One of the reasons lawyers often cite for not writing a blog is that it takes too much time. But it doesn’t have to.
This morning, I was reading, 12 Most Tedious Blogging Tasks You Can Outsource, and thought, “great topic for lawyers.” But as I went through the list of tasks, I thought, “I don’t do that”. In fact, I don’t do many of the things on the list, and the ones I do take me very little time.
Here’s the list of tasks, and what I do:
- Editing. I do my own. If I’m unsure about something, I run it by my wife.
- Finding photos. I used to add photos but I rarely do now, primarily because it takes too much time to find the right one and make sure I have the right to use it.
- Resizing and retitling photos. See above.
- Formatting. This takes seconds. I paste my text into the WordPress composition window, add bold or bullets or numbering, and done.
- Writing social media updates to promote the post. I paste the url of the post into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. If my title is well written, that’s usually enough. I could do more here, I admit, but social media isn’t a major focus for me, so I don’t.
- Posting multiple updates once the post is live. I don’t do this either, but if I did, I’d automate it, as the author suggests.
- Social media mentions for anyone referenced in the post. If I want to reach out to someone I’ve written about, I’ll send them an email, and this doesn’t happen too often.
- Monitoring blog comments. I don’t get a lot of comments (lawyers are busy, yo), so not a problem. If I did, and it took too much time, I would consider outsourcing this. Or, just turn off comments.
- Monitoring social media activity. Again, I don’t do much with social media, so I don’t have much to monitor.
- Handling guest contributions. To date, I have one guest post on my blog. If I was doing this regularly, I would turn this over to an assistant.
- Managing audio and video files and slideshows. Nope.
- Writing. I like to write and make time for it. If I was still practicing, I would probably post once or twice a week, instead of daily as I do now. If I still didn’t have enough time, I’d have an assistant help with ideas, research, rough drafts, editing, polishing, and so on.
Blogging for lawyers doesn’t have to be tedious, time consuming, or painful. For one thing, as I wrote in a previous post, having a blog doesn’t make you a blogger.
I see writing a blog as, (a) a strategy for generating traffic, mostly from search engines, and build my list, and (b) a way to show website visitors what I know and what I can do to help them. This doesn’t (have to) take a lot of time. You could write a weekly blog post in an hour or less.
I don’t do much with social media. Many experts say that blogging and social media are inexorably intertwined. That may be true for (some? most?) bloggers but not for me. If you’re not writing a blog because you don’t have time for social media, or don’t like social media, you could do what I do. Or you could get some help.
I wrote a course on getting traffic (and clients) online. Click here.
