How can I drive more referrals by writing articles?

Here’s what life was like before a web site. Your client knew that you provided a particular service for his/her need and unless they read your law firm’s brochure or received a newsletter in the mail, they most likely would not have had a clue about the other services you could provide. Nor, would they have any idea about the breadth of your expertise. And if they were going to refer you a new client, the most they could do is say “Call So and So and talk to him about your problem”. Now with a web site the scenario totally shifts to your benefit.

USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO ATTRACT READERS FOR YOUR ARTICLES

When you publish an article, use your presence on Twitter, Facebook [business] page and LinkedIn to bring readers to your articles.By connecting these three sites through a free software application, you can tweet the article title and permalink on Twitter and automatically send this through to your Facebook [business] page and your LinkedIn account. And by using a shortened URL application, such as budurl.com, you can track how many people clicked through on the shortened permalink to read your article.

Having a website as part of the online marketing strategy for your law practice is a critical component to bridging the gap between you and your clients. We view websites as an interactive opportunity to educate existing clients and potential clients about the solutions you can provide for the problems they are experiencing.

To this end, we provide you with the Adrecom CMS Suite, which is a full suite of web publishing tools you can use to manage the content on your web site.

Here are examples of how you can use the modules in your web publishing console to make more meaningful connections with clients.

PUBLISH EXPERT ARTICLES ONLINE

What better way to convince customers of the breadth of your experience than to publish articles with industry relevant content. With the Adrecom Article Publishing module you will be able to use a built-in HTML editor (looks just like MS Word) to post articles you’ve written that are both contextually compelling (we recommend hiring a good copywriter) and visually stimulating.

GET NOTICED

Here are some things you can do to make your articles more noticeable:

• Automatically showcase excerpts from the articles using the “headline” feature and draw people’s attention to the details of your articles.
• Make way for new articles by archiving older pieces and you can even control when articles get released online.
• Load a batch of articles at one time via the free Uploader and have them “appear” online at the scheduled date and time of your choosing.
• Invite colleagues, clients, experts and friends to be guest publishers and to contribute their own thoughts inside articles they publish on your site. Use the “Byline” feature to attribute the writing to give them credit for their contribution.
• With a built-in SEARCH BOX on the site, visitors can type in a word that appears in an article and they can quickly see a list of all articles that include that search phrase.
• Use multiple criteria in setting up each article including the publish date, the category and the byline so readers can sort through articles and more easily find the ones they are really looking for.

Let’s not forget about the opportunity articles give you in capturing organic rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. With Adrecom Article Publishing you can apply some nifty tricks to boost your search engine rankings. We’re not talking about the paid advertising area (PPC clicks) but rather the free listings area in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY

Here are some of the search engine friendly features available inside the Article Publishing module:

• Assign articles to multiple categories so they can be found in different sections of your site.
• Use “tagging” features to associate different, yet relevant, keywords with each article.
• Personalize the actual URL of each article so that the link to the page can include descriptive keywords in the web address. The benefit of this capability is not just about rankings. It’s about the idea that you can use the name of the link itself to attract the attention of people who are captivated by the words in the link.
• If you keep hearing about these magical meta-tags, have no worries. You can customize meta-tags for each article with the built-in “Meta-Tag Console”. You can edit the meta-title, meta-description and meta-keywords tags which are the most search engine relevant tags on your page. Refer to our free meta-tag guide for instructions on how to write optimal meta-tags for your web pages.

CAPTURE YOUR VISITOR’S ATTENTION WITH IMAGES AND VIDEOS

Want your articles to really capture a reader’s attention? Make it visually appealing with a photo or video. Your Article Publisher comes with a predesigned template that enables you to simply upload a photo or a video right from your PC. You can even find a photo online and just type in the link to the photo and our software will pull the photo automatically and display it on your site — with a caption too if you like.

Want to include a YouTube video? That’s a great way to add some movement to your site. Did you know that recent surveys indicate that 70% of web visitors are drawn to watch videos rather than just read a page of web content?

REUSE THE SAME CONTENT IN DIFFERENT AREAS OF YOUR SITE

• Want to post a snippet of your article right on your home page? Use the FEATURED ITEMS option to display the article in a special “Articles” section of your home page.
• How about giving privileged users only access to certain articles? No problem. Activate the “Restricted Viewers only” feature to restrict articles to people that have registered for a login privilege to your site.
• Did you ever imagine you could post an article and instantly see it online on different web sites? Well if you thought this was something from outer space, it’s a lot closer to home with an RSS feed. And your content is automatically RSS capable. That means you can submit your RSS Feed to other web sites and they will automatically display your article content on their web site — and you don’t even have to lift a finger after it’s all set up.
• Here’s something coming soon. Wouldn’t you like to quickly send an article to members of your mailing list? Well, how about just clicking a button that says “send out this article” and you choose a mailing list and out it goes? That would be great wouldn’t it? Well it’s coming.
• Want to drive readers of one article to another article on your site? Use the RELATED ARTICLES feature and “upsell” the reader on related articles. It’s really simple. Your Article Publishing Console keeps track of all articles in the system. When you are in the article editing screen, there’s a section called “Related Articles”. You literally drag articles from one box to another and they instantly show up on the web site in an area called “We Suggest” (you can of course change the name of the section).