How Do You Measure the Success of a Law Blog?

How do you measure the success of a law blog?

The question I was asked time and again back when I started LexBlog, almost twenty years ago, came up again last week.

The answer is the bottom line. Measure the success of legal blogging by the amount of revenue generated by your blogging

If the CFO of the law firm or your accountant can’t see a bump in revenue from your blogging, then you are not succeeding.

I can’t imagine any lawyer or law firm starting with LexBlog if they didn’t believe they would build a book of business from blogging.

I wouldn’t have sold them a blog if I, too, wasn’t confident they’d build revenue from blogging.

If a law firm had any doubt blogging would grow revenue, we guaranteed their success.

“If you aren’t satisfied with blogging at the end of a year, let us know what sum of money you think is a fair refund.”

Almost twenty years after LexBlog brought blogging to law firms there are law firm marketing professionals who do not believe lawyers generate money from blogging. And these are firms with a number of blogs.

These firms believe there is no way to measure whether a legal blog can generate revenue.

When I explain there are law firms which have grown substantially – revenues, number of lawyers and number of offices – from blogging, they ask how do they know the growth came from blogging.

Because the managing partner, COO and CFO track the blogging success of their lawyers. They look at a lawyer’s activity and where they spend their time and see if there as been an increase in revenue.

These leaders look at whether the lawyer is regularly blogging on a niche. Is the lawyer’s revenue increasing as a result of the relationships and reputation built from blogging?

Just as these law firm leaders have looked at a lawyer’s networking, writing and speaking offline to grow business, the firm leaders look at networking and reputation building through the net, via blogging, to grow business.

It’s not hard to do, nor does it require an analysis of web traffic or statistics.

The number of blog posts, a key word analysis, web traffic, repeat visits to a web site and by whom and where, subscribers and other data are, of course, easy to measure with the right software and, perhaps, provide means to justify blogging by a firm.

A law firm and its lawyers would be better served, though, by measuring blog success by the bottom line.

The bottom line has been the measurement of business success for decades, if not centuries. Nothing has changed with the Internet, and blogging.