If you hope to grow your firm’s blog and its impact on your practice, then you will want to check out these 3 tips.
Blogging is an important part of the legal marketing toolkit, especially for solo attorneys who have to work independently to promote themselves and establish their credibility.
Creating and sharing useful content increases brand recognition and makes you look like an expert in your field. In the end, this will help attract new clients.
This is all fine and dandy, but your blog won’t generate much in terms of results if no one reads it! You probably shared the article on social media, or you might have even bought ads to get more traction. But odds are that hasn’t been enough and if your content is going to have an impact then you’ll need more traffic.
In this blog post, you’ll find 3 of the most effective methods for promoting your blog posts.
Here are some top tips on how to build an audience for your law firm’s blog. Some are quick wins and others will take time, but all of them will be incredibly beneficial to your firm’s content marketing strategy.
1. Using social media correctly
If you’re like most bloggers, once your article is up you will send you a few tweets or post a few links on Facebook with a one-sentence description or just the title. While yes technically that is a way to promote your blog via social media, it isn’t always the most effective way.
Here are a few ways to improve your social media blog promotions:
- Get the most out of different social networks: each social channel is different and their users have different expectations and user experiences. Whenever you share a blog post, in order to maximize your results, try optimizing your updates for each social network in turn. This means try sharing more video content on Facebook and quick facts and sentences on Twitter for example.
- Post about your blog often: if your content is evergreen – or at the very least, for as long as it is still relevant – you should continue to share it out on your social media channels regularly. On Twitter, you can do this more frequently (once every few days, for example), while on other social networks (like Facebook or LinkedIn) you can re-share it once a week or every few weeks, depending on how much you normally post. To help with this, you can use a social media tool with queue features, like Agorapulse, which allows you to create numerous queues for your posts. Each queue has its own schedule so as you add updates to each queue, the tool will automatically share them out at the times and dates you initially set. This way, you don’t have to schedule or publish each post manually and you can even have the updates republished regularly and completely automatically
- Buy social media ads: You can always leverage ads to get a quick boost in traffic. Or use your content as an introduction and utilize content ads to grow an audience and continue to sell to them and nudge them towards becoming new clients. Try to experiment with your targeting and copy and monitor your results to see which ads perform best.
2. Guest post regularly on popular niche blogs
Guest posting is not going to be an instant solution to tons of traffic. But a great and consistent guest blogging strategy will help you grow your blog gradually increase traffic and build site authority:
- It will build up your status in your practices niche,
- It will help you build up quality backlinks, growing site authority,
- And it will boost your SEO so that your blog posts rank higher and therefore, you’ll get more traffic back
You will get traffic slightly, even more so post for popular industry websites. Make sure to include a link back to your site in your author bio, and if they will let you include a link to one or two of your blog posts within the guest post.
Start by putting together a wish list of websites that accept guest posts, check their guidelines and start pitching and writing; or, if you’ve just started out blogging and want to make a name for yourself, start with smaller blogs and work your way up.
But most importantly, set yourself some monthly (realistic) targets: how many guest posts can you produce a month?
3. Promote your blog posts to your existing audience
No matter what you’re doing in terms of promoting your blog. The biggest and most important thing to do is build your email list!
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tactics and that certainly holds true with blogging as well.
So, in order to drive more people back to your website and reading your blog content, follow these steps:
- Create lead magnets and place them throughout your blog/website. Lead magnets can include how to guides, whitepapers, quizzes, checklists, e-books, templates – basically, anything that provides real value to your audience and they can get for free in exchange for their email.
- Have newsletter sign up forms all over your blog, making it easy for people to sign up to receive all your latest news and blog posts.
- Send regular email blasts containing both new content, as well as your older and most popular evergreen content.
Test your email marketing strategy and generate better results. Most email marketing tools such as MailChimp or Hubspot let you do this. You will want to test things such as headlines, CTA’s, graphics, and even links vs put the actual blog article or content directly on the email. This will take some time, but once you are set up and know which method works best for your audience, all you will have to do is plug in new content for each email and hit send!
