In most cases it isn’t difficult to persuade the lawyers and accountants we work with to blog. They can see the benefit, they can see the positive effect it’ll have on their profile and, just as crucially, they can see the marketing capital their competitors are banking from blogging!
However, once a blog is up and running one of the questions we are asked is why we think it isn’t working and, in our experience, the answer almost always boils down to three things:
1. It’s all about me
If your blog is all about you, it’s not going to be overly attractive to your readers.
The truth is endless press releases promoting partners and services just aren’t interesting. A fleeting mention of an award you’ve won, a new office you’ve opened or the appointment of a new tax or litigation partner to bolster your team is fine for your news page but it isn’t suitable material for a blog.
If your blog is going to build a readership there has to be a reason to read it (and keep coming back to it). This means it needs to give good, straightforward, practical advice your readers can use to improve their or their business’ position.
Instead of starting with what you can do, think about your clients’ pain. What keeps them awake at night? What mistakes do they keep making? What is stopping them from getting to where they want to get to?
Once you have the answers to these questions you can use your blog to provide the solutions.
2. You’re not asking for help
While you spend your days at the coal face and undoubtedly know your stuff, shooting blindly at what you think people are searching for isn’t a brilliant blogging strategy. But the good news is there are loads of ways to give you a steer as to what you should be writing about.
Tools like Google’s key word finder, Buzzsumo.com and answerthepublic.com will show you exactly what people are searching for while looking for more information on the areas you advise on.
If you can work back from those lists and use those search terms as the angle or even titles for your blogs, you will immediately make your blog more relevant, more useful and easier to find.
3. You’re not squeezing the lemon!
If you’ve worked with Tenandahalf you’ll already know how fond we are of squeezing the lemon so you get the maximum impact from everything you do.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term it simply means that instead of shelving your blogs, articles, presentations and seminars one they’ve been published/delivered you repackage them to use across all of your marketing channels.
For example:
If you’ve posted a blog why not turn it into a short video or an infographic?
If you’ve written an article why not turn it into a series of blogs?
If you’ve recently delivered a seminar or a speech, why not turn the key points into a series of blogs?
If you’ve got a presentation or an article to hand, why not turn it into a podcast or take the key points from a podcast you’ve recorded and turn those into a series of blogs?
If you’ve written an article why not strip it’s key points out and turn them into a ‘top tips’ or turn each into an FAQ style post for social media?
If you’ve got a big catalogue in your blog, go back in time and refresh and update old posts so you can re-use them.
Or if you can pare a few of the points you’ve made into a short sentence, turn them into an image combining your sentence, the author and your logo and use that as a social media post.
And of course, it’s essential that you squeeze the lemon out of every link to every blog you post.
Don’t just post the link once, send it out at different times every day for a week on your firm’s
Twitter and LinkedIn (obviously changing the accompanying copy) because people look at their timelines at different times so will probably miss your link if you only send it out once.
Include your links in your e-newsletters.
Set up a group email to tell all of your colleagues you’ve just posted so they can like and share it. The more people who react, the higher your post will be pushed up the rankings.
If it’s possible, post the link and a quick precis on your home page or if that’s not practical, on your news page.
If you’d like some help to get your or your firm’s blog up and running or find out more about how you could outsource your blogging to us, please email us today.