The Social Media Butterfly - How to Structure Your LinkedIn Posts and a Quick Guide to Improving Your SEO Results and Blog Readership

Hi all! In this issue, I have some LinkedIn tips for you, a guide to improving your SEO and information about a few upcoming free webinars this week - make sure you're on my email list to be notified about my future programs too. Remember - it's never too early or too late to start using social media to build your business and brand - so why not start today?

How to Structure Your LinkedIn Posts for Maximum Engagement

The way you format your LinkedIn posts is just as important as what you say.

Given that reading online is 25% slower than in print and attention span becomes shorter and shorter every day, it’s important to be strategic when structuring your LinkedIn posts.

Here’s how to structure your LinkedIn posts for maximum impact.

For example, don’t write long, dense paragraphs. Today people skim content, especially online.

Instead, break up your information into short snippets like I’m doing here.

Use paragraph breaks, bullets, numbers or headers when you can to help the reader as they scan the post.

The first three lines of your LinkedIn post are the most important in terms of capturing your reader’s attention. After that point the post is truncated and says “show more.”

For people to see more you need to give them a reason to, which you can do with an enticing first three lines. Think of it as your headline. Draw the reader in and let them know what they can expect in the rest of the post.

Write LinkedIn posts in the first person. "I" and "we" help you sound like a real person talking to real people. It builds a personal connection with your audience and makes your posts compelling.

Always write with your audience in mind. For lawyers and law firms that means no defined terms. No formal language. No jargon. Don’t refer to people by their surnames. No skipping two or three spaces between sentences. This isn’t a legal brief.

Also, put all hashtags at the end of your posts and don’t use more than five or LinkedIn can flag your post as spam. I find them hard to read when they are interspersed in the body copy.

Don't put links in your posts - LinkedIn wants to keep people on its platform and will penalize you if you try and send them off of it. That's why people put links in the comments.

Users don't read but scan content when they scroll a newsfeed. Your job is to get them to stop the scroll.

Remember client-centric, easy-to-follow, authentic, value-added content will bring you success on LinkedIn and as a thought leader on any platform.

What other tips would you add to this list?

15 Ways to Improve Your SEO

Do you have an SEO strategy? If not you need one ASAP.

With more than 4 billion Google searches every day, you need to make sure your web site is optimized for SEO. Don't let your website become a crisis situation - it should be updated every three or so years. It's the first impression a visitor has of your organization.

Here are 15 ways to improve your Google SEO results.

1. Make sure your site has a fast load speed (of three seconds or less)
2. Use clean URLs and meta descriptions
3. Develop target keywords (which have high search volume, relevance to your business and low competition)
4. Use optimized headlines (include your target keywords)
5. Make sure every page on your website includes at least 300 original words of content
6. Continually update your existing top-performing content
7. Include at least one image on each page and use alt tags to optimize
8. Focus on local SEO and create a Google My Business profile
9. Ensure your content is created around a primary keyword and relevant secondary keywords
10. Use backlinks
11. Include internal links to increase dwell time
12. Make sure your site is mobile friendly
13. Use effective header tags to become a Google Featured Snippet
14. Identify low-performing pages and refreshing them with new content
15. Fix linked 404s and take over links that belong to competitors' 404s

SEO is important to ensure the success of your content - don't ignore it!

How to Effectively Grow and Market Your Blog

Here's a replay of my webinar with LexBlog (the powerhouse behind my blog and many others in the legal space) how to grow and market your blog webinar.

Remember, blogging can be a great business development and marketing tool but it's not enough to write great content.

In order to increase blog traffic and attract more readers to your blog, you need to also focus on blog promotion.

There are a lot of blogs in the legal field. It’s a saturated market and most lawyers don’t effectively market their blogs. This presents many opportunities.

That goes beyond sending an email or a social media post each time you publish a new blog post.

This webinar covered strategies and tactics you can take to efffectively promote your blog. Reach out to me to learn more and check out my Social Media Butterfly Blog.

Webinar on March 17 – Effectively Marketing Your Small and Mid-Size Law Firm in 2022 and Beyond

In this free webinar on March 17 at 1pm ET, I will explore marketing strategies and tactics that solo, small law firms and mid-size law firms can use to market their firms with a smaller budget and internal team that will still have a strong impact in a free webinar, “Effectively Marketing Your Small and Mid-Size Law Firm in 2022 and Beyond.”

Learn how to:

• Market your firm with a smaller budget and internal team that will have a strong impact
• Where to spend your time and resources
• How to take your marketing efforts to the next level utilizing the latest tools
• What your marketing and business development efforts will look like in a post-pandemic world
• How to maximize your content marketing efforts and use content and social media for lead generation and brand building.

Register for the?Effectively Marketing Your Small and Mid-Size Law Firm in 2022 and Beyond?webinar.

Women Who Wow Webinar with Elena Deutsch on March 15 – Easy Intention Setting Workshop

Join Women Who Wow for a?virtual free workshop on March 15 at 1pm ET?with?Elena Deutsch?that will help you shift from lost-the-love-for-it to leader of your life. You will be guided into clarity and ultimately your personal and professional freedom.

This hands-on, interactive session is for you if you…

• Feel consumed by work and have lost sight of what you truly want to accomplish
• Lack clarity or traction on your goals, or
• Worry it’s “too late” or you don’t have what it takes to make a change in your career or life

In?Easy Intention Setting, you will:

• Harness the power of your brain to make getting what you want much easier
• Leverage ONE simple question to transform your days, weeks and year
• Create intentions for the next 90-120 days and galvanize a powerful, positive domino effect
• Envision and energize your next steps with clarity and courage

Register here.

Elena F. Deutsch, MPH, Founder and CEO of WILL – Women Interested in Leaving (big) Law, which helps women lawyers who feel stuck and unhappy ditch their unhappy jobs and lead satisfying, soul-aligned careers and lives.

Since founding WILL in 2017, Elena has helped more than 100 women (and a few men) transform their careers and lives. Her work has been featured in Above the Law, Bloomberg Big Law Business, The American Lawyer and more. Elena also co-writes an AMA: Ask Me Anything Career Column for Above the Law.

Follow me on?LinkedIn,??Twitter, Instagram @stefaniemarronelegalmarketing,?YouTube?and?sign up for my e-newsletter?for more on these topics.