Every marketing maven out there will tell you that blogging is the best thing since the baker took a knife to the loaf of bread to slice it. And it is – or it can be. But if all you’re going to do is write a blog for your law firm marketing efforts I can tell you that you’re not going to get a ton of traffic.
Unless, that is, you do something to promote your law firm blog.
We’ve all heard the Costnerism, “If you build it, they will come.” And to an extent, that’s true when it comes to blogging. The problem is that most lawyers are passive bloggers. They write a post, optimize it as best as they can, and sit back to watch their web analytics. When they fail to see a huge spike in traffic they get angry about it.
But here’s the thing:
If you are blogging as part of your legal marketing efforts, you need to understand that your blog is going to do nothing but attract search engine traffic at first. That search engine traffic isn’t going to be enormous at first – after all, your site needs to be properly crawled and indexed to incorporate the new content. Updating can take some time, especially for new sites or domains that haven’t been updated regularly in the past.
If You Want To Get Traffic To Your Law Firm Blog, You Need To Promote It
That’s right, you’ve got to get off your duff to make something happen. Greater traffic not only increases readership, it also tells Google that you’re popular. When Google sees visitors spike, it views that as a reason to bump you up in the search engines.
To help you along, here are 5 ways to promote your law firm blog:
- Facebook It! Using the “Add A Link” feature in your status update area, you can tell your friends about your blog posts. They can not only read it, but share it with their friends. Disclosure: for a long time, I had it set up that all of my Twitter updates went to Facebook. I recently learned my lesson that this shortcut just doesn’t cut it. It clogs up your stream, annoys your Facebook friends, and is just icky (in my opinion).
- Tweet It! Send out your blog updates through Twitter (you can do it automatically using Twitterfeed as well as directly from your blog if you’re using Headway Theme or a variety of plugins). Word of caution, though: if your sole reason for being on Twitter is to use it as a broadcast mechanism for your blog posts then you should not be using Twitter.
- Submit It! There are a ton of blog directories online – some paid, some free. Submit your blog to as many as possible (caution: it’s time consuming) to help spread the word.
- Comment It! Take the time to get to know who else is blogging about your area of practice, as well as in the tangential areas in which your potential readers may take interest (hint: lots of people who are looking to file for bankruptcy are reading personal finance blogs). Read those blogs regularly, and make an effort to post useful comments (do not post those, “Nice site!” comments. They’re useless, and a smart blogger will delete them). In this way you’ll become known to the bloggers (very good) as well as to their regular readers (also very good).
- Read It! That’s right, read your blog. Are you informative and coherent, or do you write solely with search engines in mind? If you’re not writing for human beings, how can you expect that any will actually read your blog?
The process of growing blog readership can be a slow one, and frustrating. Using these five tactics will help you begin the process of building traffic and a loyal readership base.
Photo courtesy of ellievanhoutte.
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