Here’s something I hear from attorneys time after time. “I have lots of good ideas. I know content is king in promoting my site, but I don’t have time to write.”
Of course you don’t. You are an attorney and you are probably working 50 hours plus a week on your clients’ cases. Some attorneys do find time to write copious amounts. It’s highly accurate and usually of interest to the legal community. Whether the public wants to read it is another matter. Attorneys are trained to be detail orientated and to make a full case.It doesn’t always make great material for a mass audience, as any journalist who has sat through a court proceeding, listening to arguments from counsel can tell you.
The world has changed dramatically over the last two decades in which I have worked for the media. When I started out the local newspaper and TV station was the only game in town. Now there are numerous online outlets for news and discussion and people are just as likely to find out about your law firm from a YouTube video or a Tweet as they are from a newspaper ad. or the phone book.
The social media of the past
Your writing needs to be punchy, eye catching and aimed at mobile devices, which more and more people will be finding you on. That’s only part of the equation. You also need someone to write it.
Many attorneys go to legal ghost writers and have hired bloggers from Craigslist , usually with disappointing results. I often see ads offering bloggers $15 a post, demanding as many as 10 posts a week. There’s an old cliché about what you will get if you pay peanuts. The kind of legal bloggers you find on Craigslist are often young and unreliable. They may have little or no experience of legal writing. They are unlikely to have a background in journalism.
It’s important because they are writing in your name. A blogger who is unaware of the laws of libel, can get you in a lot of trouble, as can a blogger who steals content. Of course, you should check anything that goes out in your name and amend accordingly, but there’s that important time factor that we referred to earlier. If you are going to have to spend long periods re-writing every legal blog or article, you may as well have written it yourself and saved yourself $15.
Consider hiring an experienced legal SEO writer , as opposed to someone who will throw in a bucket load of vanity keywords to hide the paucity of his or her writing because, they had limited success fooling Google back in 2011. Call Veritas Legal Media at 757.582.1836 or email veritaslegalmedia@hotmail.com.