Digital Marketing

Today, I want to show you how to increase your click-through rate. If you send an email out to your mailing list, do a monthly newsletter, or if you’re thinking about starting a monthly newsletter, you want people to click on your links.

I want to show you a cool trick that will make people click on your link, go visit your website, read what you have to say, and do it much more often than they do now. This trick also works well with Facebook Ads, and it works especially well with YouTube thumbnails too.

It’s just really easy. Anyone can do it. You don’t need any type of technical ability. So with that said, I’m going to hop over to my computer and walk you through exactly what I’m talking about.

About The Email

First, I have an email for a personal injury law firm that we work with and he is targeting motorcycle accidents. He’s trying to get cases from people that have been involved in motorcycle crashes. What he does is he provides a ton of value for motorcycle riders, and he does it in the form of videos.

What we do is we send out emails to his email list. Specifically, every day, we send out a short email like this, and we say, watch now. We also put the video thumbnail in there, and we found that this thumbnail really increases the click-through rate.

About Thumbnails And How To Get Them

The problem was that I’m not a graphic designer. The thumbnail we use is a cool, elaborate thumbnail, and we have to pay our graphic designers every time we want to do one of them. When he does a video every single day or every other day, you can see how this can get a little expensive.

So, we came up with a new way to create our thumbnails. We’re now using Canva.com, which is a completely free website (although it does have a paid upgrade version). We’re now using their software to make our thumbnails ourselves. I think they look even better than the ones our designer used to make.

The Importance Of Thumbnails

A lot of times, people don’t use thumbnails. What they do instead is they write a really long description. In fact, they write a novel, and then they wonder why people don’t click on it. Of course, there’s nothing enticing to look at. Just in case this isn’t obvious, the entire goal of sending an email is to get people to click on the link.

We do not want them to figure out from the email what the answer is to the question that we’re asking in the subject line. For example, we may ask, is it possible to avoid laying your bike down? We’re not going to answer that in the email. This is just a teaser to get them to click on the link to the video. This builds authority and the brand.

Now, we wanted to create a thumbnail without having to pay a graphic designer. Let me show you how we’re doing this.

How We Create Our Thumbnails

First, we’re going to canva.com.

Once you’re there, you can see they have all these different custom dimensions. Pick the one that is most appropriate for your needs.

What’s cool in Canva is that they’ve got over a million images. What we could do is pull up images about motorcycles.

We’ll see all those motorcycle images here, and a lot of them are free. I’m picking out an image of a dirt bike. Let’s go with something that’s kind of colorful.

You select your image, check whether it’s free, and take it from there. Next, you’ll want to edit the image and as part of that, you’ll want to use a filter so that it’s very contrasty and sharp because it’s going to be small and when things have a strong contrast and are sharp, they just look better, are more interesting, and they’re more eye-catching.

So how do you do that? Just click “filter” and then click on “advanced options.” Now turn the brightness down a little bit and turn the contrast up, by about 30 percent. You can also turn on the blur feature to make the picture blurry.

Next, boost the saturation to really make the colors pop. Anyone who’s interested in motorcycles will notice it and is likely to click on it.

After that, we want to put a little bit of text over this image to attract people’s attention even more. You’ll want to think of a short attention-getting phrase.

Just click on the text, type it up, and drag it right over to the image. I like using a font like a block font. Select the new font and also change the color to your liking. Pick one that contrasts well with the image.

Once you have the image the way you want it, just hit download. I usually recommend that you pick the PNG version. Now you’ve got an image that you can insert into your email, and you can create a link where if they click on it, it’ll take them right to your blog post or to your video. It’s super simple. It works so well, and it will get you great click-through rates!

I recently got a comment on Facebook from Clint. He said, “I received a Google beacon in the mail today. Seems very big brother-ish. But do you think it’s worth using for a law firm? Do you think Google beacon will add beacon users to their rankings?”

Okay, so Google beacon is one of those things that as a marketer I’m very excited about and as a human, I’m not so sure about. I’ve done a lot of research on it, and the problem is that Google doesn’t really give you a ton of information on it.

Basically, there are these tiny little Bluetooth beacons, and I don’t have one, so I can’t really show it to you. But Google has been sending them to people that are running pay per click campaigns.

What Can You Do With A Google beacon?

To get them, you have to have a pay per click campaign. It has to be a local pay per click campaign, and you have to have a location extension installed. Here’s what’s cool about it: You can basically use it to increase the accuracy of the reporting.

For example, let’s say, somebody, clicks on your ad and then fills out a contact form or calls you, and then eventually they end up showing up at your business. Google can actually use this beacon to tie their visit to your location and their Google Account just by using the Bluetooth on their cell phone.

It’s very big brother-ish as you say, but, as a marketer, it’s really cool. You can even remarket to people that come to your business. For example, let’s say somebody comes to your office and they don’t retain you, you could start pushing ads to them.
If you are, for example, a personal injury attorney, you may be able to sneak one of these things into a hospital somewhere. And that way, you could run personal injury ads to them.

Maybe you can even sneak it into a jail somewhere. That would be kind of an interesting thing to sneak into a jail. I think a Google beacon is probably something that they’re not looking for. Don’t sneak it into the jail though. I’m just kidding. Don’t do that.

But, my point is that what’s pretty cool is that you can use this to start. It’s kind of like merging the real world with the online world.

Will It Affect Search Rankings?

Personally, I don’t think so. I think this is purely a pay per click thing. Google could use it maybe as a user or a searcher intent thing. Let’s say, somebody goes to Google and searches for a divorce lawyer, and then eventually shows up at your location. Google might take that into consideration, although I feel like that’s pretty far-fetched, I don’t know.

If someone goes to Google and searches for a divorce lawyer, ends up on your website, and then immediately bounces back, that’s not good. If they go to your website and stick around for a while, then you’re going to typically rank higher because user engagement, searcher intent, and search satisfaction is a big part of your ranking.

What About Push notifications?

I don’t know what Google has planned for it. A lot of people think that they’d like to do push ads or push notifications. If I have a beacon for my business or my law firm, for example, I can simply push a button.

Then, everyone within a one-mile radius or 100-foot radius of my business will get a push notification and have my message show up on their screen. Of course, there are ways to do this already.

I believe Android devices can do this. My advice is don’t do that because people get very annoyed. I know that I would be annoyed if I just had Bluetooth notifications showing up for a law firm that wasn’t relevant to me, and I wouldn’t use that firm for that reason.

Can it work? Probably. But, you are likely to piss a lot of people off. Still, Google beacon is a very interesting thing, and it’s still in beta.

I don’t even know if (or how) you can request one. I think it’s by invitation only and they’re sending them to random businesses that are running pay per click campaigns or have run pay per click campaigns in the past.

I’m pretty excited about the fact that we can tie real-world activities to pay per click campaigns. What does the future hold for Google Beacon? I have no idea, but I think it’s pretty interesting and as a marketer, I’m excited about it.

I want to show you something that a lot of attorneys struggle with. Sometimes, when I tell them to do social media and create content, they don’t know what to talk about. There are a lot of tools out there that will help you, and here’s one in particular that I want to show you.

What Is SEMrush And How Do You Use The Keyword Magic Tool?

It’s called SEMrush, but it’s something that’s built into SEMrush called the keyword magic tool. I want to show you how it works and how you can use it for your law firm.

Let me switch over to SEMrush here. Now I am logged into my account. It’s about $97 per month, but you can get a free trial and run this once, grab all the data, and then cancel the trial if you want.

I use SEMrush all the time because I think it’s pretty cool, but I would recommend that you at least try this out. Here’s how you do this. You’re logged into SEMrush. This is your dashboard on the left here.

On the left, you’re going to see a link for keyword research. Right here it says keyword magic tool. You’re going to click the keyword magic tool, and then you let it load. Now what you can do is you can type in any keywords.

What I typically do is start with some practice area or a practice area within a practice area. For this example, let’s try “father’s rights,” and see what this pulls up. Now, what can you do? You see right here, it says click questions.

The Power Of Questions

These are questions that people enter into Google and what you can do is you can see how many times these specific questions are asked every single month. So this one right here, “Can a mother terminate a father’s parental rights?” That’s searched 90 times per month. “Can a mother have a father’s rights terminated?” That’s searched for twenty times per month. These are very specific questions.

These numbers, you have to take them with a grain of salt because this has but. That means that this is a specific thing. “Can a mother have a father’s rights terminated?” Typed exactly like that is search 20 times per month.

These are long tail keywords, which means think about how many different ways someone can search for something. For example, “Can a mother terminate the rights of a father?”

How To Use This Data To Create Blog Posts And Videos

You can look at these and start getting ideas. These are all just different ideas for different things. It doesn’t have a very high volume, but it’s a good topic, and it’s something that people search for.

Let’s try divorce and see what happens. We’ve got questions highlighted. “How to file for divorce?” That’s a big one, with about 12,000. “What does the Bible say about divorce?: A lot of people that are thinking about a divorce, maybe they’re looking for a little spiritual guidance. You can create a video if you’re into that sort of thing.

“How much does divorce cost?” “Should I get a divorce quiz?” 880 people are looking for a quiz to find out if they should get divorced. You could put a quiz together, and you get a coder, it’s not that difficult.

A lot of people get divorced. Let’s see. Now divorce might be a little too wide, but you can keep going down. I mean, look how many topics there are, especially when you start going to these 400. These are good ones because there’s not a lot of competition for these. “How expensive is a divorce?” “How much does divorce cost in Florida?”

You can take these types of cases and interchange your state. For example, “How much does divorce cost in Florida?” or “How much does it cost in California?”

Let’s go a little more into detail. Let’s say you’re a bankruptcy attorney. You can write all types of content. You can do ow to get rid of credit card debt, student loan debt, how to get rid of that fast?

How to get rid of child support debt, how to get rid of credit card debt without paying? How you get rid of credit card debt legally. These are all questions.

You could sit down and knock out content all day long literally just on the topic of how to get rid of debt.

What are some legal ways to avoid foreclosure? How to avoid timeshare foreclosure, how to help people with foreclosure, what are some legal ways to avoid foreclosure? Will a short sale avoid foreclosure?

Now, just because it says zero searches does not mean that no one is searching for it. That means that Google doesn’t have the data. You got to remember that most searches that are entered into Google, Google has never seen before.

You’re also not going to try to rank just for this one specific term. You’re going to try to rank for the entire thing. For example, this one right here, how to avoid foreclosure on a VA loan, you could create content that talks about if you have a VA loan and you’re facing foreclosure, what are your options?

That could rank for how to avoid foreclosure on a VA loan or how to stop foreclosure on a VA loan. How to stop a VA loan foreclosure? There are so many different ways that you can rank for this stuff as long as you create good content.

What To Do If You Feel Stuck

What I would do is go to either your website or a competitor’s website. Let’s say you’re a Boston divorce lawyer. Let’s see who’s got a good website? Go to this one right here. Wilkinson and Finkbeiner and view their practice areas.

They have child custody, visitation, child support, a division of marital property, etc. Let’s use child support. You can see all these questions that come up. I mean look at all these. How long does it take to get child support? How long does it take to get child support payments?

Will I be responsible for my husband’s child support? Can arrears child support payments be forgiven? Do you have to pay child support after 18? I mean, these are, so there are 231 pages.

An Easy Way To Establish Yourself As The Authority In Your Niche

If you’re a family law attorney, you can build an entire business just on answering questions about child support, becoming the authority on child support and then, you’d be their child support attorney.

There are so many options here. I’ve gone a little long in this one, but I wanted to show you how cool and useful this tool is. If you don’t want to pay a lot of money, what you can do is you export all of these questions out and cancel your trial.

I recently received a question in the Facebook group…

Facebook states that you can’t mention someone’s financial status in your advertising. If I’m marketing to people with IRS tax problems or tax debt problems, how do I get around this? Even if we market a cheat sheet, video or post, we need to mention tax problems. Will that be disallowed?

What you cannot do…

Well, the answer is pretty simple. You don’t specify that you “do have tax problems?” or “do you have this issue?”

This is something that we deal with in personal injury cases as well. For example, in personal injury cases, you cannot say, “Have you been in a car accident?” In ads for family law, you cannot say, “Are you getting divorced?”

What you CAN do

But here’s what you can do: You can talk about people that are getting divorced or people that have been in car accidents. You can also talk about ways that the IRS is taxing people or penalizing people or different things like that.

Don’t mention someone’s financial challenges or their tax problems. Instead of saying, “Do you have tax problems?” you can say, “We help our clients who have tax problems. We tell them how they can stop the IRS calls using three specific strategies,” for example.

We can also advise how anyone who’s getting phone calls from the IRS can use certain strategies to make them stop or to do whatever it is that you’re trying to get them to do. For personal injury cases involving car accidents, we will often say, “Anyone who’s been in a car accident needs to talk to an attorney.”

Finding the right wording to get around Facebook’s rules

This isn’t something you would normally say, but in a Facebook ad, you can say that anyone who has been in a car accident needs to know these three things before talking to the car insurance company.

This means, you don’t necessarily call somebody out, but you can still address it. It’s kind of nitpicky on Facebook’s side, but you can’t make it seem like you’re targeting somebody based on their actual demographics. You can’t say, “Are you getting divorced?” But, you can say, “Everyone who’s getting divorced in Orange County, California, needs to know these three things.”

That’s how you get around Facebook’s rules. It’s pretty simple, and it has the same effect. I don’t find that there’s any kind of drop whatsoever in effectiveness when we are using a strategy like this.

This is a good question because if you’re not careful about how you word your ads, you will have your ads rejected, and if too many ads are not approved, your ad account will get shut down.

There are a lot of lawyers that have email newsletters or physical newsletters, and they all make the same mistake over and over again.

Here’s an example of the first main mistake. This guy added me to his email list, and I did not opt-in. That’s a big no-no right there because automatically, I’m annoyed with him. But there’s a bigger problem that I have because I’m still going to read it because I always look at marketing material.

At the very top, the writer said (I guess he’s a tax lawyer), “Blending left brain thinking with right brain artistry to make tax law a little less mind-numbing.” Okay. That’s kind of a cool premise. And then, I go through and read his content.

Incomprehensible Headlines

“New Willful FBAR case is Eerily Foreboding for Taxpayer.” What the hell does that mean? You’ve got to remember, I am not a lawyer. Most lawyers make this mistake. They go to law school, and they get this high-level education. They learn to write at a high level, they learn to read at a high level, they learn to problem-solve at a high level, and that’s great.

The problem is that most people that you’re writing to are not lawyers and they don’t have that level of training. “A quick Primer on Form 5471 & Some Hidden Pitfalls to Avoid.” What does that mean? I have no idea. And then there is this: “Form 5471 is triggered in situations where a ‘U.S. Person’ owns an interest in a “foreign” (non-U.S.) corporation.”

So, why would you use a headline like this? Why not “If you own a non-U.S. corporation, here are some things to avoid.” Or, “Here are some traps.” It’s just something where you’ll get so much more mileage and see so much more success if you stop writing like a lawyer and start writing like the person that you’re trying to target.

I’m not saying you have to write it at a third-grade level, but some of this stuff has to have some thought. I think that he’s trying to do this an that’s why he’s got the pictures here, the dinosaur, and even at the top here. They’re trying to make tax law less mind-numbing, but I think I’ve gotten balanced statements that are less mind-numbing than this content here.

Using The Hemingway app

Then, you come in here and see this giant block of text that nobody’s going to read. There is an app I use all the time, and it will help. It’s called the Hemingway app. If you throw your content in here, blog post or whatever it happened to be, what this does is show you that everything that has a color is too hard to read.

This says this is at a 12th-grade level. Most people read at a 3rd-grade level. So, this isn’t going to work. I appreciate writing the content, I appreciate the effort, but you’ve got to use headlines that draw people in, that show the benefit of reading and let the average person know what this content is actually about. What am I going to get out of reading this entire block of text?

Write For The End User

Now, the next thing you need to do is when you write the content, it needs to be written at a 3rd or 4th-grade level, not a 12th-grade level. Actually, this is probably higher than 12, I don’t know if Hemingway goes higher than 12.

But, the Hemingway app is cool because you can come in here and you can see where your sentences are too long, where you use adverbs or passive voice, where there’s an alternative phrase that could be simpler, and when sentences are hard to read.

You’ve got to remember, you’ve got to think about the end user. That’s why all the lawyer marketing steps that I create are very simple. I could go tech-heavy on everything. I know a lot about coding, I know a lot about search engine optimization, but I don’t do it because I know my end audience.

I know that lawyers don’t necessarily know about coding. Some do, but most don’t. Most don’t want these high-tech heavy things. They want high-level things that are actionable for them.

Break Up Those Blocks Of Text

Now, another thing. This giant block of text. You’ve got to break this up. I understand that this is probably grammatically correct, but in the world that we live in, every sentence or two needs to be its own paragraph, just because that’s how the internet is. You need to break stuff up.

Moz – a great example

Let’s look at Moz. Moz has a really good example on their blog. Take a look at how they lay everything out. See how much easier it is to read, and how the spaces are arranged in there?

It has nice line height, which is the distance between one line and the next line. It has headers that talk about the different sections. This is just so much easier to read compared to that wall of text here.

Don’t Make The Reader Work So Hard

I’m not trying to call this guy out, but I kind of am. First of all, nobody’s getting to this page, or at least very few people are, because this headline is not telling them anything. “New Willful FBAR Case is Eerily Foreboding for Taxpayer.” I have no idea what that means, and I don’t even really care because I get a headache just from looking at that.

The problem is when I have to work, and when the reader has to work to figure out what you’re talking about, they’re just going to go to something else. So, I’m not going to read that because I don’t know what it is.

The key question: Who is my target audience?

“The Onus of Large Foreign Gifts and Inheritances.” I kind of understand that, but still, that can be made so much easier and so much more appealing. So, keep this in mind.

When you are writing a blog post, when you’re writing an email, when you’re recording a video, when you’re doing anything, the first thing you need to think about is who is my target audience. Who is the person who’s going to be reading this?

Will I Be Understood By My Target Audience?

Then, you need to look at the headline and ask yourself objectively, “Is this headline or title going to be understood by the reader? Are they going to see a benefit in reading the entire article? Is it a strong benefit?” It’s got to be a very strong benefit. What are they going to get out of reading the article?

You’ve got to remember, people’s favorite subject is themselves. They only care about what they’re going to get out of it. You’ve got to make it about them, and you’ve got to make it very easy for them to digest.

Ask Yourself These Questions

Then, when you get to the article, you have to ask yourself, is this a giant wall of text that they’re not going to read or is it written in a way that they’re going to be able to digest and understand? Are they going to get something out of it, and is it going to provide a benefit? Is it formatted in a way that is going to be easier to digest?

I see this mistake over and over and over again, and it’s something that’s so easily fixed because the reality is that a lot of times, it’s harder to write like this than it is to write at a 3rd or 4th-grade level.