My monthly roundup is a short list of links to services, ideas, and articles that help make marketing and managing your mediation practice more effective and efficient.

Have you been wishing you could hire an assistant but aren’t sure you’d want to go the traditional employee route? Then a Virtual Assistant may be worth your consideration. I’ve had a VA for over a year and it’s been well worth the investment. For ideas about how you might use a VA’s time, read Home Office Warrior’s The Top 100 Ways a Home Office Warrior Can Utilize a Virtual Assistant, Part 1 and Part 2.

Need a more effective way to track your billable time? Check out 6 Cool Tools to Track Your Time from Freelance Switch. And here’s a post of mine about a few more options: How to Simplify Billable Time Tracking.

Is your website or blog geared toward a market with a certain level of education? If so, try out the Blog Readability Test, which claims to analyze the reading level of your site. I found it thanks to Muhammad Saleem’s Is Your Blog Easy to Read?

If you write your own copy for your print mediation marketing materials or for your ADR website, then you know the experience of searching for the perfect words. Mediator blah blah’s Geoff Sharp gave us the heads up on an excellent tool for copywriters in his post A Neutral’s Neural Net. I’ve been lucky enough to have access to the Visual Thesaurus, a similar tool available to those of us associated with academic institutions who’ve paid for a subscription.

Have you heard the terms “word of mouth marketing” and “viral marketing”? Skellie defines, discusses and differentiates them in Like It or Not, You’re a Marketer.

In Forum Marketing for Mediators, Dina Lynch discusses how many of us use participation in online discussion forums as part of our mediation marketing strategy. For a bit more on this, as well as some cautionary notes about over-doing it, take a look at The Direct and Indirect Approaches to Forum Marketing and Using Forums in Viral Marketing.

Recycling gadgets instead of sending them to the landfill is getting easier, thanks to the green revolution. If you’ve got an old or broken iPod stuffed in a drawer, take a look at BuyMyBrokeniPod and read a review of it at TechCrunch.

And for a laugh, take a look at the cartoon posted at Vickie Pynchon’s ABA Law School Negotiation Competition.

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.