Make Your Blog Unique to Get Potential Clients to Read it
I am still thinking about blogging today. Recently the Harvard Business Review posted a blog titled: The Moment Social Media Became Serious Business I was fascinated reading what Harold Adams Innis said about reduction in cost of communication in 1951, long before anyone was blogging. What he said applies to blogging today.
- Redistributing knowledge and, in doing so, shifting power
- Making it easier for "amateurs" to compete with "professionals," because access to knowledge substitutes for mastery of complexity
- Allowing individuals and minorities to voice ideas
- Reducing the advantages of speed that formerly accrued because some had knowledge before others
- Reducing the advantages of size that are based on the ability to afford high costs.
Because blogging costs so little, smaller law firms and younger lawyers have a chance to compete against bigger law firms and more senior lawyers. Borrowing a Seth Godin book title, the problem is, the more lawyers and law firms blogging, the less blogging by lawyers is a Purple Cow
So, if you are blogging, you better find a way to make your blog unique and valuable to your target market because your clients and potential clients are being inundated with indistinguishable client alerts and blogs written by lawyers.Valeria Maltoni has an e-book Why Blogging + 25 Tips to Make It Work that may give you some good ideas.
What can you do to make your blog be unique and interesting? One way to stand out is to tell stories and use humor. Your readers will enjoy the humor and being entertained by a story.
Cleve Clinton and Jamie Ribman, two Looper, Reed & McGraw lawyers I coached here in Dallas have a blog titled: Tilting the Scales. I love getting the email of a new post because it is entertaining and makes a point clients would value knowing. They use real legal issues and then make up names of characters. Just today, they wrote about the Ice Princess, the story of Olympic ice dancers Corrie O. Graff and Dan Saul Knight who lived together in Texas.
Brandon Mendelson shares seven ways to add humor in his blog How to Be 20% Funnier Than You Really Are. While you are at the copyblogger website, read other valuable suggestions for successful blogging.
Finally, my bet is that before long lawyers blogging will present their blog three ways:
- Video blog
- Audio blog
- Written blog
Will you be a "purple cow" and be one of the first to present your blog those ways?
