Increase Your Visibility and Credibility
APPLY TO BECOME A CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- 1. Why Submit Articles?
- 2. Who Can Submit Articles?
- 3. Where Do My Articles Appear?
- 4. How To Get The Most From My Article?
- 5. Copywrite of My Article
- 6. Duplicate Content Articles
- 7. Editorial Guidelines
- 8. How Do I Submit Articles?
- 9. Article Example
- 10. Final Thoughts
1. Why Submit Articles?
As a FreeReferral.com contributor you will increase your chances of being found online to build your reputation, authority and credibility online that can result in networking opportunities and growing your practice presence when you publish articles on our website. Through the use of short and long-form, pointed articles on a single subject you can accomplish the following:
- Help potential clients learn what you do best.
- Gain credibility as an “authority and trust” in the eyes of potential clients.
- Show how your firm fits your potential clients’ needs.
- Gain valuable, authoritative links to your website.
- Allows prospective clients to locate your listing and your website, from each article, long after publication.
- Demonstrate your expertise in a subject area.
- Improve your networking visibility with potential national and international attorney clients.
2. Who Can Submit Articles?
Legal Industry Contributors
As an expert witness referral service, we allow virtually everyone to submit articles. This is particularly helpful for both attorneys, paralegals or anyone in the legal industry to help them grow their presence online.
Expert Witness & Consultant Contributors
Expert witnesses can also submit articles as contributors however, they will be redacted to omit their name and contact information to maintain our business practices. Those expert witnesses and consultants who are a part of our network will be able to submit and publish articles as a contributor with links their Curriculum Vitae’s and other articles on our website instead of links to contact them directly.
3. Where Do My Articles Appear on FreeReferral.com?
While we make no guarantees your article will appear in a certain section or location, our goal is to promote your article as many locations as possible. There are several locations that your article may appear.
On the FreeReferral.com home page – Your article can appear on the “recent articles” list where it can be seen by visitors as soon as the day after it has been approved for publication.
In the searchable Blog article section – Your article will remain in the blog article as long as your legal resource firm is listed on FreeReferral.com providing valuable traffic to your website or to your CV page, long after you write it.
We may also promote your article on our social media channels and via email.
4. How To Get The Most From My Article?
Focus your article:
Write many short or long-form, focused articles in one specialty area or an expanded one long article that covers a topic deeply. Between 800 and 3,000 words is a broad, yet good range length for each article. When deciding the length of the article, it is not the length of the article that matters as much as the quality of the content and readability of the article. Keep your readers in mind and only provide the best quality content, in a format that is direct, succinct and to the point. Organize your content into meaningful sections and use introductions and conclusions with a clear hook at the beginning.
Citing Sources & Supporting Content
It is a great to include quotes, facts and figures and other relevant information to support your POV to add authority, credibility and support your position on the topic. However, just like any good research, be sure to cite your source and give credit when appropriate. Please include links when appropriate.
AI Generated Articles
While many people use AI tools to generate articles on the fly, greatly reducing the time it takes to generate an article, these lack a human perspective and human POV that showcases anecdotes, personal experiences and opinions with a point of view. This is something a chat bot is incapable of providing on its own. For this reason, we do not recommend creating generic content that a reader would be able to identify as bland, boring and likely generated by a AI.
Include this in your article body:
Title – a clear title that describes the topic of your article clearly with a hook that attracts your readers attention.
Excerpt – Write a concise one to three sentence excerpt of your article that answers the question “who should read this article and what major benefit will they get from it if they do?”
Table of Contents – Outline your article in the creation phase that uses headings as sections so scan readers can “jump” or “scan” the sections and read those sections they are most interested in.
Headings – Use the body of your article to demonstrate your expertise in the subject area, not to “sell” your services, broken up by topics that are the Table of Content. Show potential clients how you have solved problems like theirs, or what your company represents instead.
Conclusion – Summarize your point of view and opinion and restate your excerpt or introduction in the beginning.
Include this in your author biography:
Use your author biography as a chance to sell readers on the idea of clicking through to learn more about your company and services by including these basics:
Your name and firm name
One to three sentences on your unique expertise in the area of the article.
Promote your article:
Advertise on your website, or in emails sent to current clients to alert them when one of your articles has been approved and published on FreeReferral.com. This “third party” endorsement increases your credibility in the eyes of potential clients and gets them back to your listing where they can learn more about the services you provide.
Article marketing has proven to be a long term business builder for legal professionals in all expertise areas and in all countries of the world. You and your company can reap the benefits of listing an unlimited number of articles in our directory at no additional charge.
5. Copywrite Of My Article
By submitting an article you acknowledge that you retain full copyright to your work and you agree that FreeReferral.com and Consolidated Consultants Company may feature it on our Website and other marketing channels as long as we provide you with proper credit.
6. Duplicate Content Articles
If your articles are already published on the Internet (on your own website for example), we will add what is called a Canonical Tag. It will tell search engines that the article is a duplicate and the copyright of the article belongs to the site linked by the canonical tag. You will still benefit fromFreeReferral.com quality traffic and will retain the original copyright of your work.
You will be able to add the Canonical Tag when submitting your article from your FreeRefferral.com account.
However, we strongly encourage you to post only original content as Google devalues content that is duplicated elsewhere on the internet as evidenced by their many public statements and many algorithm updates. For this reason, for maximum benefit and impact, we recommend submitting only original content and not duplicating content from elsewhere. Promoting content on social media that was posted on a website is considering promotion and not duplication. If you are unsure if a piece of content is duplicate, reach out to us and we can discuss this together.
7. Editorial Guidelines
Please adhere to the following editorial guidelines when submitting your legal articles to FreeReferral.com:
Duplicate Content
Do not repost articles or submit content that is simply reworded/rewritten. Instead, update the content of articles that have been previously published elsewhere so they are 70-80% unique.
Spamming Content
Refrain from repeating keywords. Keep in mind that your article needs to be informative, written for the visitor and potential client, not search engines. Articles that attempt to manipulate search engine results with use of repetitive keywords will not be published.
Article Format
Enter your article content as plain text, properly formatted with an excerpt, table of content, headings and conclusion. FreeReferral.com does support hyperlinks, charts, graphs, images and any other “non-plain text” content within the body of your article, to help illustrate the point and to add authority in the form of citations to cite a source of the information to build credibility and authority. Additionally, after saving your article, please take a moment to preview it and make any necessary edits should you determine that the format of the text is obviously incorrect or otherwise unwieldy.
You can add a website URL, address, phone number, email address to any of the article fields or About the Author. However, please do not do so in a spammy, unprofessional manner.
Article Length
We accept 500-4,000 word length articles. Please submit more than 500 words and less than 4,000 provided it is helpful, direct and concise. The goal is helpful content, not long for the sake of length.
Article Content
Your article must be on a topic associated with your professional field of knowledge and should be written to be informative to the lay person. Please cite sources of information you reference and quotes of others to help build authority, trustworthiness and credibility.
Self-promoting Article
If the sole or main purpose of your article is to directly invite readers to contact your company, it will be considered self-promoting and will only appear on your listing’s article page and will not be posted in our legal articles sections. Articles should help provide helpful information, be informative and provide context with personal experience.
Each article is reviewed by our editors and may be removed or may undergo minor edits without notification. If an article needs more extensive review, you will receive an email inviting you to make changes. You can then request that the posting be removed from your list of publications.
8. How To Submit Articles?
For New Contributors.
Apply as Contributor through this link , you will be able to submit articles as a contributor and create a profile as an author on our website.
Article Contributor Submissions in 2 easy steps.
- Step 1: Once approved, use our submission form sent to the email address you used to apply. Enter in the article information on the form.
- Step 2: We will review and either publish as-is or make editorial edits to your article and send to you for review. We will notify you when it is published and send you a link you can use to view and share your published article.
Articles are reviewed by our team and are online within 8 business days after submission. Expert Witnesses and Consultants currently in our network have priority review.
Author Profiles
We have 2 types of author profiles. Public Authors and Expert Witness or Consultant Authors. An Author Bio is optional and not required to submit an article, but bear in mind it’s another great opportunity to “sell” your yourself.
- Public Authors
- If you are an attorney, paralegal or other legal industry expert, you can create an author profile on our website as a publishing author on our website with summary of your background and expertise, links to your website and social channels, contact information and related articles and podcasts you have published or are featured in.
- Expert Witness & Consultant Authors
- If you are an expert witness that we have an agreement with, we will create an Expert profile that contains links to your CV page on our website, other articles you have submitted, education and credential information among other authoritative information. Due to the nature of our business, we will redact or omit your personal information. The benefit of submitting articles is to help promote your specialty and awareness of our experience and value as an expert witness.
9. Article Examples
Understanding the Role of a Landscape Architecture Expert Witness
Understanding Thyroid Disorders: The Role of Expert Witnesses in Endocrinology
10. Final Thoughts
FreeReferral.com and Consolidated Consultants Company screen all listing applicants for validity and reserves the right to refuse to post your listing or to remove your editorial contributions, at our discretion, if you do not adhere to our editorial guidelines, or should we determine your business/company is not legitimate or misrepresents its business, services, etc. in any manner.