Linda Artesani shows attorneys and accountants how to generate organic leads by publishing 2,250-word blog posts paired with YouTube videos. Each post takes about six hours but can be faster with a virtual assistant. She uses Luigi's Pizza as an example of tracking where leads actually come from, and stresses picking one audience type to avoid losing clients to unclear messaging.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. This week's topic is called Organic Marketing: Writing Blog Posts to Get Clients. So if you are an attorney or work at a law firm and you're trying to bring more, more leads in the door, or if you're an accountant or bookkeeper trying to get more attorney clients, this post is for you. And truly, this is my main way of marketing. So it's effective if you do it right. I think that consistency is probably one of the most important ways to get the, get the flow going. So when you just throw one blog post up and then don't do another one for maybe a month and a half or something like that, you don't have that traction. Google sees your website as fresh and new every time you put a new post on it. So, it's like adding a new page almost. It sees it as an active, active website. So, it's going to list you higher. And not just that, but you want to connect your posts to Google My Business. So, Google My Business, à la Google, will see these posts. It's like your own little mini website on Google itself. If you create a Google My Website and then post to it, it loves seeing fresh content there as well. So it will— this is organic marketing now. So this is the stuff that you're not paying for that will help you to get your firm and your website and get the clients in the door. We had a big deep conversation last week about pricing and in our Law Lab and pricing for your clients and how can you raise prices effectively. And it went down the road of raising prices on you know, we all kind of came to a common ground that the older clients didn't have their price increases enough and they were far behind market rate. And then we talked about effective ways to bring them up to the right pricing. And it's very difficult, especially if you haven't raised prices in a while. And that led down the road to whether or not you should actually raise the prices or just let the less profitable ones go and start to work on this funnel of bringing in organic leads or paid leads, whatever works. But this article is really about organic leads. So if I'm going to define my reader, I'm going to define my perfect client. If I'm writing for The Law Lab, that's an accountant or bookkeeper that's working with attorneys and law firms. If I want to get clients for my own firm or the firm I have with Sarah, it's really to bring in attorney clients. And so talking about marketing, you might think it's not going to be a topic that would bring in attorney clients. But actually attorneys struggle a bit with marketing their firms. They will throw money at it for sure, but you can use this to— use this to keep your website fresh. A lot of the attorneys we work with have these beautiful splashy websites, but they really don't put a lot of content up and it takes time. So it, on average, it takes me about 6 hours to do a blog post between the post, the video, Getting it up on the— onto YouTube and getting it attached. And there's just a lot to do. So you should have a YouTube channel, even as a law firm, have the YouTube channel so you can put all these videos that you're going to put inside your blog post. So blog posts with videos do way better than blog posts without. People don't want to read anymore. They just want to hop on a video like this and listen to someone tell them what they should be doing. And let's face it, it's easier. I myself used to be a big heavy reader, and I still read a book at night, but for the most part, I use my walks in the morning to listen and learn. And this is a way that someone could listen to your advice. If you're an attorney, you're giving advice to the client of what they need to do, that which will eventually let the client see and gain a little bit of comfort that they know that you are the expert in the field, and they'll get to know a little bit of your personality. So personality will shine through. Your passion will shine through. So you want to have that for the reason of the blog post, cuz you're just a picture on a screen in, in a website about you page. But with a, with a video, we now get to see a little bit of your personality. So when you start to write these blog posts, they should really be about 2,250 words or 2,500 words. They should be on the longer side. And it does, that's what I mean about taking time. To create them. Now I have a firm that's helping me. I've got one virtual assistant that helps me take my blog posts and put them on the website. I've got my closer VA that will read it for clarity and help make sure everything's right, and she helps proofread and make sure the words are correct on my videos. So I've got like a team behind me to help, and that reduces my 6-hour time to much, much less. You wanna make sure that the blog posts you're creating look great on all devices. That's a key point because a lot of times in the beginning, I was just making sure they looked great on the medium that I was using, which would be my computer. And then when I'd look on, on my, my phone, it wouldn't look that good. So you wanna make sure, because Google My Business is gonna help, but also you wanna make sure that your mobile device is reading the content so that if I'm in a car or I'm at something that I don't wanna be, if I'm, you know, I'm a passenger in a car, and I wanna read a blog post, I wanna be able to see it nicely. Make sure you post regularly. And then one of the big things too is to make sure you don't have disorganized messaging. So, you want to be sure that if I'm gonna focus on the attorney, I really wanna focus on the attorney and why this article works well. I wanna focus on the Law Lab or the accountants and bookkeepers, I wanna really focus and narrow it down. This is probably one of the few that I can kind of tap into both. When I noticed for myself, when I started to lose sight of who I was speaking to, leads stopped. That's how I know my leads are working. A funny story, and I read this this morning on LinkedIn, and I'll just share it with you before we finish up this video. How do you know your marketing is effective? How do you know what's working? This is somewhat of a topic we will bring up when we do our advisory work with attorneys and law firms. It's a service we provide. And we're very big about asking that question, like, okay, we see you spending this kind of money. How effective is it? How do you know where the leads are coming? Is it coming from the Facebook ads? Is it coming from the Google ads? So there was an article in LinkedIn, and I'll share it in the post so you can get a little good story about it. But it was a couple of big firms were paying a lot of money to marketing. They really just assumed the leads were coming from that because they were throwing the money at it. They weren't sure. They really didn't have a finite they didn't have exact knowledge of where the leads were coming from, other than they were getting downloads. And there was eBay and it was Uber, and they were getting downloads. People were downloading their apps. So they said, oh great, you know, it's cost me $40 to have a lead download the app, but that will help in the future. And one of the CEOs got in an argument with one of the people that they were advertising with, and the person— he didn't pay, and then the person stopped allowing keywords to be put into their articles. And they realized that although the sales obviously dropped on the paid advertising, because paid advertising was kind of suspended, the advertising for the organic was working, people were still downloading the app. And that was eye-opening, because they were spending millions of dollars to get the ads to get on ads to get this to come through, and they didn't need to spend that. And inside the article, which I thought was my best best story was about Luigi's Pizza. And he hired 3 teenagers to go out and basically he gave them flyers. So the old school way, go out and give flyers and hand them out to people. 3 young kids. 2 kids were not effective at all. They were not— nobody really cashed in their coupons. And then he was like, I don't understand why one kid, like everybody's cashing in this one. coupon. I want to ask him why. What is he doing differently than the other 2? What area is he in? What is the reasoning? So this is about why you want to find out how your marketing is effective. And this is the most basic, right? Teenagers handing out flyers. Come to find out, he asked the kid, how come I see these? What are you doing differently than your friends here? And the kid said, I don't know. I'm just standing in the line at the pizzeria with people waiting to get their order, put their order in and hand out the coupons. So he's handing out the coupons to people who are already a customer, already going to pay. And of course they were, they were using the coupon. The kid's right there hitting the coupon. So you need to find out where your leads are. And organic marketing, although it sounds free, it will take your time. Test it, analyze it, find out where your leads are coming from. And then if it's paid, it works if you want to hire a marketing agency. But if you want to throw some organic in just to keep your website fresh, Share the content, share the wealth of knowledge. It will never be a bad thing. Thank you all for watching. If you want to watch future videos, please hit the subscribe button, and I'll see you all next week. Bye now.
