Guest Post By Attorney Cliff Tuttle Jr., author of the award winning Pittsburgh Legal Backtalk
(From the NL Archives)
Lawyers are often advised by marketing professionals to blog because it is good marketing. The AVVO blog recently announced an inexpensive and easy to use blogging vehicle for lawyers. If you have a modest marketing budget, investing in a blog will buy you more effective advertising than any other vehicle, including Google pay per click ads.
But if a lawyer never lands a single new client from blogging, the exercise is still worthwhile.
Here are 10.5 reasons why:
1. Self education. In order to write a blog piece you need to read and find out what’s going on in the law and in the world. Doesn’t continuous self-education make a better lawyer?
2. Reinforcement of learning. The best way to remember newly-acquired information is to use it. The best way to really understand a concept is to explain it. Blogging forces you to do both.
3. Getting away from the old me-me-me. The essence of a law firm website is telling potential clients how great you are. That can get tiresome — with legal advertising websites rivaling the leading sleep aids for induced drowsiness. A blog looks outward at the world, not inward at the firm.
4. Practice makes perfect. If you wish to be a persuasive and polished writer, you must practice.
5. Busman’s Holiday. It is surprising how relaxing it can be after a day of toil to write something. You may not think so until you start to really get into writing your blog. Meanwhile, you are thinking and writing about work related matters.
6. Making Friends and Influencing People. Through your blog (assuming you are diligent and have good content) I guarantee that you will make the acquaintance of people worth knowing. They will consider you smart, informed and very persuasive — otherwise, they wouldn’t be reading your blog.
7. The Bully Pulpit. When you have a gripe, a beef or a strongly-held opinion, shazam! You have a forum!.
8. Developing New Expertise. All that reading and writing, scrounging for topics and keeping your ear to the ground to identify advancing trends, will cause you to develop and expand expertise on new topics. Moreover, you don’t have to tell anyone you know something about a field of the law, your blog does.
9. Developing a Portfolio. All the posts you ever wrote will be on the internet for a long time. You’ll receive comments popping up on posts written many months or even years ago — ones you’ve actually forgotten you wrote. You’ll find yourself saying to people: “Read my blog post(s) on the subject.”
10. Self fulfillment. You will feel a sense of accomplishment when you post something really good.
10.5 Strange as it may seem, you could be a force in someone else’s life. Someday, if you are lucky, someone will write to you or tell in person that you helped changed his or her life. Teachers often hear it years later from students. When you blog, you are the teacher and who knows who the student may be?
CLT
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Note From the Editor:
If you are thinking of starting a blog, I hope Attorney Tuttle's excellent post gave you a little encouragement as well as some valuable tips. If you haven't seen it yet, his blog Pittsburgh Legal Back Talk is really a great source of information and advice.