Growth Session: Website Content

Lee Rosen and Rosen Law Firm attorney/writer, Lindsay Willis discuss website content – what you need and how to get it created. They talk about the content required, organizing it, making it useful and approaches to outsourcing content creation.

A technical glitch resulted in a few minutes of the call being lost. We’ve edited the recording and cut out the bad audio.

Transcript

Lee:

All right. Welcome everybody. This is Lee Rosen and I have Lindsay Willis on the line with me, as well. Say hello, Lindsay.

Lindsay:

Hello, everybody.

Lee:

Lindsay is going to help me out with today’s topic which is Website Content: What You Need and How to Get It Done, and I’ve invited Lindsay because when we talk about getting the content literally written, that has been a big part of Lindsay’s role in our law firm and she’s been practicing with us for a while. But before she practiced with us while she was in law school, we hunted her down and convinced her to help us.

And I’m going to use her as an illustration of how you might go about getting some of this content written, and Lindsay and I have not talked about today at all. So whatever you hear from her will not be anything I’ve programmed into her or told her to say. So if you ask questions of her and how she gets it done, and what her perspective is on this, you’re going to be hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth, and I think that will help you in terms of getting your content done. So we are recording the event today. The recording will be made available, inside of The Academy almost immediately. It’ll be done later today.

We can take questions, both as we go through the material and I have reserved time at the end of the program, to take questions, as well. And in this software this Instant Teleseminar that we’re using today which you may not see going forward, but we’re at least going to use it today you press #2 to raise your hand with a question. And then I can open up your audio so that you can talk to us. And if you happen to be logged in through the Webcast, instead of calling in through WebCall or through the telephone then the only way for you to ask a question is to type it in.

You don’t have audio with that Webcast option, but I will try, and keep an eye on those typed in questions, as well. There are no slides today. There’s no visual, no video. This is a purely audio presentation. So don’t worry if you’re not seeing anything. There’s nothing to see. So let’s jump in. Website Content: What You Need and How to Get It Done. To start off, I want to mention some things we’re not going to do today.

I started off with a really elaborate outline for this program, and as it got closer and closer, and I started breaking it out, and detailing each section, I just realized that I had way too much. And I wanted to push a bunch of it into subsequent programs on related, but different topics, and so we’re not going to do the site reviews. I don’t know if you noticed in the forum, but Brian and Shawn both offered up their sites for reviews, and we’re going to do that. We’re not going to do it as one of these programs. Ned Daze and I are going to do that as a separate thing.

We’ll record it, and make it available to you and over time we’ll review a bunch of websites. So if you want to subject your site to our scrutiny certainly mention it on the forum or email me directly and we’ll add you to the list. So we’re not going to do that today. We’re also not talking about video at all today and that kind of content. We’ll do that down the road, and we’re not talking about other things aside from content that sites can be used for. We’re not going to talk about using the site for intake or collecting client data or gathering leads, or many of the other things that you can do on your website.

I really want to keep this focused on content because that’s such an important approach to drawing people into your website. So I want us to stay with that, and not cover too many other things because we would give content, short shrift. So there are two kinds of websites that lawyers build. Most lawyers build sites that are in the first type that I will call a business card. These are sites that really are just an extension of your business card. Instead of it all being on one little 2 x 3-inch piece of paper, it’s on 5 or 6 or 8 or 10-pages of information about the law firm, and the lawyers, and the practice areas, and that sort of thing.

But it really doesn’t do anything in terms of generating business. It’s really as a website that provides information to somebody that is already looking for that law firm. They’re already interested in that law firm. So I really do think of it as, just an elaborate business card. It’s not going to bring you business unless somebody’s already heard about you, been told something good about you. And that’s, more often than not, that’s the kind of website that we see when we go and visit lawyer websites. But the other kind of site is a traffic generation site.

It’s a site that draws people in, lots of new people who need questions answered. Who have problems that they are looking for solutions for, and it is a very content rich site that is…it’s sticky. Somebody comes to it. They bookmark it. They come back to it. As they’re dealing with the problem, they might come back to the site dozens of times and spend, not just a few minutes on the site. But they’re very likely to spend hours, and hours, and hours, reading the materials, using the tools, watching videos, all of those sorts of things.

But if you go and look at rosen.com, I think you will find that that’s what we’re talking about, as a traffic generation website. And that’s what I want to talk about today is creating the content that goes into that sort of a site. Now before we really drill down into this, I want to tell you something, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about, and something that we are now experimenting with. Because I want for you to not only spend your energy building content, for what you might be imagining, will be useful today.

I want you to be able to use this content that you’re creating, for a site that will be very effective for you, two years, five years, six-seven years from now and I think that the web is shifting in a different direction, and so I want you to have this in your mind, as you think about creating the content. When we look at lawyer websites that are designed to generate traffic there are two approaches that people take. But I think there’s a third approach, and it is the approach that we are starting to take now with rosen.com, and you won’t see it on rosen.com, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for.

So the three approaches to building these sites are number one, a blog. You see lots of lawyers blogging, so they’re creating lots of content. Putting it on a site that is organized in reverse chronological order. That usually has a little bit of personality hopefully and is often talking about recent developments, and current events. That’s one approach, the blog and every one of you has visited a blog, and I know that because you read Rosen Institute. So you’ve spent time on blogs and you have an idea of what that’s about. That’s one big approach.

Another big approach is what I refer to as the Wikipedia approach, and that’s what rosen.com is. Rosen.com is organized around major topics and provides detailed articles, on each of the major topics. So there are 10 or 12 major topics on rosen.com. Things like child custody, and alimony, and child support, and spousal spying, and business owner that sort of thing and each of those centers or topics has lots of supporting material, and so I think of that as sort of the Wikipedia approach to a traffic generation lawyer website.

And whether you go with the blog approach or the Wikipedia approach, I think is really driven by the practice area. Blogs work really well where there are a lot of recent developments, and the clients stay with you for a long time. So if you, for instance, represent businesses who have ongoing business and therefore ongoing legal issues, they want to stay current, and up-to-date, and so you want them to keep in touch with you by reading your material.

Well, then a blog is perfect for that because these people are going to subscribe to your blog by email or by RSS Feedreader and they’re going to stick with you for months, if not years or decades of staying up-to-date with your information. If you’re in a practice area like mine, like family law where people briefly are interested in our information, I think that we’re analogous to the funeral industry or the wedding industry or the baby industry. These events that are big life events, but they come and they go. Then a blog probably isn’t the best way to present information because people are looking for that Wikipedia type, organization of information.

They’re not really interested in current events. They want to know what the details are. I think of rosen.com’s approach, as being very analogous to WebMD. When you have a foot fungus, you want to read a blog about foot fungus. You want to go research foot fungus. You want to see some pictures of foot fungus and you’re going to way to say, “Oh, that’s the one I have,” and you’re going to go, and find the solutions, and get it fixed, and so that’s an alternative approach. But here’s the third approach that we have never talked about before and I think it’s really what’s coming, and that is to organize your content, not as a blog, and not as a Wikipedia type of thing.

But to organize it as a course, as a class, and that’s what we’re starting to do on rosen.com. On rosen.com we are moving content into courses. And so instead of somebody coming to our Custody Center and just reading article after article about child custody and drilling down, what we are moving toward is inviting them to take an online course that might be an hour and a half or two hours, that will give them that overview of child custody. And then we’ll link out from the course to these detailed articles and resources, and so that’s really the direction we’re going in.

And on rosen.com, we are using some plug-ins because it’s a WordPress site, to build that and the one that we are using right now is called organizeseries.com. But there are a lot of courseware plug-ins now like LifterLMS, Lifter Learning Management System. That’s an option and these things are popping up everywhere you turn. Because presenting information in the form of a class or a course has become suddenly a very popular thing to do. If you’ve never taken a course online, check some out. There is the Networking 101 on Rosen Institute.

You can take a course on our website. We’re using the Learning Management software that’s built-in to Rainmaker which is the hosting product, and the version of WordPress that we’re using for Rosen Institute. Or you can go over to lynda.com or youtome.com, and take online courses in order to get a feel for how these things are organized, and what they look like. But what I’m suggesting to you from the outset here is that when you think about creating your content that you think about it from the standpoint of fitting it into an organized class or course that you could present, online to your audience.

I think that’s a really good way to future-proof the way that you organize the content. And Lindsay is, in fact, taking our custody work product now, all the stuff in the Custody Center on rosen.com, and organizing it into a course. Where we’ve done some trial runs of it, and had just recently recorded a version of it that we think of, as the first iteration, and then we’ll go back and do it until we get it just the way we want it. Now Lindsay I’m going to ask you before I jump in, how to create content. I want ask you to jump in here. Because what you’ve been forced to do is to take existing detailed content, and force it into the idea of a class, and I’m curious, A: How is it going building a course? And B: How hard is it to have to retrofit the old material into a new iteration?

Lindsay:

So that’s a good question. I know the first time that I looked at the rough draft of our, I guess, I’ll consider it our syllabus for the course, which was kind of existing content that was just grouped together in a fashion that made sense. Lee and Ned asked me for my input on what I thought about the course, and I immediately went through and thought, “Well, we need all this extra content. We need to add here. We need to add here.”

So it is hard. I can definitely say it was hard to go with what you already have, and make it flow the way you would if you were to start from scratch with building the course from Day 1 and saying, “This is the content related to Lesson One. This is the content related to Lesson Two.” But I do think that this is going well. What we’ve done is rearranged the content a few times, and I think we’ve got it to a point now where it flows and it seems to make sense. We’ve also noticed a need for places where we maybe thought that the content had covered everything.

But I’m noticing, “Well, it could be good if we had a little bit of extra content on this or if we explain this a little bit further.” So it is hard working backwards, but it is doable and I think the key for us was finding the best way to organize it, and the first attempt was not the best attempt. We’ve grouped it now to where I think that we’ve got it presented in a way that will makes sense to people, and it also will flow better. It’s not just getting bombarded with information and jumping from topic to topic. I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Lee:

Yeah, I think that’s very helpful, and many of you I know are building this from the ground up and so beginning with the end in mind, I think we’ll make this immeasurably easier. If you’re thinking of this content that you’re creating, as part of a presentation or supplemental to that presentation, that sort of helps you to drive it in the right direction. So that’s why I wanted to start with this. Because it really is important that you recognize where you’re going with this material that you’re putting together.

So let’s talk about when we talk about creating content, what are we really talking about? Here’s what I think you want, ultimately whether you’re doing the Wikipedia thing or whether you’re doing the blog thing, or whether your doing the course thing, you want a lot of written material. And in most practice areas, I think that you can cover the bulk of what you need to cover by covering fewer than ten topics. I’ve worked with lawyers in lots of different practice areas, and I think when you look at the big picture, it’s almost always fewer than ten overall, big topics.

So in family law it might be child custody and child support, and property division, etc. and in each area of the law it’s going to be a little bit different. But I think ten topic areas is fairly typical, and in each of those topic areas what you want is at least one really big article. You want something that is really comprehensive, and I would encourage you to create the best article on that topic that the world has ever seen. I say that not tongue-in-cheek, at all. I really would love to see you create for each of your ten-ish topic areas, the best article anybody has ever made.

And the reason that I suggest that is because the best article in the world on that topic ultimately is going to be the one that always ranks the highest on Google, and on the other search engines. Now the best article in the world will not be short. It’ll always be at least a couple of thousand words. It might be 5000 or 7000 or 10,000 words long because if you break any practice into five to ten major pieces, well, it’s going to take a lot of words to really detail that particular piece of the practice.

So in an ideal world, you’d be looking 10-ish, big articles that run somewhere between 3000 and 7000 words and you are working toward creating 50,000 or 60,000 or 70,000 words on your website about these major areas of the law in your area, and they ought to be really the best articles ever written on these topics. Now we’re going to talk about how to get that done. But that’s really what you’re working toward and if you will do that, you will have the foundation. You will have something that can be used for decades in a variety of ways and we’ve talked on other programs, not inside The Academy, but outside.

We talked about repurposing content in a recent webinar and you just think about it. If you have 50,000 to 70,000 words on your major topics what you can do with that. You can turn it into webinars. and books, and audios, and shorter articles, and FAQ’s, and on and on. So this core, this 50,000 to 70,000 words on the 5 to 10 big topics in your practice area, they are the foundation of everything you’re going to do going forward. Now a quick story. We did this.

We created about 65,000 words on family law in North Carolina back in the late ’90s. We had a lawyer in our firm who had been in a car accident, and she took about three months of working from home. Because she had a lot of pain in her recovery and she could take several hours each morning and each afternoon, and sit and write, and so she wrote this content over three months, and that content today is still the core of what we’re using on rosen.com.

Of course, over the last, almost 20 years, it’s been updated and revised, but that is really the core and the reason that that site gets 100-150-200,000 visitors a month, is because of that core content. That’s where it all started, and that’s what still brings those folks in. And so really best in the world content, that’s what you’re looking for and that content needs to be filled with stories, interesting stories about people and what’s happened to them because people love to hear a story and it needs to easily scan-able.

It needs to be broken down with headings and subheadings, with bullet points, with numbered lists, with bulleted lists. It needs to be very scan-able, and in an ideal world, you’d also have images that go along with the content. Because looking at a 7000-word article on a website is a little overwhelming to most people. So you want to make it very visually easy for them to move through that material. But a lot of folks will look at you and they will say, “Nobody will read 7000 words.” That that article is too much. Well, let me tell you this. Two things, number one, they’re right. Some people won’t read it.

Some people will say, “Oh my, gosh. This law firm is obviously the expert,” and they’re just going to dial the number and they’re going to come in, and see you and pay your fee. So they don’t have to read the content. They just need to know that you put it there. The second thing is that if somebody’s in big trouble and their life is falling apart, you’d be shocked at how much they will read. They read a lot of the content on rosen.com. They ask us a lot of questions and they find the errors in it, or when we give them advice that’s inconsistent with what’s on the site, they point that out because they’ve read the content. So don’t believe they won’t read it.

And do believe that the world at large, when they see the time and energy you put into creating the best piece of information on that topic in the world, the world will link back to it, and that’s why rosen.com has tens, if not hundreds of thousands of links, from all over the web back to the site. So you want to create 50,000 to 70,000 words, organized around these 5 to 10 big topics. With each of these major pieces of content running over a couple of thousand words, and ideally 5000, 6000, 7000, 10,000 words based on what’s needed, to adequately cover that topic.

And when you’re designing those pieces of content, when you’re thinking about what’s going to be in them, you want to be thinking about the questions you’re getting from clients and potential clients. You want to go and look on places, like Quora where people post questions and see what kinds of questions regular people are asking. You want to look on BuzzSumo.com and look for topics that have generated traffic for other websites. You want to use the keyword tool on Google Adwords, and see what kinds of volume there is for searching. You want to use all of that to develop the ideas for what should be covered in those long articles.

Now somebody asked on the forum in The Academy about stealing ideas from other sites, and we talked about that a little bit online. Here’s the deal with stealing. You want to steal all the topics. You want to make sure you’re covering the topics that other people are covering, and then you want to go further. You want to do a better job than they are doing. You do not want to steal their copy for two reasons. Number one, it’s a copyright violation, and you don’t want some law firm suing you for having copied their copy. And it’s pretty easy to find when somebody does it, and people do it to rosen.com all the time. And then number two you don’t want to have identical content. Because Google is not impressed when your content is not unique and special.

They want you to write valuable information that is new and that is helpful to people, and so go out there and look, and see what other people are doing, and steal those ideas, but obviously don’t steal the topics. Now I want to tell you where I think the best place in the world is to steal from and Lindsay I want to ask you if you agree with me or not. But over and over again, and I’ve built several of these sites for law firms around the world, we’ve done it in Australia and Canada, and in the U.S. I don’t want to do any more because it’s too had.

But we’ve done it and the place we steal content from, in terms of stealing the ideas and the concepts, is treatises. We find a treatise that covers the topic, the really comprehensive treatise and we go there as our primary source. True or false, Lindsay has that been an approach you’ve taken?

Lindsay:

Yes, I would say 100%. So part of what, when I first started working at Rosen, one of the tasks that I was charged with was to help create content for Canadian and Australian family law sites, not having any knowledge at all of how family law or divorce or anything works in those countries. So we bought the treatises, and I poured through those, and it just gave me a wealth of information that was everything I needed, basically to write the major content and the additional content, to get all those words that Lee’s talking about. But the treatises could not have been more helpful. I think that for Australia and Canada that may have been pretty much the primary resource that I used to “steal from” I guess when we were creating the content for those sites.

Lee:

Right, yeah, and obviously all these comprehensive treatises, yeah, these are law professors usually that have really spent a tremendous amount of time, and they keep it up-to-date, and all of that. So usually you can’t find a better source then the treatise on that topic area. So I would encourage you to identify these key topics in your practice, and then to outline the topics yourself. Don’t outsource this. Don’t find somebody to help you with it. Go ahead and start working on an outline of the topic because this is what you do, what you know.

There’s nobody out there that’s going to do a better job at this high level of thinking, of getting it organized and so figure out what the article’s going to be called. Outline it. Work on the topics for bulleted lists, for subheadings. I really like it when I can read the headings and the subheads, and it basically tells me the story of what’s in the article without having to read the article. So I like to start with the headings and just read one after the other without reading the article, and see if I’m basically getting a summary of the articles.

That’s really what you want to be doing is writing out those headings, and those subheads, and identifying what things are going to be turned into bulleted lists. Anything like that you’re going to put in, and you want these articles to be useful. This is not filler content. This is not content for somebody to look at and think, “Oh, they wrote this stuff.” This is content that actually will make a difference in the life of the person that’s reading it. That’s why I’m talking about best in the world. I like to think of our audience, as being people that are doing this themselves. For whatever reason they use the self-help approach to solving their problem.

So I want the content to be adequate to help them do this on their own, if that’s what they have to do for whatever reason. So when we outline it, that’s really the person we’re writing for and all we’re doing in preparing this outline is giving. We want this to feel like we are giving away our knowledge our intellectual property and we want to put as much of what’s in our heads, into their heads. And as you organize and outline this thing, you’re really doing a lot of the core thinking. This material when you’re done with it, you know once it’s fleshed out, it’s really going to be useful to the audience, to the people that are reading it.

That you’re going to be generous with them. They’re going to be helped by this, and you now have a detailed plan on their outline for what this piece of content, needs to look like. I would not outsource to anybody what I just described to you. That is a core part of the mission is getting that basic overview of what you want created, done. Then we can talk about outsourcing and we’ll shift gears, but I really want to encourage you for this overview this plan to be your brain creating it, before somebody else goes to work in fleshing it out.

We have tried a lot of different approaches to getting content written, and so let’s talk about some of those approaches and how we’ve done it, and what has worked, and what hasn’t worked for us. First of all, we have tried Elance and we had a lot of content created on Elance. What we did is we advertised the project on Elance. We’ve done it a number of times over the years, and we found writers who were willing to work with us. Always lawyers who were willing to work with us on creating the content. Our approach was to try them out.

To give them an assignment, using the detailed outline that we had prepared, and asked them to crank it out, and to see what they could do for us. Ultimately each time we found somebody who was pretty good, and we would use them for creating as much content, as we could get out of them. Eventually with those folks, we would lose them. They would work for us for a while, and then they would disappear. They would have had enough, and that was fine. We paid by the word, and we got what we needed done, done. So that is one approach, and I think it’s a pretty good approach if you don’t have better alternatives, and we’ll talk about better alternatives here as we go forward.

The thing that has worked really, really well for us is advertising for lawyers to write the content on websites where lawyers look for jobs, and we did it once on Craig’s List in Toronto and found a lawyer who was a stay-at-home mom. She had just had a baby a couple of months earlier and was looking to go back to work, but wanted to work from the home. So that worked out really well for us. She did a great job for us. She worked for us for about three months, and created about 60,000 words. Sort of the core material for one of these sites that I was talking about earlier, and so that’s an option.

And you’ll find lawyers looking for jobs on Craig’s List, obviously and in other places, like Indeed or on alumni lists from law schools, or if you have a legal newspaper in your jurisdiction, that’s a possibility. Another thing that we have done with mixed results, Lindsay being the success story, but a number of others not having worked out so well is to hire law students. We post listings at their placement offices. We get people to apply and we test them. We give them assignments. Let them go and write the assignment.

We pay them for the test, and sometimes the articles turn out well, and sometimes they don’t. And I will tell you that, for us, with Lindsay it obviously worked out really well. We’ve had a few other people it’s worked out well for. But we’ve also had a bunch of duds that we got in that way, unfortunately. So it’s an option and I would encourage to consider it. But I just don’t want to be overly optimistic about it because we’ve had some trouble with it.

The thing that has worked out for us really well is to use the creation of content, as a test for whether an associate might be a good person to work for us, and Lindsay is Exhibit A for that. She was writing content for us, and it went so well that we wanted her to work in the firm, and so it’s a terrific way…if I were in your shoes, I would look for ways to use this, as a method for determining whether somebody is a lawyer you’d want to hire down the road. Because interviewing is just terrible.

Normal interviews just aren’t terribly useful in terms of screening people out, and so this is a great way to sort of see whether somebody actually has the capability that you need for them to get the job done. Lindsay, you’ve been on the other side of this. Is there anything you would add to that, in terms of finding somebody?

Lindsay:

No, I think for me it was great for me to be able to have the opportunity to write for Lee during law school, and I really appreciated it. Because it was about the only thing that I did my third year where I earned any income. So that obviously was of benefit to me and it also helped me, working with him on the content while I was still in law school, I think was a benefit to me too. Because he really showed me the difference between content that needs regenerated for the website and the boring…the way that we’re taught to write in law school, and there’s really no life to it. So it was good for me to see his perspective on things when I was still in school.

And it helped me continue to make content for him after I was out of school that was more geared towards what we were looking for. I think that from what I’ve seen with some of the law students, I’ve had the opportunity to read some of their content, and see some of their outlines, and a lot of times they are stuck in that law school mentality and everything is dry and just about getting the information out, and not so much about having these scan-able headlines, using the words that are going to trigger big hits on Google, and having that content really catch people’s eye.

Lee:

Yeah, that’s good input. So everybody that creates content for us gets paid and I will just tell you that we pay $.20 per word. We pay the people for doing the test and we just accept we have to pay people in order to get them put real effort in, to determine whether they’re going to be able to cut it for us or not. Looking at writing samples in advance is usually not all that helpful. Because you don’t know exactly what the assignment was always. It’s not clear how much they were given, what resources they had access to, etc.

But most significantly a lot of the writing samples they produce for you have been edited. Somebody has looked at them since they wrote them and you don’t how much editing went into it. So I really think if you want to find out if somebody’s right for your use case, you’ve got to pay them to do the work. So okay. That’s a lot of it. That’s really the core of what I think you ought to do to create the content. Now I want to give you a couple of additional pieces here that I think will be useful to you.

While you’re building content on the site there are some things you can do to make the site look fuller so that it has more stuff on it, even if you’ve not yet got all this content produced. You can put statutes and cases on your site. We used to do that many years ago when we were building out the site. We would literally cut and paste the cases, being careful not to use the stuff that has copyright on it, like the head notes from West Law. That sort of thing, but we would literally cut and paste case law and put it on the site, in order to make it look like we had a lot more content than we did. The same with statutes, cutting and pasting statutes.

It’s also really easy to get law students to write reasonably good quality summaries of cases and to put those summaries on your site. I don’t think that’s incredibly useful to anybody. But I will tell you that it draws Google’s attention, and your users don’t always realize that it’s not useful. I would replace that not terribly helpful content with more helpful content, as you go forward. But it’s a shortcut, in terms of making the site look fuller and more fleshed out than it actually is. Also regardless of how much content you’ve got, the site is a great place for directories of resources with detailed descriptions of how those resources might be useful to the reader.

So I would encourage you to put those things up. Those things are, in fact, valuable and so there’s no reason not to do it. Now somebody asked a question on the forum for today and I want to address it and they said…I’m literally reading it here. It says, “I only want to take on the initial task of creating the best Louisiana family law website once. So I want to get it right. I realize, of course, that edits and revisions will come for the life of the site. But as far as filling it with tons of information and shelling out a bunch of money in one hit to a writer I’d like to get it right the first time,” and I agree with that completely for the most part. I think you do want to get it right the first time.

A really good example of that is the site we built in Toronto a few years ago. We paid the writer $.20 a word. There were about 60,000 words. Do the math. That’s about $12,000. We got it done in about 90 days. We provided that very detailed breakdown of what needed to be on the site and we got a really solid core of information that almost…well, not almost. It immediately got Google’s attention and started moving rapidly up through the rankings, and started getting a bunch of inbound links from external sites, and the traffic literally doubled overnight, and doubled every month for a long while after the content went up.

There’s no reason you can’t do that exact thing today. But in that question is this part about, “I realize, of course, that edits and revisions will come for the life of the site.” I really want to emphasize the significance of that statement and there will be a lot of edits and revisions. Realistically a site like this is going to require new fresh content in order to keep it at the leading edge. To make it more and more useful, it’s going to require new fresh content every week forever. It is literally a never-ending project of major significance.

So people like Lindsay are working on our site everyday. She’s not the only lawyer in our firm that’s working on it and we’ve got at least two other people, not lawyers. But two other people working on thing for the site and the site grows by dozens of pages every single day between the forum and the new content going on and being added to the site. So it is a major project, but when you have that going and you build it, what happens is it’s an economic driver. It takes on a life of its own because it’s worth it. Most law firm sites are not worth working on or improving because they’re not drawing in people who are then paying the firm money.

You want to build that literally has an economic life of its own, which is what goes on at rosen.com, and you have resources to pay to keep growing the site and so it’s a virtual circle. Where more people, more content, more people, more content, more clients, more revenues, that cycle just spins, spins, spins, and goes faster and faster all of the time. So obviously I believe, and I don’t think there could be any really contrary argument, investing in a site like this makes a tremendous amount of sense, and it makes sense in any market, in any jurisdiction. I’ve been involved in lots of them, and I’ve never seen it go in any direction other than very, very well.

Okay. So when you say you’re creating content, I understand where you’re coming from. I just the sense that it is kind of thin and that’s what Google is saying to you. They’re saying, “This content is not detailed, comprehensive information about this topic, and so we’re going to link to somebody else who is providing that information.” So you don’t get the traffic because Google’s not sending it to you. So that’s where I would really encourage you to dig in and flesh it out. To really do those ten articles and when you say wall of text…I mean yeah. I don’t like the phrase wall of text, but it is going to be a huge gob of text.

And in an ideal world we make it scan-able by using the approach that lots of people use to make web text readable. By making it have headings, and subheadings, and bulleted lists, and numbered lists, and images. But we want it to be an incredible resource, so yes, they’re going to be a lot of words there, and it’s going to be a wall of text in a lot ways, yeah. Does that help?

Jennifer:

It does. Thank you.

Lee:

Good. All right, so I hope you’re takeaway from this is that it’s worth creating the content. That it’s going to be a lot of work, but it will generate huge gobs of business for you as time goes by. It becomes a resource that once it’s up and running, just works year after year, after year. And yes, you will continue to improve it and expand upon it, but that’s because it becomes an asset that’s worth improving and worth expanding upon. So that’s what I’ve got for you today. Lindsay, thank you so much for helping me out today. I really appreciate it.

Lindsay:

Well, thanks for including me.

Lee:

And we will get this posted on the site and if you have questions, post them in The Academy. I will be obviously there right along with you to answer questions and discuss it further and I look forward to talking to you, about two weeks from now when we do a Q&A. So between now and then, have a good one. Talk to you soon.