Best of the Week for December 22, 2013

Happy Holidays everyone.  Every week I like to take a couple minutes and post some of the more relevant and informative articles and blog posts that I came across this week.  I’m looking for articles that deal specifically with legal marketing, or are related to running and marketing a small business.  (If you didn’t already know, I’m a big fan of stealing ideas from non-lawyers in how to market a small business).  I cam across eight articles worth sharing this week.  Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Pick Three by Seth Godin.  I love Seth and here is a another great idea that you can use this holiday season.
2. Confirmed: Google Reduces Authorship Rich Snippets in Search Results, by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land. Apparently, Google is on the move again – changing the way it handles the authorship tag.  A must read.
3. Facebook business pages: Why your results just nosedived, by Jim Connolly of Jim’s Marketing Blog.  I was starting to wonder why I would post to my business page that has close to 100 likes, and only two readers would see the post… Now I know.  If you market on Facebook, or are thinking about marketing on Facebook, you need to read this.
4. 10 Cool things I can’t live without, by Lee Rosen of Divorce Discourse.  Lee is a good friend of mine, seeing as we both run a divorce law firm in Wake County, North Carolina.  Since I know Lee, I can honestly say there are a lot of cool gadgets that Lee has that most of the modern world can live without.  However, he left those items off this list.  Most of these resources are free and very helpful to someone starting a law firm.  (I credit this post with getting me to switch from Digg Reader to Feedly – Thank you Lee for that one tip alone!)
5. 5 Things I wish you would learn about computers, by Sam Glover at Lawyerist.com.  Sam has a decidedly snarky tone about him when he writes, but if you can get past that, he provides some great articles.  This is another one of them.  If you are a solo or just starting out on your own, you won’t have a tech guy to fix everything that goes wrong with your computer.  It’s on you.  So get started learning how to use your laptop now (and I recommend going with the Mac – there is plenty of software that is compatible with a Mac these days…)
6. Year in Review: Legal Cloud Computing in 2013 by Larry Port, published on Attorney at Work.  Larry runs Rocket Matter, my former case management program, and uses this post to outline the updates to cloud computing in the past year.  Conspicuously absent is MyCase, which has made tremendous strides in cloud computing.  Read with a grain of salt.
7. I hated this headline, so why did it work? by Jerod Morris at Copyblogger.  Writing a good headline can make a huge difference in how many people read your blog or law firm website.  Here’s another great article from copyblogger on how to do that with a classic headline from Volkswagen.
8. What can lawyers learn from a 72 year old beginning blogger? by Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

That’s it for this week. I hope that you and your family have a wonderful holiday.