twofortueHere’s a scary thought – earlier today, a blog post caught my eye, talking about the “one content marketing question” we should all be asking ourselves. Remember, when we say “content marketing,” we’re talking about anyone who authors articles, writes a blog, presents at conferences, does informational videos, etc. – basically anyone who produces substantial content that is shared with others.

These days, that’s pretty much all of us, or a large number of us at least. So what’s this one content marketing question?

Would anyone miss your content if you did not publish it?

The question itself is less unsettling of course than the potential answer. But let’s consider that for a moment. If you stopped writing articles, blogging, presenting, or whatever you’re doing to provide others with your knowledge, would anyone notice?

Hopefully the answer is a resounding yes!

But what if it isn’t?

Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: How to Make Your Content as Fierce as Beyonce

Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network. For our latest interview, we’re continuing our Instagram video series!

Each of the videos below answers the questions that precede it – Marjorie Suisman of Davis Malm & D’Agostine in Boston, Massachusetts is the subject of our latest set of videos!

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?

http://instagram.com/p/4EppuFJPht/

Continue Reading ILN-terviews: Marjorie Suisman, Davis Malm & D’Agostine

Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network. For our latest interview, we’re continuing our Instagram video series!

Each of the videos below answers the questions that precede it – Amy Fracassini of Davis Malm & D’Agostine in Boston, Massachusetts is the subject of our latest set of videos!

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?

http://instagram.com/p/4ElnM5pPrU/

Continue Reading ILN-terviews: Amy Fracassini, Davis Malm & D’Agostine

twofortueYou may remember that a couple of weeks ago, we looked at a couple of tools to use when you’re facing down the dreaded writer’s block. The post I referenced listed 10 tools, and while I’m not planning to examine all of them, there are two more ideas that I want to offer you in today’s Two for Tuesday’s post.

Tool One: Quora

This may be one that you’re familiar with, and it’s one that’s been batted around the legal industry a little in recent months. Content Marketing Institute tells us:

Reportedly, Quora has the best answers to any question that you could ever ask. This popular Q&A website is built around questions introduced, answered, organized, and edited by the members of its community. This interactive platform enables users to edit questions and suggest edits to answers published by other users.”

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. If you were a fan of LinkedIn questions, this may be just the place for you. I’m not necessarily suggesting that you need to sign up and start answering questions over there, but it *can* be a place where you can find inspiration for blog posts.

Obviously, the usual rules apply when it comes to legal questions on the internet – while you can and should speak in broad terms as you would in any online setting (such as you would at a cocktail party if someone asked you a question), if the question is specific, or leads to follow up, your best course of action is to suggest an offline, professional conversation. But since you’re all intelligent people, you know where the  line is between offering legal advice and opining on legal matters in general, so you’ll be able to identify these situations and act accordingly.

As the Content Marketing Institute suggests:

Using Quora, you can select the subjects in which you are interested (business, movies, design, sports – the list of options is incredibly diverse and even fast food is seen as a topic of interest in its own right) and follow them to discover the most interesting answers to questions related to those fields.”

Sometimes, a clever question or a smart answer can make you see things from a different perspective, allowing you to present your facts from a new angle.”

So when you’re struggling for a topic to write about, dive on into Quora and see what you may find. It’s a good idea to have your profile set up already, so that you’ve got your list of subjects pre-populated and don’t have to invest much time in the moment. And make sure to expand outside of the legal industry – look to what your clients and potential clients care about for subjects and keywords, and you may find some questions that you’re happy to answer right within Quora, and others that you may want to expand upon in a blog post. (You can also do both by the way).

Also:

Toward the end of the year [2013], the company introduced the Stats feature designed to give writers the opportunity to check statistics and find out how many people have shared, viewed, and followed their answers and questions.

So if you’re using Quora regularly, it will also give you an idea of what topics people are most engaged with, and therefore, what you may want to be focusing your own writing on. That actually leads to our next tool…

Tool Two: Your Own Analytics

It’s likely that you’ve never seen me talk about analytics here, and that’s because they’re not something I focus a great deal on. In general, it doesn’t matter how many followers or visitors or likes you have – it’s the quality of those individuals and the time that they spend engaging with you that matters.

But one time when analytics can be extremely useful is when it comes to looking at which of your content has been most popular. Content Marketing Institute says it succinctly:

We can all learn from our mistakes and draw our inspiration from our past successes. Return to your most successful pieces and embrace a similar writing style or topic.

Take a closer look at blog posts that you published one year ago. Do they still get a lot of traffic? Did they create quite a stir on social media platforms? Did you get feedback from your readers after publishing them? Some of these posts could inspire your future content pieces, and some of them could also be rewritten.”

Perhaps you did a top ten list of things employers should know before hiring someone, and that was extremely popular – have there been any changes to the laws in your jurisdiction that would warrant an update to that? Are there other warnings you’d like to offer that would merit a part two for that piece? Identify what have been the most successful pieces of content, and why, and then try to capitalize on that.

Importantly though:

According to State of Digital, the words that you put on paper not too long ago can serve as your most prominent fountainhead of wisdom. This doesn’t mean that you should live in the past and stuff your audience with topics that have been done to death. However, it may be a good idea to revisit a few of your most popular posts and find the best way to give them another spin, as long as they are based on facts that could still be considered relevant and interesting.”

And that’s the key. Don’t try to pass off old posts as new ones – people will see through that, and it will weaken their trust in you. Instead, use those posts to develop new or updated content, and be transparent that you’re doing so. Those other posts were successful for a reason, and the new posts will likely resonate with the same audience as before, as well as reach new people.

What other tips and tricks do you have for combating writer’s block?

We’re delighted to announce that our firm of the month for June/July is KLA – Koury Lopes Advogados, Brazil!

June/July 2015

ILN Firm of the Month – KLA – Koury Lopes Advogados – Brazil!

The ILN is proud to announce our latest firm of the month, KLA – Koury Lopes Advogados – Brazil!

KLA is a dynamic full-service law firm, established in 2002. What makes the firm different and places it among the most modern law firms in Brazil is its way of applying legal knowledge to the business of its clients. The firm works not only with transactional and complex operations, but also dedicates the same effort to daily matters, offering full time support. It aims to understand the business of the clients and respond with the necessary agility, clarity in communications and practicality. The firm tries constantly to anticipate relevant trends and novelties, aggregating value to its legal services. The partners participate or personally manage all steps of the work and do not distance themselves from the client, since long-lasting relationships are part of the firm’s philosophy. The right professionals are allocated for each work, with the purpose of obtaining the maximum efficiency in the formation of the teams dedicated to each client and matter, assuring effectiveness and cost control. A top level team of motivated professionals is located in its São Paulo and Brasília offices, many with academic and professional experience abroad. Continue Reading Firm of the Month – KLA – Koury Lopes Advogados, Brazil!

iStock_000000865752MediumI’m delighted that we’re launching our Corporate Group’s first edition of “Establishing a Business Entity In: An International Guide” today!

The collaborative electronic guide provides a summary of key corporate law principles in 18 countries internationally. It is designed to serve as a quick and practical reference for those establishing an entity in these jurisdictions. It showcases the strength and depth of the combined expertise of our corporate lawyers, and we already have plans to add additional jurisdictions to the publication, which will be regularly revised, to make this a comprehensive and up-to-date source of information.

To view the guide, please click here: http://bit.ly/ILNCorporate

You can also regularly see more of what our Corporate Group is publishing on our ILN LinkedIn showcase page here.

Co-Chaired by Charles Cowper of Gadens Lawyers in Sydney, Australia and Charles Wander of Fladgate LLP in London, the Corporate Group provides a platform for discussion among ILN members of Corporate Law matters in an international context, including mergers and acquisitions, commercial contracts and corporate governance, for a range of clients. The Corporate Group meets regularly at all ILN Annual and Regional Meetings and discusses issues of interest via their collaborative listserv.

We’re looking forward to subsequent editions of the guide and more discussion among our members!

twofortueWe’re taking a break from our regularly scheduled content marketing discussions to talk about some important news for content providers – and make no mistake, law firms are content providers!

Yesterday, Apple presented a keynote that offered some of the most important updates for publishers in years – maybe not as exciting as a new iPhone or entirely new piece of technology, but for those of us in the content space (read: all of us), they are updates that we want to sit up and pay attention to.

The ILN’s Executive Director (and huge Apple fan), Alan Griffiths, sent me this article from Nieman Labs last night on the keynote, and there are two points that I’d like to pull out from it on the Two for Tuesdays for us to look at in the context of the legal industry, and what it may mean for us. Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Big News from Apple for Content Providers

Redhead girl with green phone on yellow background.If you ask any of my lawyers, they’ll tell you that I have a “mad face.” I reserve it for times when I need to get them moving from one thing to the next at conferences (and they’re not hustling), or when I am actually frustrated about something that’s not running as smoothly for them as I would like.

But truth be told, it actually takes quite a lot to get me legitimately mad. It happens so seldomly that I can remember each incident quite clearly – and that means they leave an impression.

I had one such issue in advance of our recent Annual Meeting, having nothing to do with the actual conference, and it was such a frustrating example of how NOT to treat a customer that I wanted to share it here as a cautionary tale for all of us to remember how easy it is to make or break a client relationship in a single interaction.

My customer service story involves clothes – the short version of the story is: I needed a few new things in advance of the conference, and decided to order from Boden, a British company (this is important). I’d never ordered from them before, but have gotten their catalog for years and always liked the look of their styles. I placed the order late on the 16th of May, knowing I was leaving on the 25th, and paid for premium shipping (3-5 business days).  Continue Reading How to Lose a Client in One Easy Step

twofortueIf you’re a regular producer of content (like a blogger), there will be days when you’ll find yourself scrambling for a topic or the words to flesh out your latest idea.

The dreaded writer’s block.

We all face it from time to time, and it can be one of those things that really stops you in your tracks as a content provider if you don’t find a way to address it. Not because it’s fatal to your writing, but because once you get out of the habit of writing for a few days, you’ll find it’s much easier to forget to do it than it is to remember.

I’ve talked here before about how my editorial calendar is a huge help to me in combatting writer’s block, and keeping me on a dedicated schedule of posts, and that is indeed the case.

But as I learned when reading this post from the Content Marketing Institute this week, there are also some tools out there that can help you with your writer’s block.  I’m very excited to try these out myself, since even when I have general areas scoped out in my calendar, there are certainly days where I’m hunting for inspiration!

So today (since it’s Tuesday), I want to cover two of them that look to be of particular use to the legal blogging community – I’ll be giving these a deeper look myself in the coming months, so let’s work together and see what we think!

Tool One: HubSpot Blog Topic Generator

I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t come across this one before, since I’m a big fan of HubSpot (my editorial calendar is based on their template, after all!). But I like it for giving me something different when it comes to generating a topic for my blog posts.

Keep in mind – this doesn’t have to be limited to blog posts either. Depending on what is generated, it may be a suitable outline for a presentation you’re going to give, or an article you’re preparing to write. Think of it as a content generator in general, if you’re looking to spice up the way you frame your content.

Let’s take a look at an example – I put in “content marketing,” “law firm marketing,” and “legal networks,” and it suggested these as topics:

Screen shot 2015-06-02 at 2.18.28 PM

Sure, these aren’t all going to work for me. But if there’s a day that I’m really struggling to find an idea (or even on days I just wanted something fresh!), I could easily use or adapt these. Knowing my audience, I could put together posts on:

  • 5 Best Blogs to Follow About Law Firm Marketing
  • 7 Things About Legal Networks You Should Know
  • 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach you About Content Marketing

And how about putting together a quiz? That might be an interesting idea. It’s not going to be right for every practice area, but it may be a neat suggestion for something different to engage your audience a little bit.

To some of you, the above may look like fluff, but that’s because I’m adding in what’s in my area of expertise. How about generating topics for your practice area?

  • The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Heard About Patent Prosecution
  • 7 Things about TTIP You Should Know
  • The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Trademark Filing in [Country]
  • 10 Myths about [Your Specialty]

We can often get caught up with looking for the latest trends and the hot story in our area of expertise, and forget about some of these more “evergreen” topics that work quite well for not only breaking writer’s block, but also engaging our audience for a long time to come! So head on over to HubSpot’s topic generator today, and use it to come up with some new content for your blog!

Tool Two: Ahrefs Content Explorer

This tool is an interesting one, and one I think will have a lot of relevance for blogging lawyers especially.  Content Marketing Institute says:

Sometimes, lack of inspiration is not your worst writing problem. At some point, figuring out how to cover popular stories that already have broken on the Internet can become the real challenge. How can you stumble across high-impact news that your readers would share a lot?”

We see this happen quite often – a new piece of legislation comes out, or there’s a ruling in a case that will impact your clients, but every other firm on the block is writing about it too.

Use the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool to spot the most shared types of content for every imaginable topic. This is one of the simplest ways to discover stories that have generated thousands of shares and tweets during the last 24 hours. This tool makes it easier for you to create interesting, high-value content pieces that mirror the current interests and preferences of your audience.”

It’s not going to tell you what to write, or how to frame it, but it will tell you what people are most interested in within the subjects that you’re most experienced in, and can write about.

For example, let’s use TTIP again (for those of you not familiar, that’s the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). There are a number of areas of this you could focus on and address as a legal author and blogger, and if you’re hitting a little writer’s block, head over to Ahrefs Content Explorer, and enter “TTIP” into the box to search for the most shared content:

Screen shot 2015-06-02 at 2.59.41 PM

You can see here that you can search by date (I looked at what was most popular in the last 24 hours), and you get a list of the most shared articles by site. Then you can read and reference those in your own posts to frame the content.

It’s another tool to broaden your horizons so you can keep up with what’s most interesting to those you’re engaging with, so that they can continued to be most interested in you.

Try out these tools, and let me know what you think, and we may be back next week with a look at a few of the other tools on the list.

twofortueToday’s Two for Tuesdays is coming to you from Taormina, Sicily, where I’m preparing for our Annual Meeting, which officially begins on Thursday (for our delegates – I’ll be putting the finishing touches on the details tomorrow!).

But for now, I want to focus again on content marketing – specifically a couple of categories that may be useful to lawyers producing content.  Content marketing can sometimes seem daunting, and some of the ideas suggested too “new-fangled” or “out there,” but in this post, I’ll be bringing you a couple of ideas for blogging or videos (or any other creative means of delivery) that I promise you’ll be comfortable with.

Tip One: Use Case Studies – But Make them Compelling

This may be something that you’ve already adopted into your content marketing mix, but just in case you haven’t, case studies are an excellent place to look for content. Obviously not every case will be a good candidate, but some will provide interesting stories that will highlight your creativity and expertise, as well as your ability to advocate for your client. And even better if you can get them to co-author the piece with you. Continue Reading Two for Tuesdays: Compelling Content Marketing Categories for Lawyers