Earlier this week, I ran into an attorney friend of mine who owns a thriving personal injury practice in the Atlanta area.  He told me that he was in negotiation with a "pay per click" (PPC) management firm and that he planned on testing PPC to attract personal injury cases.   He would be testing this tool to the tune of $3,000 per month for a minimum of three months.  What did I think of this?

I responded by asking him if he had tested his web site for conversion.  It turns out that his web site is not yet live - it is in production and will be produced by a friend at no cost.   I just took a look and, yes, the domain is registered, and the "in production" version of the site is there.  The designer is using a template downloaded from Free Website Templates, and the site looks to be about 10% complete.

Now let me stop right here and say that I have nothing against a free website template.   In my view money spent on expensive design is often money wasted as one can have a very effective web site with a free template that displays good content.

My point here is simply that before my friend even thinks of signing on for $3,000 per month of pay per click traffic, he needs to have a live web site up and running and he needs to test that site to verify that live visitors are responding appropriately.  If live visitors don't like your site, and if they don't follow the path that you have set out for them, you are wasting your money with paid advertising.

I explained to my friend my concerns about marketing for personal injury online and that in my view his target ought to be the "researcher" type who will spend hours online looking for a vendor who will provide extensive information.

I also suggested to my friend that he should capture names and email and add a sequential autoresponder to his site to communicate with past, present and future clients.

Now, my friend is a very smart and successful lawyer.  But this episode shows that even smart, savvy, trained minds can fall prey to the hype of a good salesman and the excitement of wanting to tap into the Internet gold rush.  My friend needs to either educate himself about how the Internet might work for his practice or he needs to associate a consultant like me to advise him.  Otherwise the $9,000 he plans on spending will do him no good at all.

During the course of my consulting work with lawyers and other small business service providers, an issue that often comes up has to do with how many web sites or blogs should the business owner maintain.  My response: as many as you can maintain.

In my view, the Internet functions as a research tool.  This is especially true if you are offering professional services.  People go to Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. to learn about a particular topic, not necessarily to choose a vendor or to buy that service right now.

Contrast this to the visitor dynamic in the yellow pages.  Yellow page browsers are not researchers.  They know that they will not find extensive information about a topic.  Yellow page buyers tend to be visual people who will respond to large, dramatic ads.  This is why in the lawyer market, yellow page ads work well for practice areas like personal injury, DUI, uncontested divorce and bankruptcy.  A significant percentage of buyers for these services are looking for any reason to make a buying decision - price, location, immediacy, social proof.

Internet browsers generally look for more detail.  I have had a great deal of success with my bankruptcy sites because I offer extensive information.  The people that respond to my bankruptcy web sites tend to be better educated, have more complex situations, and are less price conscious.   I have had much less success with personal injury web sites because most people involved in soft tissue auto accidents are looking for quick settlements and they do not perceive that there is much difference between Lawyer A and Lawyer B.

Therefore, before I will agree to work with a lawyer, I have a long discussion with him/her about his market - are his clients people who are looking to research?  If so, I will give those clients more information than any other competitor in the market, and my client will dominate this "researcher" part of his market.  I use blogs, podcasts, web sites, wikis, forums - whatever makes sense for the particular market.

Fortunately, the search engines also like extensive, relevant content.  So, in the ideal scenario, I can map out a multi-site approach that will please both the search engines and the client/researcher and, as a result, keep my client extremely busy with new business.

Yesterday, I uploaded a screen capture video that demonstrated how you might get rid of comment spam by using the "mass edit" mode moderation function in WordPress.  Of course, not all comments that appear in the moderation queue are spam - how do you quickly identify which comments are spam and which are legitimate.

If at all possible, you should download and install the Akismet plug-in for WordPress.  Akismet is free for personal use and carries a nominal charge for commercial use, and it can block most spam using a sophisticated spam detection algorithm.

What happens, however, if you just learned about Akismet and you have hundreds or thousands of spam comments, or you inadvertantly changed a WordPress setting that let all this spam in.  Is there any hope?

The short answer is "yes" - there is hope.  In this video, I show you how to use the search function in the mass edit mode to identify likely spam by keyword as well as by IP address.  Hope you find it helpful

Comment spam can take a lot of the enjoyment out of blogging.  Comment spammers operate in the same manner as email spammers - they use automated scripts to disperse their wares.  Comment spammers use the comment capability of most blogs to distribute links to their web sites.  If your blog has the "no_follow" attribute of comments disabled, then you may be unwittingly providing the comment spammers with some of your "link juice."

At a minimum, every blogger should enable the moderation feature for all blog comments.  If your comments are unmoderated, you will soon see hundreds, if not thousands of irrelevant, spammy, link-filled comments on your blog posts.

Most blog platforms have spam filtering either built in or available as a plug-in.  Wordpress, which is my blogging platform, has a plug-in called Akismet, which is a very good spam filter.

Many of us learn about comment spam the hard way.  What happens if you did not previously enable spam blocking and now you have 10,000 spam comments in moderation, or worse, showing up as comments on your blog posts?   Fortunately there is an answer to this problem and the video demonstrates how to go about clearing spam posts in volume.  The blog I use for my example is the Bankruptcy Law Network blog.  This is a multi-contributor blog that accepts contributions from a select group of lawyers.  The blog has been very successful in educating consumers and those in the legal community about Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy, but, as a group, we did not plan very well to when it came to moderating and processing comments.

Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves with over 10,000 unmoderated comments, most of which were spam.  Worse, the size of the unmoderated comments table in the SEQL database that manages the Wordpress blog made the manual, one-by-one processing of comments very slow and cumbersome.

After some looking around, I figured out how to deal with the spam comments in bulk and I show what I did in this screen capture video.

If you blog frequently, you will have many opportunities to link to other web sites and blogs.  I created the following video for my colleagues in the Bankruptcy Law Network.  The BLN consists of a group of bankruptcy lawyers who work in various cities throughout the country.  The BLN blog is a collaborative effort to provide consumers with multiple perspectives about the bankruptcy process and to allow member attorneys to showcase their knowledge.

Some of the BLN bloggers are experienced and comfortable with the "technical" side of blogging, while others have no technical experience at all.  In reviewing some of the BLN posts, I noted that some of the attorney authors were not maximizing the value of the network.  This video demonstrates how I approach linking and trackbacks.

I have been a big fan of GMail since it was released.  Unlike most email services that require you to think hierarchically, GMail stores all emails chronologically, but allows you to search for content in your emails very quickly.  I used to use an email client called Bloomba, which had an Outlook like interface but also included a very rapid search feature.  GMail offers and equally fast search on a web based email client.

Over the years, I have signed up for multiple GMail accounts for different purposes.  I always set up a GMail account for my consulting clients, and I use the account to add Google Analytics to my clients' sites.   Until now, it was somewhat cumbersome to check all of those GMail accounts - you had to sign out of one and sign into another.

GMail Assistant solves this problem.  GMail Assistant is a Firefox plug in that allows you to add the login information for all your GMail accounts into one tab.  If you want to switch from one account to another, you go to the dropdown and select the desired account and within seconds you are looking at a different inbox.

You can run Gmail Assistant as a stand alone application or try a Firefox plug-in version that is slightly less robust.

Lorelle VanFossen publishes a very readable and useful blog about WordPress and blogging in general called Lorelle on Wordpress.  Lorelle recently attended a WordPress event in Israel and she has published a helpful post containing tips and suggestions about how to get the most out of Wordpress.  I recommend this post to all bloggers - new or experienced.

I was particularly interested in the section where Lorelle wrote about how to deal with the problem of content theft.   Content theft happens when an unscrupulous blog owner "scapes" your content and puts it on his own (Google Adwords stuffed) blog.  Often the scraped blog (called a "splog" within the blogging community) will contain scraped content from several legitimate blogs on a particular topic.  The splogger then includes a trackback hoping to pick up page rank from the legitimate blog.

As Lorelle points out, these sploggers are content thieves.  In the "How to Stop Content Theft" section of her post, she identifies several specific tactics to deal with these content thieves.   There is a splogger who scrapes every post from my Atlanta bankruptcy blog and I am going to try some of these suggestions.  I'll report back to see how they work.

About a month ago, my house was hit by lightening.  The lightening strike was a direct hit - we ended up with a hold in the roof and water damage in the ceiling.  The strike also blew out most of my electronics - including televisions, stereo receivers, my garage door, my alarm system, the cable box and the DSL modem.   I also lost my desktop computer - the one with all of my digital photos, videos and personal financial information.

About 85% of the digital photos were backed up - I burn my digital photos to DVD's every year, but not much of the rest had been backed up.  Fortunately, my IT consultant was able to salvage the hard drive - he put it into an external enclosure so all of my data is still there.  Nevertheless, this experience served as a wakeup call to me.  You cannot assume that your digital information will always be there.

In the old days, there were backup programs that compressed data for storage on floppy disks.   Now, with hard drives holding 200 to 500 gigabytes of data, backup options are less obvious.

There are some software options but I have not found one that I like or completely trust.  At this point, I am going to use the external hard drive route - I will have to remember to back up but I will have a complete copy of all of my data.

My friend, Atlanta mortgage broker Steve Epstein included the following suggestions in his weekly newsletter.  You may have seen these tips before, but they bear repeating:

• Hold On to Those Disks. You know those disks that come with your computer…the ones with all the software on them…the ones you throw in a drawer and forget about? Well - don't. Even though software often comes preloaded and ready to use, those disks and serial numbers are priceless. Keep them in a safe, memorable place and you'll be able to easily reload your software after a crash.
• Rule of Thumb. Those little USB flash drives or "thumb drives" that you see everyone carrying around now are an ideal, inexpensive way to backup small files for short periods of time. Whether you're moving information from one computer to another or you want to make sure a critical company report doesn't get lost before the client presentation, these handy devices are well worth the small amount of money you'll spend for 4 GB of peace of mind.
• Don't Get Burned…Do the Burning Instead. Most computers come standard with CD/DVD burners. Contrary to television commercials, you can burn more than just song compilations. Make the most of this device by backing up your important data regularly. Most DVDs can hold 4.7 GB, or you can double the data with double layer DVDs (known as DVD DL) that can hold up to 8.5 GB!
• Take it Outside. To backup every last byte of data, add an external hard drive that operates independently of your computer. Products like Seagate's FreeAgent storage devices offer you a variety of options…as well as the ability to access your information even when you're not at home, so you can open a document or even view your family photos from out of town.
• Leave Home Without It. For the best level of protection, move data out of the house altogether. Storing your IT off-site protects it from fire, theft, and flooding. And it's not as expensive as you might think. In fact, you can get a ton of space free from services like Yahoo! and AOL. At that price, the only thing you have to lose is your data if you don't back it up!
• Once the Damage is Done. If you've already lost your data, you may actually be able to recover it…the cost, however, runs anywhere from the hundreds to the thousands.
• Don't wait until the worst-case scenario happens–act now to protect your important data files.

I have previously written about the benefits of adding multi-media to your blogs and web sites.  One of the first questions I hear from colleagues and consulting clients relates to the technology issues that arising from including audio and video.  I can certainly understand why a new or non-technical blogger or web site owner would be confused about how to record, edit and post audio and video.

The good news here is that the technology part about adding audio and video to your site is the easy part.  Coming up with compelling, relevant content can be a different story.  Both audio and video have their place.  I am going to start with audio because it is easier and if I was trying to learn about how to add multimedia, I would definitely start with audio.   Audio files are easier to produce and to edit.   You don't need to worry about background light or about whether your hair is combed.  You also don't need a director or to worry about video editing.  I'll talk about those things in a future post, but for now, I'd  like to focus on the "how to" of adding audio to your web site or blog.

Typical Audio Applications

When I add an audio file to my web site or blog, it takes the form of a monologue (me talking) or a discussion between myself and someone else.  If I am recording myself, I use a device called the Microtrack 24/96 by M-Audio.  This is a digital recording device that records to a compact flash card (the same type of card that you might use in your digital camera).   The Microtrack records .mp3 files, which is a compressed format usable for Internet applications.  This device works similar to a handheld dictation machine, but instead of recording to tape, it records to the compact flash card.

This M-Audio device is not cheap - it will cost you close to $500, but it does save a lot of time and effort.

Once you have recorded your post, you simply transfer the .mp3 file to your computer and upload it to your application.

When I want to record a conversation over the phone, I use a very handy device called the USB Phone recorder from usbRecorder.com.  This device, which retails for less than $200.  This device allows you to record both ends of a phone conversation and the recording is saved as a .wav file on your computer.   The recording control is in the form of software which appears on your computer screen.

As an aside, I recently had to re-install my USB Recorder and I ran into some trouble with the actual install.  The USBRecorder web site included an email address for support and I sent an email explaining my problem.  Within a few hours, a person named David emailed me back and walked me through the fix (it turns out that my USB Recorder, which I have had for a few years, was an older model and it did not work with the newer software.)  He directed me to the correct software and I was up and running in just a few minutes.   That level of customer service was impressive, especially for a customer like me who had purchased the device several years ago.

Editing Your Audio File

Once you have captured your audio file in either an .mp3 format or a .wav format, you may need to do a little editing.  There are a number of inexpensive editing programs out there.   I use Sony SoundForge, which is a full featured editing program.  There is a free program called Audacity that I have not used in a number of years, but I understand that it works well.  I am currently testing a low cost multimedia editing suite (which includes an audio editing application) from AVS Media.  Again, audio editing software has come down in price dramatically and a simple web search should  yield many choices.

Getting Your Audio File On-line

By far the easiest way to get your audio recording online is to use a third party host like FreeIQ.com.   As discussed in a previous post, you need only upload your audio file to FreeIQ and then wait for the FreeIQ system to generate a line of code that you can link to in your web site or blog post.  FreeIQ does the hosting at no cost to you.

If you want to host the audio yourself, most blogging platforms have plugins that would allow such activity.  A well known audio player for Wordpress is available online.  If you use Moveable Type or another blogging platform, I suspect that similar plug-ins are readily available.

If you decide to upload plug-ins and your own audio files, you will need a good FTP (file transfer protocol) program.  I use CuteFTP for this purpose.

While you can use FreeIQ to host audio for your web site, you may want a little more flexibility in terms of the appearance of the audio buttons.  I use Jay Jennings Sonic Memo program to add audio buttons to my web sites.  Click to take a look at how I use audio to create an audio FAQ page on one of my sites.

The technical side of manging audio on your web site or blog may be challenging at first, but once you have figured out the process, it is easy to repeat.  Hopefully some of the links and tools discussed above will help you in your efforts.

  [tags] audio recording for web sites, audio on blog, multimedia on web sites, multimedia on blogs, Sonic Memo, usbrecorder, freeIQ.com, editing audio [/tags]

I have long been a proponent of including audio and video in blog posts and on web sites. Although there are number of audio and video plug-ins for Wordpress and other blogging platforms, you must have some familiarity with programming to make these plug-ins work.

Here is a better solution. Noted search engine expert and Internet entrapreneur Brad Fallon has developed a service called FreeIQ. Brad sees FreeIQ as the "YouTube for business." Like YouTube, FreeIQ offers an extremely easy interface whereby you can upload audio and video files. You can even mail in a cassette tape, video tape or disk and the FreeIQ staff will upload your content to your FreeIQ page. You can join FreeIQ for free.   FreeIQ storage is free and all you need to do is post a link to your blog and you'll get a player just like the one here.

What you see below is a live example of the audio application. I'll post a video shortly. Again, the audio and video files are hosted on the FreeIQ system at no charge to you. If you want an easy way to get your audio and video on the web, you should definitely check out this resource.