This is a cautionary tale.
I launched my blog in late 2018. In short order, I pumped out a dozen posts. They were exciting times. I was getting great feedback from readers. The blog drove traffic to my website and I landed several new clients. Life was good.
Two months later, I learned I was pregnant with twins — happy, exciting, and slightly scary news. Blogging took a backseat to just ... coping. Any extra energy I once had for blogging now went towards growing babies.
And then, of course, the babies were born. The number of children in our home tripled. Life’s been busy.
Anyways, that’s my excuse for the blogging hiatus.
But now, due to the pandemic and associated court closures, my practice has slowed down, making space for non-billable work. In other words, I’m back!
If things are slow for you too, you may have time for blogging. But once things return to normal (they will, right?), your blog could be challenging to maintain.
So, do as I say, not as I did. Here are five tips for starting a legal blog that’ll still be around in 2021.
1. Set a manageable blogging schedule
To attract traffic to your blog and retain readers, consistency is key. Choose a schedule you can maintain, even when you’re busy. If that means just one post per month, so be it.
Don’t follow my example — a flurry of posts followed by crickets.
It doesn’t look good. A lawyer with a stale blog on her website will present as someone who: a) lacks follow-through, b) isn’t up-to-date on legal developments, and c) might even have gone out of business. Yikes. These days, when I get an inquiry from a new client, they usually ask whether I’m still practising. I blame the blog.
One more thing - before you choose a blogging schedule, write a few posts to give yourself an idea of how much time one takes. I bet it’s longer than you think.
2. Before you launch, prep 5 or 6 posts
I sort of got this right. Before I launched, I had several posts ready to go.
I recall my husband gently suggesting that I hold some back so I could post even when I was too busy to write. Did I heed that advice? Reader, I did not. I pumped those posts out every couple of days.
Don’t do that. You will get busy again. Keep to the manageable publishing schedule you chose under step 1. Hold those posts in the queue and publish them on schedule. In the meantime, keep writing. Build up a reserve to keep the blog going in the busy times.
3. Don’t be too ambitious with your topics
This can be a hard one for lawyers. We must be thorough in our legal work, and when we apply that standard to blogging, we end up trying to jam everything we know into a single post.
Don’t do that. You’re probably a perfectionist, which means you’ll want your post to be perfectly researched and accurate. If your topic is too broad, writing the post will take forever.
So narrow those topics. This is not the time for a tour de force. Let’s say you’re an estates litigator and you want to do a post about wills variation actions. Don’t write “Lawyer X’s Guide to Wills Variation Claims”. Instead, do a post on filing deadlines in wills variation claims. Then another one on standing. Then one on remedies. You get the idea. You can link each post so that by the time you’re done, your blog will feature a comprehensive guide. Narrow your focus and then narrow again.
BC lawyer Erik Magrakan does this well. The gold standard of legal blogging consistency, he has published over 2,500 posts in the last 12 years on his BC Injury Law Blog. I don’t think he’s ever gone a week without posting. He achieves this by keeping his topics narrow. Most posts are a comment on a single case, and often just one aspect of a single case. He’s taken something we should all be doing anyway — keeping up to date on our practice area — and turned it into an incredibly useful resource.
4. Share the load
Once you’ve decided on a blogging schedule and started thinking of topics, look for help. Divide up the posts among lawyers in your office or delegate a first draft to a student. Alternatively, you could hire someone to write them for you (I offer that service).
Or get creative. Erin Cowling, the lawyer behind the fantastic blog series Women Leading in Law, found a smart way to share the load. Each post profiles a different lawyer, but instead of writing the profiles herself, Erin poses a series of questions for the subject to answer. It’s still a lot of work - Erin needs to manage the lawyers, proofread and publish the posts, and market the blog. But it’s certainly more efficient than writing a 1,000-word blog post from scratch.
5. Stay organized
Here’s something I’ve done well. Treat your blog as you would one of your files — keep everything related to it in one (virtual) place. I use Evernote. My publication schedule, every draft post, every idea for a post, every random musing that could turn into a post — it all goes in Evernote. After my long pause in blogging, I was surprised and happy to find several partially written posts that I had completely forgotten. (But you won’t see those for awhile. I’ve chosen a blogging schedule and I’m sticking to it!)
Interested in learning more about legal blogging? Get in touch and let me know what I should cover next.
