Your Secret Weapon for Conquering the Internet Posted on December 7, 2015 by John Fisher At first glance, it was just another web page with the boring, mundane details about a malpractice settlement. It took about 30 minutes to write the copy for the web page. It seemed unlikely that anyone would find the post worth reading…then new clients began calling. 99.99% of people could care less about the new case result/article. A new web page about a malpractice settlement arising from a doctor’s failure to treat atrial fibrillation is boring and uninteresting, unless you have A-Fib (atrial heart fibrillation). Does anyone really care about the story of a malpractice case arising from the failure to treat A-Fib? The phone calls piqued my curiosity. The internet must be flooded with content about A-Fib, or so I thought. A quick look revealed that there were virtually no articles on the internet covering the rights of injury victims arising from their doctor’s failure to treat A-Fib. The floodgates opened with calls from stroke victims whose A-Fib had not been treated. Voila! New clients were signed up. Esoteric Web Content is Internet Gold What if you create a niche within a niche by writing web articles about a unique aspect of a car wreck—let’s say the non-deployment of an airbag in a frontal head-on collision. You give all of your information away in as much detail as you can about the non-deployment of airbags. Your web page might only be interesting to a tiny number of persons, but if they have a case involving the non-deployment of an airbag, you are the authority. “Traditional marketing and advertising is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content marketing is showing the world you’re one.” — Joe Pulizzi, Epic Content Marketing Let’s say you’ve got a unique skill that separates you from the pack of lawyers–you’re a former truck driver and you want truck wreck cases. Rather than bragging about your background as a trucker, you share the wealth of information in your head about truck wrecks. Your web articles give explicit, concrete examples showing how the black box in the tractor can make the difference between winning and losing and how the injury victim can extract the data from the black box. Web visitors will love you for giving away your secrets…and who do you think they’ll hire? One Basic Rule for Lawyer Websites: Quality over Quantity Many lawyer websites are crammed full of worthless content that no one will ever read. There may be dozens, or even hundreds, of pages on your website that not a damn soul has read. These useless web pages are a complete waste and should be deleted from your website now. Better yet, if you have web pages with ten or fewer visits, they are garbage–eliminate them! See the Webinar Slides and Hear the Recording for Target Your Ideal Client in a World Full of Lawyers There is one simple, irrefutable truth: it is not the number of web pages on your website that makes a difference. If you have hundreds or thousands of website pages with crappy, useless content, your website is worthless. Even 1 web page that is chockful of valuable, insightful information is a 10X better than 30 web pages that suck. It’s not the quantity of website pages that matters — it is the quality of your web content that is king. On the web, 85% of articles are less than 1,000 words, but studies show that 2,000+ word articles earn the most links, shares on social media and maximum organic traffic. Short articles and blog posts are rarely indexed by Google–Google favors in-depth content. Evergreen web content provides highly detailed, educational information that gives away your best secrets. This could be a blog post, article or a Frequently Asked Question—it doesn’t matter where you post the evergreen content, just that you post it. Your evergreen web content should be in-depth (1,000-2,000 words), and contain images, bullet points, sub-headings and ideally, video. (Check out the blog posts at www.UltimateInjuryLaw.com for weekly “evergreen” content for lawyers). “The more in-depth and informative your content is the better your results will be.” — Neil Patel How to Build Evergreen Content on Your Website Begin by identifying the ten most popular web pages on your website—these are the web pages that are driving the most traffic to your website. It’s a good guess that the top ten pages on your website consist of (in order of their popularity): The Home Page, Landing Page for Each of Your Practice Areas, Your Professional Biography Page These are your Top Ten pages of your website because they are jam-packed with information, contain photos, video and images and provide evergreen content that is insightful and educational. Once you know what’s working, you want to update and refresh the content on these web pages. The internet is highly visual, so you should begin by adding images, photos or video to these web pages only to your TOP TEN web pages. Letting the World Know about Your Evergreen Web Content Your next assignment is to add internal and external links to your Top Ten web pages. An internal link is a link to another page on your website and an external link is a link to a different website (yes, that’s okay—your website is not a resource if you only have internal links to your website). You want to keep the visitor engaged on your website and view your site as resource that will answer their questions. (Check out the “Resources” at www.BrainandSpinalCord.org). You should boost your Top Ten web pages by adding links to those pages from old and new posts on your website. When you add a new blog post, add a Call to Action at the end of the post asking the visitor to click the link to one of your Top Ten web pages, i.e., “Want to learn more about bacterial endocarditis, click this link.” Tell the web visitor exactly what you want them to do (“Download my free E-Book by clicking this link.”) Make sharing your content on social media extremely easy by adding sharing buttons (“Click to Share”) at the top and bottom of the web page to make it easy for visitors to “share” the web page with their friends and followers. Your Secret Weapon for Conquering the Internet An email newsletter is the number one content promotional tool on the internet. Your email subscribers are made up of people who love what you’re doing and want your new posts and articles. Every time you post a new blog or article to your website, your email subscribers will receive your new content in their inbox. With email newsletters, you’re not hoping that your visitors will come back to your website—you’re guaranteeing it! Email subscribers are more likely to share your content with their network and “like” and “share” your content on social media. You can build an email subscription list into the thousands and you’ll have metrics showing the open rate for every new email sent to your email subscribers. Build the number of your email subscribers with a pop-up box that appears 45 seconds after every website visit. The pop-up box should include a free offer of a downloadable pdf version of an article or guide in exchange for the visitor’s email address. Making Content Creation for Your Website Brain Dead Easy You’re super busy and you don’t have time for this internet stuff. Rather than working to write new web pages, you should out-source content creation for your website to a law student. Go to the Bar Review of the nearest law school and ask the students if they will write content for your website. There’s a good chance they’ll write better content than you and for a $12 an hour, you’ve got a team of legal scholars just chomping at the bit to write for your website. The Smart Numbers for Your Website’s Success Create an account with Google Analytics and use Google Analytics to track website traffic to your Top 10 web pages. At the first of every month, you should need to track 3 things: Number of unique visits to your Top Ten web pages Average length of time that visitors are spending on your Top Ten website pages, and Total number of unique website visitors to your website. When you add fresh content to your Top Ten web pages, you’ll see improvement in the # of website visits, bounce rate (% of website visitors who leave your website after visiting the entrance page) and length of time at your website. A Harsh, Brutal Reality…About You 98% of lawyers reading this will do nothing. Internet marketing is not what you do and you’ll stick to your “lawyer work”. Problem is that you won’t have any lawyer work if your website isn’t bringing new cases to you. Either you adapt to the changing realities of the digital world or die. You’ve got the tools for a powerhouse lawyer website in your hands—what you choose to do with this information is up to you.
