Blogging continues to be one of the best content marketing tools available to lawyers across all practice areas. In it’s most basic form, blogging gives lawyers a branded platform for developing a presence and voice on a particular subject matter. It also results in added visibility in a crowded legal marketplace. Here are a few tips to help you successfully blog:

• Select a blog name that quickly and clearly communicates your blog’s subject matter. Choosing cute or clever names will hurt your search engine efforts. Be sure to put keyword-driven titles and headers to work to help drive visibility to search engines and readers.
• Write easy to consume content. It is important to keep your content relevant to your intended audience and easy to consume by a variety of people. Your blog posts need to be both informative and interesting to read. Remember, your readers come from a variety of places ranging from potential clients, to referral sources, to journalists.
• Frequent, consistent posts. Free, relevant content is the key to repeat readers of your blog. That being said, to be successful, the definition of ‘frequent’ needs to come from you, your competition and your audience. Ask yourself the following questions to figure this out:  How often can you reasonably contribute new content? What competitor blogs are out there and how often do they publish posts? What does your audience expect from industry blogs? Where could your intended audience potential look for this kind of information?
• Use tags and categories. Help readers easily find related posts by using tags and categories to organize each piece of content. These tools also help you identify the topics you have already covered so that you may write future posts to update the reader on an area you are keeping track of.  It can also help you identify gaps in topics related to your readers’ businesses.
• Keep it short and sweet. Blogs are, by nature, short thoughts and commentary. Cover one topic for each post, keeping your comments direct and helpful.
• Topics can range from news items, trending topics, changes in the law, industry events and more. The glue that makes it all stick together is relevancy to a specific industry, practice area and even a geographic location.
• Identify what success looks like to you. Understand how you measure your success before you start blogging. Is success defined by the number of topics you write on, the quantity of hits you get through your social media outlets, the quality of your subscriber base or simply the act of having new content on your blog each month?
• Track your traffic. Use analytics, such as Google Analytics, to help you understand how many visitors frequent your blog, which search terms they are using to find you, or to identify the topics that are most popular. Then cater your blogging to the most successful mix.

Blogging doesn’t have to be hard.  In fact, it can be fun! Remember that blogging allows you to share relevant information with your networks so that they may in turn, share it with their collective influencers. It is an essential tool to use for building your presence and confirming your authority on your subject matter.