Over the past year, I have switched all of my websites to the Genesis framework by StudioPress.  Genesis allows quick and easy development of WordPress-based websites.  Even people with no coding skills can get a professional design up and running.  There are many hooks and other advanced options built into the framework, making customization easy for novice coders. And with automatic updates, websites built on the Genesis framework are very low-maintenance.

Genesis uses the latest code standards and a very SEO-friendly architecture, making it easy for search engines to find and categorize your content.  It is configured for SEO right out of the box, but allows more advanced users to tweak the SEO options.  This makes it a great choice for both beginner and advanced SEOs.

But the biggest benefit I get from using Genesis is access to the ever-expanding catalog of turn-key designs by StudioPress.  These designs come in the form of child themes that can easily be added to the Genesis framework from within WordPress with just a few mouse clicks.  When you sign up for the StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package (affiliate link), you get unlimited lifetime access to both the existing designs and the yet-to-be-developed themes that are constantly being added to the catalog.

In other words, when you sign up for the Pro Plus Package, you pay once.  Period.  This gives you unlimited support, unlimited updates, and unlimited websites. The price doesn’t go up with future price increases or when new themes are added.  This allows you to develop any number of sites using StudioPress themes.  When it’s time to update your site design, just pick a different theme.

StudioPress is raising it’s price on the Pro Plus All-Theme Package on January 31 (the current price is $299.00).  For a limited time, StudioPress is offering a ten-percent discount for purchasers who want to buy before the price increase.  To take advantage of the discount, purchase the StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package and use the discount code TEN at checkout.

If you’ve been thinking about developing a website or blog or moving to a more professional or SEO-friendly design, now’s your chance. And since I will set up your site for free using the StudioPress theme of your choice, you really don’t have an excuse. Take advantage of the promotion while it’s here.

This first post will reach an audience of one: me.  But for posterity, let me share a little about my background.

I fell into SEO in the early 2000s while moonlighting for a small family business as I finished by law degree.  We were looking for ways to wean the business off of paid leads.  My job was to learn how to generate our own leads using our own website.  This was before the blogging boom, so my resources were limited to online articles what I could find at the bookstore.  After doing a bit of research, I built a hideous website with Microsoft Frontpage.  I then read Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (at the time, the only book at Barnes & Noble on the topic) and applied what I learned.  Within several months, we outranked all of our lead generation sources and were completely self-sustaining.  (If only it were still so easy!)

This first brush with SEO taught me that success in internet marketing was achievable and that small businesses can leverage SEO to compete with much larger competitors. When I decided to start my own law firm several years later, I built the firm around what is now called inbound marketing (the buzzword hadn’t been coined yet).  My little one-man-firm website did pretty well.  I quickly outranked my local competitors, including those who had outsourced their law firm SEO to some of the big players in the industry.  After several months of concentrated SEO, my site had outgrown my geographic area, outranking many national websites for competitive keywords.

Of course, high rankings are only half of the equation.  To succeed, I needed to convert my visitors into paying clients.  After a bit of trial and error, I finally decided to spend time learning the basic principles of conversion rate optimization (CRO).  This science-based approach gave me a framework to further refine my internet marketing strategy.  It also taught me the most important lesson about using a firm website for lead generation:  the success of a law firm website cannot be measured by aesthetics or even by traffic, but only by how successful the site is in leading visitors to take specific actions.

Although my site did well, I was spending more time on internet marketing than I was practicing law.  Recognizing that I couldn’t be both a full-time SEO and a full-time lawyer, I looked for ways to outsource my internet marketing.  My first attempts at outsourcing taught me two things:

1. The vast majority of so-called SEO consultants prey on attorneys’ ignorance. The current SEO marketplace is overcrowded with clueless shysters who overcharge for outdated SEO tactics.  Offers abound for social bookmarking, forum spam, junk links from unrelated websites.  Very few SEOs that I spoke with knew how to rank a site in a competitive niche or to convert the traffic to paying clients.  There is no telling how much money I would have thrown away if I didn’t already have an SEO background.
2. The best SEO consultants are either doing SEO for their own sites or are too expensive for most law firms.   SEO is time-consuming, big money is involved, and the sharpest talent gravitates toward the highest fees.  The best consultants are either in-house or outside the budget of most small and medium law firms. 

My goal for this blog is to fill this gap for small and medium-sized law firms.  My experience has proven that the web is a great leveler among firms.  A smaller firm with a focused niche can outdo much larger firms with more resources.  It all comes down to knowing how to drive traffic (SEO) and convert that traffic into paying clients (CRO).

I hope to keep this blog authentic, transparent, and, above all, practical.  After spending a few months toward the end of 2011 getting the technical stuff in place and stockpiling a few posts, I’m ready to get started.  My goal for 2012 is to publish at least twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Feel free to subscribe to my feed and make use of the comments.