Totally Plugged In For Under $35

Social media is cheap, and therein lies the biggest reason to jump in.  Not because it won’t cost you much, but because the lack of a cost barrier will have everybody jumping in.  Jump in now while you can still be in the forefront.

How cheap is cheap?  Look around this site.  Everything you see here on PluggedInLawyer.com cost less than $35 in out-of-pocket costs — $10.69 for the domain name, $9.97 to map the domain name to my free wordpress site and $9.65 for the project binder to organize my thoughts.  I’d probably even skip the binder next time in favor of creating an online wiki.

Okay, the Starbucks lattes (known in my world as “liquid ambition”) will cost you extra.

Is the design of this site too simple for you?  Get used to it.  In the web 2.0 world, sites are all about functionality and not glitz.  Users want information, not pretty pictures.  As you get more acquainted with effective web 2.0 products, you’ll come to learn that this site is actually pretty elegant in its simplicity.

What about the cost of my time?  I won’t get cute and tell you that I threw this all up over a weekend, but it doesn’t have to take a lot more time than that.  Using my Social Media Roadmap, your task is considerably easier than mine as the original bush-whacking trailblazer who created the map.  How easy?  Check out WordPress Sites So Easy That Even A Lawyer Can Set Them Up, and find out.

Another beautiful thing about social media is that it is scalable.  You could easily put the bones of an effective social media strategy in place over a weekend, and you’ll be light years ahead of most of the lawyer pack.  With a little more effort, you can easily set yourself apart as the authority in your niche.

By the way, although I’ve been playing in the web world for seven years, I am definitely not a programmer or web designer.  That’s just a testament to how far web tools have advanced.  When I was involved in online marketing in the real estate space, we had a whole team of programmers to produce websites.  Today’s websites are little more than web-based word processors to which you apply a simple design skin.  Pretty nifty, if you ask this geek.

Go ahead, get social!  It won’t hurt a bit, I promise!  Get started now.