Suppose a reporter for a decent sized publication contacts you for an interview. They heard about something you did and they want to do a story.

Nice.

They write the story and run it. They mention some of your accomplishments, quote you several times, and generally make you look like a stud.

Very cool.

Your phone starts ringing. A lot of people saw the article and want to talk to you about their case or legal situation. You sign up some new clients.

Awesome sauce.

The article includes a link to your website and your website heats up with traffic. You see a big bump in email subscribers and social media followers.

Who knew?

As a result of that interview, your practice starts to take off. You have your best month ever.

What do you do next?

You want the momentum to continue, so you take that article and run it as a paid ad in other publications in your niche market. You’ll probably have to add the words “paid advertisement” somewhere on the page but that’s no big deal.

Every time you run the ad you get more business. So you keep running it, bringing in more clients, making more money.

One reason the ad works so well is that it doesn’t look like an ad. It looks like a feature article or news. More people read articles than read ads and more readers translates to more business.

There’s just one problem. The odds of a reporter contacting you to interview you are pretty slim. If they did, the odds that they would do a puff piece that makes you look like the best lawyer in town are almost non-existent.

So don’t hold your breath.

Instead of waiting for the reporter who will never call. . .

. . .write the article yourself. Or hire someone to write it. Make sure it looks and reads like a newspaper article, and then run it as an ad.

Legendary copy writer, Gary Halbert, was a master of editorial style advertising. He sold me on the idea of running ads that don’t look like ads. When I was advertised my first marketing course in bar journals, all of my ads looked like articles.

Newspaper style headline. No graphics or photos. Quotes from me, talking about the benefits, as though I had been interviewed by the author of the “article”.

And they worked. Those ads brought in millions of dollars in sales.

Editorial style ads (“advertorials”) will also work for advertising legal services.