The 2009 Rainmaker of the Year Award winners, by category, are: 

Woman Lawyer:  
Mary Ann Dunham, with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, in Pittsburgh. See http://alturl.com/oy9c
NOTE: Mary Ann Dunham will be featured on a web seminar broadcast by PBDI on Tuesday March 23 at 1PM Eastern time.  Visit www.pbdi.org for more information.

Small Firm Lawyer: 
Christopher Marston, with Exemplar, a law firm based in Boston.  See http://alturl.com/knjq

Associate: 
Elizabeth L. Gunn, with Durrette Bradshaw PLC in Richmond, VA.  See http://alturl.com/6hfc

The remaining two winners, in the categories “Partner – Transactions” and “Partner – Litigator” will be announced and profiled in the April Issue

“In selecting these winners,” according to Originate! Editor-in-Chief Barry Schneider, “we aim to find the strongest models of effective business development and marketing. In our interviews we extract the tactics and techniques that make them successful.”

The Rainmaker of the Year Awards are a joint project of Originate!, the premier online newsletter dedicated to helping attorneys build their personal practices, and Legal Sales and Services Organization (LSSO), the only organization exclusively focused on sales, service and quality issues in law firms and legal departments. 

Originate! has published more than 200 articles in the last three years, but these case stories are among the most important for the examples they present. The previous year’s winners are profiled in the September 2008 Issue.

For further information contact:

Editor in Chief Barry Schneider, (214) 315-3212 and bschneider@sageprofessional.com

Tactics Editor Larry Bodine, 630.942.0977 and Lbodine@LawMarketing.com

What else they could be doing is the subject of this month’s lead article in Originate!, the premiere online newsletter on business development for attorneys. This article is available to the public at www.pbdi.org/originate and reflects activities that consultant Michael Cummings affirms have much greater value. 

According to Cummings, the same old activities “make you seem like one of the crowd, provide no business value and often lack a true personal touch.” These proven ideas, on the other hand, “will separate you from the attorneys that go through the routine end of year motions. It also provides that contact and personal touch that lead to results.”

Mr. Cummings has worked with hundreds of attorneys as managing director of SAGE PDI, a firm that trains and coaches attorneys in results-driven business development, and has co-authored a highly praised book on personal marketing for attorneys.

The other articles in Originate! this month (available to subscribers only) also enumerate practical advice for lawyers to improve their business development for next year.

There are ten social networking actions recommended by Darryl Cross for making new work come from online sources. Seven good ways to zip up the relationships with your clients and gain new business from Larry Bodine. Six goal-setting steps to make you much more productive in the new year from Thom Singer. And three holiday card alternatives to a chilling tale from Andy Havens.

Lastly, Kristin Stark somberly assesses today’s profit picture and the evolving buyer’s market for services, then proposes how lawyers and firms can build a brighter future through advancing their marketing capabilities.

As Editor-in-Chief Barry Schneider noted, “Now’s the time to change old practices and do things a bit differently, not just because it’s the new year, but because lawyers must respond to this tougher environment.”

About ORIGINATE! – Now in its third year of publication, the online monthly ORIGINATE! offers a consistent, reliable resource for ambitious and serious-minded lawyers who seek advice on building their personal practice. The newsletter delivers practical real-world strategies and proven tactics, the best methods used by top attorneys now to land clients, sell work and strengthen relationships. With a set of contributors of unique depth and breadth, ORIGINATE! offers an unparalleled practice-building asset. www.pbdi.org/originate

What will give them a payback and what won’t is the subject of this month’s lead article in Originate!, the premiere online newsletter on business development for attorneys. This article is available to the public at www.pbdi.org/originate and reflects the experience of Steve Barrett about the kind of ROI you can expect from the most common law marketing initiatives.

As Barrett puts it, “To find a worthwhile return on investment in marketing initiatives, we need to start focusing on doing things [to the good side of the] breakeven curve.  This has been true since the 1990s, and particularly, since September 2008 when the economy went off the cliff.”

Steve Barrett knows what he’s talking about. He was CMO at Drinker Biddle in Philadelphia, and held similar positions at Perkins Coie LLP; Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP; and Choate, Hall & Stewart.

The other articles in Originate! this month (available to subscribers only) follow his theme and give practical do-it-yourself advice on how to pursue the kinds of money making initiatives Barrett highlights.

Gail Huneryager details what to do when you get and decide to responding to a request for proposal.  Michael Cummings looks at the small group gathering, specifically the business roundtable, as a way to expand your network and get business.

When it comes to contact making, our best practice tip writers steer you away from the worst options and toward the best. Thom Singer shows how you can manage the online social network of Twitter as a local resource, a shift that can prove invaluable to your personal network. And Darryl Cross examines one of the best ways to use an association for the same purpose, the membership committee, though his rationale can guide you to an optimal choice in other types of organization as well. Meanwhile, Andy Havens uses the aim of raising the profile of a practice group within a firm to show why five loser initiatives are on Barrett’s list as well. What the do-it-yourselfer should not do.

As Editor-in-Chief Barry Schneider noted, “The aim is to learn to avoid hitting your thumb with a hammer, and to grow your practice with the right tools applied well.”

About ORIGINATE! – Now in it’s third year of publication, the online monthly ORIGINATE! offers a consistent, reliable resource for ambitious and serious-minded lawyers who seek advice on building their personal practice. The newsletter delivers practical real-world strategies and proven tactics, the best methods used by top attorneys now to land clients, sell work and strengthen relationships. With a set of contributors of unique depth and breadth, ORIGINATE! offers an unparalleled practice-building asset. Try us at www.pbdi.org/originate.

Inevitably the question of money arises, as with everything in life. Can you Make Money Blogging? Yes, you can but it won’t come easily. A blog isn’t something you can make on the Sunday and have a steady profit on the Wednesday like everything it takes time and effort. However this is not to discourage you from joining the blog revolution, it just to paint a realistic picture of this craze and to make sure new bloggers do not get carried away.

It is estimated that a new blog is created every second however many of these are created by individuals thinking that they can earn a quick buck through it, in reality these users have little or no concept of the skills it takes to optimize your blog.

Making money from a blog is not just as simple as posting your views, rants and commenting on issues that are personal to you, it is much more than that. Your blog needs to be optimized for search engines (SEO  Search Engine Optimization) so that it reaches the widest possible audience, it also has to be marketed correctly on blog directories. Your blog itself has to be designed so that it is appealing to general internet users as have features such as an RSS feed.

It is only after your blog has been sufficiently optimized that you can even think about generating some income. This should not put you off however because a blog should contain something you enjoy writing about and then once you have a stable level of traffic, you can begin to make money. The free report is highly recommended because it will tell you all the basics you need to set up your blog, optimize it and then finally to monetize it so that it reaches its full potential. If you have a blog or are thinking of joining the blog revolution then the Secret Blogging Blueprint below should be read first.

To learn more about how to make money blogging, check out the free Secret Blogging Blueprint. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

Uwe Falkenberg

So, how should you use this situation to your advantage? If you’re a niche business owner, or internet marketer, the most important currency you have on-hand is speed. When you’re the first to dominate an online niche through you specific niche marketing, you’ll get a massive advantage over your competitors. This means finding and dominating niches before your competition can get there. How can you do this?

A couple of years ago, you could just fire up Google and search for poorly satisfied niches on your own time. Find something with few search results and create a website that absolutely dominates the field, and you were good to go. Unfortunately, that’s not the way things are today. Due to the different methods that search engines use to calculate results, it’s possible to find a market that appears to be empty, and ends up being massively over-saturated, despite the evidence to the contrary from its search results. Don’t let those results fool you — it’s entirely possible that the niche is being dominated by other people already.

So, what are three things you can do to make sure you get to niches first, and dominate them once you get there?

1. Use niche-finding software (such as Micro Niche Finder) to search out profitable niches for internet marketers.

2. Create a website and sales page that provides information that is both more relevant to searchers, and more enticing to buyers than your competitors can offer.

3. Acively study your niche to figure out it’s dynamics and characteristics, allowing you to predict where it will head in the future.

It’s really as easy as that, in terms of method. Don’t let the three steps fool you, it’s a lot of work to dominate any niche, but it can pay off big time if you let yourself rise to the top and master every niche market you enter. Don’t be put off by the gurus and forum members telling you that it isn’t possible, it’s something that is achievable with the right combination of method and discipline. By making the most of software, you can allow yourself to focus primarily on the bigger picture and less on the small time decisions, creating a work and lifestyle that will lead to long term online success.

To learn more about Niche Marketing, check out the free Niche Finder report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

Is it possible to make a better living from a dominating popular niche website than by dominating ultra-specific ones? It’s certainly a bigger market to play in, but on the whole the answer is most likely no. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the amount of effort and work required to dominate an ultra-competitive niche is massive, and the time dedication can prevent you from working on other projects. Secondly, with the massive amount of competition, you’re constantly worrying about your competitors and trying to anticipate their moves. This isn’t the mark of a happy business, so unless you can remake the market in your image, you’ll ultimately spend equal amounts of time looking backwards as you do looking forwards.

If you think you can handle this, then go ahead and give it a shot. If you’ve got the dedication (and most importantly, the passion) then you may well end up near the top of the pile. However, there are other avenues to online success, mostly through the use of ultra-specific and specialised niches that can yield massive rewards to those that research them before entering the marketplace. These niches aren’t ultra-competitive like their more general counterparts, and the audience size isn’t as wide, however they can offer massive payouts for those that are smart enough, and dedicated enough, to master their dynamics and market possibilities with a clever niche marketing.

So, which one is for you? The ultra-profitable and hugely time consuming passion project, or the more refined and calculated ultra-niche idea? In the end, most online empires seem to be built on a combination of the two — years of hard work and research in a field that the entrepreneur is passionate about, combined with the calculations and hard data that come with a large amount of research into markets and commercial viability. In the end, this is where you want to be. There’s nothing worse than being involved in something with no idea of where you’re moving and how you’re going to get there, and you can’t ride the market forever. Invest some time into planning what niches your project will excel in, and it’ll pay off big in the long run.

To learn more about Niche Marketing, check out the free Niche Finder report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

The 80/20 rule is fundamental to affiliate marketing optimisation. When you’re creating an online business that scales to your lifestyle, you really need to make sure that your inputs aren’t always defining the output. The best way to make sure that your business is output-specific is by applying the 80/20 rule to how you spend your time. After determining what parts of your business offer the best hourly pay rate for you, it’s best to eliminate the 80% of activities that result in only 20% of your income, and focus your energy on the most important and optimised parts. From here, you can use several strategies.

Firstly, you can automate as much of your online work as possible. For affiliate marketers, the primary time-costs are in finding and investigating products to market, monitoring their marketing programs, and analysing customer behaviour on their websites. Thankfully, all three of these activities can be optimised and automated to a specific point, the income autopilot can be set.

For finding and investigating products, your best bet is to look for products that are popular, but not ultra-competitive. With the massive range of niche-finding software out there today, this step is about as simple as it can be. Simply invest in a program to take care of your niches for you, and cut those hours out of your timetable.

The second is slightly more difficult. Although computer programs can easily analyse click-through rates and bounce rates, checking out real time marketing performance is slightly more difficult. With numbers alone such false metrics, especially in a world as subjective and human as PR and marketing, you may need to invest some time yourself in seeing which of your marketing and advertising efforts work, and which don’t.

Finally, monitoring and analysing customer behaviour is something that every affiliate marketer will need to put some time into, at least in the initial stages of a campaign. Over time, customer behaviour will lead to long term trends and behavioural patterns for your websites, which can make it significantly easier to optimise and automate this part of your work. Best suggestion: spend the first months of any campaign monitoring customer browsing habits and clicking behaviour, and after it’s reached a steady point, leave it alone. Only investigate when things are falling, not when they’re simply moving as part of a larger trend.

To read part 1 of this article, check out the free Powercharging Your Clickbank Income report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

There are hundreds of money-making products out there promising an online income with zero upkeep and input, all competing with each other. While many can definitely offer this possibility, it’s still easy for online entrepreneurs and marketers to fall for the same old traps. Whether you make your emails an absolute priority, or focus on metrics that aren’t fundamentally important to your income, it’s easy to fall back into the habit of creating work for works sake. This should be avoided for anyone looking to create an autopilot income, as the small tasks that suck time away are often the least important in the long run.

Do an 80/20 analysis on your businesses profit centres. These questions can help you cut the poorly performing parts of your business loose, and let you focus on the most important uber-profitable aspects:

- Wat are you selling most?
- Who are you selling to?
- How are you selling to them?

When you’ve identified what’s selling, it’s a lot easier to elimate the things that aren’t selling. Identify the affiliate products that are responsible for 80% of your online income, and eliminate the others. When you free yourself from the work that the others produce, you can maximise the amount of time you spend on the more profitable ones.

Still worried about losing that extra revenue? Think about things this way: How many hours worth of work do the other products produce, and how much extra revenue do they bring in?

When you actually calculate the hourly value of each product, you can make more informed decisions on whether or not they’re worth keeping. For example, an affiliate product that requires only two hours of work per week and brings in $260 in commissions, is paying you a total of $130 per hour. In contrast, an affiliate product that brings in $440 per week, and requires around 20 hours of work per week, is only bringing you $22 per hour.

If the above example proves anything to you, it’s that revenue alone can be a distracting and false metric for measuring affiliate progress. When you measure by revenue alone, you lose a massive amount of potential analysis, and often fool yourself into thinking that you’re earning more than you really are.

To read part 2 of this article, check out the free Powercharging Your Clickbank Income report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

There’s one big problem with article writing, though…

Unless you’re a total writing maniac, you don’t want to spend all your time cranking out one article after another all day long.

And every article spinning tool I’ve ever seen causes problems with Google through duplicate content and that’s if the articles aren’t totally unreadable garbage to begin with. That could damage your reputation, which you definitely don’t want to happen…

I found an easier and safer way to write and distribute articles for my own websites:

Adeel Chowdhry and Bobby Walker’s

Mass Article Control

Mass Article Creator takes an article and quickly gives you as many new articles as you want,
each one similar but unique.

This saves you a ton of time and energy, and gives you all the high-quality articles you can possibly want without spending money on high-priced and unreliable writers.

Mass Article Creator was test-driven on several websites, and the results were nothing short of amazing.

One site had been averaging 7 or 8 visitors a day but after using Mass Article Creator traffic exploded to well over 100 visitors every day.

Another much larger site was getting around 750 visitors a day, after adding Mass Article Creator to the mix, that site now frequently breaks the 5,000 visitor mark in a single day.

And of course it can be applied to all sorts of business: Real Estate, Home Business Sales … and of course Affiliate Marketing.

Have a look, it really blew me away.

Visit the website to get a free report and find out more

Uwe Falkenberg

As horrible as it may sound – they’ve unknowingly sent the hopeful entrepreneur down a path of false expectations, poor results and eventually – failure. In fact, the myth of “do what you love and the money will follow” has been responsible for more failure than likely any other influence – perhaps even more so than laziness or a lack of perseverance.

Because the simple truth of the matter is that the only way you’re going to make real money on the net is if your business is based around two crucial things:

1) Large Demand

2) Buyers

In other words – you aren’t going to get rich selling a $15 ebook about growing square watermelons – even though that might be a great passion of yours.

The demand just isn’t there. Maybe there’s a few searches a day on Google for the topic, and perhaps there’s some interest in the online “gardening enthusiast” communities – but you’d be hard-pressed to make even a few hundred dollars a month from ebook sales.

Similarly, you also aren’t going to have a particularly easy time getting rich by building websites about some seemingly “popular” topics like humor, jokes, funny pictures and so on. And while there are a few ways to “monetize” your site (with AdSense, CPA Offers, CPM Banners, etc.), it takes literally millions of website visitors to make even just a few thousand dollars in markets like that.

The demand is huge – but the visitor value is extremely low…

Instead, if you want to make it big online – pulling down an impressive six-figure income – you need to tap into markets with tons of demand, where the majority of the visitors are valuable.

You need to capture tons of traffic that wants to buy something. If you take this approach, you’d practically have to hijack your own order links (or affiliate links) not to make a sizeable income.

In fact – did you know that some affiliates make several thousand dollars daily just by promoting a single product in hot markets? (Just imagine what the merchant is making…)

In some markets there’s actually so much demand that the vendors are quite literally selling over a thousand units – or more – per day. Digital products, with practically zero overhead/delivery cost.

But it all comes back to tapping into valuable demand. In most cases, it takes no extra effort or “skill” to market to a valuable market than it does to struggle along with something you’re passionate about.

These two factors – demand and buying traffic – are what seperate the “wannabe” marketers from the millionaires. Because there’s no real secret – you just need to sell what thousands of people are already buying.

The ball is now officially in your court. Are you tapping into markets with massive, valuable demand, are you making Clickbank Profits?

Or are you struggling to simply make a few dollars occasionally with a business that’s based on your own passionate interests?

——————————————————————————————————–

Chris Rempel, author of “Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate”, reveals 5 of his most effective traffic strategies and niche-targeting tactics in full detail at http://tinyurl.com/LazyAffiliateMarketer