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When consumers run into legal issues, they start looking online for a law firm, and most of these visitors only view four law firm websites before making their choice. Due to raging online competition, you need rich, valuable content to keep your small or solo law firm visible to these potential clients. We can help you create high quality content to increase your traffic, then optimize that content by repurposing it in a number of powerful and creative ways. If you are interested in learning how to quickly repurpose content on your website, Law Quill has created the Repurposing Content Course for only $79! Check it out here!
What Is Repurposed Content?
When you write an article, you have a specific purpose in mind, and you have directed it to a targeted audience. Think of the last article you placed on your law firm website. Like any quality piece of content, it should:
- Contain helpful, relevant information
- Speak to your audience in jargon-free language
- Stay properly organized
- Contain reader-friendly design and added visuals
- Be enriched with SEO keywords and phrases
Now after all of your hard work, you want as many people as possible to read, share and benefit from your content. Once you write an article, you can choose to simply leave it on the website, and you can also carve it up into bite-sized pieces to maximize its use. These pieces, called micro-content, can be placed anywhere you need that information to get out to potential clients. This way, your long article about wills and trusts can be divided up into several short blog posts, or it can be whittled down into smaller segments of questions and answers about wills and trusts. Repurposing your content like this enables you to squeeze the most out of your content, and allows you to spread essential information in several locations.
The Purpose of Repurposing
Why repurpose content? Repurposing content is crucial for SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is the key factor of how Google ranks your website and its content, and SEO keywords tell Google’s search bots about the helpful information that is contained on your website. Knowledge of SEO has become a basic necessity for each piece of online content if you want to make digital marketing effective for your law firm. When you take your foundational content and spread it around to a wider audience, you can engage more traffic to your website and social media platforms, and more traffic translates into more new clients. The bottom line: repurposing content makes the most of your hard work and expands your audience with minimal time, effort and money.
How To Repurpose Content
Whether you write your own content, or allow Law Quill to professionally produce it for you, here are some helpful hints to get you started.
Decide Which Articles to Repurpose
The best idea is to plan on repurposing every article, every time. If you do not have the time to do this and cannot afford to outsource your content creation, here are some ways to make decisions of what to repurpose and what to leave alone. Try to focus on repurposing content which is:
- The most popular and the material that gets the most comments.
- New, fresh, and trendy. An article I wrote about Clubhouse, the fresh new social platform, is the kind of content that should be chopped up and spread around. Since I wrote it immediately as Clubhouse was launching, it gained a lot of traffic.
- Unique or newsworthy information. If there is a new law, a new statute or a current event that relates to your practice, you may want to consider dividing it up among your social media outlets.
- Evergreen content, which is material that will always be relevant and usually will not require updating.
- Similar to your competitors’ content. Research what sits on the website, blog and social media sites of your competitors and repurpose this content on a variety of sites.
Take Time and Effort
Creating quality content that people want to read is time-consuming. Even if you start repurposing from a large piece of foundational content, it still takes time and effort. Since lawyers are busy with their day job, they often outsource their content creation. Hiring a solid, smaller agency like Law Quill is more inexpensive than hiring a bigtime digital marketing agency, since our company can produce distinctive content at a fraction of the cost. When you invest in quality, SEO-rich content, it can give back in ways like better rankings, more traffic, and ultimately more leads.
Get Help
If you decide to repurpose content, you do not have to do it alone. You can create a system for creating useful micro-content, and teach it to a virtual assistant or a paralegal. You can hire a freelancer to do this inexpensively, especially if they take this course!
Schedule Your Content
I highly recommend using a scheduling tool, which will organize all of this micro-content for you. My favorite scheduling tool is called SmarterQueue. (In full disclosure, this connects to an affiliate link, and I possibly get a benefit if you use this link). SmarterQueue is a user-friendly, paid product with reasonable rates. Using an application like this enables you to add different segments of micro-content into the scheduling tool, which will lead back to the same article. Although you may have various sections of an article spread around, the scheduling tool will lead to that foundational content on your law firm’s website. SmarterQueue also allows you to schedule your content at select times, then relax and forget about it.
Micro-Content Ideas
Once you start carving up your quality foundational content, where do you place it to make it most effective? Here are some of the best ideas for using your repurposed content.
Email List
If your law firm publishes an email newsletter, consider using pieces of micro-content within the newsletter. It can be challenging to find regular material for a newsletter, but using your repurposed website or blog content is a meaningful way to fill spots on your newsletter and benefit your potential clients with the information you share.
Audio Snippets for Social Media
Your repurposed content can morph into audio snippets for social media. Tools like www.wavve.co allow you to create tiny pieces of wisdom called voice snippets, which can be enriched with captions or visuals. A number of voice snippets can be created from one voice-recorded article, and you can place them on more than one social media site.
Video
Reports say that video boosts your SEO — and consumers love it. Take advantage of this by using your micro-content in a unique way for video; all you need is your smartphone. Start by recording comments about your micro-content for around two minutes. This short video can translate into several useful segments of content. Embed these short video clips into your original article and you have given yourself an SEO-rich marketing boost. Do not forget to include your video segments into your scheduling tool as well.
Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are little gifts that provide value to a prospective client in exchange for contact information. If you want to add contacts to your email list, one way to do this is to provide a lead magnet as an incentive, and one lead magnet idea is the offer of a free webinar. You can take an entire blog post, or perhaps a series of blog posts on a similar topic and create a webinar about it. Those who sign up will benefit from the webinar, and you will gain more leads.
Podcasts
Another way to use your repurposed content is through a podcast. Podcasts are highly popular and it is easier to break into this market than through video and YouTube. (This is why I am doing one! Check it out at Legal Marketing Lounge!) It is relatively simple to take your content and create a podcast with it. To find out more about creating excellent podcasts, I recommend Pat Flynn’s Power Up Podcasting Course.
Ebook
An ebook is another solid way to create something new out of your material. Your content, organized and gathered into an ebook, can act as a lead magnet, incentive or gift for your potential and current clients.
Infographics
Research says that Google loves infographics, so repurposing content into an infographic will enhance areas of text in your articles, while also granting your favor in the eyes of Google. You can create infographics with Canva, a free and versatile tool for anyone posting on a blog or social media site.
What Are Some Benefits of Repurposing Content?
Here are some of the benefits of repurposing content:
- Helps law firms save money and quickly produce new content so they can focus instead on providing a great service to their clients
- Allows firms to reinforce their brand messaging, making it more likely for the target audience to understand and identify with this
- Encourages firms to reuse previously high-performing content in different ways and, so long as the content is up to date, this is likely to lead to content that produces similar levels of success
Should You Repurpose Content?
Below are some of the other benefits of repurposing content, and why law firms should do it:
- Enables law firms to frequently publish great content on various channels and grow their online presence without worrying about creating brand-new content all the time
- Helps law firms distribute the content more by repurposing it into different formats, resulting in better reach and promotion of the firm’s services
- Improves a law firm’s SEO as it results in having several pieces of content that focus on the same keyword
- Allows law firms to provide content in a variety of forms so the firm’s entire audience can consume the content in a format they prefer the most
How Do I Repurpose Old Content on Social Media?
According to digitalmarketing.org, repurposing content for social media is important as it saves your firm time while still providing several key benefits, including improved return on investment (ROI), enhanced legal services promotion, and better levels of organic growth on different social media platforms. Find out about repurposing content for social media, including how to achieve this below:
Consider using Twitter threads
If your firm uses WordPress, you can easily create Twitter threads using one of its features, which is a great way of reusing your firm’s old tweets to create new social media content. Alternatively, you can also do this manually through Twitter itself.
Turn Written Content Into a Visual Format
Another good way of repurposing old content for your law firm’s social media channels is to take previously written posts and turn these into visual formats. For instance, you can use the major points or quotes from these pieces of content and include them as bullet points or speech bubbles in an infographic, which you can then share on Instagram. Alternatively, you can create a video explaining the key points of this written content and share it on YouTube or TikTok.
Ask Your Followers Questions and Provide Answers to FAQs
If your followers frequently ask the same questions on social media, you can use these to inspire new posts on your channels. For instance, you can create Q&A content on Facebook and LinkedIn, or polls on Twitter, which all help to encourage engagement between your firm and prospective clients. Moreover, you can choose just one of these questions on which to focus your content and then create a social media post that answers this question.
Transform Webinars Into Video Content
If your firm previously hosted a webinar, you can transform this into video content, such as a summary or highlights video, and then publish this on LinkedIn or YouTube. Doing this is relatively straightforward and can help attract members of your target audience that prefer watching or listening to content over reading.
Conclusion
At Law Quill, creating high quality useful content is our specialty. We can also help you get the most out of your content by showing you how to repurpose, organize and share it with a growing audience of your potential clients. In fact, we created a Repurposing Content Course for $79 where you can learn all of this step-by-step!