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Six reasons for moving your law firm’s newsletters to a blog

August 14, 2016

Louise Waern, a veteran communications professional with Zooma Marketing and Communications of Sweden, shared six reasons for moving from sending monthly newsletters to blogging.

Her reasons are spot on for lawyers and law firms. With a little annotation by me, here they here.

  • Get searchable. Blog content is indexed by Google, meaning the blog itself and each of your posts is searchable by a wide audience. Blogs also rank near the top of search results. Most newsletters are not indexed by Google nor searchable online. Those newsletters which are “stored” on a website may in theory be indexed by Google, but tend to be buried and rank poorly, at best on Google.
  • Frequent communication. Most newsletters are sent out once or twice a month. A blog can be updated frequently, especially important when others are blogging on a timely topic. When a marketing department is assisting in publishing and distributing content written by lawyers, it is is far easier for marketing to post a single post on one subject than to gather content from a lot of lawyers into one long newsletter. Blogs enable the reader to choose what they’d like to read by browsing the title of one post in the subject of an email or RSS aggregator.
  • Let your subscribers share posts to a broader audience. There are more people interested in your insight and commentary than you’ll ever know. Newsletters are sent to a defined group—a defined number of email addresses. A blog post is sent to everyone who has subscribed to the blog, but a blog enables your subscribers to easily share your posts across other social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. With law bloggers receiving half of their traffic from social media today, it’s critical that your content is shared on social media, something not apt to happen with newsletters.
  • Communicate with, instead of talking to, your audience. Blogs, by their very nature have a conversational and engaging feel. Not only is the tone of language more informal, but blog posts tend to share and link to items a lawyer has read which in turn engages the thought leader cited and linkeded to. Because blog posts enable comments (admittedly you’ll get few) and are shared on social media, you and your content will be further engaged. As a result, you can start building a relationship with the people who are reading your blog and start a dialogue instead of just a monologue.
  • Tailor the content to different personas. Your law firm’s target audience has different needs. They search for different types of legal information related to their consumer or business needs. You need to publish content for their specific interest. A newsletter is a static communication with different sorts of content thrown at everyone. You need to give your audience the ability to get what they want rather than what you as a law firm want them to get. Create different blogs for different types of content, for example one blog for family law and another blog for employment law.
  • Measure, analyse and continue the communication. With newsletters, it’s difficult, or impossible, to find out what content was most popular and by whom it was read. A blog post can easily be measured and analyzed. Who was it read by? Which blog posts gets the most views? This will give you an idea of what your audience is interested in and guide you in providing content of value going forward.

There are plenty of other reasons why publishing a blog works better for business development than a newsletter, including establishing the bloggers as trusted authorities in a niche.

Sure, there are times when using a newsletter may be more appropriate such as for sharing firm news or word of an event.

But at the end of the day, for getting legal insight and commentary to your audience, blogs have it over newsletters.

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