Every week there are a ton of lawyers firing up blogs and making a go of it. For some, the urge to write is visceral. For many others, they’re doing it solely because their marketing gooroo told them that they need to churn out content or Google won’t pay attention to them.
If you’re in the former camp, you’ll be great. Just do what you’re doing, and the endeavor will be fruitful for you.
If you’re in one of the latter group, fear not – there’s hope for you yet. So long as you go the extra mile and adjust your expectations, you’ll get the traction you’re looking for.
First, you need to keep in mind that you’re not going to experience overnight success with any new Internet marketing technique. I’ve been blogging since 2004, and success didn’t come quickly.
Second, the only way to attain any level of online success is to provide value that can’t be found elsewhere. Without excellence, you’re destined for the scrap heap.
Still, you may be tempted to buy some canned blog posts from your web designer. Worse yet, you could go to one of the many freelance writing sites and hire the lowest bidder to generate your content.
I’m not getting back into the debate about ghostblogging (you should’t do it), just noting that some lawyers resort to publishing garbage just for the sake of getting something out there.
Trust me, that’s not going to help your firm at all.
Why go the extra mile and strive for excellence? Here are three good reasons.
- Badly written content makes you look bad. Lots of lawyers looking to start blogging spend their time and money on slick graphics and doo-dads to make the site look awesome. That’s terrific, but once people get to your blog there’s got to be solid content to keep them reading. You get a short time before someone clicks away, never to return.
- Good content gets saved and shared. Many lawyers create content for search engine optimization purposes only. That may rank well (or maybe not), but consider what your readers find when they get there. If the information isn’t readable, approachable and solid then it’s never going to travel. Provide your readers with something that’s truly helpful and conversational, however, and your readers will refer to it and pass it along to others.
- Value remains even if they vehicle changes. Good content is the foundation for your marketing regardless of the platform. In the pre-Internet days smart professionals used printed reports and books. Now we use email marketing, blogging and social networking platforms. Someday we may all end up using video and podcasts. Perhaps mobile apps are the wave of the legal marketing future. If you’ve got great content in written form then it won’t be too much trouble to repurpose it to another platform later on. Bad stuff dies on the side of the road.
Beyond reflecting in a good way on your practice, having quality content means that your practice will thrive online regardless of the platform. Always strive for excellence and you’ll be rewarded accordingly.
For most lawyer blogs, no matter how well designed, it is 5 to 10 posts and they are done.
Amen Chuck. The field is a better place because you didn’t follow that trend.
So many lawyers are afraid to go outside the box in their blog posts. Its always law and its often dry. I can’t do that. I have to go outside the box. I have to talk about life.
Believe it or not, the blog post I have gotten the most response from was my Papa John’s rant post, and that was written mostly because I was ticked off.
My advice to any writer is be yourself. If you are yourself, people who you would normally click with will seek you out for advice and possibly hire you, and I have never gotten a bad client who initially found me by clicking a blog post.
Amen, Jay. I think there is still a common misconception out there in the retail legal space that producing content (any content) is “just another box to check” on the SEO/SEM checklist. While this may have been true in 2007, the exact opposite is true today. Not just any content will do. Search engines are constantly working to improve the experience for their users. When crap ranks, they look bad, therefore they work to make sure crap doesn’t rank. Thanks to Panda and, most recently, Penguin, thin content, written only for search engines will at best be ignored, at worst it will incur penalties that can sink an entire battleship. Sure, Google’s algorithm uses freshness as a ranking signal, but can crap ever really be called “fresh?” I’d say not so much.