I Blog, Therefore I Am... Maybe?
A version of this article was originally published in For The Defense in March 2023 here.
Blogging has been a hot topic among the firms, lawyers, and legal marketing professionals I work with lately—and for very good reason.
Done strategically and consistently, blogging can be an excellent visibility and engagement tool.
“Blogging” at its most basic is writing and regularly posting content in one dedicated location where your clients, prospects, and referral sources can find it. It can help you connect, build, and deepen your relationship with your target audiences—to be seen as a trusted resource for excellent information. Blogging regularly allow you to showcase your expertise and experience, as well as stay in front of the people who make or influence legal hiring decisions.
So, should you blog?
Maybe…
As good a marketing tool as good blogging can be, bad blogging—blogging done inconsistently or haphazardly—can damage your visibility in the marketplace and erode the “trusted source” relationship you’re working so hard to build with your clients and referral sources.
Whether you should start a blog depends on the answer to some important questions:
Why do you want to blog?
What will you blog about?
How will you develop your content?
Can you commit to posting regularly?
How will readers find your blog?
To blog or not to blog—is that the question?
When clients bring up blogging, I want two pieces of information up front: what do you mean when you say “blog” and why do you want to have one?
After chatting for a bit, I often discover folks are using the term “blog” as a catch-all term for all kinds of content—most often alerts and newsletters posted on firm websites, often under categories such as “insights,” “news” or “resources.”
Those are good content marketing tools, but they’re not blogs. A blog takes a specific form, and has its own advantages and challenges.
Some quick blog history
People started using blogs — short for weblogs (web-logs, not we-blogs)—around the mid-1990s as digital journals, where they regularly posted their writings on a specific topic or set of interrelated topics. Blogging took hold in the political, nonprofit, and business worlds. As the internet became more readily accessible, blogs became accepted as credible information sources. Blogging became an effective tool for a variety of companies and organizations to reach and engage with a wider range of audiences and constituencies.
The same trend happened in the legal sector. Law firms quickly saw the advantage of publishing thought leadership on channels they controlled, and clients became comfortable with firm-generated content as trusted resources for legal, industry, and business information. Fast-forward to today’s digitally driven marketplace -- blogs have become a well-regarded “inbound” marketing technique, designed to attract and keep the attention of new and established clients by consistently offering valuable or actionable information that meets their needs and (hopefully) foster long-term relationships.
The evolution of blogs from online journals to today’s inbound marketing destination continues to define and drive their format. Blogs have simple architecture—short posts appearing in reverse chronological order, found together in one place online—and focus on a particular subject, market, or industry. Contrast this with the news or insights areas on law firm websites, which are designed to house a collection of different kinds of content (client alerts and newsletters, media mentions, firm news and announcements, awards, and such) on a wide range of topics relevant to the firm as a whole.
It’s undisputed that blogs can be an excellent marketing tool for every stage of the “buyer’s journey.” Blogs can generate awareness with those who don’t (yet) know you and haven’t (yet) considered hiring you, and provide valuable information and expert insights to prospects and referral sources that would make them more likely to hire or refer you. They can be a tool to nurture existing client and referral relationships by being a trusted information resource.
But that doesn’t completely answer the question: “Why a blog?”
When I ask that question, what I really want to know is whether this content marketing tool is right for them and their law firm. The answer depends on a lot of other considerations.
It is better not to blog at all than to blog and fade away
Unlike love (where some say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all), or PR (where some say bad press is better than no press), I say it’s better not to blog at all than to start a blog that ends up with inconsistent, boring or stale content, or worse, fizzles before it can gain any traction.
Sporadic posts (lots of posts followed by no posts, and then another deluge of posts) and long gaps with no updates (a couple of weeks between posts is about as long as you should go); old or outdated content, and abandoned blogs (the ultimate blogging sin, in my opinion) will all seriously undermine efforts to have a blog be considered a credible or reliable information resource. So let’s get down to brass tacks here: Are you up to the task of generating fresh content on a consistent basis come hell, high water, or your next trial?
Sorry if that sounded a little rude. Here’s why I ask.
In the last several months, I’ve had discussions with lawyers and marketing professionals who describe some version of the same scenario.
A crackerjack idea for a new blog! Hot topics to cover, lawyers interested in writing for or having a byline on the blog, technology infrastructure for hosting the blog an email list to publicize it (more on that later), and even a framework for developing the content.
So they launch it, full steam ahead, with the promise of an aggressive publication schedule.
And then …
Some blogs never make it out of the gate; they just can’t get past the planning stages. Some get a few months of great content up, and then the folks responsible realize how challenging it is to get all of that content developed, written, edited, approved, and posted—over and over and over again. In other cases, a disruption to the otherwise steady flow of content—a busy trial schedule, the departure of key lawyers in the group or practice, even something as simple as summer or end-of-year holidays or vacations—stalls the blog and it’s hard to get it back on track.
Fortunately, there are some ways to make consistent blog content development run more smoothly:
Create an editorial calendar to plan posts three to six months out, making room for a variety of pieces: evergreen content (content that revolves around topics that are always relevant to your target audience), event-related posts (bar and other association meetings, for example), new developments and breaking news items.
Develop a library of content (evergreen pieces or ones that can be quickly updated and posted) to deploy when gaps in the content pipeline occur.
Use a team approach to share the responsibility for the content (and perhaps the byline). The team can include other members of your firm, “guest” bloggers (referral sources, other professional services providers), and outsourced resources who can collaborate on research, writing, and editing content.
Find the friction in your content process and work to eliminate it. Are posts not getting written, or is the content getting stuck in the editing, approval, proofing, or posting stage? Streamline as much as possible to avoid multiple drafts, edits, and rewrites.
Keep content short and informative. You can divide bigger topics into sub-topics or break up a lengthy piece into a “series” of related posts (labeling them as part of a series can also incentivize readers to return for the next installments). Consider using different forms of content and other media types such as videos, infographics and interactive charts, for example.
Curate content from other reliable and credible sources. I’m not suggesting direct copying—which is plagiarism and copyright infringement, but rather sharing or referring to other blogs or online articles of interest (including links and proper attribution) and adding your own comments and “spin” on the topic.
If a lawyer blogs and no one reads it, is it still a blog?
If you blog but no one knows where to find it, then you’ve wasted a lot of time, energy, and content. You’ll need to figure out how to get your target audience to read your blog—not just once, but consistently.
The key to this type of inbound marketing is to creating content around what your target audience wants to know (not what we want to tell them). Writing to meet the informational needs of your clients and referral sources will bring traffic to your blog, but it won’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term play that requires—you guessed it—a steady flow of fresh content that addresses the issues your clients and prospects care about and the challenges they face.
Many lawyers and firms look to SEO—search engine optimization—to maximize traffic to their websites and blogs. Very basically, SEO means orienting your content to rank higher on the results pages of a search engine like Google or Bing (ideally on the first page and ideally as high up as possible in the results on that page) so that you get more traffic to your site. There are many techniques designed to improve SEO of your content, and many of them merit investigation.
One of the easiest and most effective SEO techniques (for those of us not steeped in the technology of search engine algorithms) is to write blog content that includes the keywords (the words or terms) that folks in your target audience are likely to use in their search engine requests. It’s likely that you already know many of the important keywords and concepts for your clients, prospects, and referral sources, but it doesn’t hurt to take some time to make a list of keywords. If you’re curious and want to dive a little deeper, there are online tools you can use to do keyword research. The key to keywords is to use them naturally and appropriately in your content. Overusing terms or “keyword stuffing” won’t help—and it might negatively impact—your efforts to generate organic traffic to your blog.
There are other ways to drive readership, including building some outbound marketing around your blog. Do you have an existing mailing list or a way to build one easily? Does your firm have a CRM system, publications preference manager, or mailing list for other content that you can use to direct potential readers to your blog? Hosting your blog on your firm website may help generate traffic from visitors who are there for other reasons.
Other simple ways to build awareness about your blog include adding a link to your website bio and your email signature. You should also be using social media, in particular LinkedIn, to leverage your blog content and expand your potential readership.
So, to blog or not to blog?
Blogging can be an excellent visibility and engagement tool. It can also be a heavy lift for lawyers, practice groups and firms.
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