Just How can a Virtual Assistant help A Construction Attorney Get More Clients?

This week, Musings welcomes Michelle Mangen to the Guest Post Friday fold.  Michelle’s vast talents and expert skills in accounting, bookkeeping and Excel, far exceed the average virtual assistant’s scope of knowledge; thereby further enhancing not only her back-end office, but those of her clients.   Extending administrative and other remote admin services to her global client base, Michelle creates personalized virtual assistant solutions for each and every client, ensuring 100% customer satisfaction, loyalty and professionalism.

Her core services are: Social Media Management: (Facebook Fan Pages, Social Bookmarking , Twitter, etc.),  Aweber, WordPress site management, Bookkeeping and Excel spreadsheets. Additionally she offers administrative services as well.  You can reach Michelle at www.TheVirtualAsst.com or follow her on Twitter at @mmangen.

Larger law firms have the resources at their disposal to place expensive TV ads or billboards along the highway to garner new clients and to establish their brand. Smaller law firms could gain a competitive edge on these larger firms by taking advantage of many of the tools and resources (many free) that would enable them to dominate local search results through the use of Social Media.

By utilizing your own website as your content hub many of the following ideas could be implemented at little or no cost:

• Blogging – this alone has innumerable benefits to your marketing campaign
• Creating whitepapers and allowing other attorneys to use the content in a cobrand situation
• Hosting a weekly or bi-weekly Q&A session around a specific topic and publishing to your website as a podcast
• Submitting their practices to the many local search engine profiles (Google Local, Bing, Yahoo!, Superpages, etc.)
• Participating within LinkedIn groups and the Questions & Answers area
• While your gut reaction may be to avoid Facebook it’s currently the fastest growing website with the greatest increase in the 55+ and older category
• Twitter
• Becoming a volunteer at AllExpert.com (January 2010 had over 5.3 million unique visitors to the site according to Compete.com)
• Submitting articles (or re-purposing blog posts) at sites like Ezine and GoArticles
• Online press releases to sites such as PitchEngine and PRWeb

So how does an overworked attorney maximize all of these areas? One of the easiest and most effective ways would be by partnering with a Virtual Assistant who is familiar with and practices Social Media for their own business.

Here are just some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

• Have a virtual assistant do the necessary research for references you would like to include on your blog (landmark cases, etc.)
• Find free stock photos that can be included in your blog posts
• Proof and / or edit posts before they go live
• Schedule your blog posts and depending on your website platform install plugins that allow for your blog posts to be spread automatically to various platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn)
• Submit previous instructional blog posts to article directories
• Set up and maintain all local search engine profiles
• Submit press releases announcing new hires, won cases, etc.
• Schedule podcast sessions and upload to website after the event
• Prepare and send out monthly newsletters

Aside from the ideas mentioned above there are many more ways a Virtual Assistant could assist an attorney or small law firm to gain new clients at a cost that is minimal in comparison to pricey yellow page advertisements.

At this point you may be asking how to find a good social media virtual assistant. I’d first suggest asking your network if any work with one. If that yields no results then you can turn to Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Once you find a virtual assistant who you feel may be suitable check out their website to see the if they have their own blog and monthly newsletter.

By just doing those few steps you will quickly narrow down the list of potential Virtual Assistants who may be able to help your firm grow its online presence.

One last thing I’d suggest to properly monitor your growth is to start with benchmark numbers on anything that can be obtained – your Google Analytics, Twitter following, LinkedIn Connections, etc. so you can document the growth you achieve through your newly established efforts.

If you would like more tips and tricks on leveraging Twitter for your business I invite you to download a free copy of an e-book I co-authored: Leveraging Your Power through Twitter. Enter code: BIZCARD at the checkout screen to receive it at no cost.

Now you’ve been given some food for thought. What other ways can you see utilizing a Virtual Assistant to grow your online presence?

As always, Michelle and I welcome your thoughts and comments below.  Also, please subscribe to keep up with this and other Guest Post Friday posts.