Practice Building Is No Time to Be Neutral

During a conversation with a mediator in the Midwestern U.S., I listened as she described her marketing efforts to date. She has regularly advertised in her local daily, buys an annual yellow pages ad, has a static website that was professionally designed, sends out a print newsletter quarterly, and has a few other traditional strategies in her informal marketing plan. After two years in practice, she’s not coming close to making a living.

[Read more]

Going Beyond Neutrality

If you’ve read Bernie Mayer’s Beyond Neutrality: Confronting the Crisis in Conflict Resolution, then you know Bernie makes a strong case that mediators and other ADR practitioners must expand our thinking about what we do and how we do it. If you haven’t read it yet, get it on your list now, because you’ll want this information and the hard questions he asks to be part of your business-building preparation.

Bernie’s rich and provocative book raises two issues that are directly relevant here. [Read more]

You Already Know How to Do This

You already know the most important ways to approach marketing and promoting your ADR business. Learning to mediate well taught you those skills and mindsets already.

If you’re new to mediation and still learning to master the craft, then you can cultivate your good mediator skills right alongside your good marketing skills and still get going with what you read here.

This book is organized around basic dispute resolution and mediation concepts that will be very familiar to most of you. [Read more]

Being a Mediator, Becoming a Business Owner

If you’re like many mediators, you chose this work because you want to help individuals, groups, your community, or the world find more effective paths through conflict. Business ownership is the path to doing mediation rather than mediation the mechanism to become a business owner.

If this is true of you, then you may have become a business owner despite yourself. [Read more]

Visitors to Your Site: Who Are They and What Do They Want?

So you’ve set up a lovely website or have begun blogging for your ADR or mediation business. Who’s visiting your site? What’s attracting them? What content is most and least viewed? How are they finding you? How long are they staying and do they visit more than one page before leaving? How many “hits” on your site are real people instead of search engine robots?

It’s time for web analytics, those programs or services that help you track and measure the answers to questions like these. The answers help you modify your site to do more of what works and tweak what isn’t working. It’s never wise to consider your website “done” if you are truly serious about making it an engaging site for prospective clients.

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Online Forms: Wufoo Makes It Easy to Put Forms on Your Site

Website forms are important for gathering information from your site’s visitors and have myriad uses: Contact forms allow them to reach you with questions or to express interest in your services, without you needing to post your email address on your site (putting your email address up, even scrambled with javascript, is a beacon to spammers’ crawlers to come harvest it for their nefarious uses). Surveys help you gather information from your site visitors or blog readers. Workshop registration forms make it easy for participants to sign up.

The trouble is, forms on your website or blog are often a real pain for the novice to get up and running properly and [Read more]

Making Mediation Your Day Job™

It was the first day of the new term and of my advanced-level course, Trends and Issues in the Field. I asked my graduate mediation students to work in small groups and answer this challenge:

Imagine that you have decided to create a private ADR practice. On what marketplace trends would you capitalize? Where would you primarily focus to bring in clients?

The small groups took their markers and flipcharts and disappeared for half an hour. As I paused periodically at the doors of the breakout rooms in which they worked, I could see earnest and diligent conversation unfolding, words appearing on paper. This was a smart group of adult students who came back to school after successful careers in other arenas.

The small groups returned and hung their lists on walls around the room. I skimmed through the posters. Surprise made me do so again. And I had one of those moments of disquieting clarity.

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Blog + Book = Blook

It’s a blog! It’s a book! No, it’s a…blook!

I’m writing a book. Yep. Indeed. And I’ll be using this blog to do it. So I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Starting tomorrow, Making Mediation Your Day Job™ will unfold right here before your very eyes. I’ll be using this blog to write the entire book. When I’m done, it will transform into a real, live, official, professional book.

Why am I using a blog to write my book? [Read more]

Mediator Tech Gets a New Look

Mediator Tech’s gotten a site upgrade and if you’re reading this post by email or RSS reader, I hope you’ll visit the site and have a look-see. My private ADR practice has several strands and I’ve been working to give the related websites a more coordinated appearance.

The software that has made the coordinated appearance a breeze [Read more]

Firefox Is My Browser of Choice

You may use Internet Explorer by default because it came pre-loaded on your computer. If that’s the case, I recommend you give Firefox a try for a few weeks. It’s considered to be safer than IE because fewer hackers want to take down Mozilla than want to take down giant Microsoft. It’s easy to use, high-performing, customizable (more on this below), and well documented. There are built in protections against pop-ups, spyware and viruses, and you can import your bookmarks from your current browser. [Read more]

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