and then update the software on live sites after making complete backups. Then we test the update on the live sites, prepared to roll back or deploy fixes if necessary. Our testing is both manual (done by developers here) and automated with software, and our platform is constantly monitored by error logging software. Unfortunately we’ve had a look under the hood of several law firm sites after they had been hacked to see what we could recover and migrate to our platform. They’ve all had pluginitis and not had a process for updating their dozens of plugins, so I highly recommend addressing issues like that now if you have them. Those kind of scenarios really underscore the importance of vetting and working with a reliable provider or on recruiting or developing the website technology talent you need to do the work in-house.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Richard Masoner: http://bit.ly/1UHyC8W So the first of four infrastructure mistakes we’ll cover is about not carefully vetting a managed hosting provider or managed platform. At LexBlog, we’ve helped law firms who have started a site with a generic hosting company with no support for the software, just the hardware. So when they run into issues with the software, they have to go to a third party in order to get help. We’ve also helped firms that have hosted their sites and blogs themselves. Unfortunately their internal team didn’t have enough time to manage their software and/or didn’t have the expertise. Regardless of your software or platform for your sites and blogs, it’s important that you choose to work with a specialist in your platform of choice for hosting. A lesson I’ve learned in my career is to never be too exceptional. I don’t mean to say never be outstanding. I mean it in the sense of being unusual or atypical. I want to work with specialists in specific technologies where I am not significantly stretching their experience. I don’t want to be having the experience of being an ongoing exception to a business. We’re human, we’re going to make mistakes, and exceptions are going to suffer the worst mistakes.
- So when you’re looking at managed hosting or better yet, a managed platform from a software-as-a-service company that supports the hardware and the software application, I thought I would share the Five Ss that I consider. The Five Ss are Support, Security, Stability, Speed, and Scale. For each S I usually brainstorm questions related to our needs in that area. For today, I brainstormed some example questions in each area that a law firm should keep in mind when vetting a website or blog provider: SUPPORT - How long have they worked with the my site software of choice, and how many projects have they completed and actively support? - What training do they provide? Do they have a robust online knowledge base for their customers to use self service? - How long does their launch process take and what services are included? What are their support channels, and how do they handle critical issues like outages at all hours? SECURITY - How do they identify and protect against malicious traffic? - How do they mitigate common attacks, like denial of service or brute force login attempts? - Do they perform regular third-party vulnerability scans and monitor vulnerability news? - Has a site they manage ever been hacked, and if so, how? STABILITY - How do they monitor their hosting for uptime and performance? - What is their hosting uptime in the past year and 90 days? Do they have an SLA? - How do they perform maintenance, like bug fixes and security updates? Is it proactive and systematic? What do they charge for it? (Sometimes this work is not included) - What is their backup system? Do they have off-site backups? SPEED - Are their site response times under 500ms? - Do they utilize caching technology and content delivery networks for complete pageloads in four seconds or less? SCALE - How will they keep your sites running well if you are receiving a large spike in traffic due to your coverage of newsworthy events? - What limits are in place, and what will success cost? - One of the favorites that I’ve been asked: How often do they update their platform with new features, and what and when were the last three features launched?
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Richard Masoner: http://bit.ly/1UHyC8W The fifth misstep we’ll cover today has effects across all five of the Five Ss. It’s using the wrong platform or software for the functionality of the site. We see this usually in three forms.
- First, is using an overly complex system to power a simple website. This can lead to poor user experience issues, such as slow performance or site administrators having difficulties keeping the content updated and professional looking. Really powerful software, due to its complexity and range of use cases, can make getting the basics right more difficult than needed. For example, we often see websites with poor on-page SEO which can sometimes be tied back to the administrators not knowing where certain settings can be adjusted. We’ll come back to this later in the tactics section. Along the same lines, the second form of purpose-platform mismatch is using a robust website CMS to power blogs. While the software can run blogs, often it’s not its specialty as much as a feature that was tacked on when blogging became a part of more business’ online strategies. One of the disadvantages of this approach is that the software will often lack features that people come to expect from blogs, such as: - Social media share buttons for each post - Subscription options like RSS and email - Comments for questions or interaction with the author - Categories and tags for browsing topic areas - Author archives or even author bylines on posts - Blog layout Finally, perhaps the most serious platform-purpose mismatch is not having a responsive design, or at least a mobile version for websites and especially blogs. Lacking a mobile friendly design can be a limitation of a backend platform, but more likely is an issue of priority. Our 2015 Am Law 200 Blog Benchmark Report found that 33% of Am Law 200 blogs have no mobile approach at all, and the majority, 41%, use a mobile template version, a legacy approach prone to failure as mobile technology rapidly evolves. With mobile internet usage exceeding desktop use in 2014 and Google’s Mobilegeddon update in April, if you don’t have a mobile friendly site you are missing out on readership. In fact, since the average person in the U.S. looks at their phone 150 times a day, there’s a good chance some of you are doing that right now! While I could spend the rest of our time on this point, I’ll stick to five key issues with having a non-responsive blog or website: 1 - First, It’s hard for all of those mobile visitors to use. Google reports that 61 percent of users say that if they don’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, they’ll quickly move on to another site. 2 - But that’s if they get to your site, that is. Second, Stone Temple Consulting found that since Google updated its algorithm earlier this year to rank mobile friendly sites higher in mobile search results, nearly 50% of non-mobile friendly pages have dropped in rank while mobile friendly pages have climbed above them. 3 - Of course, if your site is hard to use the third issue is that it’s not reflecting on your brand well. In fact, Google also found that 52% of users say a bad mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with a company. 4 - Fourth, search traffic isn’t everything with traffic from social media exceeding search referrals depending on the industry and topic. But if a user can’t navigate your site easily on their phone and that experience makes them think less of your brand, they’re also less likely to share your content. That can be a major loss given that ShareThis found that we’re twice as likely to share content from our mobile devices than our desktops. 5 - Fifth and finally, a non-responsive non-mobile friendly site is a problem that you will have to confront sooner or later as mobile traffic grows and your site renders worse and worse on new devices and operating system versions. Our team here at LexBlog knows that the progression of technology can be unrelenting, so we’ve been working all year to introduce a range of responsive redesign options. If you haven’t discussed responsive design with your account manager or business development team recently, we have some more options already and will be launching some new responsive product options in 2016.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Richard Masoner: http://bit.ly/1UHyC8W Moving on, the sixth mistake we see is hosting a law blog within the firm website. This is closely related to purpose-platform mismatch but has some specific disadvantages we wanted to cover. While only 8 percent of Am Law 200 blogs were found in a directory on a firm website as opposed to running on their own domain, we see smaller firms going this route more. But we’ve probably all arrived at a company website or even law firm website from Google and clicked on a tab labeled “Blog” in the navigation, only to find a collection of lame press release-like info from months or even years ago. You want to position your blog with an independent, editorial feel so that it develops trust with your readers and prospective clients.
- Ultimately the goal of a blog is not to bring traffic from search engines to your website but to develop relationships and reputation that lead to business. To really shine, a blog should be on its own, independent domain where the design can still complement the firm brand. As Steve Mathews, President of Stem Legal writes, “Putting blogs under the firm website risks stifling the personality of the website and of the lawyers who are blogging. [...] Developing a blog’s readership is difficult at the best of times and will be more difficult within the confines of a firm website. ” The risk of running a blog or blogs within a website include it being: - Lost amid hundreds or thousands of pages of overt marketing collateral on a company website and marked by Advertising disclaimers - Harder to use by lacking standard features of a blog like comments or subscription options - Less likely to be shared, especially when lacking share buttons or surrounded by firm overt marketing collateral - Less likely to be cited and linked to by influencers as an authoritative publication - Harder to find within the site navigation, in search engines and by remembering the URL - Less likely to be accepted into Google News, which can greatly increase traffic For a great example, look no further than one of our clients, Bill Marler of Marler Clark. Marler is one of the most prominent foodborne illness attorneys and believes that blogging has been his differentiator. He tells us that his blogs give him a place to talk about what’s important to him, do some good and generate new business in the process. Marler Clark has a firm website, but it’s dwarfed by the success of his network of 15 foodborne illness microsites, nine blogs and Food Safety News, a full-blown news site with an editorial staff. This network has been so successful, that if you search highly competitive food poisoning terms like salmonella or listeria, you’ll find a Marler Clark property in at least one of the top 10 results, right up there or above sites like Wikipedia and the CDC. Blogs outside of websites can still be integrated with other firm properties by having the sites link to each other. You can also surface blog content automatically via RSS on website pages like attorney bios and publications pages. And it may even be possible for you to modify your website search engine to include links to blog posts in its search results.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Richard Masoner: http://bit.ly/1UHyC8W Mistake seven and the last of our infrastructure mistakes is using an outdated or even noncompliant email notification system or template. We know a lot of law firm marketers are aware of email best practices but may not know the risks involved in not following them carefully. We can look at the risks terms of CAN SPAM Act compliance, deliverability and optimization.
- There are three CAN-SPAM Act compliance issues we see most often: The first is not including a valid physical postal address. It does seem a bit weird that commercial email must contain an address that can get regular old mail from the postal service, but it’s a simple requirement to comply with. The second and third are closely related. You need to give recipients a clear explanation or the means to opt-out from future emails from you, such as an Unsubscribe link in the footer of the email. And you need to honor opt-out requests within 10 business days. While these are both straightforward and recognizable requirements, I still receive commercial email from law firms that lack unsubscribe directions and/or don’t honor my multiple unsubscribe attempts. Obviously that can really frustrate someone you're emailing in order to develop business with. In my case, I made inbox filters that automatically send those messages to my trash. That brings us to email deliverability, which is a way to measure the rate at which email campaigns make it to recipient's email inboxes. Continually sending to inboxes that don’t exist anymore or to recipients who mark you as spam will hurt your sending reputation. Ultimately you might end up on blacklists, causing your email to never reach subscriber inboxes. Fortunately you can avoid that by: - Only sending to recipients who have double opted-in to receiving specific types of email campaigns from you. Never buy lists or add everyone from your address book. - Send compelling content at a consistent time, and watch your frequency. Multiple messages a day or email every day will increase unsubscribes and spam complaints. - Use a reputable email service provider that provides authentication for your campaigns. Their software should also automatically remove invalid, bounced email addresses and of course, allow recipients to unsubscribe easily and immediately. - Periodically ask your subscribers to reconfirm their subscription, or clean your lists with an independent email verification tool.
- Finally, professional email notifications should be optimized with features like: - HTML design rather than plain text so it is branded with a design that complements your website or blog and is easily recognizable as from your firm - Social share buttons so that your subscribers can pass along your content from their inbox - Links to your social media profiles so they can choose to engage with you further - Links to recent, related content they may have missed - Just like on posts, the author byline and publication date so subscribers can develop a relationship with the authors and get a sense for the immediacy of the content At LexBlog we’ve built integrations with a leading email service provider to do all of the above, plus add subscriber lists and campaign stats to the blog dashboard. We’re also able to offer advanced notifications, such as per category email notifications and email personalization with subscriber information gathered from additional subscribe form fields.
- The results of this second audience poll showed blog inside website and outdated email to subscribers in the lead. Make sure your blogs are outside of your website as soon as possible to build credibility as a stand-alone publication. And remember, branded email notifications that match your blog ensure a great reader experience. Also complying with the CAN-SPAM Act is very important.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Dov Harrington: http://bit.ly/1KIVGPS Now if there’s one online technology lawyers focus on more than their email notifications, it’s SEO. I’m sure many of you have worked with blog authors who at one point or another get hyper focused on search engine optimization. And that over-emphasis on SEO is the eighth mistake and one of the most straightforward.
- With hundreds of ever-evolving ranking factors in search engine algorithms, gaming them is not going to work for long. Once a solid technical foundation is laid, it takes the hard work of writing quality content, sharing it wisely and networking to get traction in search engines and beyond.
- Obsessing over keywords, checking analytics and focusing on rank can all destroy a blog through over-optimization or by discouraging the authors until they no longer write content. That said there are a couple of SEO related mistakes to watch out for besides focusing too much on SEO.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Dov Harrington: http://bit.ly/1KIVGPS For instance, at some point in the life of a blog or website you are probably going to need to move to another platform or even domain name. Mistake nine, a mishandled migration, can be devastating to a well established site. We’ve seen poorly handled migrations cut a blog’s traffic by more than half.
- To illustrate, here’s an analytics graph from Half Dome Partners showing a 65 percent decrease in organic traffic due to a mishandled migration. Some of the key migration tactics we know from doing hundreds of site moves are that: First a migration should be a smooth DNS switch to the new version of the site with no downtime interrupting your users or search engines’ experience.
- More importantly, you should attempt to match the site’s existing link structure whenever possible, and create 301 redirects when it’s not. If you don’t: - Users with the original links will arrive at 404 error pages rather than their desired content - The same will happen with search engines, which will drop your 404ing pages from search results - The same will also happen for inbound links, which are still the most influential search engine ranking factor Make sure you carry over verification with Google Search Console and other webmaster tools as well as configure the robots.txt on the new site to allow indexing! Monitor analytics and webmaster tools for issues You can use software like Integrity for Mac to crawl your site and report broken links
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Dov Harrington: http://bit.ly/1KIVGPS The final mistake I’ll cover is the most common we see on firm websites and blogs, which is non search engine optimized title tags. Title tags are what appear at the top of the browser tab for a page, in search engine results pages, and when your content is shared at other websites, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. They are the most important on page search ranking factor.
- Unfortunately, many firms will have the name of a page and their firm name in a title tag and that’s all. For instance, for the homepage it’s not uncommon to see a title tag read “Home” followed by the firm name. That page is missing out on the opportunity to rank for a key phrase describing the firm and the page’s content. For example, a firm specializing in “Intellectual Property” in their region would want to include that key phrase along with their firm name in their homepage title tag. A good content management system should allow you to create templates for title tags and override them on a case by case basis. Each title tag should be a unique, accurate and concise description of a page's content, 50-60 characters of which will appear in search results pages. The most important keywords or phrase for the page should lead off your title tag. But be careful of keyword stuffing, which could confuse visitors and will be obvious to search engines. An effective page title is created with how people would search for the content on the page in mind.
- At LexBlog, what we’ve found works best for blogs is to research and draft title tags for standard pages like the homepage, about, and contact and then create templates for other types of content. For instance, for blog posts part of the title tag is the post title itself, so we have resources and coach our blog authors on how to write post titles that also make good title tags.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User David Goehring: http://bit.ly/1M8Yw0t We learned a lot today as Josh outlined the ten technology mistakes. Regarding Security: - Make sure to secure your blogs for not only your users and authors, but readers as well using SSL encryption. - Avoid “pluginitis” on your site as they are often a point of vulnerability to hackers. - Remember to update not only your platform, but plug-ins if they are installed. LexBlog works off a revolving update schedule so when WordPress updates, we ensure our blogs are updated quickly after as well.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Richard Masoner: http://bit.ly/1UHyC8W A few infrastructure mistakes: - There is a big difference between hosting and managed hosting - make sure your provider includes support, security, stability, speed, as well as scale for your sites. - Also how does your software enable or dis-enable the purpose of your blog or website? Make sure the two align for ease of use. - We’ve all seen a blog within a website, but to truly have a stand alone publication which builds credibility and is easily shareable, having a blog outside of a website is key. - Along with that, make sure to have well branded subscriber email notifications which follow the CAN-SPAM act as well.
- Image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons User Dov Harrington: http://bit.ly/1KIVGPS Lastly were a few tactical mistakes to avoid: - Focus on writing great content that your target audience wants to read as well as citing and linking to influencers vs. obsessing over analytics, keywords and ranking. - Be careful with migrating your sites to avoid downtime, broken URLs, error pages, and search engine penalties. - Lastly, spend time on your title tags! Make sure your provider provides custom title tags with a solid structure to comply with search engines. Our Account Managers here at LexBlog spend lots of time developing custom title tags for each blog that launches with us.
- We truly want our clients to succeed. Every LexBlog Blog comes with 8 things that make it a customized turnkey solution for any type of lawyer or law firm. We provide: 1 - Strategic consulting on what it takes for blogs to bring in real work from choosing the right niche to explaining how to engage points of influence. 2 - Coaching on writing well and using blogs as business development tools. 3 - The LexBlog Publishing platform was built with lawyers in mind, with tools that make blogging as simple as writing an email. 4 - Whether you go custom, or with one of our LexBlog Responsive Blog layouts, these are the as clean and stylish as you’ll find anywhere. 5 - We know email communication is essential for legal professionals, so we tailor every email notification to be in line with your blog branding. 6 - We help you focus on the important SEO tactics - writing great, authentic content. 7 - Of course, don’t let your time spent writing be for nothing. We also promote your blog on the LexBlog Network, LXBN.com, the largest curated network of legal blogs. 8 - Whether things go wrong or right, we’re here for you. Through both on-demand support and one-on-one coaching, LexBlog’s here to help with whatever questions you might have.
- Thank you to everyone who have submitted questions throughout the presentation. Question 1: Passwords are a challenge to remember overall. Does it work to have a secure password even if it's used across different sites? Answer: Certainly true! Unfortunately it doesn’t work to have a password shared across sites, because as soon as one account is compromised others can easily be. One thing we do, at LexBlog, is use a managed password provider – LastPass. There are alternatives to LastPass, and what those allow is for you to just remember one master password. Question 2: Our blog loads slow, takes several seconds to load and if you go to it on your smartphone it will take forever, most people give up. What would you recommend we check so we can figure out why it's slow? Answer: There are quite a few things that could be causing that – not enough server resources or too much load. One thing would be to check in with your provider to see if there’s anything they can do. Also if you have a replicated testing environment, you could test to see which feature is causing the slowdown. Question 3: For email, what about sending other emails to blog subscribers? Like other content relevant to the practice area? Answer: Not at all, but definitely use the five S’s to vet those free tools. Specifically, check the reputation of the developer, how current the update is, and online review. Question 4: Our budget is tight, so "free" tools are incredibly tempting! Are all free tools bad?? Answer: I would not recommend sending email to folks who have not explicitly double confirmed they want that non-blog content. However, there are ways to work that into your content, e.g. you could say you have a webinar coming up through a blog post. And depending on your subscriber list, you could see opportunities for other ways to connect with them maybe on social media.
- Thank you for viewing our webinar slides. See and hear a recording of this webinar and more on our webinar replay channel page at https://vimeo.com/channels/lexblog