Thanks for joining LexBlog! We’re excited to help you create great legal content. This post shares some important information to help you with your new site. It covers topics such as logging in to the platform and where to find help articles or support. We’ve also added some of our favorite blog posts as placeholder content below. They will be automatically deleted from your site when you launch.
When planning a new blog or evaluating your current blog, measurable goals help you determine if your site is successful. The LexBlog philosophy of blogging skews away from content marketing and toward connection and reputation building. Who you connect with, be it a colleague or client, should be your desired outcome.
Continue Reading Setting your site goals and measuring your success
Imagine you’re an estate planning lawyer in Des Moines looking to grow your practice.
The marketing folks at Principal Park, home of the Triple A Des Moines Cubs, call to tell you that you’ll have free use of a luxury box for five of next year’s ball games. Better yet, they tell you they’ll arrange for the food and drink and invite a who’s who in networking for a Des Moines estate lawyer.
Twenty attendees for each game will include wealthy people in the Des Moines area who are looking for an estate planning lawyer, some of your best estate planning clients, leading financial planners from Des Moines, the reporter from the Des Moines Register who does stories on financial planning and business matters, editors and reporters from the Des Moines Business Record, financial reporters from the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.
Des Moines business leaders such as the president of the local Chamber of Commerce, influential Des Moines bloggers who have a wide and diverse audience, influential estate planning lawyers who are blogging from other areas of the country, leading lawyers from Des Moines who don’t do estate planning work and don’t have partners who do so either, influential business and financial bloggers from around Iowa.
Would you go? Darn right you’d go.
Would you wear ear plugs so you couldn’t hear anyone? Heck no.
Continue Reading Listening: First step in blogging by lawyers
When people ask me what they should do to get started on blogging, I rarely talk technology or even blogging. While those are important elements of blogging, they are next steps. Things you do after you decide you want to blog and have found your tribe and your voice.
Ask yourself this when you decide you want to start blogging: Who am I blogging for? If your answer is everyone, you are not going to be happy. Nor is anything you are about to read going to help you.
When you are right, you are looking for an audience. I want you to go online and find a person that embodies that audience for you. This should be a person, not a brand or a company. At the end of this little exercise, you should have just one name.
Now go online and learn more about that person. Look for the following things: Are they reachable online? Do they write online? Do they use social media? Do they follow other people?
If the answer to the majority of the above questions is no, forget that person for now and find another person until the majority of these criteria are going to be met.
This person should be your goal.
To create a successful blog, you will need to listen to your audience and online influencers. These resources will help you understand why listening is important and to find the tools that can help you.
As LexBlog’s Kevin O’Keefe explains:
“Blogging is much more than ‘message sending.’ You listen to the conversation that’s already taking place among leaders and the media covering your niche area of expertise. Only after listening can you engage in the discussion by referencing the discussion in your blog posts and commenting at other blogs.”
Focusing your blog around niche topics will increase your readership and search engine performance. If your blog covers too many topics, it becomes harder for people to find related content on your site and for search engines to understand what your site is about. Here are some ways to narrow the focus of your site.
Most importantly, think about your readers and their needs. Ask questions about who wants to read about the topics you want to cover: What are their professional titles? What do they need to know about these topics? What content are they most likely to share on their social media accounts?
You may want to focus your posts on news and developments affecting specific locations. If a topic doesn’t affect readers in that location, leave it out. Which topics do you know better than anyone else? Is there a topic where you’d like to establish yourself as a subject-matter expert?
Which topics affect your preferred industry? Who are your main competitors? What are they doing? How are you different?
List out the topics you want to cover on your blog. Then group those topics together under four or five larger categories. If a topic doesn’t fit under one of those categories, leave it out. Blogs that cover too many topics will quickly lose focus.
These blogs focus on specific industries or geographic areas: Broadcast Law Blog, Legal Flight Deck, Money Laundering Watch, Fracking Insider, Tobacco Law Blog, Minnesota Family Law Blog.
Both new and experienced bloggers need ideas for fresh content. This article lists ideas for generating new posts: comment on recent news, repurposing your content, conferences and meetups, personal and evergreen content, and other prompts.
Respond to current news through your blog. Don’t include a detailed recap of the news. Instead, link to the original source and provide your own summary. Then, add your commentary. You can share your ideas on: a recent case and its takeaways for your audience, a recent development in your field, an issue highlighted in the news or another blogger’s post.
Repurposing your content. You already have a wealth of potential content around you. Previous client work or posts can inspire new posts. Publish an answer to a question your clients frequently ask. Write a roundup post where you gather all the best posts you’ve written on a subject. Revisit a topic you’ve previously covered. Are there new developments that affect your audience? Watch our webinar, 5 Ways to Repurpose Content for New Blog Posts.
This is the format of an ideal blog post. The most important part of writing an ideal blog post is to, you know, actually write it. Your thoughts are brilliant, I’m sure, but when you keep them within your head you miss out on the discussions that your ideas could generate, that could subsequently help shape your own thoughts further.
The topic can be anything—if you look at our Top 10 in Law Blogs posts you’ll see the subject matter ranges from cryptocurrency regulation to a monkey selfie lawsuit. Sometimes, if you’re having trouble narrowing down a focus, or want to generate more attention with your post, it can help to write about something current in the news.
Well-written blogs are clear, concise, and don’t take too long to get to the point. The cool thing about blog posts is that they can be as long as you want them to be, or as short as you want them to be; an amuse-bouche of insight, or an entree analysis. If your blog is on the LexBlog network, and you want it to be on the front page, it may be good to write at least 250 words for your posts. We’ll put shorter posts on the front page too though, especially if they’re covering breaking news.
Other tips for creating an ideal blog post: If you’re having trouble getting all your ideas to flow, go ahead and use some bullet points! Always include some sort of title image—it will show up when you share your post on social media, and a number of social media studies have shown that you get better engagement when you include images. Read over your draft before you publish—typos, or other minor grammatical errors take away from your good writing and ideas.
Last but not least, the biggest key to writing good blog posts? Be consistent. Writing blog posts, much like anything else, can become habitual, but at the beginning you’re going to need to make a concentrated effort to push yourself to write with regularity. That consistency is worth it, though, because it’s key in building up your blog and your personal brand.
However long it takes to say what you have to say. No more. No less.
Everywhere I talk these days I am asked what’s the proper length for a law blog post. I give this answer everytime.
I fear the question arises out of a lot misinformation on law blogging flying around.
This afternoon I read Good2bSocial’s Joe Balestrino’s post on how to generate leads (I’d call it business) from your law blog in which he called out the importance of long form blog posts.
Does the number of words matter? Yes, it does, especially if you want to see your post on the first page of search engines. During the infancy of blogging, it was enough to create a 300-word post and you could expect it to rank high on search engines. But those days are gone because of today’s tight competition.
Thousands of blogs are created each day and that means marketers need to be a little more creative in producing content for their business’s blog. High-quality, long-form content with more than 1,000 words tends to rank higher in search engines compared to posts with fewer words.
Generating business, or even attention, is not dependent on the length a law blog.
The best way to build visibility and a reputation through blogging is blogging on a niche and referencing the existing discussion taking place in that niche.
Hamza Mikou (@hamzamikou), COO of Boostsquare and veteran blogger, shared yesterday 3 tips for the naming your blog.
With a little commentary from me, here they are:
Create a name that indicates your blog focus. I’ve always told lawyers to think of hornbooks. Trelease on Water Law. Prosser on Torts. There was little confusion when reading the spine of the book on what it’s inside. Don’t make your readers guess and don’t leave Google guessing. After all, Google knows you by how other people describe you (the text in the link to your blog from other sites). Nothing confusing about China Law Blog, Connecticut Employment Law Blog, or Chicago IP Litigation Blog. I’ll be the first to acknowledge exceptions such as Marler Blog or Popehat, two very good law blogs.
Use an easy, simple and notable name that’s easy to remember. Unless you reach compelling status, I’m not sure many folks remember a blog’s name, they’ll remember you the lawyer. If I asked the readers of my blog its name, I believe the majority would not know and just say it’s your blog. Having said, it’s nice if your blog is easy enough for folks to remember.
Blog name should match your domain name. Some bloggers ignore this rule probably because they’re excited about getting a domain that will garner more blog readers, whether because of search or people just keying in the domain. Poor idea. Getting a domain name that matches the name of your blog is the best way to get more readers. It shows you’re a professional, as opposed to lame. There’s also no confusion for Google. Google considers the title of your blog, the text in the links pointing to your blog (same as title of your blog) and your domain, among other factors in measuring the influence of you and your blog as well as the search performance of your blog. Google doesn’t like to be confused and can penalize you for it. Finally, assuming your blog is set up right, anyone looking for your blog will Google for it by the name they recall, your name, or the subject and easily retrieve it.
A few other factors you ought to consider:
Continue Reading 8 factors to consider when naming your blog