Celebrating Six Years of Blogging — Law Blogs & How the Online World Has Changed (Part IV: More Thoughts for Blogging Lawyers & Bringing My Story Up To Date)
photo credit: Tanel via flickr
I started this series in June 2009, reflecting on completion of six years as a blogging lawyer. Then exhaustion from all those years hit me, and without making a specific decision to do so, I simply stopped posting to this blog. Now, for 2010, I’m going to give it a try again. First, I’ll finish my old draft of the final part of this series.
Blogs for Lawyers’ Reputation-Building and Networking
Key questions for blogging lawyers are:
- Will I get new clients from a law blog?
- If it doesn’t bring me new clients directly, how can a blog fit into my legal marketing strategy?
Many variables affect the answers to these questions, including the nature of one’s practice and details about how the lawyer’s blog is set up and written.
An important factor that can be a major limitation on the effectiveness of a law blog for directly attracting clients is that the practice of law is local (due to state licensing rules) and the Web is Worldwide.
So unless a lawyer’s blog is carefully tailored not only to a niche subject matter, but also to a geographical area, a large percentage of its traffic may be from outside the jurisdiction(s) in which the attorney is licensed. (This may be changing as search engines increasingly tailor results based on the location from which a search originates.)
Add to that the fact that much search traffic is from people seeking information and not immediately looking to retain a lawyer, and it is inevitable that most blog visits will not result in the attorney receiving a call or email from a potential client.
Also, some areas of legal practice are much more likely than others to lead to referrals from Internet searches. Typically, the potential clients most likely to be using web search to find a lawyer, as they used to use the Yellow Pages, are consumers with non-repeat business (e.g., divorce, personal injury). These individuals often have fewer fewer contacts from whom to obtain a personal referral to a qualified attorney than do sophisticated businesspersons who frequently use a wide variety of legal services (or whose business contacts do so).
My law practice involves representing businesses, and many of them still choose lawyers to handle specialized matters based on referrals from other lawyers or business peers, not from the Yellow Pages or online searches. (I suspect this continues to change in favor of greater reliance by business persons on web search.)
For all these reasons, although my blog receives over 20,000 visits a month, it has not directly resulted in a huge inflow of new clients.
As a Lawyer, Blogging Can Help You Get Noticed and Receive Publicity Opportunities
At least in the conventional view, marketing legal services to potential business clients involves extensive reputation-building and networking, which then leads to essential word-of-mouth referrals.
Conventional legal-marketing wisdom has always placed great weight on reputation-building through activities such as speaking, writing, and being quoted in the press as an expert.
It is here that blogging and use of social network tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter can be tremendously powerful.
My experience has been that when I have blogged on a popular, cutting-edge topic, journalists and publishers writing on the topic have found my posts through online searches and contacted me, leading to my being quoted in a wide range of print and online publications and given speaking and writing opportunities.
For example:
- My posts on employers using social networks for background checking led to many interviews and several speaking opportunities, including a Missouri Bar seminar, which I have now done three times.
- My posts on the Americans With Disabilities Act Amendments, written while the legislation was pending, led to the opportunity to co-author a book on the subject, published by Thompson Publishing Group Inc.
- My posts on family responsibilities discrimination drew the attention of the Center for WorkLife Law, a nonprofit that works to educate employees, employers, employment lawyers, unions, and public policymakers about the prevalence of family responsibilities discrimination, and to develop effective measures to eliminate it. This connection led to my inclusion in a working group of management lawyers concerning the subject, which in turn led to my being interviewed and photographed for a recent Missouri Lawyers’ Weekly story on the subject:
Blog Becomes More of a General-Interest Employment and Career “Online Magazine” Than a Narrow-Niche Lawyer’s Publication
My blogging has meandered quite far from the original employment law focus, though I still return to it regularly. Several years ago, I began monitoring my traffic (great tools are available to learn many details about one’s traffic, my choice being Google Analytics).
I learned from such monitoring that regardless of whom I originally wanted my audience to be (employers and their lawyers), I had little control over that. Google was sending me an awful lot of people who were employees, especially job seekers — judging from the posts they found and key words they searched.
Particularly given the current economy, I decided to cater a bit to this growing audience I realized I had unwittingly acquired, adding a significant dimension of jobseeking advice.
The result is that my blog has become less readily classifiable as an employment law blog, but has caught the attention of recruiters, career coaches, and PR agents for a wide range of employment-related authors and companies (e.g., various job-search websites and HR software companies). I routinely receive far more press releases and PR inquiries than I can presently handle.
