Andrew Stickel

Here’s the question:  When making a short video, how much legal support do you recommend mentioning in the video?

How Much Legalese And Factual Info Is Needed?

Basically, you’re asking how much legalese should you include in the video or how much factual content?  How much research do you need to do? The answer is not much, and it actually works out in your favor, because you’ve got to remember that people relate to stories better than they relate to anything else.

Tell a Story Instead

So do a video where you tell a story about something that happened to a client and how you helped that client and what the resolution was. That’s going to be way better than you saying, “Florida statute 7412 says that if you’re in a car accident, you have up to 72 hours to go to the doctor.”

If you say instead, “I had a person just leave my office. They came in for a free consultation and I wasn’t able to help them and here’s why: They got into a car accident and they felt fine. But the problem was that three days later, the pain started kicking in. Just because you get into a car accident and you feel fine right away doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not injured.”

Think about when you work out. Imagine you go to the gym and you haven’t been to the gym for two years… For example, I went to the gym and I lifted weights and the next day I was so sore, I couldn’t even lift my arm. But I wasn’t sore that day, I was sore the next day.

So, a car accident is kind of the same thing. So this person came into my office and they weren’t injured right away. They didn’t get themselves checked out, and then they waited and they waited.

And now three months have gone by, and they’ve got a ruptured disc or whatever the issue is, but they didn’t go to the doctor. Because of that, I really can’t help them, unfortunately.

When you tell that story, that’s a lot better and a lot more meaningful and a lot more impactful than just giving facts and figures and things like that. So, it’s going to be a lot easier just to tell stories.

Some Clients Try To Write “Term Papers”

I’ve talked to some clients that get hung up in the research. It’s like their kind of writing a term paper and that’s not what these videos are supposed to do. These videos are supposed to be just quick pieces of information that go on to solve a problem.

What You Should Do Instead

And you can say something like, “Here’s a quick tip for anyone that’s in a family law dispute: do not post anything about the opposing party or your case at all on social media. We just left the court and in the case before us, the husband went on a Facebook rant about his ex-wife and how she was out partying – on Facebook.

And because of this, her attorney saved all the screenshots and you know what? He used it against him. And then we saw this result and this person is actually going to have to live with whatever the result is.”

That’s a better story than anything that’s just facts and figures. So, obviously, make sure what you’re saying is accurate, but it’s better to tell stories than it is to just use facts and figures and do a ton of research.

Also, doing a ton of research is going to make it a lot harder for you to consistently create content, so just tell stories about things that happened in real life, and that’s all you need to do.

Here is a question I just got:

Does Clickfunnels Take The Place Of My Website?

ClickFunnels includes the word funnel because you’re trying to funnel people in a certain direction.

What’s On Your Website

With your website, you get to the homepage and then there’s navigation at the top with About Us, Practice Areas, Contact Us, Awards and Settlements, and so on.  And then you have content on the homepage and all these different things.

There’s also a phone number and there’s a place where they can enter their email address or maybe fill in a contact form. There are so many different things on a website, so when you go to a website, it can really become kind of a fact-finding journey.

How Clickfunnels Works

ClickFunnels and funnel software, in general, is designed for one specific thing. You’ll see it if you go to any of my pages, for example, my book page, which is freebookforlawyers.com, or if you go to heylawyers.com, where you can get that free Google My Business course.

Those pages are designed to accomplish one goal. It’s to get whatever the person is on the page for. It’s trying to get them to accomplish a task.

The Example Of Amazon

Go to Amazon, for example. When you’re in the shopping cart of the checkout page on Amazon, all the other links go away. The only links left are there for the purpose of getting you to complete the checkout.

If you’re on the Amazon homepage, you’ve got Home, and they’ve got the Search box and they’ve got all those other links. But once you’re basically in the sales process, they’re trying to get you to accomplish their goal, which gets you to spend money.

A Funnel Has A Specific Purpose

So, a funnel is designed for that specific purpose. We use funnels all the time to get people to download a cheat sheet, or to get them to opt into whatever it is. And the reason I use ClickFunnels instead of my website is that I can hyper-focus them on a specific task.

And when you have things you can up-sell as well, then ClickFunnels works really well, because you can add those up-sells too. You can do the free cheat sheet. Then you tell them, Hey watch the video training, and Hey buy this thing…

What Lawyers Can Also Do With Funnels

It’s a little different for lawyers, but a lot of lawyers can be creative in figuring out different things they can sell. You can even do promotional materials, where they’re just paying for the shipping. I do a lot of the free for shipping offers and it helps liquidate a lot of your cost.

So, ClickFunnels is different from a website because the website is traditionally more informative and a funnel is designed to get people to complete a specific task.

Tracking Law Firm Organic And Social Media Ads Leads

Here’s another question I’ve been asked: How do you track cases coming from organic searches as opposed to coming from Facebook ads?

Basically, you can put a different phone number on your Facebook landing pages. Or here’s what we do a lot of times with our clients. We use a software called LeadOwl, which is really cool.

What LeadOwl Can Do

And what LeadOwl does is this… First, we tie it to a cheat sheet. So we’ll do a Facebook lead ad and it will say, download the free cheat sheet that teaches you how to get creditors to stop calling.

You can tie it into the software LeadOwl, so that the second a lead comes in, you say, enter your best phone number and we’ll text you this guide. That way you make sure that you get their correct phone number.

And then LeadOwl ties into Facebook lead ads. So you automatically get a notification on LeadOwl and with one touch of a button you can press call or you can text them and you can use canned responses. So you can typically track it that way if you’re doing Facebook ads.

What About Organic Leads?

Now if you’re talking about organic Facebook, that’s a little more difficult. But truthfully, there’s not a lot that comes from organic Facebook anymore. So much of it is ads because it all pays to play these days.

The Google Analytics Option

It’ll all come down to your phone number. Now what you could do is you could go to Google analytics and you can go to the acquisitions section and then look under, I think it’s medium. Somewhere in there, it says social, and you can see how many people are coming from there. But it’s kind of hard to do it that way outside of the tracking number.

Here’s a question I just got:

I Googled my name in quotation marks to see what came up. Then I followed that up with my name in quotation marks, followed by an attorney. When I do that, other attorneys’ ads pop up. Does anyone know if this is a violation of Google’s ad policy?

People Can Bid On Your Name

People are allowed to bid on your name. This typically doesn’t happen that often, but what’s triggering it is that people are saying anytime the word attorney pops up, show my ad. So that’s what’s happening there.

A Possible Scenario

But if you have a well-known name or a slightly well-known name it is definitely possible to bid on other attorneys’ names. So for example, it would be like Morgan and Morgan in Florida. On the entire East Coast, everyone knows who Morgan and Morgan is, for the most part.

So if someone’s looking for Morgan and Morgan, there is a good chance that they’re looking for a personal injury attorney, and they might not have even hired anybody yet.

Are There Laws About This?

So people will typically bid on those names. There are definitely laws about it. I don’t know exactly what they are. I know there are with brand names. So for example, if Coke was going to bid on the word Pepsi, I believe that they can’t just bid on it.

I don’t think they can say just anything about Pepsi. But what they can do is they can do a comparison. Like before you drink Pepsi, see how Coke compares. You can kind of do it like that.

Why You Shouldn’t Worry Too Much About It

If it’s just with the word attorney, then the reality is that most of the time when someone searches for your name, unless you’re a really big firm like John Morgan or something, they’re probably a client looking for you. And all that is happening is that the other people are wasting their time.

And if they do get phone calls, it’s people that are looking for you and they probably have a lot of wrong number hang-ups and waste a lot of money. So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

The Three Conflicting Elements Of Website Design

Let’s say you have a website that looks awesome. It’s got a big beautiful slider up top and all these cool designs, it’s artsy and everything. It’s not going to convert at all.

You’ll have to back off from some of those design elements to make sure that when someone goes to your website, they listen to the message and pay attention to what you’re trying to get them to do. That’s one part of it.
Now about those sliders.

Have you ever been on a website where there’s the header and then the picture changes, it says something, it fades in, and then the words come in from the side, and then it changes again. Then, another picture comes in, and the words come in.

Those look great, and they’re captivating, especially when they have really good pictures. The problem is, and you can Google this, they are conversion killers because they just destroy conversion rates.
In that regard, you have to pay attention to those two elements: the conversion optimization side and then there’s also the design side. The third side is search engine optimization.

If you have a website that converts awesome and looks great, you might be missing some of the search engine optimization elements, which means that Google might not necessarily like it. If you’re running paid ads, it might not be that big of a deal.

That’s the challenge with websites. It’s like a triangle, and you’ve got to balance all three of these elements so that you’ve got a website that converts well, that converts people. If it shows up in Google and looks great, but it doesn’t inspire anybody to pick up the phone, then it’s useless.

If it looks great, but nobody can find it because it doesn’t have the elements that are necessary for Google, then you either need to run paid ads or do something else. Then, it’s useless again because nobody’s seeing it unless you’re paying for people to see it.

What If Your Website Doesn’t Convert?

If it looks great and Google loves it, this is the best option, to be honest with you. But what if it doesn’t convert as well or if it doesn’t convert at all, that’s a very big issue, too. It’s really important.
One of the most important things is the headline, above the fold. You want to make sure that you’re talking about the client and not yourself. I see all the time that lawyers are talking about super lawyers, have five million cases won, went to Harvard, etc.

Focus On What Your Clients Will Get

We found that it works a lot better when you say, “When you contact our law firm, here’s what you’ll get. Here’s what we do for you: we help you stay out of jail. We make sure that parents get as much time with their kids as possible.”

Of course, this comes down to knowing your clients. Whatever it is that your clients want, you want to make sure that that’s where your headline is. That’s why everything I do with my book, which is called “How to Get More Law Firm Clients Without Losing Time and Money or Getting Screwed by Marketing Companies.”

But, I use that statement everywhere because I know that lawyers want more clients and I know they’ve been screwed by marketing companies and don’t want that to happen again. They’ve lost time, money, and a lot of energy.

Everything I do focuses on that for lawyers. If you come here, what you’re going to get is you’re going to learn how to get more clients, and you’re going to do it while avoiding all these things that you don’t want. That’s very important.

If you could put that on top of your website and incorporate that into the actual design of your website, that would make a big difference. We did a thing recently for a pay per click landing page for a DUI attorney. What was cool is we added an entire section of what the process is like:

Stacking Value

Once you retain us, we’ll immediately file a notice of appearance and a plea of not guilty. Then, we’ll meet with you and design a custom strategy for your defense. Then, we’ll file whatever it is for the DMV to make sure that they don’t take away your driver’s license.

The entire thing is talking about when you hire us, you’re going to get this, and you’re going to get this…it’s almost like a stack. If you ever listen to the Click Funnel’s Russel Brunson’s stuff, you’ve seen that.
We’re almost stacking the value there. It works well when you do that. If you can work that into the design of your website, that is very valuable, and I would recommend that.

Here’s The Question:

Does similar language on a website really harm the website? We’re struggling in creating content for our site.

My Answer:

Duplicate Content Versus Similar Content

I think you’re referring to duplicate content. Now, there is a difference between duplicate content and similar content. Duplicate content is literally copying and pasting from one page to another, and similar content is just content that is similar.

I’ve never heard of anyone being penalized for similar content, and to be totally honest with you, duplicate content doesn’t necessarily penalize the website either. What happens is – and here’s the thing – you can get away with copying local content.

So, if you have a city page, for example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer and you work in Orlando, and then you have a Winter Park page and an Oviedo page and a Winter Springs page and all these different suburbs.

Now, this may still be going on but I don’t know if it’s going on or not because we do not do this. But in the past, you could basically duplicate the content word for word, just change the city, and be okay, at least on rank and maps.

The Problem With Duplicate Content

We never did that because it’s basically a hole that Google could fix so easily that it’s not worth it for us to invest the time to do that, and then having to scramble to fix the content later if Google ever fixes the hole.

Now, with that said, duplicate content does cause issues. And again, I don’t necessarily think it’s a penalty per se, but it will basically cause pages to get de-indexed. After all, Google doesn’t want to show the same thing over and over and over again.

So I would stay away from duplicate content. It causes quality score issues, it causes panda issues, and it causes a lot of other issues. I wouldn’t do it.

How To Create Your Own Content?

But if you’re struggling with creating content for the site, it comes down to this: Either you don’t have time to create it or you don’t know what to create? Those are two different problems.

If You Don’t Have Enough Time…

If you’re not having time to create it, there’s a job board on Facebook – it’s called Cult of Copy Job Board. Just go in there and look for a writer. I mean, that’s the way you solve that problem.

If You Need More Ideas…

And then, if you’re not sure what to create, you just go into Google and you search “DUI lawyer” or you search “personal injury lawyer” or you search whatever. And as you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll see that there are related searches and there are also going to be boxes that say “people also asked these questions.”

And then just start answering the questions that people also ask because it’s telling you exactly what Google thinks is related and relevant to that search term. So, trying to be relevant to your search is a huge thing with Google.

Just Answer the Questions You Find

So just answer the questions. For example, if you type “DUI lawyer,” it will be, “What are the consequences of a DUI lawyer?” or, “What are the fees for a DUI lawyer?” or, “Will I go to jail for a DUI.” All these different questions are related to DUI.

And then, you can go even deeper. So, like, for example, I know in California – just off the top of my head – there’s something called a Harvey waiver that deals with DUI.  I don’t know what it is but I know that people search for it. Then you search Harvey waiver and you start doing all the content there.

Another Great Resource for Questions

There’s another really great website called “answer the public” that you can use. Just type in DUI or terms related to DUI like breathalyzer, or roadside sobriety test, or field test, or road sobriety checkpoints or whatever.

Just start putting those keywords into Google and into the website answerthepublic.com and you’ll have more ideas than you’ll ever know what to do with. So, that’s my suggestions. It’s pretty easy to do that.