There’s nothing worse than mustering up the willpower to sit down and actually write a blog post, only to give up after 20 minutes of staring at a cursor because you don’t know what to write about.
It’s demoralizing. And every time it happens, it makes it less likely that you’ll even bother sitting down the next time.
In this activity, we’re going to invest some time in clearing the roadblocks associated with getting a blog post written and out into the world.
Before we get into the details of creating the list, it’s probably helpful to explain the reasoning behind it. After all, the goal of these posts isn’t just to give you a to-do list, but to teach the underlying concepts so that eventually you’ll have a good sense of what to do next when you get to the point that these lessons seem basic to your more-advanced marketing skills.
A Strategy for Law Firm Blog Content
Readers of this blog will note that I reference the following article a lot. It’s because it’s so instructive. It demonstrates how a simple, structured approach to informing your clientele in an historically untransparent industry can differentiate your firm in a sea of, well, boring competition.
This is the abbreviated story of Marcus Sheridan the pool guy . Marcus’s company sold pools, and they found themselves in pretty dire straights. None of their marketing was moving the needle. They were being drowned out by their competitors. If they were going to continue on as a business, they needed to find a way to stand out.
And that’s when Marcus noticed that his competition seemed to write about anything except the big questions their customers were asking. The competition wanted to keep their specialized knowledge to themselves in hopes of getting a consultation scheduled where they could tailor the pool to the clients’ exact needs.
Sound familiar?
It should.
So what did Marcus do? Well, he answered the questions that his competition was hesitant to answer. Simple. Potentially risky. But profoundly effective.
Suddenly he was appearing in Google for the searches his customers were actually using. When his customers got in touch, they were already qualified buyers, knowing about the process and willing to put their trust in Marcus to apply his expertise to their unique situation. It was an inflection point for his business.
Simple? Yes. Obvious? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.
Marcus’ solution might sound really obvious in hindsight. But when you’re in an industry that’s based around the service provider holding all of the cards from an information standpoint, being willing to part with some of that knowledge can go a long way toward jumpstarting your firm’s marketing.
We go over the reasons why in our lesson about why attorneys should add their pricing to their website . But suffice it to say, that while this strategy has been around for a while, it’s still not used in the legal world, and presents a giant opportunity for folks that are willing to take it on.
And so, with that in mind, let’s apply Marcus’ strategy toward building our list of blog posts.
Building our list of blog post ideas
The first step in the process is deciding where we want to keep this list.
There’s no perfect tool for this because everyone is different, but the important thing is that whatever you use is easy/familiar (so that you’ll use it) and accessible (so that it’s available whenever an idea strikes.)
But, if nothing immediately comes to mind for you, I’ve used Evernote, Google Docs, and Trello with success. So pick one open up the editor, and let’s go!
Now that we’re at the actual “do something” portion of the exercise I want to address the elephant in the room. That is, the fact that most folks will read this article to the end, make a mental note to do this “someday” and then pat themselves on the back for spending 15 minutes reading an article about marketing.
But that’s not enough! This isn’t going to work unless we do the work. So take 5 seconds and promise me one thing. That you’ll open up the text editor of your choice, and come up with one blog post topic . That’s it. One topic. I bet you already have one in mind, you just haven’t written it down. It’ll take 60 seconds, tops! After that, you’re off the hook. Feel free to hang’em up for the rest of the day.
But what I hope will happen is that you’ll realize just how unbelievably easy it is, and come up with a bunch more just to see how many you can come up with in the next 5 minutes. Can you do 10? 20?
Let’s find out.
Alright, here’s the secret sauce…
- Write down your practice areas.
- For each practice area, just stream of consciousness, start listing the questions your clients always ask in their initial consultations or at cocktail parties. The ones that you have a rote answer for in your head. Just write down the question, question mark and all, and move on to the next one.
- When you’re all out of ideas, go back through and reorder them in terms of how often you get asked.
That’s it. It’s so stupidly simple. But I guarantee that 95% of the folks that read this don’t ever sit down to do it. So don’t be in that 95%.
Be in the 5%.
If you join that 5%, tweet, facebook, email, snail mail or carrier pigeon us a screenshot of your list and we just might have a special gift to send along!