Marketing your law firm with a blog is a romantic notion in a certain sense.
Law firm marketing folks – heck, all marketing folks – extol the virtues of blogging. Create a law firm blog and your business will soar, setting you apart from the competition and bringing you accolades of all sorts. Your law firm marketing efforts should center around a blog, they say.
Actually, that’s not true. Creating a law firm blog as part of your marketing efforts will set you apart from the competition, but maybe not in a good way.
Blogging is a content marketing mechanism that’s designed to provide useful information and show your stuff. By creating a law firm blog you build trust your prospective clients and the public, enhancing your reputation. It’s also terrific for search engine optimization, which exposes your words and thoughts to a wider audience and increases the reach of your message.
But unless you’re adding content on a regular basis, you’re not going to look so terrific to people to visit your law firm blog.
I’m not telling you to create content every day because I know it’s not realistic for lawyers to take that kind of time. But would it kill you to put down something on your law firm blog once a week, something valuable and helpful?
There’s a lawyer in my area who, in a fit of “I want to market my law firm,” went out and hired a designer to do two new sites for his bankruptcy law firm. The sites are beautiful, and very easily navigable. And they both have blogs.
OK, I can see someone creating more than one law firm blog – in fact, I have more than one. The problem is that both of the blogs cover exactly the same topic, with the only difference that one site allegedly covers New York City and the other covers Long Island (a distance of under 60 miles).
Since he launched these beautiful sites over six months ago, he’s suffered from a bit of over extension.
On one blog he’s done 10 posts since September 2009, which is respectable.
On the second blog he’s done 2 posts since September 2009. And one of them is a duplicate of a post on the first site.
A failure of consistency tells a visitor that you’re not serious. And if you’re not serious about this aspect of your marketing, how reliable are you as a service provider? Your law firm blog signals a commitment to provide information and share knowledge; your lack of consistency signals a failure to live up to that commitment.
In addition, failing to consistently publish content onto your legal blog will lower your site traffic. If there’s a blog I like, I’m going to visit it more frequently (as much as I love it, I recognize that RSS readers never really caught on with the masses). Once I show up a few times and see nothing new, I’m not visiting anymore. It’s like when I turn on the television every week to catch Big Bang Theory (which you should watch), I expect to see Sheldon in a new episode. If all I get is repeats for a few weeks I’m going to find something else to do on Mondays nights.
So, too, with your legal blogging activities. If you’re going to do it, understand that you’re in this for the long haul. If you’re in that’s cool. And if not, you need to go find some other way to market your law firm.
Jay – If there is one thing that gets my blood boiling is when a new blogger tells me their blog is not working. The first thing I do is visit the blog to check on one thing and one thing only. Are they posting to their blog. Too many new bloggers think, wrongly so too, that they can just throw up a blog with a little bit of content and it will be the magic pill to success. Wrong-o! You have to post.The next problem is and the other item I check is this. Are they posting on a consistant basis? Usually not. The mistake new and old and use up bloggers make is they don't pick a schedule of posting and stick to it. Even if you only post once a week, post once a week.Bloggers need to remember:Post to your blogPick a schedule to post onStick to the scheduleThanks again Jay for your insight.
Agreed. It's really no longer necessary to post every day in services-based business blogs (if it ever was), but it is crucial to stick to a regular schedule. I'd also add a third consideration here – one of the quickest routes to failure that I see with new bloggers is that they do absolutely no (or quite minimal) prelaunch work. For example: They launch with one single "welcome to our new blog!" post – nothing else for new readers to look at at all; they have no resources on other pages; they've done no advance marketing/promoting work; they're using stock templates with no contact forms or information; they've done little to no quality control testing.
You definitely have a great post over here! I am starting to understand better how law using blog works. Thank you.DUI Attorney
Grant and Sheryl, we all know content is king in this regard. The lack of new, unique and relevant content that draws in readers and keeps them on your site, ultimately taking action, is why we create online properties. Big business has yet to realize this on a grand scale, so I suppose we should not be surprised when lawyers do the same.
Jay, have you covered the topic of what happens 1 year after you have launched your blog and you have -or at least feel like you have- nothing left to discuss? How do you continue posting years later? Isn't there a limit to how much you can discuss on Bankruptcy for instance?
Jay, have you covered the topic of what happens 1 year after you have launched your blog and you have -or at least feel like you have- nothing left to discuss? How do you continue posting years later? Isn't there a limit to how much you can discuss on Bankruptcy for instance?