You just started your brand new solo law practice. Bought the business cards, letter head and put an ad in your local Yellow Pages™. And if you had some spare funds sitting around, you may have sent out some personal announcements to family, friends and those you know in your community. The only problem with this marketing is you are most likely sitting at your desk wondering where the clients are actually going to come from. To pass the time, you start browsing the web to see what websites some of the firms in your area have. And you quickly realize you need more then the initial marketing you are doing.

The marketing activities mentioned above are what I like to call, “the yellow page approach.” You throw it up and hope beyond hope that someone actually picks up the phone and calls you and then hires you to be their attorney. The problem, this is such an antiquated approach to marketing. Is it easy? Yes. Is it effective? Not if it is the only way you are going to market your firm.

What is very apparent in today’s fast paced internet influenced world is the fact that a “static” website is not enough. The average person on the street is going to the internet to find everything. From sports equipment to clothes. And yes, even professional service providers like you, the newly minted solo attorney. In fact it has been estimated that approximately 75% of those looking for a service provider are going to the web before they even think about picking up a yellow page book. A lot of people, me included, don't even keep a phone book in their home anymore. Why, because we go to the internet to find everything.

No longer can you just throw up a static website and hope to compete with the larger firms with their huge advertising and marketing budgets. Your website will get lost in the shuffle just as your small yellow page will do in the mountain of other firms with their full page ads and back cover ads. You need to do something more. You need to be proactive in your marketing. And blogging is the proactive marketing tool which will put you on the same footing with the big firms. Best of all, blogging is not expensive and you can launch a blog which is just as good or even better then what most big firms are doing at this time.

Over the last couple of years, having a professional looking blog has become easy for the solo lawyer to obtain. In fact, blogging platforms like WordPress have made it possible to have a blog which even looks like a static website but provides all of the benefits blogging gives.

But, why a blog over a static website?

First of all, and don't ask me to explain this one, getting a blog is not nearly as expensive as hiring a design firm to setup your website. Even if you have a blog professionally designed and launched, it is a lot less expensive then a custom done website. In fact, this is one of the key reasons a blog will put you equal footing as those firms who spend a fortune on a static website.

Second, blogging by its very nature will enable you to move up in the search results on all of the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. No longer are search engines and the consumer for that matter, satisfied with static information on a website. Because a well done blog gives you the ability to update the content as often as you want, you are going to move up in the search engines and even move ahead of those firms with static websites. Remember, Google and humans alike, like new content. New, up to date, relevant content is what gets a blog noticed by both the search engines and the human doing the search. And best of all, if you can write an email, you can update your blog with new blog posts as often as you want to. By providing this constant stream of new information, you are going to become know as the place to go for information on your particular practice area. Blogging will get you noticed not only by search engines and your possible clients. Blogging will get you noticed by media outlets looking for “experts” to talk about a particular topic or hot issue of the day. Blogging helps to eliminate the need of an expensive PR department because your blog will become a key resource for anyone looking for information about what you are writing about.

Third, as a blogging attorney you will find you are better informed in your own practice area. Blogging about your practice area will almost force you to be more prepared to represent the clients in the area you are blogging about. And if you are a brand new attorney, this is a great reason to blog. New attorneys especially, should not use their self-imposed feeling they are not qualified to write about their practice area. Because you are writing about your practice area, you are going to know it better.

Finally, as a blogging attorney you will be answering the questions people are searching for online. If you will simply answer the questions you get in your office every single day from clients and prospective clients in blog post, you will find you will get noticed. And there is another advantage of using this method in writing your blog post, you are educating the legal services consumer. Which in turn gives you a better educated client and a better client.

Final thoughts

Blogging works and it works well for the solo attorney. Those attorneys who take this marketing tool and run with it are seeing the benefits it brings. They are getting noticed and best of all, they are getting new paying clients