Is attracting people to your law blog necessary?

Attracting people to your law blog may not be necessary for your blog to be a professional and business development success.

Most people talk of law blogs as a means of generating traffic. Traffic to the law blog. Traffic to a web site. Traffic to a lawyer’s bio.

Success is then measured by viewers. How many unique viewers a month? How many viewers are generated from email notifications? How many from social networks? How many from RSS feeds?

If we’re not generating traffic, then we need to change course. Maybe we need to throw in the towel.

But what if traffic and viewers are not determinative of whether your blog is a success in generating business? What if traffic and viewers are not determinative of whether your blog is establishing you as a “go-to” lawyer in your field and/or locale?

I’m serious.

Tina Emerson, Marketing Director of Rodgers, Thomas and Townsend, shared the following in a LinkedIn Legal Blogging discussion as to the value of a law blog.

I think blogging adds a lot of dimension to an attorney’s professional biography. If I am searching an attorney’s name, and I find his/her blog in the process, I am likely to read it to get a better feel of their personality as well as deeper insight into their legal interests.

A blog as part of a lawyer’s professional biography. A blog found while doing a search on an attorney’s name, presumably after you received the attorney’s name from another source.

A blog which then adds to a prospective client’s evaluation of an attorney. What’s their personality like? What are their legal interests?

Veteran legal professional, Sangeet Kaur, a consultant to law firms and in-house counsel, shared this in the same LinkedIn Group discussion.

Blogging takes time and effort. So when I see a lawyer blogging, I know they are passionate about the topic and I am likely to hire or recommend them.

Same thing. When I find a lawyer who is blogging, not when I find a blog and then the lawyer publishing on the blog. And when I find that lawyer blogging I know they are committed to an area of the law.

A blog is much like a book. A law blog sets an attorney apart.

If someone gets a referral to a lawyer they look them up. What’s the impact if they see the lawyer has authored a a book on the area of law for which they’re seeking assistance?

My partner, when I practiced, co-authored Wisconsin Family Law. Not only was I impressed, but so were prospective clients.

The prospective clients never heard of the book before they were doing research on my partner — and they were never going to read the book (not the case with a law blog – prospective clients read relevant posts).

A blog has an equal effect today. It shows a lawyer is committed to what they do and is committed to staying abreast of developments in their field.

When I started LexBlog over ten years this concept of a blog as a “self-authenticator” was so obvious to me.

Somehow with all the noise of web traffic, social media to generate traffic, putting blogs in a website to generate traffic and producing volumes of content to generate traffic, I left a little common sense behind.

Sure prospective clients will need to come to your blog. And we’ll all take the traffic that comes from people finding our blog posts on search and social media.

But thanks to the LinkedIn Legal Blogging Group discussion, I realized (again) a good law blog differentiates an attorney from their peers. In and of itself.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Ethan Lofton