The print newsletter is a long time staple of law firm marketing. For years, firms have written, published and distributed newsletters to their clients covering legal trends and developments in various practice areas. More recently, firms have converted print newsletters to PDF and uploaded the files to their websites.
The latest innovation in newsletter marketing that lawyers may want to consider is converting from PDF to Flash. Here's an example:
http://www.elawflash.com/
A key advantage of Flash over PDF is that you can track readership: how many times each newsletter page was viewed, how long people spent reading the newsletter, and other useful metrics.
For subscribers who still prefer offline reading, there is a print icon to print some or all of the pages of the publication.
Article titles in the table of contents can be hotlinked to the pages where those articles begin, and for associations selling advertising in newsletters, you can hotlink ads back to advertiser websites.
The text inside the Flash is searchable and can be indexed by the search engines.
You can even insert video or forms inside a Flash newsletter for maximum interactivity.
A final consideration for those firms still distributing print newsletters: the cost of electronic distribution is a fraction of the mailing costs for a print newsletter.
The really bad news about this idea is that PDF content is easily crawled by search engine spiders on the web ... and Flash is not.
Food for thought ... not for spiders :)
Posted by: Florida Criminal Defense Lawyer | October 08, 2008 at 04:19 PM
Let me clarify. These Flash files have a text component that is both searchable by readers (see toolbar at top of page) and by the search engines. So they would be indexed just like PDF documents.
Posted by: Joshua Fruchter | October 26, 2008 at 01:58 PM