What Law Firms Can Learn About Blogging From Startups

Last week TechCrunch featured a terrific guest post by Mark Suster about Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about …). In reading Suster’s blog post, it occurred to me that many of his recommendations for startups apply equally well to law firms.

The kinds of questions I constantly hear from lawyers about blogging – “what should I blog about?”; “who is my audience?”; “where should I post?”; etc. – are the same kinds of questions many startup company bloggers-to-be ask about blogging. Suster’s article provides insights that bloggers from any industry can benefit from.

A few highlights from the article:

1. Why blog? “If you care about accessing customers, reaching an audience, communicating your vision, influencing people in your industry, marketing your services or just plain engaging in a dialog with others in your industry a blog is a great way to achieve this.”
2. What should I blog about? “Blog about your industry. Think Mint.com. In their early days they had an enormously effective blog on the topic of personal financial management. They created a reason for their customers to aggregate on their site on a regular basis. They became both a thought leader in the space as well as a beautifully designed product. They created inbound link juice on topics that drove more traffic to their site. Type “personal financial management” into Google. Mint.com is the second result. Smart.”
3. Where should I blog? “If you’re a company and if hanging it off of your company website makes sense for the link traffic – go for it. If you’re head of marketing at a company and keeping a more generalized blog (in addition to your company blog) so that you can influence brands & agencies – it can be separate.”
4. How do I blog? Get going quickly with a platform like WordPress.com or Squarespace.com. Be authentic. Keep posts between 600-1,000 words. Be consistent about posting. Let people know you’re blogging. Use Twitter, Facebook and other social media to distribute your posts.

Give Suster’s full article a read – although targeted at startups, the lessons apply equally well to law firms.