Five Reasons to Include a Blog on Your Law Firm Website

March 30, 2017
Daniel Decker

Every lawyer’s website should include a blog. And you should regularly create new content for it. I’ve talked elsewhere about what that content should look like, so I won’t repeat that here. Here are five significant reasons to include – and regularly update – a blog on your law firm website.

1 – Engage visitors. If you create blog content that provides practical information for your website visitors, you’re giving them a great reason to linger on your website. A quick example – if you’re a business lawyer, writing a blog entry highlighting the benefits of incorporating as an LLC versus a corporation will be of great interest to at least a portion of your potential clients. Follow it up with a blog entry offering five tips to reduce the chances of being sued and you’ll hook another significant portion of your website visitors. The bottom line is that you’re giving potential clients reason to spend time on your website, and helping them to develop trust and rapport, so that when they are ready to hire a lawyer, you’re the one they think of.

2 – Build your expert status. At the same time as you are educating and engaging your readers, you are also establishing yourself as an expert in their mind. Your blog allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and your command of the issues that your clients are concerned about. It also gives you a platform to showcase the type of work you do and the type of clients that you help.

3 – Create a reason for repeat visits. If you’re regularly adding new content to your blog, you’re creating a reason for potential clients to keep coming back to your website. There are potential clients out there for you, who are still at the very top of your “sales funnel.” In other words, they are just beginning to realize their need for a lawyer. They’re thinking about their challenge/opportunity and doing their research. These are the type of prospects that will come back to your blog regularly if you’ve made it a source of useful information for them. And then, when they’re finally ready to hire a lawyer, weeks or months down the road, you’ve got an inside track because you’ve already built credibility and established a relationship with them.

4 – Feature the content on social media and elsewhere. Blog entries make for great content to share on social media (which allows you to drive traffic back to your website), through your email newsletter, and across other channels. The key to creating an engaging marketing presence is to provide value to your audience. If you do that through your blog entries, you can leverage the content in countless different areas of your marketing. It’s one of the critical engines at the core of all your marketing.

5 – Repurpose the content for a book, for articles, for podcasts, etc. If you blog regularly, you’ll soon end up with a whole lot of great content. Now, you have the opportunity to re-purpose it elsewhere with minimal work required on your part. Hire an editor and have him turn the blog entries into a book. Stitch two or three entries together into an article and submit it to industry publications. Use your blog entries as a guideline for a podcast. The opportunities are endless.

So what’s the downside? Blogging is a lot of work. Of course, my team is available to take that task off your plate, and you can click here to schedule a discovery call to learn what that looks like.

But whether you hire us or not, you need to make this happen. If you’re not ready to hire a professional firm, here are two simple ways to make it happen:

1 – Assign the task to someone on your staff and hold them accountable to get it done. If you’re going to go this route and you’d like to give them some guidelines to get started, I’d be happy to send them some materials completely free of charge. Just have them email me – daniel@spotlightbranding.com

2 – Do it yourself by scheduling it into your calendar. I’ve literally lost count of the amount of lawyers who have told me that they really like writing and they’re going to write their blog entries by themselves.  And I can count on one hand the amount of them who actually do it consistently. You’re busy – and blogging isn’t going to happen unless you treat it like a non-negotiable task. Put it on your calendar just like you schedule a client meeting or a court appearance. And take it just as seriously. This is the only way to make it happen… otherwise, you’ll never get around to it. Trust me on that one – I’ve seen it over and over and over again.

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Daniel Decker

Daniel Decker is a co-founder and Partner at Spotlight Branding. In addition to helping lawyers stand out from the crowd, he spends his time writing, dreaming up new marketing strategies, and coming up with catchy subject lines. In his spare time, Daniel enjoys playing sports, guitar, politics, and Minnesota sports.