What Should I Write About?
This was a major question for many people at BlawgThink! And I have to tell you, when I first heard the question, I thought it was pretty silly. Write about what you know about and care about. But then when I listened, I realized that it was a very legitimate question. The real question people were asking was not ‘What’ should I write about, but ‘How’ should I write about it. Here are my thoughts on that:
- Who is Your Audience? – Who do you want reading your blog? Potential clients? Existing clients? Other lawyers? Lawyers who might potentially refer business to you? People in your community? Determine that and that will help you focus your blog. At BlawgThink! Bonnie Schucha from WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library asked for advice on how to increase readership and bring more value with her blog. She got a lot of real good advice for increasing her readership on the internet. But it didn’t do anything for her target readership, Wisconsin lawyers. Jim Calloway does a great job of appealing to Oklahoma lawyers, but most of the advice will help anyone, whether they’re in Oklahoma or not. Keep in mind who your readers are.
If you live in a relatively small town, you might want to write more about community news and what it means to the town. What is happening at City Council and the effects it will have on the town. What the zoning changes will mean. If you have a niche specialty, like inadequate security cases like my friend Richard Jones, then you would want to write about that. Or, if you specialize in pharmaceutical law, like Mark Zamora of A Georgia Lawyer, you’d want to write about that (and he does). Look at what you know, what you care about, and the audience you want to reach.
- What Categories Should You have? – If you want your blog to become a valuable resource over time, rather than just a running commentary, I strongly believe you should organize your blog by categories. The standard archiving by date doesn’t help people find your previous posts. So what categories should you have? Think about your topic (or topics) and what you will want to write about, think about how they break down into logical categories. Also, think how the blog will grow over time and the topics and information that you will want to see and write about.
A friend of mine was thinking of starting two blogs on fairly closely related material. I asked him if he really needed a second blog, or whether he could just make a separate category on the first blog? The answer to that lies in who was the target audience for the first blog and who was the audience for the second blog. While the issues were fairly related, if he had a different audience and a different approach for each of the topics, he should go with two blogs. If he has the same audience and same approach, but different information, then he should go with a single blog and multiple categories.
It helps to map out your categories beforehand and think through your topic, rather than just add categories as you go along.
- Do You Have Enough to Keep Going? – It’s easy to do a post a day and go like a bat out of hell for three months. But with a blog you have to be in it for the long haul. I’ve written about 350 posts in the period of a year. That’s a lot of posts. Within the South Carolina trial bar, I have a reputation for knowing about technology and applying it to being a trial lawyer. I frequently spent 15–20 minutes responding to technical questions on our listserv, only to answer the same question six months later. One of the things I wanted to do with my blog was to answer common questions and put them in a public forum so I didn’t have to revinvent the wheel on a regular basis. I had a lot of information I wanted to share. But the built up storage of things to say was exhausted in the first six months. Remember, writing a blog is a marathon and not a sprint.
It’s a nice thought to have a weekly feature, but that means you will have 50 posts to that weekly feature in a year and 150 posts to the weekly feature in three years. Yikes! That’s a lot of writing (and consistency). Evan Schaeffer has done that with remarkable consistency over at his Legal Underground site, but relatively few people have that kind of discipline, week in and week out.
- What Do You Want to Talk About? – In the end, write about what you want to write about. Don’t worry about the rules, just write about what interests you, what concerns you and what drives you. (I refuse to use the word passion as it’s become a seriously overused business buzzword / cliche). If you’re having fun, you’ll get readers and good things will happen.
