One of the unfortunate consequences of the blogging trend is that many people naturally associate a blog with advertisements. Many of the free or even low-cost blogging tools include advertisements as a way to generate revenue for you or for the site you post on. While this is a great idea for private citizens who are blogging about things that interest them, the trend of placing ads on professional blogs has a number of problems that come with it. Let’s look at why your legal blog is no place for ads.
To start, consider the reason you are writing a blog for your law firm in the first place. You plan to offer useful information to clients and the general public, provide advertising for your firm, and establish yourself as an authority in some area or another. In short, you are hoping that your blog will help bring your law firm money by demonstrating to current and potential clients that you are the type of law firm that provides authoritative, expert legal information. So when a potential customer visits your site looking for information, he or she will see what you have written and will want to become a client. However, when you place ads on your site, you may be sending a very different message to your customer without even realizing it.
Ads, by nature, are designed to entice customers to click on them, leading them to another page that has something of interest. In the case of most blog advertising, the information that is displayed to customers is a rotating series of paid advertisements for everything from porn and scam work from home opportunities to offers for service- including things like legal services. So, after the time and energy you have spent developing your blog, creating content, and working on providing information that will attract potential customers, you may lose it to an advertisement for your competitor.
Of course, another reason to stay away from advertising on your legal blog is the simple fact that ads are just plain tacky. The legal profession as a whole is viewed as a conservative, highly professional industry, so writers of legal blogs must consider the advertisements that their customers will likely see and what those ads say about the firm. If you were looking for an attorney to handle your estate and you ran across a legal blog that featured an add offering you the ability to “chat with hot local girls”, would you think about that firm a little differently?
The bottom line is that your legal blog should reflect how you want your firm to appear to potential clients. Using an ad-filled online space where you have little control over what your customers see won’t create the image you want. Even worse, you could lose potential clients to ads that offer low-cost legal fees. Think about your blog the way you think about presenting a case to a judge or jury- you want to show the information in the best possible light and help your audience see you as competent and capable. Don’t let the idea that you can make a few dollars selling ad space on your blog compromise your reputation and ability to attract new customers.
