Yesterday, I said you should plagiarize yourself, that is, take your previously written, recorded, and presented material and re-use or re-purpose it. I also suggested that you pay attention to the emails, documents, and other materials sent to you by other lawyers, and use it for ideas for creating your own materials.
Today, I’m going to take things a bit further and suggest you blatantly steal from other lawyers.
Now, don’t lose your lunch. I’m not going to tell you to do anything illegal, immoral, unethical, or unbecoming of a professional.
What I mean is this:
Go online and find content in your practice area that other attorneys are publishing–on their blogs, in guest posts, articles and anywhere else you can find it. Look especially for material that is getting a lot of traffic, upvotes (Medium), Likes, shares, comments, and so on. You might use a tool like Buzzsumo.
Once you’ve found some popular articles, look for ways to cover the same subject or idea in a different or better way. A few ideas:
- Take a post by a lawyer in another state and write a version of that post for your state
- Write a more in-depth article on the subject, or a shorter, more accessible summary
- Write a version of the article for a different type of client or market
- Link to the article and provide additional arguments, stories, statutes, or case law, to support the argument posited in the article and why you agree with it
- Link to the article and show why you disagree with it or explain when and why things can be different
- Take one section of the article and explore it in depth
- Take something barely mentioned (or not mentioned) in the article but relevant to the subject and write about it
- Interview or survey other attorneys or subject matter experts on the subject for your own article
Re-write the headline, optimize the headline and body for keywords you target, and you’ll not only have new content for your blog or website, you’ll have something you know is likely to bring traffic and engagement.
And you’ll never again say, “I don’t know what to write about”.
More ideas here
