Blawg In A Box

This is the third post in an ongoing series titled Blawg Focus, in which we’re exploring why focus is so important, how to tell when your blawg needs a “focus makeover,” and — here — how to plan such a makeover.

Plan Your Attack

So, you’ve taken a critical look at your blawg, and you think you need to either refine the blawg’s focus, or give it a complete overhaul. Either way, you want to start with a plan. Do the work now that, perhaps, you skipped or rushed through in the beginning.

This works starts with the formulation of an objective for your site. Your objective must consist of these three components:

• Your target readership;
• Your primary conversion factor; and
• Your focus.

While we’re obviously focusing for now on the final factor — the focus of your blawg — it’s advisable to consider all three factors in combination. So, let’s take a look at each in turn.

Your Target Readership

If there’s one aspect of publishing a successful blog of any type that most bloggers get “wrong” it’s this: not understanding and knowing intimately the blog’s target readership (”TR,” from here on out).

What is the target readership? At its most basic level, it’s simply the individuals you want to read your blog. But for a marketing-purposed blawg, it’s a little more complex than that. In order to identify and get to know such a blawg’s targeted readership, the blawgger needs to know who the practice’s ideal client is as well.

The ideal client is simply a three-dimensional persona that is used for marketing purposes, to enable the business owner to more accurately target all marketing efforts. You keep your ideal client in mind while you’re creating that three-panel brochure, laying out your Yellow Pages ad — or writing that blawg post.

While a full exploration of TR is beyond this post’s scope, here’s a brief rundown of what the concept means:

• Your ideal client (”IC”) for the practice area or demographic you’re targeting with your blawg
• That IC’s need: what problem does she want to solve? What question does she have that only you can answer?
• The tone or approach that will most effectively reach that IC and convince her of your expertise. Example: a CEO of a mid-size corporation will respond to one voice, but a consumer seeking to avoid foreclosure will respond to a completely different voice. Understand which voice your TR needs to hear in order to make a purchasing decision.

Your Primary Conversion Factor

The old saw works here: If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

It’s true for sales, road trips, disciplining kids — and blawgging. So, let’s think about conversions from the lawyer’s perspective. To do so, answer this question: What do you want your TR to do, once they’ve found you? Do you want them to call a number for an appointment? Sign up for an email newsletter? Download a PDF brochure?

Whatever your answer to this question, that’s your answer to the conversion inquiry. Then it’s a relatively simple matter of funneling your TR from the home page for your blawg to the point of contact on your blawg at which the conversion is made (i.e., the place where you’ve published the call to action with your phone number, the sign-up form your autoresponder, or the page where the TR can download your brochure).

Your Focus

Now that you have your TR and primary conversion factor identified and sussed out, you’re ready to look at your focus.

To some degree, your focus will be determined by your TR. Example: if you have three distinct practice areas, but you want to use the blawg to reach the IC for one of those areas, then that area will be your starting point for determining your focus. Or you may want to target a particular demographic, across several practice areas.

As an illustration, let’s take Loretta Lawyer. Loretta practices family law and personal injury litigation. She’d like to focus her blawgging efforts on the family law area. Loretta could take her IC for the family law portion of her practice (middle age professional women with 1-4 children, residing in homes with a particular dollar value, among other characteristics), and further refine her focus by blawgging primarily about questions those ICs would have about child custody issues.

Now, her actual focus is not the IC herself — that’s just a persona Loretta uses to help her target her writing to a particular audience. Her focus is the practice area’s specific sub-topic of child custody issues.

So, for instance, Loretta can write about the process by which courts determine custody issues, how to arrange for emotional and psychological support for both mom and children, the ways professional women are viewed by courts in custody issues — virtually anything that might occur to Loretta’s IC as a concern.

Illustration #2: Larry Lawyer has a practice that’s almost identical to Loretta’s — in fact, let’s say it is identical. But Larry chooses instead to focus his blawgging efforts on a demographic instead of a practice area. He chooses to focus on a demographic — particularly, on young entrepreneurs of both genders.

So, although Larry will also have a TR in mind (possibly more than one, since he’s focusing on both genders and including both practice areas, and will want to make sure he’s speaking effectively to both), that TR isn’t his focus.

His focus instead is this narrowly-defined conceptual demographic that will have questions about both family law and personal injury law, from the perspective of the entrepreneur. He can write about protecting business assets in a divorce, or arranging child care for the busy single parent, or even how to deal with employees’ torts on the job.

Wrapping It All Up

I hope you can see now a little more clearly how important planning your blawg’s focus is to your overall marketing success. But I also hope I’ve demonstrated how blawgging is not an isolated venture, separate and apart from your other marketing endeavors. It’s but one aspect of a well-thought-out and implemented marketing plan, or should be; it uses some of the same concepts, background, foundational concepts and planning that your other marketing efforts are built upon.

Once you have your three core concepts — TR, conversion factor, and focus — clearly enunciated, on paper or in whatever notetaking software you use (please don’t keep this valuable info in your head), you’re ready to expand on these concepts to create a plan for your focus makeover. This plan should outline how you intend to implement the makeover, paying special attention to these factors:

• Categories: How can you use your category listings to communicate your focus? Think about inherent organizational structures that will help your TR realize that this blawg is a valuable resource for their specific questions.
• Tags: Tags are another excellent way to communicate focus. Typically slightly or significantly more specific than categories, tags can direct readers to your blawg from social bookmarking sites like Technorati.
• Blogroll: Many blawgs skip this sidebar item, and that may be preferable for your blawg’s focus. But if you do choose to have a blogroll, stuff it with blogs that answer questions your TRs have — not just blogs you like. Use it to communicate focus.
• Other pages and links: A terrific way to add value to your blawg, creating other pages and links out to primary and secondary resources that are relevant to your TRs’ concerns should be a primary task in implementing your plan.
• Call to action: The old chestnut for all marketing, but it applies just as strongly to all internet marketing, including your blawg. What do you want your TR to do? You have to provide a clear, convincing call to action and provide all necessary information for your TR to carry it out right then and there.
• Voice and tone: Your TR will respond best to one particular approach over all others. Find it, make it your own, and use it consistently.
• Blawg post structure: “Top 10″ lists, frequently asked questions, story-based posts — blog posts have their own structure and architecture, and which you use will, to a lesser degree, also communicate focus. Structure will also come into play when planning how your blawg will communicate effectively with your TRs in general; some TRs want short bulletins with one single “black letter” piece of advice or solution, while others want to get a general overview of a topic.

Conclusion

It seems like a lot of work, I’m sure — and it is. But it’s work with a purpose, and it’s work that makes achieving your marketing goals ultimately much easier. So start at the beginning and create your blawg with focus and specific intent. It will pay off in more of the right kind of readers in the long run.

In the last post in this series, scheduled for later this week, we’ll wrap things up with a checklist and a summary of “Do’s and Don’ts” for giving your blawg a focus makeover.

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Today’s post is the second in a series titled “Blawg Focus” and explores how to tell when your blawg might be in need of some tweaking or major reworking. The first post addressed why blawg focus is so important.

When Your Blawg Needs a Focus Makeover

Your blawg might be in need of a focus makeover in any or all of the circumstances below:

1. Your original focus was too scrambled or “mixed” to be effective. Most blawgs are highly targeted to a specific area of the law and even further niched, for instance by way of particular demographics or a discrete aspect of the practice area. If you started off your blawg too generally, writing about every aspect of your practice — a criminal defense post here, a wills FAQ there — then you’ll want to reexamine your blawg’s purpose and design, and narrow your sights a bit.
2. Your blawg is too personal. A lot of novice blawggers make this mistake, and I cringe every time I see it. They mistake the common (and wise) advice to “be personable” with an exhortation to write about personal things. For more on this, see my post “Personality - NOT ‘Personal’ - Makes the Blawg.” If you’re writing about your weekend and what you had for dinner, take a step back and refocus on professional matters; you can always start a personal blog on one of the free sites such as WordPress.com to scratch that itch to divulge the random trivia of your life.
3. Your original focus is too narrow to be useful. This — in some ways the opposite of the first circumstance — is slightly less common a problem but it does happen, especially among lawyers who possess a high degree of expertise with respect to a particular practice area. There’s a tendency among experts to slant the blog so narrowly that they run out of blog fodder too quickly and can’t think of anything else to write. Likewise, if the focus is at all uncommon, you might begin to get desperate for blog post ideas; with no daily cases or legislation to report, there are just so many ways you can state your personal opinions or the elements of a cause of action, for instance!

Conversions Tell the Story

One of the most solidly valuable tools to interpret the success of your blawg is its conversion rate. For those unfamiliar with the term, conversion is simply a reference to change in status — how well, or how poorly, your readers move along the pipeline you’ve established for them from vaguely interested reader to committed client, and every step in between.

You can define conversion in any way you want — number of subscribers, number of those who’ve signed up for a weekly newsletter, those who’ve called in and mentioned the blawg, those who called in for an appointment and became paying clients.

It’s critical to track this information properly, as it is without doubt the most precise metric of your success in marketing your services with a blawg. If those numbers are solid and steadily improving, you can be assured that you’re doing something right and perhaps all that’s needed is a bit of tweaking or refinement. If the numbers, however, are cause for concern, then it’s a sign that you’re losing those prospects at some point — if, indeed, you ever had them in the first place.

Focus is an essential part of this analysis. You’re looking for clients who have a specific legal problem that you have the expertise to resolve for them in a beneficial way. Your focus is a strong part of the equation that’s at work in convincing those prospects that you’re the lawyer for the job.

Changing Your Blawg’s Focus

The next post in this series will address how to go about the process of changing your blawg’s focus or theme, beginning with planning the shift and whether to announce the change or just implement it. Future posts will also look at debriefing your focus-shift’s success, and analyzing it for future tweaks.

Recently, I was forwarded a link to a post in a rather popular blog aimed at a segment of small firm lawyers, that shall remain nameless, in which the blogger passed along a link to another blog. This second blog, which we’ll call the B Blog, had recently been created, according to blogger #1, and promised to be the next great thing - or, at least, worthy of a mention in this very popular “A Blog.” (I’m going to get all kinds of flak for that, I’m sure…)And so, I clicked.What I found confused and confounded me.

So Much Promise …

First, the good. This was obviously a well-structured blog. Fairly simple, just a few pages in organization, but with a laser sharp focus on its theme, B Blog was built around a sorely under-served subject, specific to attorneys. It promised a fascinating spin on its subject, and, heck, even I got excited for a minute.

… But So Little “There” There!

Then, I took a second look. There were errant HTML tags here and there, but that wasn’t the main problem. No, the real issue with B Blog: only two posts, each of them a month apart, and the last one over 2 weeks old.Immediately, I cringed for the B blogger. It’s a serious misstep, and it’s so easily avoided!

Why I Say “Ten Posts Minimum”

To each of my clients, the phrase “ten post minimum!” is probably eye-rollingly familiar. But that’s what I advocate for a pre-launch post count, and I say it for a very good reason.To illustrate, let’s take a closer look at B Blog, and what the casual reader’s experience with this blog probably is. Reader probably comes to the blog much as I did, through the very generous link provided by A Blog. But what the reader finds is confusing. Two posts, and while each of them are basically pretty good posts, they aren’t meaty enough to warrant a snap decision of “Brilliant! I’ll add it to my list of feeds!”That’s just one problem — capturing the highly elusive and much-competed-for attention of your TR (targeted readership) and visitors requires something much more than a couple of “OK” posts. Had B blogger made those two posts into flagship content of the highest order — offering, for instance, a 10-step “how-to” guide for lawyers in the subject of choice, or offering a new philosophy of said subject — the sparse content might be forgiven. Otherwise, it looks as if the blogger isn’t serious.Then there’s the matter of the timing of the posts. Two posts, a month apart, tells your readers that, whatever you are, you’re definitely not a regular blogger and they can’t expect any sort of commitment from you on this venture. And, they think, if you’re not willing to put the energy into it up front, why should they?Ten posts, in my experience, is a good safe number of posts to aim for with a new blog’s launch. It provides an average of two weeks’ worth of posts, and that’s enough for most readers to decide “Yep, worthwhile.”Because here’s what happens:You’ve done your homework, and you’ve laid a great foundation of ten really solid posts. You publicize your link via email to other bloggers, and in (relevant, substantive, non-self-aggrandizing) comments on other blogs. Your traffic starts to come in — slowly, to be sure, at first. The visitors start arriving. They read the top post, of course. But they like what they read. So they look around and see more content. Strong content, and enough of it to form a value judgment: Subscribe? Yes, definitely. This blogger is committed.You’ve provided your readers with a pleasurable experience, and given them what they’re hungry for. That provokes good will, which will often manifest itself in higher subscribe rates and return traffic.

Keeping It Going

Of course, you can’t put up the ten posts then forget your blog for a few months. You have to keep posting. So I also advocate holding five draft posts in the hopper at all times. The reasons are purely practical; you’re a lawyer, and there are going to be times when you simply cannot produce a post. You’re in trial. You come down with chickenpox (ahem). You’ve got a new client that needs some handholding. Whatever the reason, there will come a day when you can’t get new content up. For those days, have a selection of evergreen posts, not time-sensitive, that you can publish to keep the blog wheels rolling.Apart from crunch times, however, how often should you blog? Ideally, you want to blog often enough to keep your readers interested, and to show your commitment. The general wisdom of “post daily” is absolutely correct in this regard.A lot of lawyers blanch at that. But understand this: what we’re saying is “be prepared to publish a post a day.” That doesn’t have to mean “you must write every single day.” Thanks to the timestamp feature (and most blog platforms other than WordPress have some similar functionality), you can write a week’s worth of posts on Sunday and set them up to drip a day at a time. You don’t even have to be there to click “publish.”The ideal is to keep it going with a daily schedule for at least the first two months — more if you can stand it. Of course, that’s not always possible — or even necessary. Some niche blogs won’t require such devoted attention. But if your blawg is a primary marketing vehicle for your practice, then definitely aim for “ten post minimum” with a daily schedule to follow.

The ABA Blogging CLE: No Known Bloggers?

I read with some skepticism the invite in my email inbox some time ago, trumpeting the ABA’s entry into the “phenomenon” of blogging with an hour-or-so long teleseminar. The faculty selected for the panel omitted solos completely, and - frankly - didn’t include a single blogger I’d ever read. Not that I know them all, but it’s my business to know blawgs, and I have to stop and ask some hard questions if an ABA-sponsored event isn’t being headed by well-known bloggers.

The seminar triggered this article, the link to which was just emailed to me in the weekly “YourABA” email alert. Tim Stanley from Justia is quoted in this article as advocating “personal” blogs - from the article:

Stanley shared a tip on creating a successful blog. Those that are more personal in nature - where a sense of the blogger’s personality comes through - tend to do well, advised Stanley.

I really doubt that’s what Stanley meant, but I’m afraid the wording of this cite is going to confuse some folks, so let me share my thoughts on this subject.

Personality? An unqualified YES.

Personal? An equally unqualified NO.

Here’s the difference, and why I feel so strongly about this.

The Difference Between Personal and Personality

Personality: writing authentically; not putting on “airs;” being comfortable in your skin; writing from the “center” of yourself; referring to your own experiences; self-referential; writing like you talk; writing informally (but well - good grammar, proper spellings, etc.).

Personally: writing about your family, your dog, your weekend, your vacation, your political beliefs, your candidates of choice, your bank account, the guy who cut you off in traffic this morning, the woman applying mascara in the drop-off lane at your kid’s school, the funny commercial you saw this morning, the awesome episode of Heroes last night, the supremacy of Batman to Superman, your colon “issues,” the last time you saw your doctor, the idiot who made the waitress cry at the restaurant you went to last night - anything, in short, other than your blogging topic.

Caveat: you can, of course, write about some of these things in connection to your blogging topic. But never about your colon “issues.” Some things - just - no. Never.

Why is it so important? Read on.

Read More…