Once up a time, I believed the dogma and rhetoric of Findlaw and the like. The false belief that clients and prospective clients want to read webpages, articles, social media posts, blogs and more about the law and how the law may affect them and their particular circumstances. The false belief that companies like Findlaw have done this for hundreds of law firms so they must know what they are doing. The false belief that good clients are looking for legal information on the internet and if I give it to them, then they will hire me.
WRONG, WRONG and WRONG again. Here’s the truth … clients want to know their lawyer is a human being, treats them like a human being, relates to them like a human being and doesn’t sound (on the web) like every other lawyer out there…or worse yet a robot with plug and play blogs, webpages and repetitive posts which appear on dozens, if not hundreds of other law firm websites.
How do I know this? I started my law firm in 2017 and went first in the way of Findlaw (it was another company called Capital something or other, but you get the point) Horrible writing. Wrong law cited. Wrong legal analysis. I spent hours fixing their content to be legally correct and sound like someone with at least a 4th grade education wrote it ONLY to be told something along the lines of we can’t fix it like that because it won’t make the Google Bots happy. F’ the Google Bots. They don’t hire me. Real people hire me. That’s paraphrased to make it a bit more suitable for reading. And it took me more than 6 months of courage to actually tell them that. Time, money and opportunity wasted. But important lesson learned.
So, we started writing for real people. And Roland and Creative Legal Content came on board to write original content, but also to de-legalize some of mine. And the compliments started coming in on this story and that story and so on. I know what you are thinking. I can’t pay my rent with compliments, Jenny. I hear you. Neither can I. But then something bigger started happening. People started coming in to initial consults and saying I picked your firm because of your writing. No other lawyer talks like that. Talks like what, I’d say. A real person, they’d respond.
I have been practicing law since 1998. I have been running a law firm business since 2017. Let me share some real data with you. In 2017, we spent a lot of wasted time and money with two local companies on website content and social media. As a result, we could only attribute approximately 3.5% of our revenue to on-line searching/website. The costs exceeded the return for sure.
In 2018, we attributed 10.5% of our revenue to content and social media. The only change in 2018 in our online and social presence …Roland and Creative Legal Content. In June/July 2019, we hired a FL company to help with our website optimization (WSO) and our SEO and Roland and his team stayed in the same capacity, 21% of our 2019 revenue was attributed to content and social media.
Yes, I attribute some of the revenue growth in those website and online search figures to the WSO and SEO, but the point is, the writing didn’t change. We just fixed some issues, so more people saw it.
At least once a week someone calls for an appointment and says, I saw your article on Rick and Morty or Narcissists or SCUBA diving or whatever. And my team tells me that people still frequently say in consults that our webpage is unique and that it attracted them.
We now give my full-length, semi-autographical book away (which Roland helped write) as part of our pre-engagement glidepath. People are responding positively to that and our tracking shows the ones who open the book link hire us more often than the ones who don’t. That may be correlational data, but anything that can help us help more people be smart when getting divorced is worth investing in.
. . . if you aren’t getting the results you want, what do you have to lose by talking to Roland and getting started? A little bit of your time? What if that investment of time got you one or two new clients a month? What else do you have to lose? Some money? If you are like me, you have wasted more money in many places with failed attempts at doing everything yourself, with starting and stopping marketing, or by doing NOTHING. ~Jenny Bradley, Triangle Smart Divorce, Cary, NC
Roland and I have worked together about 2 ½ years and he has a knack for “getting” his clients. He maintains my WordPress site, blog (he writes my blog primarily), my LinkedIn (he has me up to 1700 connections locally), and my Facebook. He has also helped me ‘get ahead’ of issues and drafted letters to the editor and editorials that have been published in the Courant, and my blog was named to the ABA’s top 100 law blog list 2 years in a row thanks to him (before working with him I had no blog!). He has also helped me compile and edit all my writings from over the years and we are *this close* to publishing it … I couldn’t have done any of that without him. I highly recommend reaching out to him. ~ Sarah Poriss, Attorney, Hartford, Connecticut.
Creative Legal Content, LLC 