In Episode 40, Anthony speaks with Vik Rajan, the co-founder of Phoneblogger.net.
Vik is also the creator of Inner Circles, the free LinkedIn networking add-on: Focus your time on engagement & reciprocity. Vik started Practice Marketing Advisors and its blog as he realized attorneys, CPAs, and related professionals required specialized marketing help that accounts for clients’ professional code of conduct, ethics, and model rules. Vik is a columnist for AICPA’s largest publication for accountants and frequently helps to present CLE classes through various Bar Associations. Vikram’s book, “365 Personal Brand Marketing Thumb-Rules” published in 2008, is available through any bookstore. Vik lives in Harlem, NYC.
Here is a full transcript of our conversation:
Verna: Welcome to the lawn
business podcast. I’m here with Vikram Rajan. Vik, how are you doing today?
Vik Rajan: I’m well Anthony,
Verna: I’m doing all right.
Vik Rajan: Yeah, thanks for having
Verna: So, Vik, you’re the
co founder of phoneblogger.net ,which is an internet referral service for
finance professionals, accountants, and attorneys. How is it having
professionals as your main consumer?
Vik Rajan: It’s a lot of fun. You
know, sometimes people it and like and you work with lawyers. “Why would
you want to do that?” I think maybe you said that to me.
Vik Rajan: That’s funny. I
wanted to be a lawyer. I’m not an attorney, you know, full disclosure, but I
was a political science major and did great in my con law class and had hopes
and dreams of potentially going to law school, but ended up working with my dad
right out of school. So I never achieved the ultimate American dream of being
an attorney. But I love working with predominantly lawyers and, um, and really
helping them succeed in their practices, growing their firm. It’s a lot of fun.
I mean, it’s, I like what you guys do for a living. I liked that area of, uh,
you know, I guess maybe I romanticize it. Maybe it’s not awesome all the time.
Verna: I’ll let you
romanticize it all. All you want. I’ll take that smoke.
Vik Rajan: I mean, it’s, a lot
of us grew up being, geeks and nerds and I tend to say that affectionately and
I, and I very much, I can relate to that. So from that aspect, I like working
Verna: Wonderful. And yeah,
some of us are, some of us layers are geeks and nerds and, and, and you know,
it was funny, my friend Doug, when I first was accepted to law school, he
looked at me and he said, “This means you’re not going to be a nerd
anymore.” And I looked at him and I said, “I didn’t know that that
Verna: Phoneblogger
quickly, what’s, what’s your business model and, and we’ll go from there.
Vik Rajan: Yeah, sure. So in
our clients, as you mentioned, they are, they’re practicing professionals. They
need to stay top of mind with your referral relationships, you know, out of
sight, out of mind, out of referrals. So we help our clients do that. They’re
usually busy working with their clients. So a lot of the marketing stuff fall
by the wayside. So phone blogging is kind of a term we made up. It’s by which
we brainstorm article ideas with our clients over the phone of course, and then
set up a series of telephone interviews where if you can say it in five
minutes, they can read it in five minutes. So they’re are short five to seven
minute telephone interviews on a variety of blog topics that we brainstorm. We
audio record it, transcribe, edit and optimize those articles and then review
it with our clients to get their final approval.
Vik Rajan: They have full
opportunity to make any edits and changes they want. But, the goal is that what
we presented to them, it’s good to go. We want to make sure they find it an
efficient process. And with their approval, we, we make sure all the attorney
advertising, disclaimers and disclosures are attended to or as they can’t say,
must say, et cetera. We, we optimize it from an SEO standpoint. We add a
copyright approved image. We then promote those articles. Of course on their
blog website. They don’t have one. We could launch one for them. But usually
nowadays people have a blog, they just don’t use it. But we changed that and
then we promote the articles through their relevant social media. They don’t
need to be on everything all the time, but depending on the practice, maybe
Facebook is more important than linkedin or vice versa.
Vik Rajan: Um, us when it was
around was a, was an important aspect, but more than even any other social
media, you know, more people check more email, more times a day, more than any
other social media combined. So we put the, the articles together into an email
newsletter that goes out from their email address to their circle of influence,
you know, using like mail champ or constantly contact, et Cetera and uh, and
get it done. And kind of the latest twist to all this is making sure that our
clients are doing more and more video blogs and we bring our clients together
on zoom video conference calls and take turns to record video blogs together
and give each other feedback and introductions. And in a very similar process,
but a little bit more automated system, they were able to stay top of mind. And
engage their referral relationships are the lawyers as well as potential
clients using video blogs. And then they could turn those video blogs into
regular articles. Kind of like what we do at phoneblogger because we’ve got the
audio and we could kind of follow the same process that we do traditionally at
phoneblogger that we’ve been doing for the past eight, nine years.
Verna: All right, well now
that the commercial’s over, I gave you some thoughts on what a blog should be.
I appreciate it. It’s what we’re here for. I gave you, I gave you some homework
and the homework I gave you was to give me three items, professionals forget
about blogging and, and, and we’re going to dig deep here, but you said:
Verna: Number one that a
professional should keep it short and simple so that perfection is not required
regardless of the medium that one is using and three to remember frequency. So
unpack this a little bit becausecause it’s kind of like that Seinfeld episode,
I’ve got some problems with this particular list. And so let’s start off with,
with short and simple. What, why, why should somebody keep it short and simple?
Vik Rajan: Well, the quote
Seinfeld, you know, it’s more important to be real and spectacular and more
than anything else. Um, and the reason we need to keep it short and simple, um,
is attention spans. And at the end of the day, you know, if you’re writing an
article, um, you know, you’re doing it for some type of marketing purposes. Um,
not everyone’s going to read every word and it’s almost not important that they
read every word cause we really want them to engage with the article or reply
to the article, you know, literally click reply on the email and use that or a
quick comment like share it on social media. And you know it when we get these
long emails from people, like not even a newsletter but just from a client
perspective, client even or a family and it’s like paragraphs and paragraphs
and even a relatively short email looks even longer on a cell phone.
Vik Rajan: It’s just kind of that
TLDR, too long didn’t read or uh, I’ll just read that tomorrow. Tomorrow never
comes. It’s always today. So from that aspect alone, from a word of mouth,
marketing, attention grabbing perspective, we want to keep it short and simple,
focused on one or two main topics and we can always have a part two, part
three, you know, link to further link to previous articles, further resources,
quote others, et Cetera. So, um, it’s really from that, uh, attention span
perspective so that people get the gist of it. We also, it prevents, uh,
especially a lot of our attorney clients from tripping into the, uh, giving
advice issue, you know, giving legal advice. You know, first of all, obviously
their attorney advertising epics in play, but there’s also kind of marketing
common sense that you don’t want to Kinda give it all away, you know, then why
would they buy the cow? So that aspect, it doesn’t make marketing sense, let
alone, you know, it’s violating epics to give advice and, you know, keep it
Verna: I get that. But,
but, but if I’m writing an article on my, on, on my website and it’s, and it’s
500 words. Sure. I mean that’s not going to be painful.
Vik Rajan: 500 is fine. Know
what we are cut off is about 600 hundred words, a minimum 300 so we say someone
should be able to read within five minutes, preferably three minutes. So it’s
very much kind of a a hundred words a minute kind of a rule of thumb. So yeah,
minimum 300 words. It’s Kinda, you know, with Google’s, you know, you know, mythological
or a number of minimum for a page being 300 hasn’t always been confirmed, but
you know, around 300 sure. And I’ll cut off at around six, 700. The reason is
because if someone veers into an article that’s like 800 words, that enables us
to kind of say part one, part two, we still got a 400 word article. Um, so 500
is fine. Yeah, no, we don’t consider 500 long.
Verna: Well, well, but
that’s kind of, that’s kind of my point. Like don’t I need to have a longer
article? Don’t I need some thousand word articles in there in order to keep my
SEO up? Like, like Google’s, I, I always was under the impression that Google’s
going to knock you down if a page is really under a thousand words.
Vik Rajan: No, no. I mean,
first of all, they don’t really disclose that.
Verna: Well I know they
don’t really discuss that.
Vik Rajan: Right, right. And
it’s much more relevancy. Well, first of all, the overarching question is, are
you building your practice off people finding you in the modern day yellow pages,
which is Google. And that’s fine if you are creating a firm that way, which is
kind of be purposefully built to filter the tire kickers and, and to make sure
you have some type of uh, uh, a cost model that makes it efficient for that
type of maybe higher volume type practice. So it, and there are a variety of
ways of using FCL effectively, but know that of course you’re going to get a
lot of people who just want the free advice or the cheapest option, et cetera.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you can configure your practice to
that, what a lot of boutique professionals, a lot of boutique firms, Solos,
even to three partner firms, they find more lucrative business from the word of
mouth referral from another attorney who kind of tees up that client.
Vik Rajan: They look, you can
go to Google and find a whole bunch of people. You could even Google this
gentleman as well, this person as well. Uh, but trust me, I know her, I know
him, I know their work. They’re phenomenal. These are the people you want to
work with. Or maybe they give you a short list and say, Hey, here’s two or
three people depending on personality or exactly what they’re taking on right
now. But that referral tends to be more lucrative. However, going back to your
point, Anthony, in terms of SEO, there are a lot of great statistics around a
long form article that is a thousand word plus, right? And defined it that it’s
very skewed by kind of people like me. Maybe you’re in that camp where it’s a
lot of bloggers writing about blogging for other bloggers and you know, so
like, but that’s my main source.
Vik Rajan: I don’t subscribe to
print magazines. I don’t really read print books anymore. Everything I do is
online. I’m staring at some type of screen all the time depending on the size
of screen. And that is coming, becoming more and more commonplace. I mean sure.
But in general, people are not spending a whole lot of time learning from the
article as much as they’re justifying and edifying that that you know what
you’re talking about as an attorney, I can know like, and trust you from this
little bit of information and now I’m ready to start talking to you and seeing
if you can answer my specific questions. And as you are, now you’re off your
job to kind of convert that into an engagement relationship. So yeah,
Verna: but once again, am I
m? I, N, n obviously I let you correct me when I’m wrong, but if I, if somebody
wants to know who I am and if somebody wants to know what my thought processes
are, especially as a professional where my, my work is in my head and, and it
doesn’t happen until I put it onto paper or adaptable file these days. Don’t I
want a longer article to show somebody why I’m worth picking up the phone and
outliers. It’s kind of like any other bell curve, you know? Sure. You’re going
to have some articles that are completely self promotional. Look how great I
am. I’m in super lawyers yet again, I’m still awesome. You know, you should,
you know, essentially hiring me now. Uh, and those are outliers, but that gets
really annoying really quickly, including the, you know, you know, it’s, you
know, it’s great that it’s, you know, Christmas time again and you know, the
kind of the holiday messages. Okay, fine. Um, so the music, the personal
musings as well as the, like the pat on the back is on one end of the spectrum
of, you know, we could roll the eyes and of course we know someone. It’s kind
of Nice and Dearing to Kinda hear about those kinds of stuff. On the other end
of that bell curve spectrum, I would place what you’re talking about in terms
of that white paper peer reviewed article type long form that honestly is going
to be way over the head for most of your clients.
Vik Rajan: That’s depending if
you’re an FCC attorney working with hedge fund managers, maybe you’re very
highly sophisticated, very long article with a whole bunch of citations than
other footnotes. Um, it’s gotta be this wonderful openness of a, of a blog
post. Okay. That’s not really what a blog is post to be. You know, a blog
originally is like this travelog the musings of someone, you know, traveling
around the world and you know, they’re not writing like a book on each plate.
You know, they’re not, they’re not Darwin kind of writing this opus of what
they’re discovering on the island. It’s a really kind of a quick musings of
their expertise when it comes to professional blog. So look, I’m not going to
disagree that, look, it’s your blog. Do whatever you want. But from a marketing
standpoint, you know, it’s, you know, will someone sit there and watch like a
one hour sophisticated video, uh, that really, let’s say a cle quality
presentation that you would do.
Verna: I know the answer to
Vik Rajan: Yeah. Wait, which
was very similar to let’s say, I’ll read a thousand word read that maybe takes
15 minutes to read, let’s say on average. It’s like, look, it’s cle quality,
pure review quality, and look, when you do get published in the New York Law
Journal or other type of peer reviewed periodicals, absolutely you want to have
it on your blog or at least an excerpt too, like the paywall version of it. Um,
and of course that also legitimizes you with your referral relationships. Other
attorneys who know that you’re for real and not just some, you know, marketing
maven. So from that aspect, it builds credibility, kind of the reason to teach
cle. Um, but on the, you know, for the bulk of your blog posts, either out four
or 500 words because it goes to the other rules of thumb that we’ll talk about
Verna: All right. Very
good. Thank you. Thank you, sir, for, for dealing with my torturous question.
Thank you for challenging. Uh, so for number two, perfection is not required.
Vergara plus of, of medium. So assuming media meaning, uh, the text, uh, for,
for a podcast like ours, uh, or for a video blog as well.
especially when it’s in, you know, we definitely don’t want glaring typos, uh,
awful glaring grammatical issues and yeah,
Verna: I’m just going to
save that. I’m a lawyer, I gotta make it good. I don’t know.
Vik Rajan: And even when we,
when we work with our clients, you know, we ask, we have an author, voice
preference, ABP, it’s our jargon and it’s a couple of questions that we always
ask our clients because it’s exactly that. It’s how colloquial can we be with
this article? How verbatim can we be with how they sound on the phone? Because
it is conversational. It is more engaging to be that way. It’s very, very much
blogging, uh, best practices to just speak in the first and second person. I,
we you, um, as well as to use numerals, use contractions. It’s okay. You know,
look, we’re not going to say lol or use Emoji or anything. Now if that’s your
personality and you wanted to show, you could, if it makes sense for your type
of market, but by and large, we’re not doing that. So it’s still professional,
but you can use contractions.
Vik Rajan: That’s okay. Even if
you wouldn’t use it in a more formal setting. Um, you could use even, you know,
some colloquialisms and phrasings. And, um, I remember, uh, one of our criminal
defense attorneys, uh, were using all sorts of four letter words and I don’t
even know if it’s allowed on this podcast. And he was essentially quoting, uh,
one of his clients. I’m like, f this, f that. And I had to show a prospective
client, like examples of our work and we have a website called recommended
authors where all of our clients are cross promoted. And that was the first
one. And he didn’t see me. We were on, we weren’t on like a zoom video call or
anything back then. So I went red in the face and I stamped around that. I
said, hey, look, here’s proof that all of the articles are very much custom.
Vik Rajan: They’re 100% our
client’s words. It’s their personality because that’s how he wants to relate
with his potential clients. He wants to show that, you know, he, he’s a salt of
the earth guy and he could have a salty tongue as well. And that’s okay.
Obviously other attorneys would not feel comfortable being like that on their
website. So it’s okay to be the way you want to be, especially when it’s
relevant to your type of clientele. Um, however, you know, from that aspect,
it’s, you don’t have to worry too much about perfectionism in terms of getting
it all in because they’ll always be more to say because there are books and
books and you know, longer form articles, as we said before, written about this
topic. And you know, grammar is important when it’s written, but when it’s on a
podcast, we can speak in fragmented sentences and that’s okay.
Vik Rajan: Sometimes even more
powerful. Likewise in the written world, it’s bullet points and the more bullet
points, it’s easier to absorb and skim. And we really want people to kind of
get the point of the article and then contact you. So it’s not really, we’re
not educating them about the topic as much as inspiring them, not in the raw
raw sense, but inspiring them to take action, which is basically to email, call
you, set up a time, and obviously do business with you so that from a marketing
standpoint, another reason, keep it short and simple and don’t focus so much on
like, oh, it’s not yet perfect. It’s not exactly how you can always rewrite the
same sentence. So long as structurally it’s correct. And then when it comes to
video even more so it’s kind of taking podcasting to the next level and saying,
look, be you be natural. You flub up a word, not a big deal. You’re always
talking to people live and you, oh, you know, we’re always messing up words and
saying [inaudible] but that’s no big deal. And it kind of gives you more
flexibility to showcase more of your personality that way. Uh, even more than
the written word where yes, more spelling and grammar is expected. So yeah,
showcase your excellent work and work ethic, but don’t, don’t worry too much
Verna: When in terms of
having second thoughts on a blog posts, in other words, yeah. Gee, I could have
said x differently. I could’ve said white differently. Is that going to hurt
you or help you from an SEO standpoint considering that if Google goes to the
page and now sees that page updated in some particular fashion, uh, is that an
SEO consideration at all? Or would it be better to put out a second blog post
that adds to what the original set?
Vik Rajan: Yeah, and we blog
posts you add to your website is in essence adding a new page to your website
because every blog post has its own unique URL, its own web address. It’s very
long. And Google considers that another page. So more pages, the better shows.
You’re a complex website. It’s obviously now a new page, so it shows your, your
firm is alive, the website is alive. So I use a very much a tree metaphor and
analogy when it comes to SEO that the longer been around, it’s like the trunk
and the roots. It’s deeper that Google is going to have respect and other
people respect you established since let’s say 1984 so you’ve been around a
long time. Um, and then you also want that tree to have fresh leaves because it
shows that it’s still alive and growing and it’s still relevant and, and the
Vik Rajan: So yes, absolutely
more than correcting a previous article that are, that have a new post.
Likewise, it’s up substantively. It’s not only like stylistically I couldn’t
have said it better, but you know, laws change, regulations change, the market
changes. You want to update your blog because something from even last year or
a couple of years ago could no longer be accurate. Um, and I would suggest if
it’s literally an accuracy issue, you should probably put something on that
blog of here’s an updated article and link it to the new one so that because
that, that article probably is going to be better index because again, it’s,
it’s been around a while, but not necessarily. It goes up again into keywords
and freshness, the variety, variety of, uh, uh, um, aspects and, uh, um, points
to, to be made in terms of SEO Algorithm. But with that new article, to your
point, Anthony, absolutely create a new post link to that previous one if you
want even more context. Um, and then you gotta achieve everything you want.
Verna: Well, and this goes
to your third point as well, which is to make sure that, that your blog is
updated with some kind of frequency.
Vik Rajan: Yeah. Consistency is
key. Frequency even more so
Verna: how, how do you
measure that? Because first off, as, as, as professionals, whether, whether
you’re doing it for professionals or we’re doing it ourselves, there is a time
constraint on, gee, how often, how often should I put up a blog post? Also, how
often does inspiration hit me to say something in my area? Oh
Vik Rajan: yeah, sure. So, you
know, in one aspect, you know, we want to solve the inspiration issue. It’s,
you know, it’s like me going to the gym. If I only went to the gym when I felt
inspired to work out, um, I, I’d essentially look the way I look. So that’s the
problem. That’s the problem right there. So I need to kind of get over the
inspiration aspect and realize it’s that it’s about perspiration just made that
up. But that is really, it’s work. It’s a consistency effort and this is a
marketing strategy, not just the musings of life. And in that sense, we need to
help our clients come up with a consistent, um, bank of ideas and get them
thinking that whenever a client asks them a question, whenever they get,
whenever they are answering a client or a prospective client by email, um,
whenever a another attorney kind of just ask them a quote unquote quick
potential topics for the blog. So we have a tool called blog brainstormer. It’s
literally blog, brainstormer.com anyone can use it. It’s just kind of an open,
it was a Google document that we made into something that looks a little
cooler, but we may actually go back to a Google document because it’s easier to
print and there’ll be a new version of our probably in May, 2019. Um, so the
blog ways from our helps our clients come up with topics. That’s the easiest
issue to Colorado to tackle. And then when it comes to time, you know, of
course here there’s a foam barker plug, but that aside of using a service like
phoneblogger, um, it’s again, it when you’re focused on keeping it short and
simple and knowing that grammar and spelling are important, but everything else
should be bullet points. Um, it enables you to kind of get more posts out
Vik Rajan: However, when it
comes to frequency with SEO, Google is a sponge, so more is more, but when it
comes to staying top of mind to some extent, less as more because you can very
easily overstay your welcome. And if you blog too much or post almost too much
on, even on social media, you’re going to venture into like eye-rolling
territory. Where are they going? Here he is again, it’s like I wonder if he’s
not busy enough. You know? So that’s that. You have to be careful because it’s
like, unless they know that you’ve got affirm and you’ve got staff and Paris
staff, etc. You’ve got attorneys on staff, et Cetera, where your job is the
rainmaker and this is your job. And then at that point the, you know, they’re
like, all right, I get it. Because that’s all you do all day. It’s markets, so
Vik Rajan: You’re writing blog
articles all day, but the rest of us actually have to work with clients. So
from that aspect, you don’t want to create resentment. And I would say, look,
one blog post a week is great. Two a month is fine. Every other week is fine. A
lot of our clients do that and they do well, if you can’t do that, look,
something is better than nothing once a month. I know everyone can do, you can
carve out time to really get it done once a month. Now with video blogging it’s
even easier. It’s more efficient with video blogging, I say minimum once a week
because it’s so easy to do, especially the way we do it. It’s very comfortable
and convenient, but as you kind of get used to it, you could do more. So, um,
once you get over the kind of coming up with the topics, you know, kind of
jotting out a 400 word, 500 word post really isn’t that difficult.
Verna: Uh, Vic, how, how,
how do you, how do you recommend that somebody posts the, um, and the video
blog then to the site for maximum SEO boost, which is really what we’re all
looking for when we’re doing the store websites.
Vik Rajan: So I would highly
suggest people keeping it simple. Use Youtube and youtube will give you an
embedded code, which essentially the copy and paste thing that you can put into
your website and your website will kind of take care of the rest. If it’s
wordpress, it’s going to be even easier to, to embed a youtube video. If you
have Squarespace or any other kind of platform, they all going to work with
youtube very effortlessly and seamlessly. It’s gonna all work. And the reason
from an SEO standpoint, youtube itself as a search, people go there to kind of
get their questions answered. Of course, it’s owned by Google, so it’s highly
optimized. Google prefers youtube over other video platforms like Vimeo, etc.
So it’s, you know, that’s the easiest. But then when you’re sharing the videos
on social media, which I highly suggest so that people know you’ve done
something, you want to upload it straight to that platform, it’s called native
video as opposed to sharing the youtube link.
Vik Rajan: So click a button
and post it on to, you know, upload it to Linkedin, upload it to Facebook. Um,
you know, kind of annoying to Kinda having to upload everywhere. But look, you
don’t really, hey, you’re not really uploading it everywhere. Most likely
you’re going to pick a platform that makes sense for, for your type of
practice. And even if you kind of want to be quote unquote everywhere, it’s
going to be Facebook, linkedin, and youtube. Unless you’re purposely creating
special type of videos for Instagram. But that’s a whole different world.
Instagram has its own issues where they want vertical video, they want one
minute video. You know, that’s a whole [inaudible] that you have to kind of
judge if that’s your kind of market, which it may be if you’re an entertainment
lawyer. It makes sense. Uh, you know, it depends on the practice area. So from
that aspect it, I don’t mean to dismiss it, it’s uh, it’s its own beast, but
for the most part you’re going to be great with video. For Facebook, Linkedin,
Youtube, very easy. We make it even easier cause the review page is all
integrated. So you just click a button and everything is automated. But even
when you do it on your own, it’s not that, uh, not that difficult.
Anthony Verna: All right Vik, thank you. We’re, we’re out of time here, but uh, before we go, I will give you one last commercial. How can people find you?
Vik Rajan: You can email me.
[email protected] yeah, ask me any questions. I like email. Obviously you
can find me on all the social media platforms, but email is easiest.
Verna: All right, sir. Thank
you so much for being on. Thank you, Anthony. Well, hope to do it again.
Vik Rajan: Yeah, likewise.
