By Kimberly Alford Rice
Special to the Legal
Reality check: According to the WordPress website, there are more than 327 million people who view more than 2.5 billion blog pages each month. WordPress.com users produce about 500,000 new posts and 400,000 new comments on an average day. There are 54,523,503 WordPress sites worldwide.
How can lawyers leverage the blogosphere to build a prosperous practice? Glad you asked.
1. Blogging is one of the most powerful and least expensive marketing tools available – ever! A self-hosted WordPress blog site costs less per week than a Starbucks chai latte.
2. Blogging on a consistent and persistent basis will position you as an expert in your chosen areas of practice. The possibilities are absolutely endless for the connections you can make. Hosting a blog places you on the world stage and right in front of your targeted audiences, all at the same time.
3. With thousands of people sharing content for every one person creating content, useful blog posts can spread like wildfire via social networks. There are hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn eagerly seeking useful, interesting content to share.
4. To blog regularly and in an impactful way, you need to stay alert for rich content. Blogging can make you smarter, or at least better read.
5. Blogging gives you a platform to shine, to become an influential voice in your profession and beyond.
6. As a professional (legal) writer, blogging provides a creative outlet for you to share views and perspectives that you may not otherwise have.
7. Blogs are super juice for website SEO (search engine optimization). Studies show us that blogs drive three to five times more website traffic than adding fresh content alone.
8. Blogs are designed to be short. Depending upon your chosen topic, a typical blog post can be 300 words or less. Unlike a well-composed brief, drafting a blog need not take a lot of your valuable billable time.
9. If you commit to blogging over the long term, this commitment will be widely noticed by prospective clients who are following you and will come to regard you as reliable and solid.
10. Blogging can be a tremendous public service. In addition to posting blogs on timely and interesting legal topics, you can carve a special niche of being helpful to others. And isn’t that why you pursued law in the first place – to help others?
Kimberly Alford Rice is principal of KLA Marketing Associates, a business development advisory firm focusing on legal services. As a legal marketing authority, she helps law firms and lawyers develop practical business development and marketing strategies which lead directly to new clients and increased revenues. Additionally, she provides career management services to lawyers in transition. She can be reached at 609-458-0415 or via email at kimberly@klamarketing.net.
Through observing business people who have been successful, and how they achieved their success, I have concluded that there are a number of factors that must be present for business success to occur.
Posted by: PageMax | Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 08:37 AM
Blogging is really a great way to success in business specially if you got a good content for it.In Helsinki many of business already experience success through blogging it is a matter of being patient and consistent.
Posted by: Suvi Sarparanta | Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 10:05 PM
Thanks for sharing this great article, I really enjoyed the insign you bring to the topic, awesome stuff!
Posted by: jack | Saturday, September 15, 2012 at 05:20 PM
One of the cheapest and most effective ways to get the word out there about your business goods and services is with a blog. Blogs are excellent because they can be updated at your leisure, are specifically calibrated for ease of use, and, best of all, they can be entirely free.
Posted by: US Trademark Application | Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 04:02 AM
Blogging is only effective if you write it with love. I mean, you write for the purpose of helping and providing information and not for keyword density and some sort of SEO thing. One should create a helpful article so readers will have the enticement of going back to your blog.
Posted by: Los Angeles Disability Attorney | Thursday, September 06, 2012 at 10:57 AM