- Credibility – with a well written blog you can showcase your expertise and position yourself as an expert.
- Relationship Building – your blog can not only be a place to regularly communicate with your current clients, but also a way to gain new clients. Through your writing and your responses to comments, potential clients gain familiarity with you which makes it easier for them to take the step to make contact with you when they have a legal issue to resolve.
- Information Library – the archive of blog posts is a repository of knowledge where you can direct your clients to articles that help them understand their legal position.
- Drive traffic to your website – by writing blog posts your website will do better in search results because Google prefers websites that are regularly updated and which can be seen as an information resource.
When not to blog
- If you don’t have the time to write regularly – a blog that hasn’t been updated in months leaves a worse impression than no blog at all, so if you can’t schedule yourself a regular timeslot on your calendar for writing then it’s better to leave it until you can.
- If the only person with the time to blog is the office junior – dealing with disgruntled client’s comments online requires the same level of maturity and dispute resolution skills that you would expect of a staff member who deals with difficult clients in your office.
- If you consider your blog no more than a free advertising soapbox – blogs fail if they are too blatantly self promotional. There needs to be value in your posts for the reader, and being bombarded by advertising these days is just a turnoff. Your blog posts could be intelligent, provocative, inspiring, funny, or informative. They could share news or ideas, answers to common questions or interesting case studies. Consider them more of a conversation than an advertisement and you will be on the right track.