Content marketing has become an integral part of law firm digital success. Adding content to your law firm website lets search engines know you are keeping things fresh and draws in new readers with compelling, timely content.
Before you promote your blog posts, you should make sure your posts utilize at least the basics of law firm blogging best practices. The basics include:
- Drafting blog posts of 350 words or more
- Making sure you have completed metadata for your blog post
- Using captivating imagery within the post and on social media when you share it
- Using a URL shortener when you share the post that tracks link clicks
BLOG PROMOTION STRATEGIES
1. Share it on social media.
If you post content on your law firm blog, but do not share the content elsewhere, there is a strong possibility that no one will read it. Social media provides a free, easy, and quick way to share your content with a virtually unlimited audience. But there are so many social media channels these days – how do you know which ones to spend time on? It is better to engage well and thoroughly on just a few social networks than to be present and not really use many. For most attorneys, the top three most important social networks to use are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Quick tips on social sharing for law firms include:
- Share an image-centric post with a link to your blog post on your law firm Facebook Page.
- Post your blog to your law firm LinkedIn Company Page and then both like it and share it via your Individual Profile. In addition, find appropriate LinkedIn groups and share your content there.
- Tweet out a concise and engaging statement with a link to your content on Twitter just before or just after the hour.
- If you are like most lawyers, and too busy to post to social networks in real time, work with a tool like Hootsuite to schedule and automate your posts.
- If your social following is small or nonexistent, utilize the various forms of social advertising to increase your reach and engagement.
2. Target influencers instead of sending your post out into oblivion.
If you simply share your blog post by tweeting it out or posting it on your Facebook Page, and your following is small or relatively inactive, you will not get much traction. You need to be more strategic with your post. Search on social media by hashtag, by Twitter directories, and other methods to isolate users on each channel that if tagged would be interested in your content. You can also use Klout.
3. Use Google Analytics to see what content works best and work off of that information.
Use Google Analytics (Behavior>Site Content>All Pages) to see what content on your law firm website got the most page views over the last two months and which content held visitors on your site the longest.
4. Interview experts to expand your post reach.
Reach out to professors, other lawyers, government officials, or anyone who has both the credentials and the knowledge to provide authoritative insight for a piece of content. You cannot only capitalize on their points of view to improve your content and make it more attractive to influencers, but also leverage their already established following. When you email your experts to thank them and let them know a piece has gone live, they are very likely to share it through their own social channels, which could be extensive.
5. Syndicate your post.
Once you publish something great on your blog, you can use other external publishing platforms to share the same content, including Medium, LinkedIn, and more such sites.
6. Include recent blog posts in your law firm’s email marketing campaign.
Sending out a monthly, quarterly, or even annual electronic newsletter with links to your most successful blog posts will drive even more inbound traffic.
7. Use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to achieve organic traction for your content.
Search is one of the most enduring ways to drive traffic over time. You can make sure that your blog posts perform well in organic search results by aligning them with keyphrases. In order to find the optimal keyphrase to use, look to see (1) if people are searching for it and (2) if you have a chance of ranking for it. Use the keyphrase and/or use related phrases and/or synonyms for that phrase at the beginning of the title, in the header, in the meta-description and up to four times in the body text.
8. Put a link to the blog in a variety of highly visible locations, including:
- Main website homepage
- Main website primary navigation
- Employee email signatures
- Social media channel designs
- Email marketing templates
9. Turn your blog content into video.
Internet users don’t read as much text as they used to. Some very effective marketing can be accomplished through the instant gratification of visual content. People are watching more video now than ever before. Search engines recognize this trend, and they’re giving video more space in the search engine results pages. If you take the content of your blog post and turn it into a video, you can then publish it on YouTube, Vimeo, and/or other online video communities where there are millions of users looking for great videos. Be sure to optimize your video to gain maximum exposure.
10. Submit your blog to content communities and digital directories.
There are a number of sites that allow you to submit your content to their established audience. The competition is stiff on many of these sites, but if your content is good (we hope it is), you may gain some traction. There are a virtually unlimited number of content communities to which you can submit your blog posts, including BizSugar, Triberr, and more. Lawyers can submit their blogs to be included in the American Bar Association’s “Blawg Directory” here: http://www.abajournal.com/blawgs/submit/.
There are hundreds of directories that will list your blog for a fee, not all directories are worth the money. Quality directory listings can include DMOZ (free, but hard to get into), Best of the Web Blogs, and EatonWeb Blog Directory.
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