How does a lawyer walk the line between authoritative and approachable in a blog entry? How can your firm best maintain that tone over time in regular articles or opinion posts? The answers matter when it comes to web traffic and lead conversion—if your potential clients can follow your point and get to know your character through your online presence, they’re far more likely to trust you with their case.

Obu Interactive knows what keys unlock the average person’s final reservations and reluctance before they call an attorney. We see it on the back end with website analytics: the hard numbers showing clicks, time spent on pages, and the journey visitors take from curiosity to contact.

If you want more info on lawyer blog topics and content ideas directly from our marketing team, call Obu Interactive today at 800-619-5944 or contact us online. For insight on the inner workings of an effective legal blog, read on.

What Is a Blog?

Flashback to the 1990s, when blogging first became a thing: a “blog” is an abbreviation of the word “weblog”—a log of information stored on the world wide web.

What began in spheres of online diaries and fan and aficionado directories has since gone mainstream, corporate, and professional. Presidents, CEOs, and, yes, even lawyers, have embraced blogging to inform their people, build their brands, and advertise their products and/or services.

The secret to a successful blog undertaking still lies in the origin of the artform. The point of a blog is still to share yourself, and to write with conviction about the topics that interest you most, i.e. your areas of practice.

The secret to successful blogs for lawyers still lies in the origin of the artform—share yourself, and talk about the topics that interest you most: your areas of practice. Essentially, get personal when blogging about personal injury.

How Does Blogging Help Lawyers Reach Clients?

When done right, blogging isn’t a waste of time or a vanity project—it’s a form of direct marketing you can control. Regular legal blog content helps lawyers find clients in a few important ways:

Builds Trust and Authority

When people search online for a lawyer, an empty website does little to assure them that you’re the one they should call. Having a wealth of content people can explore shows your attention to detail, your understanding of multiple areas of law, and your trust-worthiness as someone dedicated to their job.

Makes You Relevant

When a topical news story pops up in your area or nationally, discuss it in relation to the legal solutions you offer. When readers arrive to find out about the latest product recall, malpractice, or negligence case that is trending, they’ll hear your name, and may remember or refer to you when they need an attorney.

Humanizes the Profession

By building a recognizable tone as someone down-to-earth, compassionate, or relatable, you cross over from an intimidating lawyer in a suit, to a person the reader can imagine speaking to and working with.

This consideration of your personality is often the last decision a potential client makes before placing a phone call. In fact, we can watch it happen in as few as three steps from a web traffic standpoint:

1. A person arrives on a blog post page relevant to the type of case they may have
2. They next click on the About Us page to see the faces and read the background information of the attorneys at your firm
3. If they like who they’ve found, they click the Contact link

It’s as simple as that. So long as you’ve provided your potential client with a good balance of professional and personal information, you’re giving them what they need to make an informed decision.

So how do these important factors look on a fully optimized blog post? Obu Interactive has the answers.

Download a copy of the “What Are the Key Elements of a Legal Blog Post?” checklist here.

What Are the Key Elements of a Legal Blog Post?

There are three main elements in an effective blog post. We’ve covered each below with specific references towards lawyer and law firm content.

1. Style

By style we mean the visual aspects of the page and any promotions you make to link back to it from your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn page. Visual style could include:

• Graphs and data images: In school, teachers understand that some students are visual and not auditory learners. You could lecture for an hour and still not effectively relay the information. Or you could provide visual tools to your readers (as you would in an in-person PowerPoint presentation) to show statistics, time progressions, and results, thus creating immediate understanding.
• Photos and videos: Using photos helps break up the monotony of a full page of text, and can help create an imaginative connection for your audience. Don’t just talk about victims of negligence, show a testimonial video of people much like them. Don’t just tell the reader to call you, show them someone resolute and hopeful, making the call that may change their life for the better.
• Infographics, charts, and memes: Don’t be afraid to get creative with your visual content, including making your own infographics to match the color scheme of your firm (and spread your brand’s visibility). You can also utilize lighter elements like popular memes, especially when integrating your blog entries with eye-catching social media strategies.

Other elements of visual appeal include formatting (varied heading sizes, bulleted lists, and pull-quote boxes), which helps you provide detailed information without overwhelming or intimidating a reader.

2. Content

There are subtleties to written content for personal injury blogs, and an art to the type of content you could provide from all the knowledge you’ve accumulated. Examples include:

• Question-and-answer problem solving: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) starts with gathering data about what people search for when they need a lawyer. Use that information to start answering people’s questions like “How long do I have to file a personal injury claim?” or “What does a car accident case usually settle for?” By answering their questions, you gain a reader’s confidence.
• Teaching opportunities: Those who’ve never needed an attorney before often base their assumptions on lawyers seen in movies and TV shows. If you keep running into misconceptions, address them in your personal injury law topics, and teach people the truth. Let the reader know how important it is for community safety to hold bad actors accountable, and just how much work a lawyer does on their behalf—removing burdens, not adding them. Take them through the elements of proof and give examples about how you collect them.
• Storytelling moments: It doesn’t all have to be business—remember that the personal touch is important when gaining a prospective client’s trust. Tell the story about why you became a lawyer, stories that keep you dedicated to your profession, stories about people who deserved legal help and didn’t get it, or stories about those you’ve personally helped.

To ease the task of having to generate ideas into your workload, remember to recycle content like your latest press release. You can also take time to highlight the people in your office—attorneys and staff—or feature previous clients’ testimonials. With enough content planned out, you can release regular blog updates without it becoming a chore.

3. Personality

This is where we talk about the old adage: “To thine own self be true.” Let people know what’s important to you, because it’s likely important to them too. Do so by embracing approaches like:

• Allowing for hope and humor: Though you work in a serious field with people who are likely having some of the worst days of their lives, let moments of humor and optimism come through when appropriate. After all, you’re selling people hope that by filing a claim with you, they can make something good come out of the injustice they’ve experienced. A can-do attitude may help them believe.
• Promoting good deeds: Without veering into bragging, do share with potential clients your office’s charitable giving or community service. Especially if your practice mainly covers a limited region, these local highlights are both good promotional tools and excellent recommendations for your character.
• Describing your persona: Let people know who you are beyond your resume and services. Do you have a family? Are you into sports? Did you use to be something else and decided to change careers? How do these other parts of your life inform the work that you do? By sharing your journey and your goals both personal and professional, you gain clients and keep their loyalty long after their case is closed.

Blogging can help introduce you to brand new clients. Once you work with them, your blogs can serve as the business card those clients send to their friends and family when they too are in need of representation.

In a digital age, people want to investigate you before they call your office. With these three elements of excellent blog creation, you can give them something good to find.

When Should You Hire a Marketing Team With Legal Blog Experience?

For many attorneys, joining or founding a law firm of their own is all they’ve dreamed of and more…sometimes too much more. You go from just being a person and an attorney to being a person, attorney, boss, business manager, accountant, and advertising executive all at once. This is why legal marketing firms like Obu Interactive exist.

Rather than guess about what makes good personal injury blog topics, image selections, social media tie-ins, and marketing copy, you can set the tone of your website and hire us to populate the pages. We write content on trending topics, we create branded images, we put them on a social media calendar, and we promote them regularly. That way, you and your office can better prioritize the bulk of your time and energy to building cases and changing lives.

That’s our motto at Obu: Changing lives, one lead at a time. Reach out to Obu Interactive by calling 800-619-5944 today. Our team runs the Design, Content, and Analytics work for blogs and marketing, we just need you to provide the personality.