Leverage Archives - The Attorney Marketing Center

Repurposing content

July 8, 2025 by David M. Ward

One of the best ways to build your law practice is to create content about your field and what you do to help your clients.

Writing articles and blog posts, posting on social media, recording videos and podcasts, and the like, are a simple and effective way to boost engagement with prospects and clients and professional contacts, establish your authority, generate traffic to your website, build trust, generate more leads, and “close” more of the leads you generate.

If you don’t create much content, no doubt the time required is a major factor.

You can reduce that time, and get a better return on your investment, by reusing or repurposing your content.

You can

Update a previously published blog post with additional thoughts, comments you received (and your replies to those comments), questions you were asked when you posted it (and your answers), additional examples from recent cases, and anything else that adds value to the original post
Expand a short post into a longer version
Convert a post or article for a different niche
Use the post as an outline for a new post for a different practice area
Cut up a long post into smaller posts
Compile several posts into a report and use it as a lead magnet for your newsletter, or for prospects who make an appointment or sign up for your webinar, or as bonus content for your new client welcome package
Add several posts to your email autoresponder for future opt-ins
Translate your articles into other languages
Write additional posts or articles on the same subject but with a different angle
Repost your article on sites like Medium or Quora or Substack

You can also

Convert an article into a blog post or a blog post into an article
Convert an article into a video or podcast episode
Convert the transcript of a presentation or interview into an article or post
Create an autoresponder e-course from a series of posts
Post your LinkedIn post on Facebook or vice versa
Compile articles into an ebook and publish it on Amazon
Use a series of posts as the basis for a webinar
Create an infographic highlighting key points in your article or presentation
Record your speech or presentation and post it on YouTube
Record a video speaking about the subject of your article and embed the video in the original post
Create PowerPoint slides and record yourself doing a summary of your article(s)

Need help? Ask your favorite ai for suggestions for ways to repurpose your content for your existing niche or repurposing it for different niches.

The easiest thing to do? Send it or post it again to your existing list because most of your subscribers didn’t see it six months ago, won’t remember it, or didn’t appreciate your message because they didn’t have the problem you speak about, but now they do.

I’ve used several of these strategies to repurpose and reuse content and recommend them. It’s a great way to get more bang for your content buck.

Filed Under: Content creation, Leverage, List building, Marketing legal services

Marketing for lazy lawyers

July 1, 2025 by David M. Ward

A little clickbait-y? Sorry. I know you’re not lazy. You’re busy and don’t have a lot of time for marketing.

Or you’re just not into it like some lawyers.

No problem. You don’t have to invest hours (or spend a fortune) to build your practice. What you need to do is leverage the time you do have doing small things that have the potential for a big return.

To wit:

If you can’t commit to writing a regular blog or newsletter, you can do guest posts on blogs or occasional articles in publications read by your target market. “Borrow” their audience, authority, and list.

You’re not big on social media? Identify a handful of non-competitive lawyers or other professionals in your market who are very active on social and comment on their posts.

You do a seminar in your conference room but haven’t had time to promote it? Hire high school kids to go door-to-door and pass out flyers or put them on windshields.

You’re not ready to do your own seminars or events or to do a lot of networking? Find existing events and meetings and get yourself invited as a guest speaker or to sit on a panel. Similarly, find podcasts and channels with an appropriate audience and offer to appear as a guest. They need smart people like you with something to say.

No budget for advertising? Invest $500 a month improving your website SEO, navigation, and content, and get more traffic. Don’t forget to add an opt-in form or landing page and collect names (by offering a report) and start building a list you can connect with when you’re ready.

Not getting as many referrals as you’d like? Talk to your clients, former clients, prospective clients, business contacts, and personal friends. “If you know anyone…. I’d appreciate the referral” is simple and effective and takes no time or money.

Don’t forget lawyers in other fields, or even in your field. Tell them to keep you in mind when they have something they don’t handle, a conflict, or a case that’s too small or too big for them. I got my practice started that way and it was very effective.

In short, there is a middle ground between “all in” in your marketing and doing nothing and that middle ground can bring you a lot of new business.

Filed Under: Leverage, Marketing legal services

Use leverage to get bigger, faster

February 8, 2024 by David M. Ward

There are a lot of ways to grow your practice. Most involve improving and expanding what you’re already doing.

Things like:

Improving your SEO
Getting more sign-ups for your seminars
Getting more subscribers for your newsletter
Creating better content or ads
Learning how to better use LinkedIn (etc.)
Converting more leads and prospects to clients
Getting more repeat business and referrals
Promoting your podcast, blog, newsletter, or channel
Getting more social media followers
Improving your networking or speaking skills
And so on

These are all worth considering. Each can help you grow your practice. But that growth is unlikely to be more than “incremental,” meaning single digit.

That’s not bad, especially if you continue to do them and allow your results to compound. But if you’re looking to do something bigger or quicker, such as doubling or tripling your revenue this year, you should focus on strategies that can create that kind of result.

One of the best, most leveraged methods for doing that is setting up strategic alliances with other professionals and businesses that sell to or serve your target markets.

In short, you form a relationship with another lawyer or business professional, they endorse or recommend you and your services to their customers or clients, subscribers or followers, and you do the same for them.

Because their clients trust them, their recommendations can quickly result in a large number of new clients for you. You don’t have to invest a lot of time or create new infrastructure. Your job is to identify suitable candidates, connect with them and propose an alliance.

To start, that alliance can be as simple as mentioning each other’s upcoming event or recommending each other’s blog or podcast. As you get to know each other better, this might evolve into full-throated endorsements and referrals.

You don’t need dozens of strategic alliances partners to make this a very profitable undertaking for you; you only need a few.

To learn how to do this, see my course on Lawyer-to-Lawyer Referrals

Filed Under: Leverage, List building, Marketing legal services

It’s not a problem if you can write a check

October 25, 2023 by David M. Ward

I’ve mentioned before that a lawyer friend of mine who did a lot of speaking and training used to tell his audience, “It’s not a problem if you can write a check”. He meant that most problems aren’t fatal, they usually have a solution, and that if you have enough money, the solution is simple.

What if you don’t have enough money?

That’s a different problem, isn’t it? But it also has a solution.

If you’re a self-employed lawyer, for example, and are struggling financially or want to up your game, go get 5 new cases or clients. Problem solved.

Sure, you need to know how to do that, you need to do it, but first, you need a plan.

Not a complex plan with lots of contingencies and moving parts, a simple plan. For me, that means easy to start and get some results, however small, relatively quickly. A plan that allows you to leverage your resources—your time, your staff, your contacts, your skills and knowledge, and your email list.

You might start by asking yourself the “Focusing Question” at the heart of the book, The One Thing by Gary Keller:

“What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Leverage.

If you want to bring in 5 new cases or clients, ask yourself that question. And answer it.

There is an answer. There’s always an answer. Even if the answer is to read or re-read something written by yours truly.

How to use email to build a successful law practice

Filed Under: Leverage Tagged With: focus

Leveraging other people’s talent, knowledge, and resources

October 19, 2023 by David M. Ward

One of the best ways to grow a law practice is to conduct joint ventures with other professionals and businesses that target the same markets and clients you target.

If you handle family law and target high-income executives in the health-care industry, for example, you should talk to business owners, insurance brokers, financial planners, consultants, accountants, and other (non-competing) lawyers who have an established clientele and/or actively target the types of people who fit the profile of your ideal client (and the people who can refer them).

You identify joint venture candidates, find ways to meet them, and learn more about what they do. You then tell them what you do and see if there is some common ground for working together for your mutual benefit.

This might mean conducting seminars together, sharing the costs of a mailing, or interviewing each other for your respective newsletters or blogs.

It might mean inviting each other to networking functions, co-authoring articles or books, or sending emails to each other’s lists with information or offers.

It might be keeping each other on a list of recommended “vendors” and referring to each other when a client or contact says they are looking for someone who does what you (and they) do.

And it might simply mean providing suggestions, feedback and encouragement to each other in your individual marketing ventures.

But don’t try to figure that out right now.

Just make a profile of the kinds of joint venture partners who might make a good fit for you. Once you’ve done that, you may discover that you already know people who fit that profile. Talk to them, tell them you think you should talk about “working together” and see what develops.

How to get referrals from, and set up joint ventures with, lawyer and other professionals

Filed Under: Leverage, Referral sources, Referrals, Relationship marketing Tagged With: Joint ventures

To dream (and achieve) the impossible dream

June 30, 2023 by David M. Ward

Think bigger. Follow your dreams. Don’t play small. We’ve heard all this before (and probably said it a time or two) but do we do it?

No. We’re lawyers. Logical, careful, traditional. We don’t like risk. At least when it comes to our business.

So we take ten years to reach our goals, if we reach them at all, when we might reach those goals in one. That’s what authors like Tim Ferriss, Benjamin Hardy, Grant Cardone, and others tell us.

“Impossible goals are easier to accomplish than “possible goals” they say. And they actually have a point.

When you set reasonable goals and seek incremental growth, to increase your income by 10%, for example, you have too many options and strategies to choose from. These are the “trivial many” in 80/20 parlance. Small ideas, common strategies, that are likely to only reach small results.

To grow by more than 10%, we should be looking at the “precious few”.

To increase your income by 10%, you might look for a new marketing technique or improve an existing one. You’ll do what you’re already doing or something like it. With hard work and a little luck, you might achieve the goal. But because the goal is small and unexciting, you also might lose enthusiasm, get busy with other things, or bump heads with every other lawyer who is trying to do what you’re trying to do.

Instead of walking, you need to run. Instead of playing it safe, you need to do things you’ve never done before.

Not only are these likely to be more exciting and motivating, they are the only things that offer you a chance of achieving massive growth.

The reason they do that is simple. Impossible goals force you to innovate and find things nobody else has thought of, let alone is doing. Find and focus on those precious few ideas, connections, or strategies, and you can grow much bigger and much faster.

Impossibly big goals help us to “shape the process,” in part by making us ask better questions. If you ask, “What would I have to do to increase my income by 10% this year?” you get a long list of options. If you ask, “What would I have to do, or what would have to happen, to grow my income by 1000%?” you get a very small list of options to choose from, and you only need one.

The idea comes from “constraint theory” which is explained in the book, “The Goal”. Every goal, but especially a big goal, has a core restraint or bottleneck that is keeping the business from achieving it. Most people don’t focus on the bottleneck or constraint. They focus on the 80% that doesn’t matter.

Growing by 10% is about doing more. Possibly a lot more and for a long time. Growing by 1000% and achieving your impossible dream is about doing something different.

Filed Under: Leverage, success Tagged With: 80/20 principle

Build family to build your practice

June 20, 2023 by David M. Ward

Your clients and former clients, your professional contacts, everyone who knows your name and would take your call—that’s your family.

One of the simplest and best ways to grow your practice is to grow your family.

That means (a) increasing their number, and (b) increasing the strength and depth of your relationships

And you do that by going out of your way to serve them and help them, not just with legal matters but with other areas of their business or personal life.

Make them feel good about themselves for hiring you or referring people to you

You also increase their number by looking for opportunities to meet the people they know—their employees, partners, friends and colleagues. People they can introduce to you and who can become a part of your ever-growing professional family.

As your family grows, look for ways to get to know these people better and help them. Give them referrals, advice, and introductions. Give them helpful information and stay in touch with them.

In other words, by networking with the people you know and the people they know., your family will grow and so will your practice.

What does it take to do this successfully?

You need to be willing to talk to people who aren’t necessarily in need of an attorney, and be genuinely interested in them and not just what they can do for you. You need to be a good listener, because that’s how you show them you are interested in them and how you learn what they need or want so you can help them get it.

And you only need to find a few.

Yes, you need to talk to more than a few to find that few. But just long enough to learn what they do to see if they might be a good match for you.

Find a few of the right people and they can lead you to more.

To start, commit to getting to know your clients better than you do now. Call or email them off the clock, say hello and ask how they’re doing. Don’t be surprised when they’re glad you called and ask you about a new legal matter or tell you about someone they know who might need your help.

If that happens, enjoy the win. But don’t contact them solely for that purpose. Contact them to say hello.

Heres a step-by-step plan for growing your professional family

Filed Under: Leverage, Networking, Referrals

Run

January 18, 2023 by David M. Ward

Building a business or law practice, especially from scratch, is best done quickly.

If you want to build yours, run, don’t walk. Sprint, don’t jog.

Here’s why:

Building fast gives you less time to think and more time to do. Once you have some sound marketing strategies in place, spend most of your time executing those strategies, not refining your plans or making new ones.
Building quickly means you’ll talk to more people, create more content, get more subscribers, do more presentations, and so on. You’ll have more opportunities to find things that work and get better at doing them.
Building quickly allows you to compress time, that is, to do in minutes what might otherwise take hours, by finding ways to do things faster and by productively using the spaces between activities that are often wasted.
Moving quickly forces you to adopt routines and simple daily activities, which are the building blocks for success.
Whether you are new or seasoned, the faster you move, the sooner you find bigger cases and/or better clients and referral sources (and employees), which lead to compound growth as first time clients become repeat clients and referrals lead to more referrals.
Moving quickly allows you to create personal momentum. You get faster (and better) at what you do, delivering more outcomes to more clients and bringing in more revenue and more success stories, which leads to more of the same.
Moving quickly allows you to discover flaws and eliminate them, make mistakes and fix them, and get better at what you do.
Fast is exciting, and excitement is contagious. You’ll be perceived in the marketplace as someone who is going places and doing things and attract people who recognize your pace and energy and want to work with you.

Don’t confuse “fast” with “busy”. They aren’t the same thing. Being busy doesn’t necessarily mean being productive.

You can build quickly even if you aren’t particularly busy. But only if when you work, you run.

How to build your practice bigger, faster

Filed Under: Leverage, Marketing legal services, Marketing Plan, Productivity

How to get 4 articles out of one idea

October 20, 2022 by David M. Ward

Leverage is my name. Content my game. If you want to play this game, behold a simple way to turn one idea for an article or blog post, video or podcast, into 4.

Choose a subject. It doesn’t matter what it is—anything you know something about. It can be as simple as “torts” or “trusts” or “the rule against perpetuities” (JK).

If you’re not sure, choose something at random.

Once you’ve got a subject, write down ways you could write about that subject based on these 4 categories:

Actionable (How to Do X, How I Do X)
Inspirational (You Can Do X, You Can Get X)
Analytical (How X Works, The Details, The Steps)
Explanatory (Why it Works This Way, How Things Used to Be, What I’d Like to See Changed About X)

Let’s say you decide to write about “negligence”. Your 4 articles might be:

Actionable: How to Represent Yourself in Small Claims Court, 3 Things I Always Do Before I File a Lawsuit, How to Maximize the Value of Your Case
Inspirational: You May be Entitled to A and B and C, How I won a ‘Lost’ Case, What Happened When My Client Tripped and Fell and Thought it Was His Fault
Analytical: How Damages are Calculated, What You Need to Prove to Win Your Case, What is The Reasonable Person Standard?
Explanatory: How Our System Developed (and Why), How to Improve Our System, Why Legal Expenses Are So High

Hold on. We’re not done.

I promised you 4 articles out of one idea, but you can use these categories to dig deeper into your subject and come up with even more ideas.

For example, if you plan to write about why legal expenses and lawyers’ fees are so high, you might come up with 4 (more) articles:

Actionable: Five Ways to Reduce Your Legal Fees
Inspirational: How My Client Built an 8-Figure Business Without Spending a Fortune on Lawyers
Analytical: What I Spend Each Month Just to Keep My Doors Open
Explanatory: Why Hiring a ‘Low Cost’ Lawyer Costs You More, Not Less

And thus, one idea may lead to dozens.

If you find yourself unable to come up a subject to write about, instead of racing around wildly searching for ideas, take something you deal with every day and know well, extrapolate concepts related to it (based on these 4 categories) and come up with 4 (or more) ideas, not one.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry; leverage means never having to say “I don’t know what to write about”.

More ways to get ideas to write about

Filed Under: Content creation, Leverage, Writing

Clone your best. Forget the rest.

July 1, 2022 by David M. Ward

No doubt you have a favorite referral source or two. You know who I’m talking about. The ones who regularly send you good clients and cases. The ones who introduce you to people you need to know and do other things to help your practice grow.

They’re low maintenance, highly profitable, and you wish you had more like them.

Seek and ye shall find.

Instead of trying to meet “anyone” who can refer business, set your sites on cloning your best referral sources. It’s better to have a few studs than dozens of people who might try but can’t deliver.

The most effective way to increase referrals is to focus on your existing referral sources.

Get to know them better. Learn about their niche. Meet the people they know and work with. They’ll lead you to more referral sources and opportunities.

This will require time and energy, which is why you should focus on a handful of people who have already proven themselves rather than the many who haven’t.

Invest 80% of your “networking” and relationship-building time with your best sources.

You may not be able to reciprocate with referrals, but there are other ways you help them. You might have information they want or need, do other things for them or their clients or family, or introduce them to people who can.

Help them prosper and they’ll do (more of) the same for you.

How to get more referrals from lawyers and business contacts

Filed Under: Leverage, Referral sources, Referrals