In this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, I'll walk you through our 2024 content strategy at Ben Glass Law, highlighting how to effectively generate and repurpose content across multiple platforms by leveraging AI as a supportive tool rather than relying on it completely.
Our primary driver: Avoid the pitfalls of leaning too heavily on external vendors and, instead, cultivate a robust in-house processes to elevate our firm's value.
And if you're serious about taking your law firm's marketing to the next level, we'll discuss the benefits of joining the GLM Bootcamp in Fairfax, Virginia. This episode is packed with practical strategies to boost your marketing results and elevate your practice. Don't miss out!
Interested in the Bootcamp? Code LBTB500 will save you $500 on the registration fee.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
In this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, I'll walk you through our 2024 content strategy at Ben Glass Law, highlighting how to effectively generate and repurpose content across multiple platforms by leveraging AI as a supportive tool rather than relying on it completely.
Our primary driver: Avoid the pitfalls of leaning too heavily on external vendors and, instead, cultivate a robust in-house processes to elevate our firm's value.
And if you're serious about taking your law firm's marketing to the next level, we'll discuss the benefits of joining the GLM Bootcamp in Fairfax, Virginia. This episode is packed with practical strategies to boost your marketing results and elevate your practice. Don't miss out!
Interested in the Bootcamp? Code LBTB500 will save you $500 on the registration fee.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Welcome back into Life Beyond the Briefs, the podcast for lawyers who want to avoid living life on autopilot and exit the traditional Bill Moore hours model, and lawyers that want to greet each other with something other than I'm busy, but it's better than the alternative. Now, if you want to live a life of your own design and take control of your future, join us as we explore life beyond the briefs. This is a special vacation solo Friday episode. I'm in Arizona where I've been for the last two weeks. It is the longest vacation that I've ever taken with my kids. We are on, as I record this day, nine of what will be 12 or 13 travel days with the kids. It's been a lot of fun. I'll do a recap episode here coming up in the future.
Speaker 1:
The things that I want you to know about going on vacation as a law firm owner is that if you build your team properly, the firm will function without you for longer than you think it can function without you. I have been fortunate enough with the team that I built to be able to check my emails in the morning and in the evening, and really that's about it. I haven't had to get any client phone calls. I haven't had to answer any substantive questions. It's been pretty cool. Despite having all that extra time, I did not record a new episode for you today, so I'm digging into the vault, pulling out a piece of content that I recorded a few months earlier for our tribe members and for our in-person mastermind members, describing the 2024 Ben Glass Law content strategy for creating new articles to go on our website and then for creating YouTube videos and repurposing all of that content to splash across the less valuable areas of social, like Instagram, facebook, your Google, my Business updates, things like that that keep the Google machine happy. So if you are looking to implement a content strategy in the second half of the year, or if you don't know what the hell a content strategy is, this is the episode for you. Maybe share it with your marketing director.
Speaker 1:
And last thing, before we hit the episode is another plug for our August 1st and 2nd GLM Boot Camp, where we are going to be teaching all of this stuff in my office in Fairfax, virginia, to a small and intimate group over a day and a half. I have some expert speakers coming in, but primarily it's going to be Ben and I going over the tools and the tactics and the mindset that we have used to build our law firm into the multi-million dollar firm that it is and helping firms who are not yet at the $1 million mark get there within the next 18 months. So if you're one of those law firms that falls into the $500,000 to maybe $900,000 in revenue category and you can't quite figure out how to get over the seven-figure mark, this is the event for you. You can check it out at glmbootcampcom. And now on with the episode. I'm going to run through the system that our wonderful marketing director in the law firm, lauren, has created for how we're generating new content, repurposing old content and just trying to turn into a machine in 2024, and how we're doing it all through the use of AI, not the reliance on AI, which is important and which I'll get into towards the middle of this video. So here's my thesis Is, the longer that your firm is reliant on some outside vendor to create content for you whether it's digital, website, video, social media and the longer that you are paying them to do that without creating some sort of a process within your firm, the more you are robbing your firm of an asset that it could be building and the more you are costing yourself money. At the end of the day, if you ever want to sell your firm, if you ever want to get into a position, and if we wind up in a world where VC money is coming in and making offers for law firms, then having these content processes in our firm and not being reliant on outside vendors is going to be a tremendous benefit.
Speaker 1:
The other half of that is I think it's really hard to tell what these outside vendors are telling you is complete bullshit and which is like actual truth. Right, because I get emails every single week from people who are selling SEO services or selling we'll rebuild your website. Services that start with. Here's all the stuff that your current website is doing wrong. Website services that start with here's all the stuff that your current website is doing wrong. And I'm not alone in this, because I've talked to the members in our Hero and our Icon Mastermind groups and I know that everybody is being pitched on this and we all have different website vendors, right, and so it can't be that all of our vendors are making mistakes. It's just that if there's a dozen things your website vendor is doing, then anybody who comes in from the outside can identify the three or the four things that they would do differently.
Speaker 1:
And you, as a law firm owner, you have very little ability to tell whether differently is better or whether differently is differently, and so what we are doing in 2024 is taking the knowledge and the resources from the vendors that we have and taking these sales calls, because it's important to know what differently looks like. Right, and you make notes during these sales calls, you bring it back to your current vendor and you say here's an idea, what do you think about this? Not necessarily that we need to pursue it, but is it good or bad or indifferent? It's almost like cross-examining vendors in slow time right, because you're not doing it in real time, but cross-examining vendors in slow time right, because you're not doing it in real time, but you can get feedback on everybody else's idea. But it's important, at the end of the day, to have somebody in your firm who understands this stuff and can synthesize all of the different opinions that you get and put them into practice in your firm through a system.
Speaker 1:
So the important thing for me in the first quarter of 2024 was that Lauren be able to operate this system number one but also teach this system. So her rock in EOS this quarter is that by the end of the quarter, in a 12-minute video, she should be able to teach to a fifth grader our process for content creation, and so what I'm going to do is walk you through my understanding my fifth grade understanding of what our current content system looks like. So we're using really three tools to figure out what do we do. Next, we're using a combination of SEMrush, surfer, seo and the Google Search Console to figure out what topics are we currently weak on and where's the low-hanging fruit. That would not take a terrible amount of effort for us to increase in the rankings. And in our April Mastermind meetings, which are in person, lauren is doing a detailed presentation to our hero and to our icon level folks about the step-by-step process that she takes when she runs through these three things, what we do when there's conflicting information coming out of them, and how we choose where is the most efficient space to spend our next dollar or our next hour. And I'll give you that one of the hints that we have is this Google also suggests a feature is really powerful.
Speaker 1:
If you're writing a specific article and you feed that headline into Google, it will tell you what people are also searching for into Google, it will tell you what people are also searching for. And so if you go then to the third or the fourth or the fifth note in Google also suggests that's the low-hanging fruit that you can attack, because it's not necessarily important that you be number one for everything. That would be awesome if we were number one for everything, but listen, I got Morgan Morgan in my backyard. I have Seth Price and Price Benowitz in my backyard. Really hard to compete in that space as somebody that's not spending five figures a month on SEO. So, knowing that, we pick and choose the areas where we do want to compete.
Speaker 1:
Now, once we've gotten the topic that we're going to write our next article about, then we begin doing keyword research, and the best tools that Lauren has found for that is SEMrush and Surfer SEO. So we plug the topic in. It tells us here's the keywords that you want to rank for. And then we use Surfer SEO to start to flesh out the outline for what that article should be, how long the article should be, and then again, if there's different iterations or different topics that we ought to be writing on within subtopics within that topic. Surfer SEO tells us that. Now here's the key component we're not using Surfer SEO to completely automate the process and generate its own AI, because our fear is that, while Google says they are not currently banning AI content, it may pivot at some point in the future. Right, if what we see is law firms spitting out 300, 400 articles a month because it's push button, get article, push button, get article. Push button, get article. Google's going to do something to combat that.
Speaker 1:
And your AI written articles often write at a much higher level of English than we like. So we had, as a test case, I had Surfer SEO write one article I think it was about motorcycle accidents and I started to read it and it read like a term paper. So we took that article it was copied and pasted and put it into the Hemingway app and said tell me what grade level this is written at. It said 13th. I said okay, great. I fed it back into Surfer SEO and said rewrite this again for me, but this time at a fifth grade level. And what we got back was a much cleaner, much more different, much more readable article that still used the keywords, still had powerful H1 and H3 tags and then allowed us to add our own voice back into the article and use it, and so when you're doing this, you don't want to have.
Speaker 1:
It is helpful to have the AI write your outline for you, because it'll tell you all of the things that you need to put in the article, but you don't want to have it completely flesh out the article. It's good to have your own examples from your practice. Obviously, it's not going to get 100% accuracy on the law, especially not the law in whatever state you're in, and so you have to put eyes on this so that we're putting correct information out into the world. And so Lauren has also cultivated this list of best practices that we're making sure we use in every article before it posts. We're using, by the way Notion, which is a knowledge management and a project management software, to make sure that all of these things are done, and among our best practices are we're putting three images into every article. We're linking back in every article the two of our practice areas. We're linking outside the two other high-ranking websites, outside source links, and then, if we have one, we're embedding a video into the article, and I'll come back to our YouTube strategy in just a minute. But we're doing all of those things and they're not automated. Strategy in just a minute, but we're doing all of those things and they're not automated, but they're tasks that are created in Notion, outsourced to our VA in the Philippines to generate the stuff and then, when that's done, he clicks a button that comes back to Lauren or to me for review before it gets posted. So that's holistically how we're generating articles and putting them up online.
Speaker 1:
The other thing that we are trying to get better at in 2024 is our video and our social Now. These are places that, if you're not doing website CEO correctly, don't worry about YouTube and don't worry about social. Start with the website, but YouTube and social media are places where your prospective clients are coming to confirm that you're not a lunatic. Okay, especially people who are my age, 40 and younger are making sure that you have some social proof out there that you are not a lunatic. Every restaurant that I go to, almost every business that I engage with, everywhere, I'm going to be showing up live and in person. I check their social media beforehand to get a feeling for what is this like. And if your social media has nothing but three videos from 2018, I think that's going to be a problem for the younger generation. Now, if you're planning estates, maybe it's not an issue, but if you're planning estates by marketing to the younger generation about the reasons that their parents should go and get a will and should get a trust, then I think again, you do need to have this social proof out there.
Speaker 1:
So one of the things that we've done is we've tasked our VA in the Philippines with creating all of this stuff. We got almost 300 Google reviews as of today. We'll have more by the time this comes out. Just go through those and, with this Canva template, scrape 75 Google reviews and put them into the template so that we can have that in our arsenal to post. We're not going to post them all next month, right, but now we can feed that into a content calendar and we can drip it out so that a year from now, I've got a fully fleshed out Instagram page. Instagram, I think, is the lowest value on the totem pole because people come there to check, but in terms of showing up in the feed, instagram is devaluing right now Pictures it's devaluing really anything that's not a reel and it's only showing up in your feed for 24 to 48 hours after you post it, and so, really, the place that we're focusing in terms of social media is going to be on YouTube, because YouTube, effectively, is a big search engine. It's the number two search engine in the world and it's owned by the number one search engine in the world Google and so if you put good content, good quality content, on YouTube now, it's going to sit there forever.
Speaker 1:
If you go and you Google Virginia auto accident video or how do I settle an auto accident case in Virginia, you're going to see videos from Ben in the driveway from 2018, right? So the videos that are high quality in terms of information, not even in terms of production quality. They stick around for a long time on YouTube, much longer than on any other social media. So here's what we're doing on YouTube we have split now our channels split the LTD channel into its own YouTube channel and we split the auto accident channel into its own YouTube channel and we split the auto accident channel into its own YouTube channel, and we did that so that we don't confuse the search engine, because I only want to feed YouTube and its algorithm videos that are exactly about what those videos are about. So if I have, like our old channel, did some things about lawyer marketing some things about refereeing, some things about auto accidents and some stuff about ERISA long-term disability. Youtube doesn't know what the hell my channel is about, but if I have how to Settle your Auto Accident Case in Virginia and I have how to Manage your ERISA Long-Term Disability Case, and those are on two separate channels.
Speaker 1:
Now YouTube has a pretty clear idea of what they're marketing what to feed people and YouTube is very good and the algorithm is getting scarier and scarier that we really think, if you have a practice that's like long-term disability, you have a practice that's like family law or elder planning or something like that. It's going to start to identify people that watch videos that are like yours. So, for instance, for elder planning, if somebody has watched a Medicare video and a how do I find the right nursing home video and they've looked at ads for adult diapers, then they probably also are interested in estate planning, right, and so YouTube is going to start to funnel those videos. Now it doesn't work as well for auto accidents because there aren't defining characteristics around that community. It doesn't work as well for auto accidents because there aren't defining characteristics around that community. It doesn't work as well for criminal defense because there aren't defining characteristics. Maybe there are defining characteristics around criminals and YouTube, so that's a little bit harder, but if you have the kind of practice area where you have very clearly defined demographics and psychographics, yeah, I think YouTube is the place to be, because it's going to start feeding videos to people that are interested in stuff that is like your stuff, and so the last thing that I'll say about that is, as we called through our old YouTube page, we didn't necessarily want to move the videos or delist the videos, but we are reshooting a number of them.
Speaker 1:
So I had our VA go through our most viewed and our most engaged with YouTube videos and I gave him a template and I said I want you to pull out of each of these. What's a list of three things that you learned? What's a list of questions that people are asking in the comments section? And then, what are some things that we could use on social media, either as Instagram carousels or as a short video? And make me a big list of content Again, so that I don't have to sit down and think about. I need to shoot 17 videos. What are the first 17 things that come to mind? I've got a good list of what people already engaged with and what people already were interested in, and I can pull from that and just do it a little bit better this time around, using all the YouTube best practices which we'll probably talk about in some future video. All right, I just re-listened to this episode as I was getting ready to post it, and I do think it's worth a second listen or a share to your marketing director If there's something in there that made your head spin or made you go huh, that's, I never thought about that. Like this one is worth going back through again, unpacking, finding one strategy that you can put into place in your law firm in the back half of 2024.
Speaker 1:
And one more plug for the GLM bootcamp If you get value out of podcasts like this and you listen to podcasts like this over and over and over again, but you don't seem to be making progress what you need is not more podcasts over again, but you don't seem to be making progress.
Speaker 1:
What you need is not more podcasts. What you need is some accountability, a little bit of coaching and somebody to help you make a decision on where to spend the next marketing dollar and where to spend the next hour of your marketing time and the best entry point for that if you have not been to a great legal marketing event is going to be this GLM bootcamp that we're hosting the first week of August in our training center in Fairfax, virginia. There will be no more than 25 law firms there. We will be looking at your marketing assets, reviewing the things that are going on in your firm and making recommendations for what you need to tweak in order to get yourself over the seven-figure mark. Listeners of this show will save $500 by using code LBTB life. Beyond the briefs 500, LBTB500 at checkout at glmbootcampcom. See you there.