First of all, I do have a dog in this race as we design blogsites for lawyers. Second, I do coaching and consulting with clients on blogging. What you see below is a response I posted on an email listserv called Solo Lawyer Marketing. It is a great listserv where lawyers and marketing professionals freely exchange questions and answers. With that out of the way, let me respond.
Let me first take your concerns one by one:
- it will not foster origination of clients in my area;
- it’s a sinkhole for time;
- if I start and stop, the prominent existence of a blog last
updated “August 21, 2007″ will publicly testify to my lack of
dedication in perpetuity.
First of all, there are some attorneys who blog and never do get a client directly from their blog. I would venture to guess they are few and far between. However, there are attorneys who get media attention, invitations to speak and attention from other attorneys from blogging. And they get clients from those activities. But, if a blog is done right and the right post are written and posted, you can not help but get clients. Which leads right to your next concern.
Second, yes it can be a sinkhole for time, if you do not blog right. One of the biggest mistakes I see lawyers do when they blog is to write god awful blog post. They are either too freaking long or are written with the same language and words you see in a boring law review article. They use too many legalese words too. The key to writing blog post, especially for a consumer focused practice area, is to simply answer questions. Take for example a family law practice, or for that matter, any “personal plight” area of law. If you will take the time to consider questions you get every day or at least very often and turn those common questions into blog post. Answer those questions with a short, well thought out blog post, you will get results. What I found and still do, if you answer questions you hear every day in your office, on your phone, in your office, these are the same type of questions people are looking for online. If you answer them, you will be found.
Next and on this same line of thought, if you don’t set you blog up right in the beginning, it is going to fail. Take some time to consider the domain and the name. These are key to getting good search engine placement. Take some time to consider the design too. Is it eye appealing. Make your blog a welcome mat to your firm. And don’t get hung up making it look like a lawyer site with the scales of justice and pillars of the courthouse. Keep your intended audience in mind when you both design your blog and write your post.
Finally, your concern on having a stale look if you stop posting. FIrst of all, do the things above and you will get results and won’t stop. However, I know some do stop. What you can do is shut off the date field for the post and that way when someone visits, they won’t know when the post was published.
Mark Merenda of Smart Marketing Now added even more when he said:
The Internet is littered with abandoned websites and blogs. Thus Google and other search engines put a premium on fresh content. Why?
Google wants those using its search engine to find the latest, most relevant, and up-to-date answers to their search queries.
Whether your blog is a separate domain or is attached to your traditional website, every time you post, the search engines “see” that you have added valuable new content, and you are correspondingly rewarded in search engine rankings.
Thus, blogging is valuable even if no one ever read one word.
If anyone has comments or questions, add them to this post. Let’s keep the conversation going.
