Setting Up Your Website – Choosing A Host

I highly, highly, highly recommend that you set up your site at WordPress.com (“WP.com”).  This is a completely free website platform, and the functionality you get for the price is not to be believed.  I have four sites set up on WP.com:  PluggedInLawyer.com, AttorneysOnTheMove.com, TracyTC.com (my personal site) and TracyThrowerConyers.com (my resume site).

WP.com sites allow you to do almost anything you can do on other sites where you pay somebody to host the site, with the exception being that you can’t set up your WP.com sites to make money (ie, you can’t include pay-per-click advertising).  This makes them perfect for resume sites.

Another beautiful thing about WP.com is that the founders treat the platform as a labor of love and “giving back.”  They are on a mission to bring web publishing to the masses and have added all kinds of functionality in an easy to use way that we used to have to pay expensive programmers to create not that many years ago.

The instructions below assume that you are using WP.com.

Setting Up Your Website – The Backend

Let me start by saying the guys at WP.com have made website creation braindead simple.  I figured it out and you can, too.  It’s almost as simple as using wordprocessing software.

A long laundry list of helpful training videos for setting up WP.com sites is outlined in WordPress Sites So Easy That Even A Lawyer Can Set Them Up.

Whatever else you do, do not stress over design.  Start with one theme to work with to get your content up and running.  Then WP.com has 150 other designs that you can “try on” with the preview button on the themes page, once you have content to better help you visualize the right look for your resume.

I created my resume site using the Manifest theme.  I liked it because it’s very clean and keeps the visitor focused on the information I want them focused on.  Other themes that you can start with are Comet, Structure, Grid Focus, Rusty Grunge, Quintus, Piano Black, Pilcrow, Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven.  All of these themes are clean and elegant for lawyer resumes.

In addition to the laundry list of training videos referenced above, let me say a couple of words about settings in the backend that will have you up and running with a resume site in a matter of hours.

On the General Settings page, definitely upload a “Blog Picture/Icon.”  Ideally this is a version of your professional headshot that you upload on your welcome page.  This photo appears in lots of cool places, including the internet browser tab.

The site title should be your professional name.  You can play around with potential taglines.  Not all theme designs support a tagline.

Be sure and set up the Sharing Settings.  These settings allow visitors to print pages on your site, email pages and share pages through their networks.  Make it easy for somebody to recommend you.

These are the most important settings for our simple resume site.

Setting Up Your Website – Pages

As you can see from my resume site, I set up five pages – a welcome page, a CV page, a personal page, a writing samples page and a contact me page.  Actually you can’t tell as a casual observer, but I set up the welcome page and chose to have that page as my “static home page.”

Set up your own welcome page and define it as the static front page display under the Reading Settings (on the menu at the left, toward the bottom).  The page has to be set up before you can elect to make it your “static front page.”

I highly recommend that you include a photo on your welcome page.  The web is less formal than typical written lawyer resumes.  Website visitors connect with photos and appreciate that they aren’t looking at a page full of text.  Make sure your photo is professional.

Also in keeping with the less formal nature of the web, I chose to add a personal page.  I didn’t put much on this page, and a visitor doesn’t have to click on that page, if s/he isn’t interested.

Regarding your writing samples, if you want to keep these private for any reason, you have the ability to set up any page as a password-protected page.  On the page where you draft your content for that page, there is a “visibility” option in the upper right-hand area (near the “publish” button).  You can choose the password-protected visibility option.

You can also put up a school transcripts page and keep it password-protected, also.  I didn’t add this to my site because I don’t get many people asking for my transcripts since I stopped practicing law.

I also put up a contact page.  I’m leery about posting my personal contact information on the web, so I am using a web contact form.  Submissions through the form come right to my email inbox and my email address is not shared with people I don’t know.

To set up this contact form, open a “New Page,” give your page a title (“Contact Me”) and then beneath the title box and the permalink address, you’ll find a row of icons next to the words “upload/insert.”  Click on the last icon (“custom form”).  The form builder is very straightforward.

Take a second and click on the “email notifications” tab at the top of the formbuilder.  There you can define the subject line for the form submissions when they come to your email inbox.  Be sure and define something that will catch your eye.  You wouldn’t want to miss a message from somebody about your resume. 

On your CV page, simply paste your written resume there.  Preview the page to make sure you didn’t bring over any funky formatting.  I clipboarded my resume from LinkedIn and it looked fine with a little formatting clean-up.

So there you go.  In Part 1 we talked about the benefits of having a digital resume.  In Part 2 we talked about picking an appropriate domain name and setting up email branded to that domain name.  Today you get the critical settings on the backend that will have you patting yourself on the back as a newly minted webmaster in no time.

Tomorrow?  Attaching your domain name to your new site and other bonus tips for leveraging your new site in Digital Resumes For Lawyers — The “How To” Part 4.

Picking a Domain Name

The first step in setting up any website that supports your digital reputation branding strategy, including a digital website dedicated to your resume, is picking and registering a domain name.

I highly recommend Go Daddy for domain name registration.  Go Daddy is a rock solid vendor (not all in the web game are) and their administrative interface is pretty intuitive.  Most importantly, they have excellent – and patient – support staff.

I also recommend that you set up your email accounts with Go Daddy or Google Apps for Business.

For any attorney embarking on a campaign to build and grow a professional reputation on the web, you must, must, must register your professional name as a dot com domain name.  Why?  At a minimum, you need it under your control for future use.  Optimally, you will start using the name now to initiate the “seasoning” process that we discussed in Part 1 of this series.

If your digital resume is the first site you’re putting up in your digital empire, use your professional name domain for this project.  Later, you can condense the resume portion down to one “about” page and start adding more reputation-building content to the site.

I own www.tracythrowerconyers.com and am currently using it for my resume site.  I also own www.tracytc.com, which I use for more casual projects (a personal blog).

What if your personal name isn’t available to register?  Google your name and find out who else is using your same name and what they are doing with it.  If you have a common name or somebody else coincidentally happens to have your same name, you’re going to have to take extra steps to set yourself apart on the web so your intended audience doesn’t confuse you with that “other” person in search engine queries.

If you’re already using your professional name yourself for another web project, register your name with “digital resume” added.  This domain name will display favorably in the search engines when people search for your name and want to see your professional qualifications.

As alternative domain names, consider something with “esq” or “attorney” on the end.  You definitely want the .com version of your chosen name and you want the name to make sense to your audience.  Skip the .net’s and .info’s and, for the most part, skip the cutesy new .me’s and other similar vanity extensions.  Dot com is still the web standard and the web address that most visitors expect to see.  Contact me, if you want help choosing an alternative name.

Do not choose personal nicknames as part of your domain name, if your professional audience doesn’t know you by that nickname.  Conversely, don’t use a formal name, if your audience only knows your by your nickname and you don’t intend to “re-brand” yourself to that formal name.

Setting Up Email Branded To Your Domain Name

Once you register your domain name, set up an email address that is firstname@yourdomainname.com.  This is going to be your professional networking and reputation building email of choice, and you’ll look way more pulled together than the gmail attorneys out there (don’t even get me started on the Yahoo! and Hotmail attorneys).

Again, the support team at Go Daddy is very helpful and can help you set up your email address.  It’s a little more complicated when you are keeping email with Go Daddy and pointing the domain name to another host, which is what I’m going to recommend later in this series of posts, so get the support team at Go Daddy involved.

Up next, choosing a host for your digital resume website in Digital Resumes For Lawyers — The “How To” Part 3.

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Some of the links in this post are affiliate links and some are not.  All recommendations are for resources that I use and proudly recommend.

Whether you are a new attorney just starting to look for a job or whether you’re a seasoned pro getting ready to launch an all out campaign to raise your digital profile, you need a website with your marketing name on it as your base camp.

If you’re job hunting, this site is the perfect place to plant your resume.  I describe all the “how to” steps here.

Later, you can consolidate the pages you created for your resume site to one “about” page, and start building up your digital content with the rest of your site.

Why set up a site dedicated to a resume only?  A couple of reasons come immediately to mind.

First, you need to acquire a domain name with your professional name now, while it’s available, and start “seasoning” the name.  “Seasoning” is using the name in connection with content related to the domain name over a period of time to signal to the search engines that you’re not putting up a fly by night spam site.  Think “fine wine.”

Later, when you want to start building your professional online reputation as a thought leader, the search engines will already “trust” your site because it’s been around for a period of time with content that makes sense with the domain name.

Second, it is much easier to share your resume through social networking web platforms if you have a link, rather than a pdf of your usual written resume.

So, how do you get started?  That is up next in Digital Resumes For Lawyers — The “How To” Part 2.

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

You type in your search term(s), view initial results to see if the information is what you had in mind, and then save your search and pick how often you want new information emailed to you.

You can get the alerts sent as soon as the information hits Google’s search engine database, once a day or once a week.  Depending on the nature of the information, you might have different queries sent to you with different frequencies.

For instance, I have an alert set up for my professional name and if I’m mentioned on the web, I want to know “as it happens.”  Alerts set for content creation ideas probably don’t need to land in my inbox more than once a day or once a week.

Here are six ideas for using these alerts to build your law practice:

1.  Retaining and managing existing clients

Nothing keeps your practice humming like cementing existing client relationships.  Set up alerts to follow news for your biggest clients.  Congratulate them on reported accomplishments or reach out if you see issues on the horizon.  Also consider following their biggest competitor so you’re ready if an issue or opportunity arises with your client due to the actions of a competitor.

2.  Nurture potential client relationships

Set up the same alerts for potential clients and reach out when new developments in the news make it appropriate.  Find out about developments before they hit the traditional media outlets.

3.  Content marketing research

Lawyers should be on the constant lookout for ways to demonstrate their expertise in writing — articles, blog posts, client newsletters, in addition to content created for other distribution channels like podcasting and video distribution.  Source content ideas by setting up alerts for topic keywords relevant to your practice area.  When you see a topic of interest to your clients and potential clients getting traction in the alerts, you know it’s a popular enough topic to invest your time in presenting to your audience.

4.  Syndication tracking

As mentioned above, lawyers should be constantly distributing content that demonstrates subject matter expertise.  Keep track of where your digitally distributed content is getting mentioned by setting up alerts for your titles.

5.  Brand monitoring

Make sure you’re monitoring your own name with Google Alerts, and any other names that can impact your personal brand, such as your partners’ names and your firm name.

6.  Practice niche research

In addition to setting up alerts related to your practice niche for content creation, look for other factors that impact your practice area, such as competitors in your niche, and watch what they’re up to through Google Alerts.

Cool bonus tip

If you’re on Google+, you can set up your alerts through the Sparks functionality.  The alerts don’t come to your email box, but if you’re spending any amount of time on G+ (it’s always open on my computer), you can start to use Sparks like an RSS feedreader (that is, a destination to read your news).  And if you’re on G+, come find me.

Conclusion

These are just a few ways you might use Google Alerts to “listen” in on the web for information critical to growing your practice.  How else might lawyers use this free tool?  Leave your idea in the comments.

In Part 1 of this series, we covered reasons why digital reputation is becoming increasingly important for attorney job seekers and I advocated the AIM Model for growing a targeted online reputation.  In Part 2 of this series, we discussed “assessment” strategies under the model and in Part 3 we discussed “influencing” your reputation under AIM.  Today, we talk about monitoring and maintaining the online reputation that you’ve worked so hard to establish.

Don’t Forget To Monitor & Maintain

If you do nothing else but read this series of posts, please pay attention to this next piece of advice.  Even if you do everything described in the series, please likewise pay heed.

Set up Google Alerts for your name!

Setting up these alerts allows you to receive email notifications advising if your name is referenced on the web in the future.  Personally, I have these set up for myself, my husband and my young daughter, as well as my employer and everybody else whose web fortunes can impact my personal reputation.

If anybody so much as whispers about you on the web, you want to know about it.  If something nice is being said, go say “thank you.”  If something less flattering is being said, take appropriate curative steps.

Set these alerts up for all possible variations of your name, including maiden names.  Have the alerts sent to an email address that you check regularly.

Besides setting up the alerts to monitor your name, there are also maintenance steps to implement in building your rep.  Calendar a quarterly reminder to tour your online digital assets to assess whether they still accurately reflect your marketing message and target audience, and make changes accordingly.

Good Luck & Get Started

Following the steps outlined in this series of blog posts will get you off to a great start in affirmatively building your digital reputation, and put you miles ahead of many of your fellow new lawyers.  There are big changes afoot in the legal industry and digital marketing savvy has never been more important.  Jump in now with both feet!

“See” you on the web!

To see Part 3 of this series, click this link

To see Part 2 of this series, click this link

To see Part 1 of this series, click this link

In Part 1 of this series, we covered reasons why digital reputation is becoming increasingly important for attorney job seekers and I advocated the AIM Model for growing a targeted online reputation.  In Part 2 of this series, we discussed “assessment” strategies under the model and today we discuss “influencing” your reputation under AIM.

Influencing Your Digital Reputation

You will never own your own digital reputation!  You can only influence it.

Read those last two sentences three more times.  They are that important.

What do I mean by “own” a reputation?  Just as with offline life, outsiders can come along and hurt (or help) your digital reputation.  A spiteful ex-girlfriend or any other random person can digitally post negative information about you (or somebody with a name like you) and it can turn up under a search for your name in the search engines.

So how do we control what we can control (aka “influence”)?  By acquiring as much digital real estate as possible where we can put up our desired (focused) message.

Each little acre of digital real estate you acquire on a different platform gives you the ability to snag one spot in the list of results that come up when somebody searches your name in the search engines (“Search Engine Results Pages” or “SERPs”).

To see an example of this, google my name “Tracy Thrower Conyers” and you’ll see my name in connection with a slew of different little digital “houses” – some that I control and many that I don’t.

What digital real estate do I recommend for lawyers just starting their professional careers?

At a minimum, I highly recommend that you register a .com domain name related to your professional marketing name.  If you do nothing else with this domain name other than register it, you’ll have at least locked it up for later expansion of your digital empire.  You should also set up an email address attached to this domain name for your professional marketing.

For tips and more information on choosing and registering domain names for your digital empire, and setting up email accounts branded to your domain names, see Domain Name Branding For Lawyers.

Next, set up a couple of profile pages on prominent social networking sites.  You don’t “own” this digital real estate (unlike having your own website where you “own” the site), but you do control the message you contribute.

For creating profiles that rank well in the SERPs, I recommend Google Profiles/Google Plus, LinkedIn and About.me.

As an aside, About.me, is one of my new favorites.  Not only is it a place where I can aggregate links to my other digital real estate, About.me also partners with a printing company called Moo. com.  With just a few clicks, you can get free business cards (you pay shipping) with your contact information and a printed QR Code so that smartphones with bar reader apps can read your code and take their owners directly to your About.me profile page with all that great information about you and links to your other digital assets.

And yes, new lawyer, you definitely need business cards as a job seeker.  Hand them out everywhere.

When setting up your profiles, make liberal use of your “keywords” discussed above.  Equally important, don’t add any information to your profiles that doesn’t support (or worse, contradicts) your concise (focused) marketing statement.

Let’s say, for example, that Jane Doe is a marathon runner.  Should she include that in her profiles?  If her target audience (the firms she wants to work for) can appreciate the discipline and dedication that go into marathon training, then she should add it.

On the other hand, if her target audience is more apt to interpret this activity as something that will prevent her from working 80 hours a week – and work weeks like that are prized by the firm – she better keep that activity to herself.  Analyze every piece of information you add to your profiles in a similar manner (i.e., with your target audience in mind).

Why do I recommend the particular profile sites above?  All of them rank well in the search engines and will help push your name to the top of the SERPs when somebody searches your name.  LinkedIn has the added importance of being the platform where most social recruiting takes place at this point in time.

If you want to put your digital reputation on steroids, I advise using the domain name you registered to create a social media resume.  For more information on building social media resumes for lawyers, see Digital Resumes For Lawyers.

What about all your hard work building and influencing your digital reputation after you land the job you’re seeking?  Your efforts now are a smart investment in your future.  Your keywords might change as you evolve your focus to demonstrating thought leadership and start marketing to potential clients, but the formula remains the same – laser focus on your name and mindfully chosen keywords for a well-defined audience.

Summarizing Influence

If you’ve followed my advice to this point, you’ve defined your digital reputation goals, you’ve assessed your “today” picture and you’ve started to influence your existing reputation.  It won’t take long before you can google your name and start to see the seeds of your chosen digital reputation taking root.  And because you’ve been so diligent in your use of keywords, you’ll see a consistent message presented.

As time goes by, you’ll want to add more and more digital content to the web aligned with your evolving marketing statement and audience.  You’ll start writing articles, blogging, micro-blogging, joining social conversations and otherwise developing your role as a thought leader in your niche.

This might sounds like a lot of work, but this is occurring over the course of your entire career.

Besides, it’s kind of fun to be master of your own message. 

Tomorrow, monitoring and maintaining the online reputation that you’ve worked so hard to establish.

To see Part 2 of this series, click this link

To see Part 1 of this series, click this link

In Part 1 of this series, we covered reasons why digital reputation is becoming increasingly important for attorney job seekers and I advocated the AIM Model for growing a targeted online reputation.  Today, we discuss “assessment” strategies under that model.

Assessing Your Digital Reputation

The first assessment step is defining your endgame.  Who is your audience and what do you want them to know?  In the case of junior attorneys looking for jobs, the audience is who you see yourself working for, whether that’s a small firm, large firm, in-house law department, non-profit entity, governmental agency or the like.

What do you want your audience to know?  You want them to know that you’re a new, ambitious, hardworking attorney with x, y and z special talents.  As you work to define your audience, what that audience is looking for (based on research, not wishful thinking), and what you offer that is attractive to your audience, you are developing your “marketing statement.”

The idea of “marketing” might be a foreign concept to junior lawyers, but trust me as a longtime attorney and legal recruiter when I tell you that marketing and mindful self-promotion are skills critical to your ultimate success as an attorney.  At some point, law schools will wake up and start teaching these concepts.

In the perfect world, you’ll be able to articulate your marketing message in one or two sentences, commonly referred to as an “elevator pitch.”  If you haven’t heard this expression before, it refers to having the length of time it takes to ride an elevator to introduce yourself to somebody important to you, including your value proposition (i.e., what makes you valuable to your audience).

Here is an example:  “My name is Jane Doe, and I’m a recent UCLA law school grad interested in using my background as a software engineer to join a small, busy IP practice.”

What does this say about Jane and her value proposition?  It says that she is disciplined enough to get into and obtain a law degree from a highly respected law school, and that she has special skills that IP attorneys desire in associates.

Her “key” words are “Jane Doe” (because Jane is marketing herself as the “product”), “UCLA law school grad” (descriptive of Jane and particularly important if she is addressing a fellow member of that community or another audience that values UCLA’s law school), “software engineer” (because this is a valuable skill set to IP practitioners) and “small, busy IP practice” (members of this audience are Jane’s primary targets for her message).

Write your own pitch down and circle words that are “key” to your pitch.  If what you articulate doesn’t seem quite right, don’t worry about it.  “Sit” with it for a few days and try again.  Try to keep your finished product very simple and, whatever you do, don’t let striving for perfection prevent you from moving forward.

The reason for articulating a marketing message and identifying key words or “keywords” will become clearer when we discuss the “Influence” aspect of the AIM Model, but this part of the process is critical for focused marketing.  The less focused your marketing, the more effort you have to put out to obtain a similar result.  “Focused and efficient” should be your marketing mantra.

The second step in assessing your digital reputation is to get a snapshot of your “today” footprint.  Do this by putting different variations of your name in quotation marks into one or two of the search engines.   At a minimum, use Google.  To be extra conservative, try Bing and Yahoo! as well.

What do you see?  Nothing?  That’s easy to address.  Unflattering photos?  That’s usually easy to fix.  Somebody with a similar name?  That might require a more aggressive strategy to distinguish yourself from that person, but it can be done without too much heavy lifting.  The goal is to influence and develop whatever you see into something that supports your focused marketing message.

Now that we’ve defined our endgame and reviewed our “today” picture of our online digital footprint, we turn out attention to the “Influence” portion of the AIM Model.  Tomorrow, we look at simple strategies to grow and influence your online reputation.

To see Part 3 of this series, click this link

To see Part 1 of this series, click this link

There is no question that Web 2.0, with its inexpensive tools and exponential reach has changed much of the way business is conducted these days.  Recruiting is no exception.

Today’s graduating law students may not even remember Web 1.0, but in early web days, web information was a one-way flow of information that website owners published, and then sat back and hoped visitors would find.

The next iteration of the web – “Web 2.0” – was much more interactive, and invited conversation and development of community.  Early sites like MySpace (known as a gathering place for entertainment-minded people) and Facebook (known as a gathering place for friends and family to have digital conversations and share photos) contributed to the social revolution.

Flash forward to today and “social media” is ubiquitous.  Recruiting is a natural context for encouraging inexpensive social conversation – hiring entities can showcase their companies and advertise their jobs.  Employee candidates can shop opportunities in great detail.

Lawyers and law firms, with their heavy emphasis on historic precedent and conservative natures, have been slower to adopt social recruiting to the same extent as their corporate cousins, but they are increasingly making their way to the social media party.

What does this mean for attorney job seekers?  It means that you must, must, must (did I mention “must?”) pay attention to your digital footprint and take affirmative steps to grow and manage that footprint.  Employers are either looking for you, or where they already know you, they are checking you out with a “social media background check” prior to extending an offer.

Taking Aim

Some of us already have a footprint that we’re either unaware of or ignoring.  Take the case of Justin P. (not his real name), a late 20-something patent agent that I presented to an AmLaw 30 firm.

I hadn’t yet started digitally vetting candidates at the time, but when I put his name and email address into my Google contacts list, Google diligently fetched a matching profile picture for me from the web.  I’d never seen the system do this, and I nearly fell out of my chair when the contact record auto-populated with a photo of a shirtless guy waiving a beer.  Amusing picture, but surely not one that my stuffy AmLaw 30 client was going to like.

When I mentioned the photo, Justin immediately knew the one and sheepishly told me he’d “forgotten” of its existence.  That photo would likely have surfaced during a later social media back-ground check.

Jobs are hard enough to come by these days with-out putting yourself through the whole process on a particular job, and then finding yourself rejected because a past indiscretion surfaces on the web.

What if you know for a fact that you spent the first 25 years of your life in the library and there can’t possibly be a digital skeleton in your closet?  Do you need to pay attention to the advice in this article?  Let’s just say this – if the job comes down to two equal candidates, and one has demonstrated marketing savvy by building a positive digital footprint, the job goes to the marketer.

Why?  At the end of the day, law is still a business and lawyers are starting to recognize the importance of web marketing savvy in client acquisition and retention.  If two candidates are equal or “equal-ish,” online marketing savvy and experience are premium tools for you to bring to the party.

Is digital reputation building expensive or time consuming?  It is definitely not expensive and it’s scaleable, meaning that you can start small and grow your reputation over time by adding more tools and strategies.  Junior attorneys already have written resumes and that’s half the battle in starting the process.

Where to start with building your digital reputation?  I advocate the “AIM Model” for digital reputations – Assess, Influence & Monitor.  Tomorrow, we dive into Assessment strategies.