Many lawyers who have a law blog have no idea they have a law blog.
I am serious.
Many of the law blogs I am seeing submitted to LexBlog’s network, and I use the word “blog” liberally, are a page on a website filled with a lot of content. The blogs appear to be submitted by marketing folks or at their direction for the free syndication and inclusion in our law blog directory.
The blogs are not titled anything more than “blog.” No Florida employment law blog, no Illinois Workers Compensation Law Blog, just “blog.”
How can a lawyer or a group of lawyers not know that their firm has a blog? Easy.
A lawyer in the firm buys a new website from a legal website company. The lawyer, having heard of a blog, jumps on the offer to pay a little more for a blog. Whatever it is or wherever it goes, who cares. “I’ve heard I should have one.”
In some cases, the lawyer has never heard of a law blog is, but the offer to buy one sounds reasonable since the website company says it’ll make their website rank higher on Google.
And not to worry about the blog, as if the lawyer would, the website developer says we’ll take care of everything with the blog thing.
In a little larger firm up to 10 or 15 lawyers, one lawyer will be in charge of buying the new website. When asked over a partner’s meeting if they have the website covered, the response will be “sure thing.” The other partners are glad that website thing is over with.
I’ve been at a firm like that and the yellow pages (it was the ‘90’s), television, radio, and magazine buys were handled just like that – one partner covered, with the others paying little, if any, attention.
Not much due diligence on anyone’s part – as if we had enough expertise and common sense to exercise due diligence anyway.
Reading a post from Mark Homer, a leader in digital legal marketing, and the head of GNGF (Get Noticed Get Found), about what he was seeing in legal blogs only reinforced my thinking.
“The more we looked at the blogs most law firms had, and even some of the ones we were creating, we realized that many blogs on law firm websites were taking away from the client experience, not enhancing it.
On top this “aha” moment, I have been forced to read so much—let’s be blunt—crappy content over the years when providing web presence consultations and audits I felt there had to be a better way.”
Either lawyers didn’t know lame when they say it on their website, or they didn’t know they had a blog to even look.
When Homer found lawyers who thought they had a blog, it was a stretch to say they knew they had a real law blog.
“When I asked the attorney about the blog content, most all said it was there because the lawyer was told he needed to buy a package of content each month for SEO reasons.
Many of the lawyers were not even required to approve the content, it just showed up on the blog each month. That’s just crazy and ethically dangerous. None of the companies selling these packages ever tell the lawyer that they should be the ones writing the blog content, either.”
Okay, at best in the case of crappy blogs, “I know I have something on my website because I was told I needed to buy a “package of content” to get some SEO.”
When you look at the all the content being sold by leading legal website companies, Homer says it’s clear you can only write so many blogs “before they all sound the same and provide no differentiation benefit for the law firm.”
The result is one polluted Internet – the pollutants sadly being pumped into this ocean by lawyers.
“Let’s assume over the years that about ten thousand solo, small, and medium law firms were sold these packages of four blogs a month. That is almost half a million blog posts a year not written by the attorneys themselves about anything they care about.”
Ask your colleagues if they know they have a blog. Better yet, if you see lame, ask them if they know they are polluting the Internet.
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