If you're an attorney using WordPress for your website or blog, which by the way, I recommend, you will need to consider which plugins make sense for you. At the time of posting, the WordPress Plugin directory holds 15,481 PLUGINS which, while providing extensive additional functionality to wordpress, can also be very overwhelming. Here are just a handful of plugins for wordpress that I usually recommend to attorneys.
If you use wordpress, Joost de Valk is a name with which you should quickly become familiar. Joost, or Yoast, provides awesome information and a variety of plugins for tweaking wordpress. Further, if there's plugin functionality that you want and can't find, Yoast might be your man for custom wordpress plugin development. I personally recommend trying:
Translating your offline professional reputation on the web is really what Internet for attorneys is all about. As the web evolves to embrace HTML 5 and rich web content, online author-lawyers will have additional opportunities for competitive advantages. One of these is implementing authorship markup on sites for which you contribute content.
By default, the current version of wordpress (Version 3.2.1) strips HTML elements from the user profile. Weasel's HTML Bios plugin:
simply stops wordpress from stripping HTML from the User Bio field. This is handy for anybody that actually uses those User Bios.
Which allows authors to user their wordpress user profile for authorship markup.
Sharebar
Whether your blog has success online will ultimately come down to the quality of the content you publish and how/if it is consumed, linked to, and shared. Social sharing plugins like sharebar provide you with a quick and easy way to implement sharing tools on your posts.
Sharebar preset with the major sharing networks and also allows you to add additional networks and custom buttons. What I like about sharebar the most is that it travels down the side of your posts as your visitors scroll down. This works as a friendly reminder to readers as they read your content.
WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin
The WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin:
This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url.
This is another plugin that will help connect and engage your blog visitors with your social communities.
Generally speaking, you don't want to go plugin install crazy. Some plugins can do things to your website that slow it down or negatively impact user experience in a variety of ways. Also, always be sure to back up your database before testing any new plugin. Some unstable plugins or version incompatibility issues can crash your database rendering it unreadable. In fact, whether you're installing a new plugin or not, you should schedule regular backups of your wordpress database and site files. And you guessed it, there are a variety of plugins for backups too.
Ok, so what plugins have I missed?
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
We developed a plugin. Its not free, but it is essentially a client login area that stores all of the clients information. ' Client Intake Plugin. ' Robust, easy to use and install.
A directory is always a popular one for attorneys. We build at least 2 a month customized for attorneys in thier local areas. This builds not only SEO, but a lot of traffic.
We tend to use DirectoryPress a lot. ( http://directorypress.net )
http://Mailchimp.com , for email marketing, you can't beat them, you get 2000 members for free
Gravity Forms, integrates in all kinds of ways, including submitting custom post types.