Lawyers are like professional categorizers. We like things to fall into neat pigeon holes, each with their own set of characteristics, that have no overlap and leave no situation unaccounted for. Just look at your old law school outlines.
Marketing your law firm rarely has solid categories like this. The field of advertising is much more loose, relying on energy and emotional hunches as much as on simple logic.
When it comes to your legal blog, though, that doesn’t mean that there’s no place for categories. In fact, nearly all the posts on your law blog can easily be distributed into one of four categories, based on its substance.
Legal Elements of Practice
Many blog posts deal with a legal element of your law practice. If you’re a criminal defense attorney, these elements could include bail, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, and summaries of the crimes that you specialize in defending against. If you’re a personal injury attorney, these elements would include the legal responsibilities property owners owe to trespassers, or your state’s damage cap on medical malpractice suits.
These blog posts are evergreen, because they’re unlikely to change or become stale for your readers. They also enhance your reputation by giving you the opportunity to wax poetic and show off your knowledge of the law, and how things work, making them the backbone of your legal blog.
Developments in the Law
Sometimes, the law changes. As an attorney, you need to show your clients that you keep up to date with the newest developments. If a bill is being proposed that would impact your practice and your clients, analyzing it in your blog tells clients that you do your homework.
These blog posts are topical ones, and so can get more attention than evergreen posts soon after going live. However, they also provide an excellent opportunity to link to other relevant, evergreen articles in your blog, to build traffic.
News Items that Showcase the Law in Action
When you run a DUI defense firm and the police chief gets caught drunk driving, you’re given an excellent storyline to show how your legal practice works. Because of the high profile of the case, details will emerge through the media that you can use to tell blog readers and potential clients what you do as a DUI defense attorney, giving you more reasons to link to other blog posts, generating more traffic for your site.
Practical Advice
Lay readers and potential clients don’t come to legal blogs because they want to. They come because they have a problem, and they want to find a solution. Sometimes, that solution is a practical one that you can’t charge for, but is related to a legal situation that you can earn fees for solving. Writing blog posts about those practical solutions can lead to clientele, in the long run.
An example: What should you do when you hit a pedestrian? People searching for an answer to that question online do not have a legal problem. But they’re about to. Having a blog post on your personal injury law blog that effectively answers their current, practical question brings them to your site, where you show off that you can also solve their legal issues, as well.