Is your law blog unique?
Long time early stage investor and entrepreneur, Brad Feld (@BFeld), writing in the Wall Street Journal on social media tactics being useless without strategy said this on blogs:
…[B]log readership is at an all time high and continues to grow, yet the volume of unique blogs has declined. If you’re a smart marketer, you realize this means tremendous opportunity because people are still consuming blogs, yet the competition is not growing in ferocity or volume.
Law firms launch blogs by practice groups, industry groups, or existing practiced of individual lawyers. This has worked for some firms, but for many firms this has left firms measuring success by how much content they are producing and traffic – not increased revenue.
In addition many lawyer and firms are missing out on tremendous opportunities they’ve never had before.
What if a firm saw a growing opportunity for doing eminent domain work for the fast food industry or vineyards. Such blogs would be one in a million and would only need to land 1 or 2 sizable matters a year (very possible) for the effort to pay off. And how could you have ever chased such niches as fast before the net and blogs?
Veteran lawyer now lawyer coach, Cordell Parvin (@cordellparvin asked last week “Who will become the “hot sauce” industry go-to lawyer?”
Parvin’s point was though “hot sauce” is one of the top 10 fastest growing industries, he did not see a lawyer going after it. One of the tactics Parvin recommended was a blog.
Parvin ought to know, when he was developing a national construction litigation practice, he went after the highway and transportation defect niche. Others thought he was nuts, but he grew a bigger practice than those doing construction litigation in general.
Rather than measuring ROI with hollow website traffic statistics, well done nice blogs measure success in seven figures.
Blogging on what brung you may serve many law firms well. Others ought heed Wayne Gretzky’s insight, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”